“The Rap Bias” and race

Twenty-two years ago, I have a vivid recollection of reading Peter Kreeft’s Ecumenical Jihad and seeing some of the most outlandish claims I have ever read like:

“Even polls by the far-left Los Angeles Times in 1992 proved the existence of a massive media bias against traditional values, especially families, fidelity, morality, and religion.”

“We are not surprised when a teenager, who has typically seen fifteen thousand murders, rapes, and brutal beatings on TV and MTV and has heard this type of behavior encouraged and idealized on rap “music”, turns to violence.”

The notion that children could see fifteen thousand “murders, rapes and brutal beatings” on television or MTV has always made me laugh. So has the claim about the Los Angeles Times after reading such publications as Socialist Alternative, Socialist Worker and Green Left Weekly. Nonetheless, having in 1994 experienced a threatened murder leading to loss of $50 in Keilor Downs, and also bullying of a similar nature at school and during my early years in Carlton, I possessed and possess more sympathy for views like Kreeft’s than those around me would like.

Whilst some rap music – like gangsta rap – certainly does condone violence regardless of what its apologists say, critics neglect that many other genres of cutting-edge music were frequently equally or more violent:

1. heavy metal
2. grunge
3. hardcore punk
4. industrial

Moreover, extreme violence in heavy metal dates back to AC/DC. That band influenced but predate (most of) the above-mentioned sub-genres and were the first band to celebrate violence in their songs, as I have noted many times before. Celebratory violence in rap developed much later, beginning with N.W.A. around seven years after Back in Black’s ‘Shoot to Thrill’ glorified violence against women and stated there were “too many women” in the population.

Nonetheless, as Rachel Powers showed in ‘The Rap Bias’ from Orange Coast four years ago, it is rap that is associated with crime. Power says that:

“The bottom line of this research is that if you are somehow implicated in a crime, or if you are pulled over in a traffic stop, just the presence of rap music on your person or in your car can dramatically affect whether or not you’ll end up being prosecuted and convicted.”

“A [University of Georgia] law professor named Andrea Dennis wrote one of the earliest pieces on this practice, analyzing every case where defendant-authored lyrics were introduced as evidence in a criminal trial. All but one were rap lyrics...”

“The people who thought the lyrics were from a rap song [as opposed to a country song] saw them as more dangerous, offensive, threatening, in need of regulation, and literal.”

The last statement’s context demonstrates how conservative cultural critics simply ignore heavy metal and related genres of what my brother calls “white people’s music” or lump them in with “rap” as Robert Bork ridiculously did in Slouching Towards Gomorrah. This implies that criticism of rap is not related to (justifiable) moral complaints about lyrics condoning violence, but about criticising and blaming blacks – and that rap’s critics believe criticising heavy metal or other white genres will lose votes. However, in my view, the whites who listen to heavy metal are exceedingly unlikely to be persuaded to vote for conservative policies. Rather than being the struggling industrial workers upon whom Bush junior and Trump based their victories, heavy metal listeners are likely to be urban welfare-receiving whites. These people would be extremely unlikely to support tax cuts on bases of race because they would know that blacks suffer the same problems as whites, and because they are extremely dependent on the public sector for essential services.

In contrast, the whites upon whom Bush junior and Trump based their victories were poor rural folk who – owing to laws established between 1840 and 1940 excluding blacks from their communities (see James Löwen’s Sundown Towns) – have no direct contact with blacks and rely on outside media for their images thereof. Unavailability of noncommercial radio and concerts in rural areas means that these rural whites have had zero access to other than “middle-of-the-road” music ever since the tightening and standardisation of commercial radio playlists during the Carter Era. Consequently, they have missed the urban revolution in moral values during the past four decades, and feel severely threatened both socially and economically thereby.

Nonetheless, it is impossible for me to not believe that white musicians and cultural leaders are much more responsible for these radical cultural changes than black, even if white people have shown greater overt resistance to it. Moreover, because audiences for rap and cutting edge white music strongly overlap, criticism of the two needs to be linked and related to the economic and demographic problems faced by today’s Enriched World.

