Cleveland’s Terrible Stain

By THE NY TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD

Tamir Rice of Cleveland would be alive today had he been a white 12-year-old playing with a toy gun in just about any middle-class neighborhood in the country on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2014.

But Tamir, who was shot to death by a white police officer that day, had the misfortune of being black in a poor area of Cleveland, where the police have historically behaved as an occupying force that shoots first and asks questions later. To grow up black and male in such a place is to live a highly circumscribed life, hemmed in by forces that deny your humanity and conspire to kill you.

Those forces hovered over the proceedings on Monday when a grand jury declined to indict Officer Timothy Loehmann in the killing and Timothy McGinty, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, explained why he had asked the grand jurors to not bring charges. Mr. McGinty described the events leading up to Tamir’s death as tragic series of errors and “miscommunications” that began when a 911 caller said a male who was “probably a juvenile” was waving a “probably fake” gun at people in a park.

The fact that those caveats never reached Officer Loehmann — who shot the child within seconds of arriving on the scene — was more than just an administrative misstep. It reflects an utter disregard for the lives of the city’s black residents. That disregard pervades every aspect of this case and begins with the fact that the department failed to even review Officer Loehmann’s work history before giving him the power of life and death over the citizens of Cleveland. Had the department done so, it would have found that Officer Loehmann had quit a suburban police department where he had showed a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training and was found to be emotionally unfit for the stress of the job.

Officer Loehmann joined a police department that itself had acquired a well-documented reputation for wanton violence and for shooting at people who posed no threat to the police or others. In a particularly striking event, documented by the Justice Department last year, officers mistook the sound of a car backfiring for a gunshot. They chased down and fired at the vehicle 137 times, killing two occupants who turned out to be unarmed.

The lengthy Justice Department report shows clearly why the black community viewed the Cleveland police as dangerous and profoundly out of control. In May, the Police Department entered an agreement with the Justice Department, enforceable by the courts, under which it is to adopt sweeping reforms.

The Police Department’s disregard for life was fully evident in the way the officers behaved after shooting Tamir. A surveillance video shows them standing by the child for four minutes without giving medical assistance, which was finally provided by an F.B.I. agent who happened to be in the neighborhood. Officer Frank Garmback, Officer Loehmann’s partner, nonetheless tackled the wounded boy’s 14-year-old sister as she tried to rush to his side. One can only imagine her suffering as she watched in handcuffs from the back seat of the squad car while her brother lay bleeding on the ground.

In addition to portraying the killing as a result of a tragic misunderstanding, prosecutors have also suggested the officer’s decision to kill Tamir was shaped by the fact that the surrounding neighborhood had a history of violence and that the boy appeared to be older than 12 because he was big for his age.

These arguments sidestep the history of violent, discriminatory police actions that led up to this boy’s death. They also have the reprehensible effect of shifting the responsibility for this death onto the shoulders of this very young victim.

2 Bankers Charged With Creating A.T.M. Cards to Steal From Accounts

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD NY TIMES

The Restoration Plaza branch of Chase on Fulton Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Two Chase bankers who worked in the neighborhood and two other men were charged this month with stealing from accounts.

The 15 JPMorgan Chase bank accounts had a few things in common: They had high balances, there was little activity on them and they belonged to elderly clients — indeed, at least eight were dead.

And all 15 of the accounts got regular cash infusions, thanks to direct deposits from the Social Security Administration.

That caught the eye of two private bankers who worked at a Bedford-Stuyvesant branch of JPMorgan Chase, Jonathan Francis and Dion Allison, according to an indictment filed this month in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. Creating cards for automated teller machines and forged documents, the men and their accomplices withdrew about $400,000 from the accounts over two years, according to the indictment.

The New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, warned in June that bank tellers and other employees have easy access to customer data, and had committed fraud using the data on multiple occasions.

In this case, prosecutors for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office charged in an indictment, the bankers could not only gain access to but also issue A.T.M. cards for the 15 accounts, without the account holder’s consent.

Mr. Allison, 30, and Mr. Francis, 27, created bank cards for several of the dormant accounts. (While prosecutors believe most, if not all, of the account holders have died, benefit checks continued to be deposited because of faulty reporting to the Social Security Administration.)

With two friends, Gregory Desrameaux, 24, and Kery Phillips, 40, the men then withdrew most of the stolen money, about $300,000, by using A.T.M.s around New York City, according to the indictment. Some withdrawals were as small as $200; some were up to $2,000, the daily limit for A.T.M. withdrawals for some Chase accounts.

In April 2013 alone, members of the group made withdrawals on 26 of 30 days, according to the indictment. One night at a Chase branch at Nostrand and Church Avenues, they withdrew $1,000 from one account; 49 seconds later, group members took out $1,000 from a different account.

By May of that year, people in the group had created fake power of attorney documents. That gave Mr. Phillips control of four of the dormant accounts, Adam Zion, an assistant district attorney, said in court on Monday. This allowed Mr. Phillips to withdraw much more money than the daily A.T.M. limit, up to $9,500 at a time, through a teller.

In another example of the scheme, in February 2013, according to the indictment, Mr. Allison created a bank card for one account. That May, at a Chase branch on Flatbush Avenue, Mr. Phillips turned in fake power of attorney documents giving him control of the account. The same day, prosecutors said, Mr. Phillips withdrew through a teller $49,929.91 — everything that remained — from the account.

JPMorgan Chase has already faced accusations of fraud among staff members this year. In April, an investment adviser, Michael Oppenheim, was charged in Federal District Court in Manhattan with stealing $20 million from seven of the bank’s clients.

Also in April, another employee, Peter Persaud, who worked at a Chase branch in Brooklyn, was accused of selling customer data — including account numbers, Social Security numbers, addresses and dates of birth — to an informant and an undercover officer. Mr. Persaud was charged with fraud and identity theft in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.

Lauren Ryan, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan Chase, said the company had been “working closely with the authorities and the Social Security Administration” in the current fraud case.

