Genetics and exercise

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve always liked exercise. I just don’t feel well when I’m inactive. After my severe back and arm injuries about two decades ago, and the resultant chronic pain, some of my range of activities was reduced. No more tennis, which had been my absolute favorite participatory sport up till then (although I was a raquetball aficionado for a while). I had quit ballet in my mid-30s, but that was shortly before my injury and because it was just getting harder and harder and harder to do it, with fewer and fewer rewards. No running, but then I never cared for running to begin with.

No, it’s pretty much fast walking for me now, and I’m lucky to do that. I’ve been consistent about it (some near and dear to me would say obsessive), but that’s because it really does tend to make me feel better. I stretch, too, twice a day, and don’t feel quite right without that, either.

I doubt that puts me on the high end of jockish people, although I suppose I would have qualified as such in my younger, ballet and tennis days. What’s more, I come from a line of jocks. My mother played tennis into her 80s. My older brother played several sports, and lacrosse at the college level, and still works out (and this despite also having a bad back; he had major back surgery at the age of twenty). My father, who only lived till his late 60s, was a special case because he had also hurt his back very badly in his twenties (as did I originally; are you detecting a pattern here?), but as a young man he’d been a football and tennis player. And both parents were avid ballroom dancers.

And so maybe there’s something to the genetics-and-exercise thing after all: see this and this. As we learn more and more about the specifics of the human body, it becomes more and more clear that we’ve got an awful lot left to learn.

After the bombing

The New Neo Posted on by

Boston bomber (I could say “alleged,” but I think it’s hardly in doubt that he’s the perp) Dzhokhar Tsarnaev blew up a bunch of people on Monday and went back to his college classes for the next couple of days and acted normally, according to the Boston Globe. It seems pretty clear that it was only the release of the photos that made him and his brother go on the lam.

That is pretty hard to fathom, except if you postulate either or both of the following, which are not mutually exclusive:

(1) Dzhokhar is a sociopath (or psychopath; take your pick).

(2) Dzhokhar is a highly-trained, cold-blooded, highly committed terrorist.

Or perhaps he was in shock and denial, which is by far the kindest interpretation.

Here’s the way it went down:

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev spent an apparently normal day Wednesday at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he was a sophomore, according to a school official, working out in the gym, then sleeping in his dorm room that night, while law enforcement officials frantically scanned photos trying to identify the men who planted deadly bombs at the Boston Marathon on Monday.

Card swipes told officials that Tsarnaev, described as a good and typical student who played intramural soccer, was on campus Wednesday, but it was not clear if he had been there earlier in the week.

A student, who did not want to be identified, also said she saw Tsarnaev at a party on Wednesday night that was attended by some of his soccer friends.

“He was just relaxed,” she said.

I would add that Tsarnaev must have been pretty ignorant of the extent and sophistication of surveillance videos, both professional and amateur, and the skills of law enforcement. Either that, or he already considered himself a dead man walking, once the act had been committed.

His demeanor reminds me very much of reports by friends of criminals such as the perpetrators in the very high-profile Menendez case and this New England one, in which teenage or young adult brothers come together to kill their parents and then act quite nonchalant afterward.

As the news dribbles out…

The New Neo Posted on by

…here are some interesting tidbits (offered, of course, with the caveat that so much of the news about this story has been mistaken).

Was this man the inspiration for the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev? Note the boxing background which they shared.

It’s been very difficult to get a bead on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s exact medical condition, but some of the reports indicate his main problem was weakness from loss of blood. If so, it seems there’s a very good chance he would be mentally competent (in the legal sense) as soon as he regains his strength.

A great deal of the news today consists of legal arguments about how the younger Tsarnaev brother should be tried, assuming he lives and is healthy enough to be prosecuted. Should he be read his Miranda rights, or should the public safety exception be activated, despite the fact that the police said the threat to the public is over? Could he be considered an enemy combatant, despite the fact that he’s an American citizen (naturalized last 9/11) committing his act on American soil? Should he be tried in Massachusetts, a state which does not have the death penalty?

