Friday, July 5, 2024

History

 

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Well, they weren't distracted by social media

This is pretty incredible.  I have never heard the story but it is apparently true.
The details are even more remarkable.  From Wikipedia:  

When the boys completed their Santa Fe journey, they began planning a cross-country horseback ride to New York City, again by themselves, to meet Theodore Roosevelt when he returned from his trip to Africa and Europe. They made that trip in 1910. They were greeted as celebrities, and rode their horses in a ticker-tape parade just behind the car carrying Roosevelt. While in New York, the boys purchased a small Brush Motor Car, which they drove, again by themselves, back to Oklahoma, shipping their horses home by train.

In 1911, they accepted a challenge to ride horseback from New York to San Francisco in 60 days or less. They agreed not to eat or sleep indoors at any point of the journey. They would collect a $10,000 prize if they succeeded.

After a long trip, they arrived in San Francisco in 62 days, thereby losing the prize but setting a record for the time elapsed for the trip.


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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Institutional decay in the academy is obvious to anyone who looks

From Against the Burden of Knowledge by Maxwell Tabarrok.  The subheading is Why the most intuitive explanation for ideas getting harder to find is wrong.  

An interesting argument but this is the observation which caught my eye.  Emphasis added.

Another explanation which equally explains our observations is that the institution of academia is depreciating. Inward looking networks of grant applicants and reviewers reward a fixed cohort of researchers that gets older every year. Risk averse funders and reviewers that reward incremental, labor intensive research. A business model based on exclusivity that requires more and more hurdles as the initial pool of applicants grows.

Institutional decay in the academy is obvious to anyone who looks and can explain our observations of aging, narrowing careers in academia.

Tabarrok may or may not be right that academia is depreciating (I think he is right), but the weightier issue is that, like many inconvenient truths, we are choosing to turn a blind eye.

Of course this entirely parallels the obvious cognitive decline of President Biden, evidenced over the past two years and almost unavoidable in the past twelve months, but now out in the open.  It was ignorant, cruel and forbidden to discuss until that point of inflection leading to the preference cascade when it is no longer forbidden, it is now necessary to discuss.

Same with Russian disinformation campaigns, Hunter Biden's laptop, the lag origins of COvid-19, the failure of the public health institutions during the pandemic, the catastrophe of renewable energy, the catastrophe of anthropogenic global warming, the deleterious effects of uncontrolled illegal immigration, the reality of genetics on life outcomes, the fact that gender income differences are the product of choices rather than discrimination, and on and on.  Things which the institutions and establishment insist are true as long as they can get away with the lies/errors and then which suddenly reverse when the truth can no longer be denied.

Just look for the truth.  Ignore the noise.  Assume that the institutional narrative is both self-serving and wrong.  

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Data Talks

 

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Ferry 2 by Dmitri Cavander

Ferry 2 by Dmitri Cavander




















Click to enlarge.

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Colonel Bogey March

Yesterday I was listening to patriotic tunes from the various Armed Forces bands when all of sudden I heard a tune I hadn't considered in years - The Colonel Bogey March.  Anyone who has ever been to summer camp or in Boy or Girl Scouts would likely recognize it.  From Wikipedia:

The "Colonel Bogey March" is a British march that was composed in 1914 by Lieutenant F. J. Ricketts (1881–1945) (pen name Kenneth J. Alford), a British Army bandmaster who later became the director of music for the Royal Marines at Plymouth. The march is often whistled. Featuring in films since it first appeared in The Lady Vanishes in 1938, Empire magazine included the tune in its list of 25 of Cinema's Catchiest Earworms.

As Wikipedia notes, The Colonel Bogey March shows up in many movies, most famously in The Bridge on the River Kwai.  

But Wikipedia does not have the youthful variants which all who have been to camp know.  I think the first version I first encountered was something along the lines of:

Comet, it makes your teeth turn green;
Comet, it tastes like Listerine;
Comet, will make you vomit;
So get some Comet and vomit today.

What a tapestry.  Commercially successful music, classic movies, camping.  

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Thursday, July 4, 2024

Independence Day Thank You

The Battle of Bunker's Hill, June 17, 1775 by John Trumbull (American, 1756–1843)

















The Battle of Bunker's Hill June 17 1775 by John Trumbull
Click to enlarge.