The four men listed in the current indictment have been charged with conspiracy, grand larceny and falsifying business records.

On Monday, Mr. Allison was arraigned before Justice Cassandra M. Mullen in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. Mr. Zion, the prosecutor, said that Mr. Allison searched for and maintained the targeted accounts, and issued and used some of the cards.

He had told Chase investigators that he had looked for high-value accounts, issued and used the A.T.M. cards, sold some of the cards and account data, and worked with Mr. Francis on the scheme, Mr. Zion said. Also, he had logged onto the Chase system with his co-workers’ credentials when they were away from their desks, according to Mr. Zion.

Prosecutors requested $100,000 bail; Justice Mullen released him on $25,000 bond. Mr. Francis and Mr. Desrameaux were arraigned earlier this month.

Mr. Allison’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Douglas Rankin, the lawyer for Mr. Francis, said that his client denied the allegations, and that he no longer worked at Chase and “left on his own before this became an issue.” David Walensky, the lawyer for Mr. Desrameaux, said his client denied involvement in the scheme.

Mr. Phillips is still at large, according to a news release from the district attorney’s office.

Cleveland Officer Will Not Face Charges in Tamir Rice Shooting Death

By MITCH SMITH NY TIMES

Timothy J. McGinty, the Cuyahoga county prosecutor, announced on Monday that the Cleveland police officer who fatally shot Tamir Rice last year will not face criminal charges.

The Cleveland police officer who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice last year will not face state criminal charges, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office announced Monday.

The decision by grand jurors was the end of a lengthy investigation that was criticized by Tamir’s family and by activists, who called the shooting senseless and said the officer should have been charged with murder months ago.

Tamir, who was black, was carrying a replica gun outside a recreation center when someone called 911. The caller cautioned that Tamir was probably a juvenile and that the weapon was “probably fake,” but that information was not relayed to the two officers who responded, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback.

Surveillance video, which has been widely circulated online, showed Officer Garmback pulling the police cruiser within a few feet of Tamir, and Officer Loehmann, who is white, stepping out of the car and almost immediately firing his gun. Tamir died hours later. His partner, Officer Garmback, was also not indicted.

Timothy J. McGinty, the county prosecutor, who made the announcement at a news conference, said that while “this was a perfect storm of human error,” the evidence considered by a grand jury over two months “did not constitute criminal action by police.” He noted that the law gives the benefit of the doubt to a police officer “who must make a split second decision.”

Mr. McGinty said it was “indisputable” that Tamir was drawing the weapon from his waistband when he was shot — either to hand it over to the officers or to show them that it was not a real firearm. But Mr. McGinty said there was no way for the officers to know that as they pulled up.

He said he “appreciated the sincere emotion and concern of all citizens” but asked the community to “respect the process.”

In a statement, Gov. John R. Kasich said that he understood “how this decision will leave many people asking themselves if justice was served,” but urged residents not to “give in to anger and frustration and let it divide us.”

A statement from the office of Jonathan S. Abady, a lawyer representing the Rice family, said Tamir’s relatives were “saddened and disappointed by this outcome — but not surprised.”

“It has been clear for months now that Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty was abusing and manipulating the grand jury process to orchestrate a vote against indictment,” the statement said. “Even though video shows the police shooting Tamir in less than one second, Prosecutor McGinty hired so-called expert witnesses to try to exonerate the officers and tell the grand jury their conduct was reasonable and justified.”

Tamir was shot on Nov. 22, 2014, two days before a grand jury in Missouri declined to indict the white Ferguson police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old. Though Cleveland did not experience protests as large or frequent as in Ferguson, Tamir’s death infuriated demonstrators across the country, and the case has become among the most prominent in a national debate over race and policing.

The official investigation into Tamir’s death moved slowly, with the county sheriff’s office taking over for the police department, and then the prosecutor’s office conducting its own inquiry after the sheriff’s inquiry concluded. Fed up with the pace, some activists used an obscure provision of Ohio law to seek the arrest of the two officers. Though a judge found that probable cause existed for some charges, neither officer was arrested.

Mr. McGinty released a redacted version of the sheriff’s investigation months ago, and in recent months has published three independent reports by use-of-force analysts who found that Officer Loehmann had acted reasonably in shooting Tamir.

Mr. McGinty, who commissioned the reports but said they would not taint the fairness of the grand jury process, was criticized by Tamir’s family, who suggested that the investigation was rigged and that an indictment was all but impossible.

The Rice family also commissioned outside reports on the shooting, which found that the shooting was unjustified and that the officers used poor tactics in responding to the scene.

Neither Officer Garmback nor Officer Loehmann has spoken publicly about the shooting, though both men read statements to grand jurors about their actions that day. Officer Loehmann told the grand jury that he fired out of fear for his safety after Tamir reached into his waistband and grabbed the replica gun, which he believed to be real.

Tamir’s family has questioned Officer Loehmann’s account of the shooting, and has sued the city and both officers in federal court.

Since Tamir’s death, questions have been raised about Officer Loehmann’s qualifications and about the Cleveland police’s standards on the use of force. Records show that Officer Loehmann resigned from another Ohio police department after a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training. The Cleveland police did not review that department’s personnel file before offering Officer Loehmann a job.

For years, the Cleveland police have been criticized for being too aggressive in its use of force, and for broader failures in management, record keeping and training. In May, the city agreed to a sweeping consent decree with the Justice Department that required broad changes in how officers use and report force, and which placed the police under the supervision of an independent monitor.

Tamir is among several black people whose deaths at the hands of the Cleveland police have raised questions in recent years. In 2012, 13 Cleveland officers fired a combined 137 rounds at Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, both unarmed, after the car Mr. Russell was driving fled police. One officer was charged with manslaughter in the case, but was acquitted in May at a bench trial. Last November, Tanisha Anderson, a 37-year-old black woman said to have suffered from mental illness, lost consciousness and died in police custody after she was placed facedown on the pavement. An investigation into her death is continuing.