The first newspaper to identify where the climate was moving?

During the middle 1970s, most climate scientists believed that another ice age was imminent, with fears reaching their highest point during the frigid Eastern United States winter of 1976/1977, and in several cool Arctic summers earlier that decade.

In the Northern Hemisphere, a general cooling was widely noticed between 1940 and 1975. For instance:

• there was not one subzero Central England Temperature (CET) month between March 1895 and December 1939, but
• five between 1940 and 1975
• and as many as seven between 1850 and 1895

However, in Australia, annual mean temperatures showed a somewhat different pattern, as can be seen from this graph of annual mean maximum temperature:

As you can see, and as I have noticed since 2000, Australia saw a major rise in mean annual temperatures in the late 1950s, notably from (fiscal year) 1955/1956 to (fiscal year) 1957/1958. There was no downward trend in Australian mean maximum temperature at any point between 1956 and 1975. Only one year (July 1966 to June 1967) between 1957/1958 and 1972/1973 is more than fractionally below the virgin mean.

Whilst these figures would have been valuable to those discussing climate trends during the 1970s, it surprised me that the Brisbane Courier-Mail, in February 1974, published a detailed analysis of January 1974’s super-monsoon that saw an all-Australia rainfall of over 230 millimetres – whereas Australia’s wettest month between 1890 and 1973 was around 128 millimetres!

The Brisbane Courier-Mail’s article, titled ‘Floods Part of Our New CLIMATE Pattern’ was also focused on the unusual equatorward displacement of summer rain belts in the Southern Hemisphere during the 1960s. Great Barrier Reef coral cores suggest that the decade from 1960/1961 to 1969/1970 may have been Queensland’s driest since at least 1631.

What ‘Floods Part of Our New CLIMATE Pattern’ and published on 19 February 1974, was highly prescient about is:

1. the (continuing at an accelerating rate) southward shift of winter rain belts in the mid-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere (central Chile, southern Australia, southwest Cape)
1. that in these regions there already existed evidence of poleward movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though not nearly so much as since 2010 when climatic displacements poleward reach between 5˚ and 7˚ of latitude (550 to 770 kilometres) vis-à-vis preindustrial climates
   
2. the poleward shift of summer rain belts in Australia, and also Northeastern Brazil and Southern Africa, during the 1970s, especially January 1974
1. although January 1974’s record has not been approached subsequently, there have nonetheless been ten months since with higher all-Australian rainfalls than the wettest month between 1890 and 1973.
2. these months and years could be called super-monsoon months, since all were due to more southerly monsoon troughs and depressions than anything known before 1974, and likely anything since minimally the fifteenth century
3. the continuation of the observed trends in rainfall over the previous few years indefinitely
   

The only problem with ‘Floods Part of Our New CLIMATE Pattern’, of course, is that the article does not relate it to man-made greenhouse gas emissions, in which Australia is — since 1980 at least — of course alongside the Gulf States by far the world’s worst offender. It is remarkable even with this severe limitation that such a popular article manages to explain climatic changes that were beginning in 1974 and are accelerating as I write this. The tragedy is that the public was never encouraged to grasp the changes – but then, encouraging the public to understand would be immensely threatening to Australia’s and the Gulf States’ super-rich and super-powerful greenhouse emitters.

The AFL though the lens of Cherin-Gordon

To an Australian encountering US team sports, and soccer in Europe, it would no doubt feel surprising to discover how many games are played in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball Association. Whereas no major sport in Australia plays more than 25 games per season, those three leagues play 82 games (NBA and NHL) or 162 games (MLB). European soccer leagues play between 30 and 46 games per season.

In his Untangling Skill and Luck from 2012, Michael Maubossin noted that a 50 percent ratio of skill to luck can be achieved by:

• 12 NFL games
• 69 MLB games
• 15 NBA games

For ice hockey and soccer, estimates are extremely variable, ranging from 35 to 75 games for ice hockey and 25 to 50 for soccer.