My mother.  An uncle.  A cousin.  Another cousin. And others.  Keen genealogists all.  

Late in her life I took up my mother's hobby on her behalf, finding new information, more stories, more history which we discussed and enjoyed.  She is gone now and I am left organizing all her voluminous files, bringing new order to all those loose ends.

One of the things I have meant to do for a number of years is to pull together as best I can, all our direct ancestors who served in the American Revolution.  Since my family lines originate early in both Virginia and Massachusetts, there are a large number of individuals.  Some lines are very long lived and some shorter.  Consequently, I have individuals ranging from six to nine generations ago who were alive at the time of the American Revolution.  Perhaps 300 male candidates who could have served.  

One branch started the war on the side of the British but then halfway through, based on the terror of Tarleton, switched to the American side.

Some had arrived only in the most recent couple of decades from Palatinate Germany, but the overwhelming majority were already one hundred and fifty years or so deeply planted in the early colonies.  

There are a handful of Quaker branches, there are a good number, especially out on the frontier, where the records are just not adequate to tell what was happening, there are occasions where the ages did not line up (father too old and sons too young).  There are a small number of lines I cannot trace back that far owing to record ambiguity.  

Even so, there are thirty-two family lines where I can document a direct male ancestor with military service or Patriotic service (elected public office, supplying the American forces, and the like).  Five of those lines have instances where father and son (direct ancestors) both served.  

And indeed, the whole war was a family affair.  For every direct male ancestor who served, his siblings and the brothers of his wife were also likely to have served.  And his sons.  And his uncles and father.  His cousins.  There are a couple of families where, had they all come together at one place and time, they would have had more than a 40-man platoon of serving blood relatives.  

Thirty-seven director ancestors served, ranging from a single service for a month as a Minuteman responding to the Lexington Alarm to one who served two multiyear tours in the Continental Army from beginning to the end of the war.  

Some were in their seventies when they served, some in their late teens.  A couple of them died during their service.  Many lost family members.

They are from almost all the States - Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, New Jersey, Maryland, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

They are now names in dusty records, and crumbling books and in only a few memories, but it is worth remembering all of them specifically for what they did, what they sacrificed, what their families sacrificed.  For us today.  They gave us the first and longest enduring Constitutional Republic based on the principles of the Age of Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.  

In gratitude for what they did for us:

4th Great-Grandfather John Bayless, Virginia Continental Line, Five years

5th GGF Ezekiel Hampton, North Carolina Militia

5th GGF William Carroll, North Carolina Continental Line, Two years

5th GGF William Franklin, Georgia Continental Line 

6th GGR Captain James Currin, North Carolina Militia

5th GGF Captain William Martin, North Carolina Militia

5th GGF Shadrack Mercer, North Carolina Patriotic Service

4th GGF Ambrose Latting, New York Militia, One year

5th GGF Colonel Andrew Morehouse, New York Militia Five years

5th GGF Lieutenant Colonel Robert Longley, Minute Men (Lexington Alarm) and Massachusetts Continental Line

6th GGF Zachariah Whitman, Massachusetts Militia

5th GGF Lieutenant Thomas Whitman, Massachusetts Militia

4th GGF Captain John Biggar Bibb, Virginia, Prince Edward County Militia, Four years.

5th GGF Captain James Philemon Holcombe, Virginia, Prince Edward County, Patriotic Service and Member of Committee of Safety