Mr. McGinty presents evidence in all fatal police encounters to a grand jury, but some activists have questioned the fairness of the process, and have noted that indictments are generally unlikely unless one is sought by a prosecutor.

In the Rice case, family lawyers have said for months that they have little confidence that Mr. McGinty wanted the officers charged. The lawyers have called for a special prosecutor to take over the case, and have asked the Justice Department to investigate.

Stylish, Tenacious Defender

Character Study

By COREY KILGANNON NY Times

Photo

Mario F. Gallucci, 51, outside the Richmond County Courthouse in St. George on Staten Island. Credit Nicole Craine for The New York Times


Mario F. Gallucci was at it again, throwing a curveball at a witness on the stand in a Staten Island courtroom.

“Objection,” said the prosecutor, rising to her feet.

“She’s right,” a smiling Mr. Gallucci said in response to the prosecutor’s protest, which was not over a point of law but rather of Mr. Gallucci’s complimenting the suit worn by the detective on the stand, whom Mr. Gallucci was trying to cross up.

Mr. Gallucci, 51, was defending a local teenager charged with four others in the beating and robbing of another teenager. Mr. Gallucci lowered his usual $20,000 retainer to take the case on good faith, although it is hardly the high-profile type of case he is known for on Staten Island.
Questioning the arresting officers and hoping to elicit discrepancies, the other defendants’ lawyers read from notepads at a lectern. But Mr. Gallucci paced around theatrically, circled the prosecutor’s desk and adopted a jocular tone borrowed from the “My Cousin Vinny” legal playbook.
He is known for his courtroom theatrics and his sartorial style.

“People know Mario Gallucci for the way he dresses,” said Mr. Gallucci, narrating his own profile.

He keeps 150 ties on a rotating rack at home next to his array of nearly two dozen designer suits tailored to fit his 5-foot, 6-inch powerlifter’s build.

Today’s suit was a charcoal Hickey Freeman, which he wore over a custom-made shirt with monogrammed cuffs.

During the hearing, Mr. Gallucci got one detective to admit hiring his client repeatedly in the past, to serve as “filler in a lineup” for unrelated arrests, at $20 an appearance.

Afterward, he walked through the courthouse, fist-bumping court employees, who enjoy the Christmas cannolis that Mr. Gallucci is known for distributing each December.

In other circles, he is reviled for defending accused wife-killers, husband-killers, baby-killers and, in the current case of Eric Bellucci, an accused parents-killer. Mr. Bellucci is accused of stabbing his mother and father to death in their Staten Island home in 2010.

Mr. Gallucci, who was assigned the case by court officials, advised Mr. Bellucci to plead insanity. Mr. Bellucci objected and told Mr. Gallucci in open court that he would have him shot unless Mr. Gallucci helped him argue self-defense instead. Nevertheless, the case is proceeding, with the Bellucci-Gallucci pairing still intact.

Then there is the New Jersey police officer charged with driving drunk and getting into a wrong-way crash last March that killed two passengers, after the group left a strip club.

Mr. Gallucci is demanding a blood test to determine whether strippers may have slipped the defendant a dose of a date-rape drug before he got behind the wheel.

Addressing his critics, Mr. Gallucci smiled broadly and said that even the most heinous of defendants “didn’t kill anybody till the jury convicts them.”

“Fifty percent of the people hate what I do, and the other 50 percent respect the fact that I defend the Constitution,” he said. “But even that first group, I’m the first person they call when their loved one gets into trouble.”

Mr. Gallucci lives in Marlboro Township, N.J., with his wife and three teenage children.

Originally from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, he moved with his family to Staten Island when he was 4. He went to Monsignor Farrell High School there and attended the State University of New York at Brockport, where he played second base on the baseball team and took Staten Island Italian cooking to his upstate dormitory, preparing his mother’s lasagna and baked ziti dishes for dorm-mates.

After attending Vermont Law School and working as a prosecutor for the Staten Island district attorney, he practiced civil litigation and then criminal law, and joined a pair of high school pals to form Helbock, Nappa & Gallucci, whose office is on what else but Victory Boulevard.

His love of the gourmet and pampered life helped land him and a law associate, Lou Gelormino, a reality show, “Partners in Crime,” for the USA Network in 2014.

Mr. Gallucci gets regular manicures and pedicures. He is proud of his legal record and his cooking, noting that his meatballs finished second only to those of Big Ang, another Staten Island fixture, in a charity meatball challenge.

He was once so obsessed with finding out where his father, John, bought his lauded cannolis that he had his private investigator tail his dad on a pastry run.

Not every legal defense happens in court, he said, recounting the time in 2014 that he helped a client who had been partying with a group at the Hilton Garden Inn. A woman in the group wobbled away wearing the red ruby replica slippers from the “Wizard of Oz” on display in the lobby. Mr. Gallucci brokered their prompt return with no arrest.

Mr. Gallucci also represented Michael Mastromarino, a New Jersey dentist who masterminded the harvesting of body parts from more than 1,000 corpses in the early 2000s, including the body of Alistair Cooke, the British journalist and former host of “Masterpiece Theater.”

Mr. Mastromarino pleaded guilty in 2008, after which Mr. Gallucci allowed that his client “decided to cut corners” after starting the practice legally.

Mr. Mastromarino wound up dying of bone cancer, which Mr. Gallucci noted as irony. Before that, Mr. Gallucci would visit him upstate in prison and would take Italian food to correction officers to help ease access to his client.

“I’d bring Italian heroes, capicola, prosciutto,” he said. “They don’t get that stuff upstate.”

Fernande Grudet

Under the name 'Madame Claude' Gurdet operated a deluxe call-girl ring in Paris in the 1960s and ’70s that attracted the patronage of world leaders, business executives and playboys and made her a byword for sophisticated sex, died on Saturday in Nice, France. She was 92.

The news agency Agence France-Presse reported the death on Tuesday.