Liberals and the left are predictably saying that people like Lindsay Graham, who think Tsarnaev could be considered an enemy combatant, are violating the Constitution. My opinion is that Graham’s suggestion would be a stretch, but certainly it’s not based on thin air (Graham is an accomplished lawyer and very knowledgeable in this particular arena):

Graham contends that a 1942 Supreme Court decision upholding a military trial for Nazi saboteurs who landed in Long Island during World War II authorizes the detention of Americans as enemy fighters. One of the men in the WWII case was a U.S. citizen.

As for the Miranda rights, it may be moot because of the time it could take Tsarnaev to recover enough to answer questions. But I don’t see how, considering the nature of the crime, the police could have been indicating that they knew that no public threat remained when they made that statement. They were trying to reassure a rattled public that the threat that Tsarnaev’s being at-large represented had passed, not that they knew there were no other people involved and no planned future attacks. How could that have been known at that point (or even now)?

By the way, Here’s the document that authorized a military tribunal for Lincoln’s assassins. As you can see, some of the questions involved were similar, some different. For example, when Lincoln was assassinated, Washington DC was still in a state of military readiness because the Civil War was not yet over, although it was drawing to a close. This is not the case for the US today, or for Boston; there is no conventional “hot” war. But what is the nature of the so-called “war on terror”? Are we in an (undeclared) war with Islamicist supremacist terrorists, who have declared war on us, some of whom are American citizens committing acts of mayhem and terrorism on our soil? Does it do anyone any good to say that these acts by these perpetrators should fall under the regular criminal justice system?

The Lincoln assassination military tribunal proclamation had this to say (note especially part 2):

But enemies with which an army has to deal are of two classes:

1. Open, active participants in hostilities, as soldiers who wear the uniform, move under the flag, and hold the appropriate commission from their government. Openly assuming to discharge the duties and meet the responsibilities and dangers of soldiers, they are entitled to all belligerent rights, and should receive all the courtesies due to soldiers. The true soldier is proud to acknowledge and respect those rights, and every cheerfully extends those courtesies.

2. Secret, but active participants, as spies, brigands, bushwackers, jayhawkers, war rebels and assassins. In all wars, and especially in civil wars, such secret, active enemies rise up to annoy attack and army, and must be met and put down by the army. When lawless wretches become so impudent and powerful as to not be controlled and governed by the ordinary tribunals of a country, armies are called out, and the laws of war invoked. Wars never have been and never can be conducted upon the principle that an army is but a posse comitatus of a civil magistrate.

The Lincoln assassination conspirators were home-grown American citizens. The difference was that they were acting during a time of official war. The Tsarnaevs were acting during a time of undeclared war in the formal sense. Should this limitation protect the surviving perpetrator from a military tribunal?

Public Enemy #2 captured

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, unless you were on a desert island yesterday, you probably already know that suspect #2 in the Boston Marathon bombing, Dzokhar (“Jahar”) Tsarnaev, was captured last night alive though wounded.

You may have noticed that I was AWOL from the blog while all this was going on, despite the enormity of the news. You may have thought that I was the one marooned on a desert island—but no, I was actually flying cross country and watching the action on TV but out of computer range, although my fingers were itching to write about it in real time.

A tremendous relief for the city of Boston and for the country, including the fact that Dzokhar has a good chance to live and be interrogated and then tried.

As for me, don’t worry; i plan to keep blogging during this visit.

Once again, so many of the facts are still unknown. What is Dzokhar’s medical condition at this point? When was he shot? Did he and his brother actually rob a convenience store or not? Did they release the guy whose car they commandeered, or did he escape?

But most of all, why did they do it in the first place?

Obviously we know the “why” to a certain extent. The older, less assimilated, less friendly, more religious brother was apparently the leader in the enterprise. They two are Chechens and Muslims, and there is little question that both of these facts were driving forces in their terrorist activities. But how and when did they “turn”—particularly the younger brother, whom everyone seems to describe with words like “friendly,” “normal,” “American” (which is not the usual profile of a terrorist bomber)? Was it during Tamerlan’s recent trip back to Dagestan (with a possible side trip to Chechnya)? If so, how did he influence the younger man?

And especially, what was the extent of any outside involvement or training? Is this the beginning of a new wave of “American” Islamicist terrorists?