4th GGF James Baggett, South Carolina, South Carolina Line

4th GGF Abraham Briley 

4th GGF Captain John Young , Virginia, Augusta County Militia

4th GGF John Miller Marr, Virginia Continental Line, Three years

6th GGF Johann Dietrich Leonard Struble, New Jersey, Patriotic Service

5th GGF Ensign Daniel Struble, New Jersey, Militia

6th GGF Henry Couse, New Jersey, Patriotic Service

5th GGF William Loveridge, New Jersey, Morris County Militia

7th GGF Abraham Pinney, Connecticut, Patriotic Services

4th GGF John Murray, South Carolina, Patriotic Service and Soldier

5th GGF Samuel Nelson, South Carolina, Continental Line

5th GGF Peter Culbreath, Georgia, Continental Line

7th GGF Thomas Shepherd, Virginia, One year

6th GGF Thomas Shepherd, Maryland Militia

5th GGF Sergeant Richard Cox Bond, Virginia Continental Line, One year

6th GGF James Cozby, Virginia, Patriotic Service

5th GGF James C. Cozby, Virginia First Light Dragoons, Five years

6th GGF Lieutenant Joseph Browder, Virginia, Brunswick County Militia

5th GGF Lieutenant John Mefford, Maryland Militia

5th GGF Benjamin Bailey, Virginia Militia and Patriotic Service

6th GGF Francis Cheatham, Virginia, Patriotic Service

6th GGF Jeremiah Early, Virginia, Patriotic Service

5th GGF Colonel Jeremiah Allen Early, Virginia, Bedford County Militia.  Also Patriotic Service

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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We find that the strength of the evidence and key city features do not strongly predict adoption

From Bottlenecks for Evidence Adoption by Stefano DellaVigna, Woojin Kim, and Elizabeth Linos.  From the Abstract:

Governments increasingly use randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to test innovations, yet we know little about how they incorporate results into policymaking. We study 30 US cities that ran 73 RCTs with a national nudge unit. Cities adopt a nudge treatment into their communications in 27% of the cases. We find that the strength of the evidence and key city features do not strongly predict adoption; instead, the largest predictor is whether the RCT was implemented using preexisting communication, as opposed to new communication. We identify organizational inertia as a leading explanation: changes to preexisting infrastructure are more naturally folded into subsequent processes.

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Woman Reading by Frèdèric Forest

Woman Reading by Frèdèric Forest 

























Click to enlarge.

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Wednesday, July 3, 2024

Hope III: Assortative Mating

Hope III: Assortative Mating
by D.M. Charette

I hear how you proclaim the fault
for unequal shares in wealth
arises from the greediness
rich enjoy at poor’s expense.

But if you go through white papers [7,8]
you’ll notice one more factor
when you marry in your class
you increase the income gap.

Now let me call upon you all
who declare as liberal
to regard the bigger picture
when deciding on your future:

Seek outside of your career
ask out the single cashier
skip out on the grad event
hit the bar beside the plant

don’t inquire on film noir
learn to spot a muscle car
pass up on that back-stage tour
plant yourself in the bleachers.

So to decrease income division
you’ll marry someone not envisioned
but since you’re not a hypocrite
I’m certain you’ll be fine with it.

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What else did we just see which we are not discussing?

Since part of the purpose of this blog is for me to recall in years to come the thoughts of a moment, I want to capture one observation.

The debate between Trump and Biden was last week and was immediately assessed as a major loss for Biden.  All the discussion has been about Biden's poor performance, his age and his cognitive infirmity.  There has been very little discussion about Trump's performance.

That makes sense to a degree.  However you might assess it, he was within normal bounds of expectations.  The shock, to some, was just how outside of those bounds of expectations was Biden's performance.  And not on the high side.

We are, a week later, still in the midst of the aftermath.  Many in the legacy mainstream media, more in sorrow than anger, have already explicitly called for Biden to step down.  There is much discussion of the fraught process in front of the Democrats if he does step down, and then, also, if he does not.  The absence of any sort of credible national bench of talent is getting a fair amount of attention with attention focused on Newsom of California and Whitmer of Michigan (long shots) and even, in the zanier corners of the party, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton.  

The donor class and even some in the party in down ballot races are voicing concerns.  It feels like maybe there might be a congealing around the view that Biden should step down.  We'll see.  There is also increasing discussion about 1) how this could have happened, 2) who in the administration and in the legacy media is responsible for having hidden Biden's condition, and, even, 3) to a very small degree - how concerned should we be given Biden's current condition and the fact that there are four more months to go.  My sense is that everyone is sort of holding their breath and not wanting to discuss the need to replace Biden for 25th Amendment reasons not because of the political horse race.  

What I have not seen is any discussion from Trump's perspective.  In advance of the debate, there was a great deal of both criticism and concern from the right about his having accepted the Biden/CNN demands without any pushback.  They wanted an early debate (in the campaign schedule) when people are not yet usually paying attention.  They wanted no audience.  They wanted the moderators to be dyed-in-the-wool Trump critics from CNN.  They wanted to have control over Trump's microphone with the ability to switch him off.  They controlled the positioning, the lighting, the stage craft, etc.  