Ms. Grudet, a woman of modest background from the Anjou region, arrived in Paris in the 1950s. After working a series of menial jobs, one of which may have been selling sex on the streets, she decided that the managerial side of the business suited her talents.

“Two things in life sell,” she once said. “Food and sex. And I was not meant to be a chef.”

Precisely how she built her business remains a mystery, despite two memoirs, larded with colorful and eminently uncheckable stories. But build it she did, grooming a finishing school’s worth of beautiful young women, many of them foreign, from the fringes of the film and fashion worlds, with a sprinkling of students looking for extra cash and housewives looking for adventure in the manner of Catherine Deneuve in “Belle de Jour.”

Ms. Grudet zeroed in on “failed models and actresses, the ones who just missed the cut,” the high-society columnist Taki Theodoracopulos told William Stadiem, who spent many years interviewing Ms. Grudet for a book that never materialized, but that did yield an article for Vanity Fair last year. “But just because they failed in these impossible professions didn’t mean they weren’t beautiful, fabulous.”

Ms. Grudet liked to call her charges “swans”; clients referred to them as “Claude girls.” The term “prostitute,” she once said, “was revolting and denigrating.”

She was choosy: Only one in 20 candidates made the grade. Requirements included beauty — plastic surgery could be arranged — poise and a familiarity with history, literature and current events. Also, talent in bed. This was assessed by Ms. Grudet’s testers, male acquaintances who took candidates for a trial run and reported back to her.

Working with nothing more than a notebook and a telephone, Ms. Grudet received calls with a terse “Allô oui,” made polite small talk and then got down to prices: up to 1,000 francs for a night of bliss — about $200 in 1965, or $1,500 today.

Ms. Grudet kept 25 or 30 percent (accounts vary) of the young women’s earnings. Many of her “Claude girls” went on to find success in film, fashion or business. Quite a few married rich clients.

In 1975, the French tax authorities, who had begun taking an interest in Ms. Grudet’s business, estimated that she was taking in 100,000 to 140,000 francs a month. Her clients, whom she called “friends,” were a catalog of the rich and famous.

The soul of discretion in her heyday, Ms. Grudet became a heavy name-dropper when the time came to tell her life story, which she did in two memoirs: “Allô Oui, or the Memoirs of Madame Claude” (1975), written with Jacques Quoirez, the brother of her good friend Françoise Sagan and one of her testers; and “Madam,” published in 1994 under the name Claude Grudet.

By her account, the “friends” included John F. Kennedy, the shah of Iran, Muammar el-Qaddafi, Gianni Agnelli, Moshe Dayan, Marc Chagall, Rex Harrison and King Hussein of Jordan, who, she said, once told a Claude girl: “You and I are in the same business. We have to smile even when we don’t feel like it.”

Kennedy came to her with a special request, Ms. Grudet told Mr. Stadiem. He wanted a look-alike of his wife, Jacqueline, “but hot.”

Ms. Grudet aimed to please, within limits. A client requesting a dead body, still warm, was rebuffed, she said. Still, breathless need on the other end of the telephone line was music to her ears.

“It was so exciting to hear a millionaire or a head of state ask, in a little boy’s voice, for the one thing that only you could provide,” she once said.

Fernande Grudet was born in Angers, in western France, on July 6, 1923. Her father, who died of cancer when she was 18, kept a cafe and helped make ends meet by selling sandwiches from a cart at the train station. After graduating from Catholic schools, she made her way to occupied Paris during World War II.

She claimed to have worked as a saleswoman at Les Halles, the central food market, and as a door-to-door Bible saleswoman. She also told various people at various times that she had joined the Resistance and had been deported to Ravensbrück, the women’s concentration camp. Even friends did not know what to believe. She also said that she came from a wealthy family.

In 1958, she set up shop as a “mère maquerelle,” or “mother pimp,” as the press often referred to her, using a term she detested. She took pride in running a five-star operation and presented a well-maintained facade to the world. Meeting her for the first time, Mr. Stadiem described her as “tiny, blond, perfectly coifed and Chanel-clad.” Every morning at 8:30, she paid a visit to the hairdresser, who opened shop early for her.

The French authorities allowed her to operate undisturbed — perhaps, some theorized, because she passed along information about some of her more interesting “friends.”

After Valéry Giscard d’Estaing came to power in 1974, the climate changed. Charged with tax evasion, she was presented with a bill for 11 million francs.

In 1977, she fled to the United States and ended up in Los Angeles, where she opened an unsuccessful pastry shop and, some of her friends suspected, returned to her old trade in a small way. In the mid-1980s, she returned to France, where she bought a sheep farm by Cahors, near the home of Ms. Sagan, and tried to keep a low profile. She was arrested on the outstanding tax charges and sentenced to a short prison term.

After being released, she returned to Paris and, hoping to build a retirement nest egg, started another call-girl network — a small one with perhaps 20 “swans.” In 1992, she was arrested again, spent six months in prison awaiting trial and, after being found guilty and fined one million francs, was released.

After her trial, she became, for a time, a highly visible figure, publishing a memoir and giving interviews to promote her video on the art of seduction. She spent her final years in penury in Nice.

Her legend inspired several films, some watchable, others not. In the mid-1970s, French audiences enjoyed two Madame Claude films, “Madame Claude” — directed by Just Jaeckin, best known for the soft-pornography film “Emmanuelle” — and “The Pink Telephone.” “Madame Claude” was released in the United States as “The French Woman,” with a poster that proclaimed: “The Arab Prince, the Japanese Diplomat, the Greek Tycoon, the C.I.A. Bureau Chief — She Possessed Them All!”

Françoise Fabian, who played the title role in Mr. Jaeckin’s film, got to know Ms. Grudet well. She did not like what she saw. Behind the polished image of “swans” and “friends,” she said, was a cold, calculating business mind.

“She was like a slave driver in the American South,” Ms. Fabian told Mr. Stadiem. “Once she took a girl on, the makeover put the girl in debt, because Claude paid all the bills to Dior, Vuitton, to the hairdressers, to the doctors, and the girls had to work to pay them off. It was sexual indentured servitude.”