Some puzzles

The New Neo Posted on by

You might say the whole Boston bombing story is a puzzlement, the big question being “why?” It’s easy to speculate—and I’ve done so myself—but I hope we’ll be able to find out a lot more as the days go on.

But for now I have a couple of less central questions: why did the terrorists spare the man whose car they took? They were on a killing spree, and had nothing to lose by killing him, too. But they did not. Did they identify with him in some way, since he was a man of about their age? If so, that certainly didn’t stop them on Monday from killing and maiming a lot of other similar people their age. Perhaps the difference was that he was a single individual, someone they had talked to. Or perhaps it was purely pragmatic; they just didn’t see the need of killing him.

Why rob a convenience store? Didn’t this call a lot of unwanted attention to themselves? I assume they needed money, and didn’t want to use their ATM cards because they thought the police might already know their names. But still.

Who was the third man who was shown being arrested last night? Was that just a police error, or is there a third suspect?

Were the perps on their way to commit another terrorist act last night? There were a few reports that they had with them another pressure cooker and explosives.

And of course, the obvious: where is Dzokhar Tsarnaev? If he has confederates to help him, he’s more likely to be able to hide or escape successfully. If not, he may run out of resources and draw attention to himself again.

Or he may have killed himself already, in some relatively isolated place. This would not be unusual for this sort of situation.

Looking into the eyes of evil

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a piece about how one of the most badly wounded victims of Monday’s bombing, twenty-seven-year-old Jeff Bauman, looked into the eyes of perpetrator Tamerlan Tsarnaev as he placed a bomb at his feet.

Bauman apparently was able to describe Tsarnaev to the police, and this helped in IDing the perp, who is now dead.

The story reminded me quite a bit of the story in this post of mine, about the man who looked into Muhammed Atta’s eyes on 9/11.

The Boston bomber chase

The New Neo Posted on by

Anyone who’s been watching the news knows what’s been going down in Boston. I was up till very late trying to absorb it all, hoping against hope that bomber #2 would be caught. So far, nothing doing on that.

Boston is reeling, of course. Other cities may be familiar with enormous shootouts and SWAT teams, but Boston really is a relatively sleepy city, and aims to keep it that way.

Watching the news, I haven’t seen anyone yet mention what almost everyone in Boston knows, which is that Watertown is something like Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn (if you’re familiar with that area)—that is, the place to go for Middle Eastern food, with a relatively heavy population of Middle Eastern origin. That may be irrelevant to this story, because most people there are not Middle Eastern, the bombers themselves are Muslims of Chechnyan ethnic origin (nearby, but not really Middle Eastern), and the presence of the shootout there may have been a pure coincidence anyway.

Chechnya, by the way, is in a part of the former Soviet Union that’s not too far from Georgia and Armenia, and then Iran to the south of that. Anyone who’s followed the news of the last decade knows that it was Chechnyan separatist terrorists who perpetrated the Beslan massacre, a particularly heinous attack that heavily involved children.

Whether or not these two brothers have Chechnyan concerns as a motive is unknown, however, as are a great many other things about them. The one who’s been killed, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was an athlete and amateur boxer of no small skill. They came to this country as youngish boys in 2002 with their parents, so it’s hard to believe they were sleeper agents unless it was the family who were the agents and who trained them in some way (the parents are reportedly back in Russia).

They are Muslims. Is this a surprise? If so, it shouldn’t be, despite the left’s deep and ardent desire for the truth to be otherwise, and despite the fact that the left will no doubt do some heavy tap-dancing to either disguise the fact of their religious beliefs, or minimize it, or blame their radicalization on the right and/or America anyway.

My guess is that as the facts emerge, the brothers’ motives will turn out to be a toxic mix of the political, the religious, and the personal and pathological. Whether or not they are freelancers or in league with some organization remains to be seen. My hunch is some form of the latter, although perhaps not officially al Qaeda. The fact that they are a pair, and brothers, puts them in the camp (in psychological terms, that is) of so many famous crime duos in which the twosome is more than the sum of its parts, and each member acts synergistically on the other.

[NOTE: I have a very busy day today and evening and won’t be able to update as regularly as I otherwise would. So it’s up to you!]