Everything was favorable to Biden and there was nothing advantageous to Trump and yet he still accepted.  His critics, and many of his supporters, evinced great concern in articles and interviews.  He was walking into the lion's den with no help or fallback save his own wit.

And, as it turns out, Biden's incapacity.  

Was Trump just so confident that Biden was incapacitated?  Did he just luck out because Biden unexpectedly had a bad night.  I don't think so.  Trump is a careful gambler and I suspect that he was neither foolhardy nor foolish.  

He made an assessment and bet on it and his assessment turned out to be right.  And now everyone is saying that which only observers on the right were saying before.  That Biden is many months down a dark path that puts our nation at risk and certainly unsettles the presidential campaign.  While people on the right were connecting the dots and pointing out the accelerating pattern of Biden's dysfunction, no one was willing to bet the farm.  Trump was and did.

And it seems to have paid off significantly.  There are still a long four and some months till November and many possible paths.  Maybe Biden stepping down or forcibly being replaced might not be the electoral windfall that many think.  Maybe there is a dark horse in the Democratic wings who can give Trump a run for his money.  An actually better candidate.  

Maybe.  But I still think it worth pondering what we saw, which is a pattern in Trump's success.  He had a contrarian interpretation (and or the courage to bet on that interpretation), he swung for the bleachers, he won hard.  Seems to me worth thinking about.

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History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Data Talks

 

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Tuesday, July 2, 2024

History

 

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An Insight

 

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I see wonderful things

 

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Saturday Night Live does Ecclesiastes

A serendipitous encounter with two Saturday Night Live skits from the past eight years highlighting the incestuous barren insularity of the institutional left and the dysfunctional absence of any sort of bench strength.  

I have commented a number of times on how disastrous the Obama administration was for the Democratic Party.  His singular focus on his personal political career ill-served the party.  At the end of his second term, the Democratic Party was down more than a thousand national elected roles (Governors, Senators, Representatives, State Attorney Generals, etc.) which constitute any party's bench of future talent for other elected positions.

That decimation was greater than the numbers indicate because many of the casualties were mid-career, i.e. they lost the strongest part of their future bench of talent.

The first SNL skit is on the epistemic and cultural insularity of the modern Democratic Left which they encountered in the 2016 election.  Funny because it is true and chilling because it is dysfunctional.

Double click to enlarge.

The second clip is from 2022 when the Democratic Party began to recognize the consequences of how empty their bench was of talent.  And it is even worse now.  Not only is it politically and legally difficult to replace Biden at this late date, even if that were feasible, there is still the horrifying question, "Replace with whom?"


Two old videos reflecting the current reality.  I would be tempted to quote Ecclesiastes 1:9-10

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. 

Except that they are unsympathetic to religious belief.

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Offbeat Humor

 

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Still living in Brooklyn-With-a-Bubble-On-It with Pauline Kael

From Democrats Should Acknowledge Reality And Abandon Their Utterly Failed Anti-Trump Strategy (If You Can Even Call It That) by Jesse Singal.  The subheading is “Orange Man Bad” might be accurate, but it doesn’t work as a campaign slogan in 2024.

Singal is a dyed-in-the-wool establishment Democrat.  I read him, not for the validity of his arguments but as a bellwether of the fashionable left.  In this column he is making a clear argument.

For about a decade now, the Democratic Party has put a referendum to the American public: “Donald Trump is a racist, fascist, misogynistic strongman and alleged serial sexual assaulter who doesn’t care about democratic norms and who will seek, whenever possible, to demolish them if it benefits him. Do you really want someone like this to be president?” Over time, the party has been able to add ever-more damning, fully accurate details, like “felon,” “adjudicated rapist,” and “attack on the Capitol instigator” to this description of the now-former president.

The American people have answered the same way, over and over: “Sure, maybe.” 

And it hasn't worked.  The Establishment narrative just doesn't have traction.

Look, you took a crack at the “Trump is racist and fascist” line — many cracks, in fact — and you got all the already-liberal folks on board, plus some moderate (mostly suburban) educated Republican types, at least for an election or two. But clearly, clearly, clearly, this is a failing strategy when it comes to consistently beating Trump at the national level. 