Mrs Grudet was always kind to important world leaders. She delighted in sending fabulous rich chocolate Brownies to those she admired. In recent years she sent Brownies to President Obama, Vladimir Putun and Pope Francis. It's been reported she once had a serious crush on President Jimmy Carter, who received peanut butter Brownies! DAF  

INTELLIGENT DESIGN OR INTRICATE DECEPTION? 

WHAT I TOLD STUDENTS DURING THE KITZMILLER TRIAL

by Paul Braterman From 3 Quarks Daily

Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, in which judgment was pronounced on 20th December 2005, is the court case that established that Intelligent Design is not science, but a form of religiously motivated creationism, and as such may not be taught in publicly funded schools in the US. This is a shortened version of what I told the students at Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science, University of North Texas's early admissions programme, whom I was privileged to be teaching at the time of the trial. I have omitted my discussion of the embarrassing Intelligent Design pseudotext, Of Pandas and People, and the even more embarrassing statement that the Dover School Board instructed teachers to read, for reasons of space and because I have discussed them here before.  I have tried to avoid rewriting in the light of what I have learnt since, but insert some comments for clarity, and links where relevant.

Pandas_and_people

The "supplementary textbook" at the core of the case

This is a rather unusual presentation.  It is the only presentation that I have ever given in response to a specific request from the [then] President of the United States, who has given as his opinion that Intelligent Design should be discussed in schools.  It is the only presentation in which you will see me, a chemistry professor, practicing philosophy and even biblical exegisis; and I should warn you that I am practicing without a license.  It is the only presentation I have ever given with the expectation that a number of people in the audience will be actively hostile to what I intend to say, because the point of view that I stand for is often misrepresented in this society as being hostile to religion. 

But what is really extraordinary about this presentation is, that it is necessary at all.  Having been a hundred years in the making, the central notions of evolutionary biology erupted into public awareness a century and a half ago, and, over the following 50 years, the major religious groups of the industrialised world came to terms with these ideas.  The creationist challenge to what has been, for over a century, the central theoretical framework of biology, is a recent development, and, very specifically, a 20th-century American phenomenon.  Very recently, creationism has changed its name to Intelligent Design Theory, but this is a purely cosmetic change.

I expect that this talk will please no one.  I will, as you might expect, argue against Intelligent Design arguments.  Indeed, I will go much further, claiming that such arguments are part of a particular kind of mindset, which I will call literalism (although some call it fundamentalism), and that the rise of this mindset represents a most serious threat to knowledge.

When a majority of Americans polled reject the central concepts of mainstream modern biological science, something is very badly wrong.  I will also argue that the scientific establishment has contributed to this disaster (and when a majority of the American public deny the plain facts of biology, this is a disaster) through its own ineptitude and philosophically muddled teaching.  I will argue that literalism is a harking back to a prescientific mode of thought, that is systematically distorts the way in which its practitioners view the world, and that it represents a seriously impoverished approach at the spiritual level and the level of human affairs, as well as being completely hostile to the spirit and practice of science.

Linnaeus_-_Regnum_Animale_(1735)The standard picture of modern biology, as I will call it, stems from the work of Linnaeus who in 1737 establish the classification that we still follow into species, genera, et cetera.  It was not long before Buffon and others started explaining similarity in terms of family resemblance.  A critical stage in this development took place in the mid-19th century, with the idea that species originate through descent with variation, followed by competition between the different variants.  We associate this insight with Charles Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species, but the fact that the same key ideas were independently discovered by Alfred Russel Wallace suggests that this was an idea for which the time was ripe.  The entire evolutionary position is still sometimes referred to as "Darwinism", especially by its opponents, but this is completely unhistorical, and the expression should be reserved for the specific ideas put forward by Darwin, Wallace, Thomas Huxley, and others in the mid-19th century.  Current evolutionary theory is a much refined and altered version of this, much as present day atomic theory is a much refined and altered version of that used by mid-19th century chemists.

The immediate upshot of Darwin's publication was intense debate between those who welcomed it as a major scientific advance, and those who saw it as a threat to established ideas in religion, and in particular to the authority of the Bible.  In Europe, and particularly in Britain, the debate was played out in the next few decades, and led to general acceptance by the churches of the correctness of the evolutionist position, and reinterpretation of Genesis in terms of allegory. Darwin himself lies buried in Westminster Abbey.

Since that time, the argument for evolution has enormously strengthened, in ways that Darwin and Wallace could not have foreseen. The work of Grigor Mendel and his successors gave us a science of genetics, which shows how it was possible for variations to be passed on undiluted from one generation to another.  We can understand how the necessary variation arises, because we know about mutations, and since the work of Franklin, Crick, and Watson in 1953, we even know the nature of the genetic material.  In Darwin's time, there were massive gaps in the fossil record, so large in fact that Wallace continued to believe that humanity was a separate creation, rather than having common ancestry with the apes.  By now, we have a whole range of intermediate forms, so much so that there is held the ongoing debate among anthropologists and paleontologists as to which ones lie on our direct line of ancestry, and which represent evolutionary dead ends.  We have the discovery of deep time, necessary for evolution, and the development of about a dozen separate, mutually consistent, methods of radioactive dating, which enable us to assign dates to fossils, going back over 3 billion years. Finally, and most convincingly, we have the development of DNA sequencing, which makes it possible to give a quantitative estimate of how long different species have been developing separately, and the family relationships discovered in this way bear a remarkable closeness to the family resemblances observable when we classify present-day organisms, and to the distances between branches of the evolutionary tree, as displayed by similarity of features and the fossil record.

I was therefore amazed, on arriving in Texas in 1988, to discover that in the minds of many Americans these matters were still in dispute, and since then I have been appalled at the increasing expression, for largely political ends, of the view that evolution is seriously in doubt, and even that creationism should be offered in biology classes in schools.