ADDENDUM: Here’s a piece about what friends and classmates of Dzokhar (“Jahar”) Tsarnaev have to say about him. No one saw this coming; he is uniformly described as a nice and friendly guy, and since he’s only 19 now these people knew him up until quite recently. Here are some interesting reactions:

“I saw the pictures last night and thought it looked kind of like him,” said Rebecca Mazur, who was in Tsarnaev’s class at school and is now studying at Harvard. “But I felt mean even thinking that the person in the photos looked like him.”…

“I went on Facebook and so far have been reading Facebook status after Facebook status of people who are feeling shocked and betrayed,” Mazur said.

“I didn’t know Jahar extremely well, but he was literally among the sweetest, most laid-back guys I’ve ever known,” said another student at Harvard who went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Always friendly and welcoming, I always felt comfortable hanging out with him.”

Tsarnaev seemed even-keeled up until recently, the student said.

“In fact, as recently as November, I played pick-up basketball with him and he seemed like he was doing great at UMASS Dartmouth,” the student said. “I don’t know what changed since then, but evidently it was something pretty big.”

There’s really too much news to cover adequately here, but if you go to memeorandum you’ll find links to a great many articles and reactions to those articles.

Breaking…

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m still awake and watching the news because there’s been so much drama for the past couple of hours in Boston. I’m hoping against hope that the following story, which is being reported on Fox, is actually true: one of the Boston terror attack suspects has been apprehended in Watertown, after a police officer was shot earlier this evening (presumably by one of the suspects) at MIT. Another suspect seems to be at large in the neighborhood.

There have been so many false reports that I cannot vouch for this one. But if true, it reminds me of the way Oswald was apprehended: he had shot police officer Tippit and then ran into a movie theater for cover, where he was apprehended.

UPDATE: I’m listening to a recording of some of the firefight. Whoever these guys are, they have a ton of firepower.

UPDATE: Now I’m watching video of the authorities walking the naked suspect into a police car—naked because they called in the SWAT team, held up shields, and made him strip before they’d go near him.

UPDATE: And now they’re reporting that one suspect is dead and one at large. If this is the case, who was that naked man being marched into the police car? Bizarre.

Suspect 1 and suspect 2

The New Neo Posted on by

The photos have been released.

One of the suspects, #2 (white cap), was spotted as a suspect quite some time ago by online websites and/or bloggers, although I can’t place where. Baseball caps, by the way, are very useful for perps, especially if they keep their heads down. As are sunglasses. Both make their features more difficult to see.

My guess is that these guys aren’t in Boston anymore. Are they even in the US?

I also don’t think these are amateurs. Their body language says otherwise.

Musical primacy

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This post of mine sparked the following reflections.]

Our responses to music are closely tied to emotion as well as memory. People who are brain-damaged and cannot speak can sometimes access music and even lyrics; different parts of the brain seem to be involved. A person going through a difficult emotional time—particularly romantic heartbreak, the subject of so many popular songs—can find music acting as a cathartic releaser for emotions otherwise kept hidden.

Although some people are disinterested in music, most of us are very very drawn to it. We have our favorites, and our favorites can be tenacious. Like Proust’s madeleine, a song or piece of music can vividly conjure up a lost time and place, distant people, and heartache or joy and almost everything in-between.

I have long thought that we all have a general tendency to prefer the first version we ever heard of a particular work, especially if we’ve grown familiar with it before hearing other versions. Of course, that first version must be a good one, but given that, it seems that the first one embeds itself into our minds and hearts in a way that makes it difficult to dislodge from its place of primacy.

There are many pieces, classical music and popular, that I know so well in their first versions that I can sing along (albeit badly) with every note, every nuance and hesitation and diminution, every accelerando and crescendo and shade and color. New versions just seem so wrong, even if other people might love them.

I’m sure there are exceptions where I’ve grown to love the later versions. But right now I can’t think of any. Well, maybe this one—but I wasn’t all that fond of the original in the first place:

The original:

Or was this the original? I think it was the original original (it sounds a lot more familiar to me):

As I said, neither is a big favorite of mine, but I think the Taylor version is more interesting. And the public seems to agree with me.

One exception to the primacy rule for me is Mark Knopfler. My favorite Knopfler version of any Knopfler song is usually the one I’m listening to at the moment. With Knopfler, it’s all good.