The most damning evidence against the orthodox Democratic strategy for fighting Trump and Trumpism is the trajectory of black and Latino opinion toward Trump. This graph from Bloomberg shows what those lines look like during seven years of blanket dissemination of the message that Trump is a dangerous and bigoted madman who is perhaps one or two steps removed from bona fide white nationalists: 
 

 














It. . .didn’t seem to work. At all. This shouldn’t necessarily surprise anyone familiar with the heterogeneous nature of these voting blocs, and with the fact that both include tens of millions of moderate-to-conservative voters, but at the end of the day, if you’re a Democrat who thought Trump was beatable if only the racist/fascist drum was beaten hard and loudly enough, how can you come to any other conclusion that you’ve failed spectacularly? The very groups you are claiming to want to protect from Trump have warmed to him over time.

I agree.  Their tactic was flawed from the beginning both because it was a negative message and because it was at best only weakly and even then only occasionally linked to reality.  

Singal has a striking statement interposed in the opening paragraphs.  Perhaps it is only a declaration of tribal fealty to avoid being cancelled.  Perhaps.  But if taken literally, he is the very thing he is objecting to. 

I am intentionally setting aside my own feelings about Trump for the purpose of this post, but I’ve made them clear over and over and over. Suffice it to say, I cannot wrap my head around the fact that Trump is so popular, relatively speaking, and I know most of my friends can’t either. 

He doesn't understand and nobody in his network of friends understands either.  If that isn't a declaration of blind insularity, I don't know what is.  Calls to mind the SNL skit, Brooklyn with a bubble on it.

Double click to enlarge.

He is supposed to be a public intellectual commenting on the times and yet is declaring he does not understand those times at all.  In that opening paragraph he affirms all the fevered beliefs that the institutional Left have about Trump and for which there is no or only ambiguous evidence.  It is all supposition and projection.

And we have been down this path before.  Staunch Democratic party stalwart Pauline Kael, theater critic for The New Yorker, had a very similar take as Singal back fifty-two years ago in 1972 when McGovern lost to Nixon.

How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him.

Another variant being, and the version most resonant of Singal's confession:

I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.

Singal's basic argument is true.  The Democratic Party effort to demonize Trump has failed.  The Democratic Party needs to persuade voters that they have the better alternative.  After last week's debate performance, that is a much harder task, but it is the task that needs to be accomplished.

But to persuade, you have to understand the counterargument and Singal (and Democrats) appear to no understand at all.  Singal.

I hate Trump.

I don't understand how anyone can like him. 
 
Nobody I know understands why Trump is popular.

He is a demon.

OK.  All that is already apparent.  But if that is the case, as you acknowledge, then how can you understand enough to be credible trying to persuade?  

This part of the argument simply does not compute.

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Data Talks

 

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Knives and Hobnail by Nick Patten

Knives and Hobnail by Nick Patten






























Click to enlarge.

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Monday, July 1, 2024

History

 

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Moral judgments are used to exercise power. That makes their truth status suspect.

From Links to Consider, 6/23 by Arnold Kling.  Referencing Martin Gurri.

I read him as saying that moral judgments are used to exercise power. That makes their truth status suspect.

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I see wonderful things

 

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Offbeat Humor

 











Click to enlarge.

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Data Talks

 

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Elite misinformation is just another term for Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

From The case against municipal fragmentation by Matthew Yglesias.  He includes a readers comment to an earlier column, Elite misinformation is an underrated problem.  

In elite misinformation, Yglesias argues

People have a lot of erroneous beliefs about the policy status quo in the United States, and that seems to matter. These beliefs are normally not formed via exposure to some kind of social media misinformation; they’re just about things that aren’t in the news very much and that people misunderstand. Which is to say that “people having information that is not correct” is absolutely a huge deal in politics… it’s just not necessarily “misinformation” in the sense that the misinformation police intend. In Dylan Matthews’ profile of the State Department’s small but very successful intelligence bureau, for example, one thing that comes through is that the bulk of American intelligence agencies genuinely believed that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons program. This erroneous information had a huge impact on the media, on the mass public understanding of political debates 2002-2003, in decision-making in Washington, and on the broad trajectory of American politics.