I fear that the usual reaction of us scientists including myself until recently, has been to ask "How can anyone believe anything so stupid?", and then not wait for an answer.  Or, alternatively, to put forward reasoned defenses of the evolutionist position, as I have spent the past few minutes doing, without stopping to examine the thinking of their opponents.  The result is an outpouring of writings by scientists, for scientists, which are either ignored by the creationists, or, worse, mined for phrases that can be used against us.  What I plan to do today and henceforth, is to take a rather different approach, to suggest that the opposition to evolutionist biology depends on what I shall call "literalism", and to contrast the methods of literalism with those of science.  I shall argue that literalism extends far beyond the usual biblical context that we associate with the word, that literalists will regard as legitimate kinds of argument which to scientists seem downright dishonest, and that through failure to understand the nature of literalism, we scientists and science educators give ammunition to our enemies.  We are losing the public relations battle because we have not taken the trouble to understand what we are up against. 

We (and by we, I mean the whole of mainstream science) are at war, and don't know it.  This is why I am urging scientists to play attack, rather than defense.  If an adversary who is determined not to be convinced demands more evidence, there is no point in trying to give it to him.  He will complain of the inadequacy of any volume of evidence, and will always be able to ask for more, in much the same way that the coal companies keep on demanding more evidence for global warming.  For example, if you point the fossil record as evidence, the creationist will point out that there are times in the fossil record, and however detailed the evidence may be that you offer, there will still be gaps. If you fall for this ploy, you will always be on the defensive, and your opponent will always seem to an outsider to have the stronger case.  As I shall show later by example, what you should do is to ask the creationist why, in his scheme of things, there is any fossil record at all.

Firstly, let me define my terms.  By literalism, I mean the belief that it is possible to find out the truth about things by closely examining words.  By creationism, I mean the belief that separate species or groupings represent separate acts of divine intervention.  Since there is only one serious candidate for the role of Intelligent Designer, and since proponents of Intelligent Design never give us any details of how the designs come to be embodied, I think we must conclude that is simply a form of creationism that dare not speak its name. By absolutism, I mean the belief that it is possible to arrive at a final absolute statement of the truth.  Absolutists generally believe, although logically they do not really have to, that they themselves happen to be the ones in this fortunate position. 

We need some terms for the contrary positions.  I shall refer to the opinion that all living things on Earth share a common ancestry as the standard picture.  I will use the term fallibilists for those who believe that, except perhaps in certain areas of mathematics or of direct experience, absolute certainty is not of this world, that some degree of uncertainty attaches itself to all their opinions, and that they are certainly wrong about many things, although they don't know which.  In their working lives, at least, all scientists are fallibilists.  That is because we care about the facts, and our experience shows that the facts can prove us wrong.  This position leaves no room in science for absolutism or literalism.  Nor should we want there to be, since reality is more interesting, subtle, and complex than our ability to describe it.

I think you can already see how this is going to play out.  Scientists will, ideally at least, make carefully qualified statements, judiciously spelling out the degree of uncertainty in their opinions, and emphasising their willingness to change their beliefs in the face of new evidence. That's because we care about the facts.  They will maintain, correctly, that literalist arguments are devoid of scientific merit, and will naïvely imagine that that settles the matter.  Literalists will often be absolutists, and will attribute the cautious way in which scientists use words to lack of conviction.  The literalist will freely quote the scientist out of context. The scientist will complain that this is dishonest, that his or her meaning is being distorted, but the literalist will reply, in all sincerity, that he cannot be faulted for simply citing what was actually said.  If the scientist regards the literalist at this point as dishonest, the literalist will regard the scientist as evasive.  The result is that we have a cottage industry based on literalist quotation mining, and a counter-industry in which the defenders of science try to keep up by mending the fractures, and putting the quotations back in context.

All this seems to me a symptom of a deeper problem.  The fallibilist will assume that the conversation is in the last resort a cooperative effort, a kind of conversation, with both parties interested in winding up a little bit closer to the truth.  The absolutist believes he knows the truth already.  For him, the conversation is a competitive debate, where the aim of each party is to vanquish the other.  The absolutist will therefore play by rules closer to those of the law court that the laboratory.  He knows the truth, and all he has to do is to make the case for it.  His job is to assemble all the materials, good, bad, and indifferent, that supports his own case and to trash any counter arguments made by their opponents.  Faced with these tactics, scientists will believe themselves to be the victims of conscious intellectual dishonesty, and may even withdraw from the debate.

Literalism has various attractive features, some of which I have already mentioned.  There is certainty, provided one can convince oneself that one has interpreted the text correctly.  There is power, if you can convince other people of your superior ability to interpret the sacred texts.  There is finality, since once something has been said, with sufficient authority, the issue is regarded as settled once and for all.  There is a sense of comradeship and shared purpose with those that use the same texts as you do. Some literalists go so far as to believe that everybody who agrees with them will go to heaven, and everyone who disagrees will go to hell.  A powerful consideration, which may well distort anyone's judgment.  For American audiences in particular, there is the ever popular illusion of individualism; this is what I believe, dammit, and no pointy head is going to tell me different. Above all, literalism gives you an easy way of resolving complex issues.  It deals with words instead of dealing with things.  When presented with a thing, the literalist will put it in a box, put a label on the box, and then decide how to deal with the thing by reading the label.

I argued that literalism is intellectually bankrupt in the area of biblical exegesis, quoting 2 Corinthians 3:6: "the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" and pointing, much in the spirit of Maimonides, to texts that surely were never meant to be taken literally. My first example was day and night on Day One of Genesis, but no sun and moon until the fourth day.

How could you have alternating day and night before you had sun and moon?  I ran this argument by a literalist, with whom I had a long and informative correspondence, and he said, more or less, no problem: God can turn the lights on and off whenever He feels like it.  Fair enough, perhaps, but notice that if you argue like that, you cannot pretend to be doing science.  By invoking God's will in this way, you can explain absolutely anything, you can never be proved wrong, and your idea can never be tested against the facts.

The poet John Donne gives, as an example of what humanity does not understand, "Why grass is green, or why our blood is red".  Oddly enough, one of my own first scientific papers helped answer this very question.  But using Intelligent Design logic, there is nothing that needs to be explained.  Why is grass green, why is blood red?  Because the Intelligent Designer so designed it.  Why is blood green, why is grass red?  Same answer.  Intelligent Design theory can explain anything, which means that it explains nothing.  It leads to a total end of questioning, since all questions have the same answer.  And the death of questioning is the death of science.

I then considered other examples; God being said (Genesis 6:6, I Samuel 15:35) to have changed his mind and repeatedly in Exodus to have hardened Pharaoh's heart. If you believe in a God who is all-knowing and just, these verses cannot mean what they say. Such arguments, I said, date back to the time of Maimonides, are independent of modern science, and serve to show that biblical literalism is bankrupt on its own terms. I have since discovered the existence of a broad swathe of religious opinion, displayed by Biologos, Evolution Weekend, and the American Scientific Affiliation, who argue in much the same way. I regard the believers in these groups as my natural allies in combating creationism, however much we may differ on other matters.

I said earlier that defenders of the standard picture should stop playing defense, and go on to the attack.  It is high time that I did so, and I will proceed by taking Intelligent Design at its word and evaluating it as I would any other scientific theory.

It is difficult to work out what Intelligent Design really means, because its advocates never tell us how it's supposed to work, but I shall assume that it means that there is a Designer, capable of imposing his design on matter, and that this designer is extremely intelligent.  Regarded on its own terms of scientific theory, Intelligent Design theory does make one clear prediction. It predicts that organisms should be intelligently designed.  But they're not.

I stand before you today as living proof of this sad fact.  If a freshman engineering student were to turn in my body plan as an assignment, he or she would be gently taken aside by the instructor, and advised to seek some other way of making a living.  I sprain my ankle and I twist my knee.  I have lower back pain as my disks are squeezed under the weight of my body.  My nose gets congested, and my sinuses, with no good way of draining, are a haven for germs.  My eyes are back to front, with the blood vessels in front of the retina, getting in the way of the light.  I had a dreadful time getting born and millions of children, some of whom I have known, have had an even harder time of it, and ended up permanently brain-damaged.

All of these things are exactly what you'd expect on the standard evolutionary account.  We have superposed upright posture on a skeleton originally evolved for walking on four legs.  The blood vessels in our eyes trace their ancestry back to the blood vessels of the skin, while the light sensitive cells of the retina are outgrowths of the brain.  Over the past few million years, all we simians have been living on our wits, in extremely complex social groups, producing strong evolutionary pressure to enlarge our brains, and in our species in particular this will have been intensified by the ability to make more complex sounds.  As a result, our brains have grown forward over our snouts, distorting the shape of our air passages, and pressing up against the constraints of the pelvic skeleton.  Evolution fits the facts, and may perhaps be correct.  Intelligent Design doesn't fit the facts, and can't be.

And how about the use of design as an explanation?  Let us take Paley's (1802) classic example, a watch.  From the discovery of a watch, we would infer an intelligent designer.  But that is not the end of the matter.  We would have to further infer that this intelligent designer had access to processes, by which material could be shaped to match the design.  Invoking the designer would have to be the beginning of a chain of explanation, not the end of it.  Otherwise the whole process is what I have called antiscience, since it tells us to stop thinking when we come across something that we do not understand, which is just when things get really interesting.

This illustrates a general point, and one that I think is of great importance.  Advocates of Intelligent Design spend much time drawing our attention to aspects of biology where they see weaknesses in the conventional account.  We should be grateful to them for this, but our response should be the exact opposite of what they suggest.  We should not view these problems as defeats for naturalistic science, but as opportunities and challenges.  Thus several systems which a decade ago appeared irreducibly complex, now appear understandable in relation to simpler components.

Here, I suggest, we have a potent winning strategy; by staying true to ourselves as falllibilists, we make our opponents' weapons turn against them.  We don't pretend that we know the answer when we don't, but we can look for it and may even find it.  The creationist, on the other hand, already has an answer. He has no need to look, and will find out nothing.

Science feeds on unexplained facts as opportunity and challenge.  Science questions. Intelligent Design answers all questions.  Therefore Intelligent Design makes science unnecessary.  Is that what we want?

In discussion, I predicted that the case would be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. I was wrong. Judge E. Jones III's ruling is only binding in the middle district of Pennsylvania, but is such powerful opinion that it is unlikely to be challenged unless at some later date the US Supreme Court acquires a creationist majority.

Martin Shkreli Indictment Portrays Small-Time Fraud

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN NY TIMES

Another psychopath gets slapped by the Feds! DF

Martin Shkreli told investors that his hedge fund had an auditor, that it had posted a 36 percent return since its inception and that it had $35 million in assets under management.

None of it was true, federal authorities say.

Mr. Shkreli has gained nationwide notoriety for his bravado in spiking prices on pharmaceuticals, one of the biggest industries in the country. But his predawn arrest in Manhattan on Thursday was on charges of a small-time hedge fund fraud.

An indictment unsealed by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and a related civil lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission assert that Mr. Shkreli was nothing like the stock market genius and savvy entrepreneur that he had portrayed.

His former hedge fund, MSMB Capital Management, had recorded losses of at least 18 percent and was essentially broke by 2011, having less than $1,000 in its bank account, according to the indictment. The hedge fund had no auditor.

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The authorities described Mr. Shkreli, 32, as a failed trader with a habit of spreading falsehoods and running his businesses on fumes and misappropriated money. His Ponzi-like scheme, they said, involved looting Retrophin, a biopharmaceutical company he used to run, to pay back his disgruntled investors.

“At a certain point, when you lie, it catches up with you,” said Robert L. Capers, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, at a news conference discussing the charges.