And I think erroneous ideas that are perpetrated by mainstream institutions — what I’m going to call “elite misinformation” — are a really big deal in an underrated way.

The whole column is worth a read.  Yglesias is focusing on elite misinformation but I think we already have a term for this - Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.  And have had since it was first described in 1841.  

The reader's response Yglesias calls out in municipal fragmentation column is:

I wrote a book adjacent to this topic, Radiation Evangelists, about the early development years of radiation therapy in medicine, and I have an add-on to this column: a lot of times people doing this kind of misinformation have functionally managed to talk themselves into believing what they are pitching.

Most of the early radiation innovators that I wrote about ended up dying of cancer or other radiation-induced maladies. I expected the story to be one where people who didn't know better died of something they didn't understand. But what I found in the research is that users recognized--and documented!--the risks more or less immediately. It's just that they then proceeded to talk themselves into alternate explanations. A lot of patients were harmed as a result, but the therapists bore the worst of it; more or less an entire generation of men and women who were enthusiastic early adopters ended up dead in a pretty painful and awful way.

All of which is simply to say that I think "elite misinformation" is an even harder problem than this column suggests, because motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug. Even well-meaning humans armed with reasonable information are highly prone to talk themselves into believing wrong stuff, and they will do that EVEN WITH the counter information right there in on the table. And someone who has lied to themself first is hard to disabuse of a notion, because 1) they do not "know" that they are lying, and 2) admitting that they are wrong now carries a component of shame and disappointment to go along with the embarrassment.

It's just a really hard problem.

The book is Radiation Evangelists: Technology, Therapy, and Uncertainty at the Turn of the Century by Jefferey Womack.

The obsession with misinformation, disinformation, deep fakes, cheap fakes, etc. all appear to be mere manifestations of totalitarians obsessed with the consequences of free speech, i.e. that free speech allows challenges to their centralized power in ways they do not understand nor wish to tolerate. 

But the phenomenon of fanatical obsession with empirically unreliable beliefs is longstanding and well described.  Among the literature:


Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell




Mistaken medical beliefs in the face of clear evidence is a well populated sub-genre in itself.

All mass movements, whether cultural, popular, political, intellectual, etc. are driven by motivated reasoning touched by fanaticism.  The short term antidote is never more information.  That is necessary in the long run but is ineffective in the face of short term fanatical conviction.  The only antidote is behavioral and cultural - the cultivation of humility and openness. 

The problem is not the factual underpinnings of the belief, it is the fanaticism of the belief.  A fanatical belief that is also incorrect will eventually founder on harsh reality.  It might take days, weeks, months, years, decades, occasionally centuries, but reality always wins.  The more fanatically the belief is held, the longer it takes.

Humility and openness are the antidotes to fanaticism.  And not often seen together.  

DEI, Critical Race Theory, Communism, Treatment of scurvy with citric acid, Occupy Wall Street, Anthropogenic Global Warming, Radiation Therapy, every investment craze - all divorced from empirical reality (or unsupported by it) and yet all having their cadre of fierce believers and their periods where they dominated the public discourse despite the empirical reality.  

But getting public intellectuals and those who control the levers of power and influence to cultivate openness and humility, not to say respect for their fellow man, is not something we can readily anticipate.  But it is always the only alternative to harsh encounters with reality when fanatically held beliefs are founded on beliefs not consistent with empirical reality.

UPDATE:  In the tide of today's news, there is a further example of fervid conviction overwhelming empirical data.  From What If the Most Notorious Murder of a Gay Man Wasn’t a Hate Crime? by Ben Kawaller.  The subheading is A generation ago, Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in what appeared to be a homophobic attack. This month, Ben Kawaller traveled to the scene of the crime. He heard a different story…

And it isn't a new story.  The book revealing that the murder was due to a drug deal gone wrong was published in 2013, eleven years ago.  But the conviction that it was a hate crime based on homophobia remains the dominant interpretation in may circles.  Not because of an absence of knowledge and information but due to a belief system which does not permit any different interpretation.  A belief system reinforced by financial inducements.




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Let Summer, 2011 by Axel Krause (German)

Let Summer, 2011 by Axel Krause (German)

















Click to enlarge.

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