The investigation of Mr. Shkreli was underway long before he became a target of criticism for raising the price of a drug sold by a company he acquired, Turing Pharmaceuticals, to $750 a pill from $13.50.

It is not clear whether federal authorities had quickened the pace of their investigations in light of the defiant posture Mr. Shkreli struck in news media interviews and on Twitter since the drug-price gouging controversy first emerged. Recently, it became known that he was the buyer of the sole copy of a rare Wu-Tang Clan album at an auction for $2 million.

The F.B.I.‘s New York office tweeted on Thursday that it had not seized the record, saying: “no seizure warrant at the arrest of Martin Shkreli today, which means we didn’t seize the Wu-Tang Clan album.”

The schemes outlined by both prosecutors and securities regulators were not especially sophisticated.

The indictment charges Mr. Shkreli with two counts of securities fraud, saying that he deceived the fewer than two dozen investors in his former hedge fund about the firm’s viability and performance in persuading them to give him more capital. He also faces five conspiracy counts.

Mr. Shkreli, the authorities said, quickly lost money at a small hedge fund he managed called Elea Capital Management from 2006 to 2007.

At his next fund, MSMB, he did not disclose information about his prior losses and poor performance when raising money from investors.

He also lied about MSMB’s assets. He told an investor in December 2010 that the firm had $35 million in assets under management. In fact, it had $700.

He then lost even more money — some $7 million — at MSMB when he bet wrong in 2011 that the shares of a small pharmaceutical company would fall in price. He owed Merrill Lynch, his brokerage firm, that amount, and settled with Merrill for $1.35 million. He used money from a new fund, MSMB Healthcare, to pay off the Merrill settlement.

Again, he did not tell investors.

Finally, at Retrophin, he once again used company money to cover up his failed investments.

Mr. Shkreli received help, authorities said, from a corporate lawyer, Evan Greebel, 42, who at time was working for the law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman.

Mr. Greebel, who lives in Scarsdale, N.Y., recently joined the Kaye Scholer firm as a partner. Prosecutors charged him with helping Mr. Shkreli engineer a series of fraudulent transactions that effectively took money from Retrophin so it could be given to some of Mr. Shkreli’s former hedge fund investors.

The indictment mirrors some of the accusations contained in a civil lawsuit filed in August by Retrophin, which ousted Mr. Shkreli as chief executive in 2014. The company had accused him of using Retrophin as his personal piggy bank to help pay off upset investors in the hedge fund by hiring some of them for sham consulting jobs.

The authorities contend that fraudulent transactions were devised to make it appear as if Mr. Shkreli’s former hedge fund had invested in the pharmaceutical company when in fact it had not.

In a scheme involving two other unnamed people, Mr. Shkreli and Mr. Greebel created a paper trail using backdated stock transfer agreements in response to an inquiry the S.E.C. had begun in early 2012.

Mr. Shkreli and Mr. Greebel also used $3.4 million in Retrophin funds and stocks to settle claims with several MSMB investors who were threatening to sue in 2013. The money was transferred to the hedge fund investors, even though Retrophin had no responsibility for those claims.

The indictment contends the lawyer was an active participant in the scheme.

In some instances, Mr. Greebel removed the outside auditors from Retrophin from emails to hide what he and Mr. Shkreli were doing, the authorities said. The indictment includes portions of an email exchange between Mr. Shkreli and Mr. Greebel in which they discussed questions from Retrophin’s auditors in August 2013 about the appropriateness of the settlement agreements.

In one email, Mr. Shkreli writes, “There were serious faults with the agreements including lack of board approval.”

Mr. Greebel responds, “That will open up some very big issues. The current thinking is let RTRX pay,” referring to Retrophin’s trading symbol. “It would be easier than the road you are referring to,” he continued, adding that the auditor “would get very spooked with what you are talking about.”

“That works for me,” Mr. Shkreli replied.

It is not clear from the court filings what Mr. Greebel’s motivation might have been in helping Mr. Shkreli with the purported fraud. Mr. Greebel is charged with one count of conspiracy.

Regulatory filings with the S.E.C. show that Retrophin was not Mr. Greebel’s only corporate client. In recent years, Mr. Greebel had built an expertise working with Bitcoin, the digital currency. He is listed on filings with the S.E.C. as one of the outside lawyers working on the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust, the publicly traded Bitcoin investment vehicle that Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss plan to introduce.

On Mr. Greebel’s profile at Kaye Scholer, which he joined during the summer, it mentions that The Financial Times recognized him as an “innovative lawyer” in the United States.

A spokeswoman for Kaye Scholer said in a statement: “We are deeply concerned that these charges have been made against Mr. Greebel. He has been with us for a relatively short period of time, and all the alleged activities occurred before he joined the firm. We are conducting our own internal investigation, and based on our findings we will take appropriate action.”

Jacquelyn L. Heard, a spokeswoman for Katten Muchin Rosenman, said, “It would be inappropriate for us to comment on an investigation into a former colleague.”

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said, “It is no coincidence that these charges, the result of investigations which have been languishing for considerable time, have been filed at the same time of Shkreli’s high-profile, controversial and yet unrelated activities.”

Both Mr. Shkreli and Mr. Greebel entered not guilty pleas at their arraignment in the Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Thursday afternoon. The case is being prosecuted by assistant the United States attorneys Winston Paes and Alixandra Smith.

Mr. Shkreli, dressed in a short-sleeve, black T-shirt and dark jeans, was released on $5 million in bail, secured by a bank account and guaranteed by his father and his brother.

Mr. Greebel was released on $1 million in bail, secured by his house, and guaranteed by his wife and his mother.

Mr. Shkreli, who had shown a great deal of self-confidence in recent television appearances before his arrest, looked a little shaken during the arraignment, occasionally twisting his head to look at the packed courtroom.

At one point, he questioned Magistrate Judge Robert M. Levy after the judge mentioned a date, asking, “Did you say 2016, your honor?”

He wore sunglasses as he exited the court in the pouring evening rain, declining to speak to journalists.