Last year – though I discovered this only today – journalist Simon Cherin-Gordon offered a further insight into the difference in season length between gridiron (NFL) and the other major leagues in North America. In an article titled ‘Why Are We Playing 82 Games, Anyway’ – written to advocate a shorter NBA season, which Maubossin had shown to be more practicable than any other US or European team sport – Cherin-Gordon said:

“Much of this has to do with the inherent nature of each sport. A baseball star will only bat four or five times in an average game, or pitch one out of every five days. Runs are hard to come by, and lower scores lead to higher variance and make a short season untenable (the same can be said for the NHL, which has an 82-game season just like the NBA).” 

“[Gridiron] Football, meanwhile, is a sport where the best players are involved in somewhere between 60 and 70 snaps per game (which constitutes roughly half of the game’s plays). Its scoring is less random, and the best team usually wins. It is also as violent a sport as there is, thus frequent games and a long season are out of the question” 

“While the NBA season falls just in between that of the MLB and NFL in terms of length, it has far more inherent similarities to [gridiron] football than it does to baseball.” 

“If you think 60-70 plays per game is a lot for a [gridiron] football player, try more than doubling that. Basketball players play both offense and defense, and NBA games generally feature around 200 possessions. The best players play between two-thirds and three-quarters of those possessions (32-36 minutes).” 

“That’s just one of many ways the NBA takes out variance. It is the only sport where every successful play is quantified on the scoreboard. There are no base hits or first downs. When you do score in other sports, it is a more random occurrence with more impactful ramifications. Crossing home plate or the goal line one time is worth exponentially more than putting the ball in the hoop. There are also less [fewer] players involved, and less [fewer] quirky advantages to playing at home. The best team in an NBA game wins more often than they do in any other sport.”

What strikes me about this list is that if we apply what Cherin-Gordon says to the AFL, we have the following comparison:

Sport	“Possessions” per game	% played by best players	“Possessions” played by best players
Baseball	≅240 (pitches)	≤⅙ (16.67 percent)	≤40 (pitches)
Gridiron	≅140 (downs)	≅½ (50 percent)	≅70 (downs)
Basketball	≅200	≅¾ (75 percent)	≅150
(Australian rules) football	≅600-700 (total possessions)	≥⅞ (87.5 percent)	≥525

This table does not measure how many team possessions there are per (Australian rules) football game. However, in basketball the rules make teams to alternate possession after every score, which gives weaker teams more of a chance than in football, where a team can extremely easily score and then regain possession without one opposition possession. (In one game in 1954, it is known Richmond kicked five goals without a Melbourne player touching the ball, and as the Demons actually won that game this is unlikely to be the most extreme possible case.) Football is also analogous to basketball in that every “successful” play is rewarded on the scoreboard – although if a team kicks out of bounds on the bounce or a pack forms that team can regain possession without an opponent necessarily touching the ball.

The table above suggests that, although the AFL season is much shorter than those of baseball, ice hockey or soccer, it is not proportionately so relative to the requisite length for a passable skill-to-luck ratio. In fact, if in Cherin-Gordon’s words,

“MLB needs 162 [games], the NHL needs 82 [games]... the NFL needs 16 [games]”

then the AFL would “need” no more than 10, or maximally 12, games per season.

However, although Australian football has exceedingly low internal variance via randomness in player performance, external variance from variation in weather and ground conditions was highly significant before the climatic “magic gate” of 1997/1998 and the closure of Waverley Park and the AFL’s old suburban grounds. Subsequently this external variance has been effectively eliminated by:

1. rapid poleward expansion of the subtropical arid belt, totalling 800 kilometres since 1964, which has:
• reduced the incidence of wet weather and increased evaporative drying of grounds when it does rain
• also reduced the possibility of extremely windy conditions that favour shorter players
2. artificial drying of grounds during rare cases of wet weather, and improved drainage
3. the opening of closed-roof Docklands Stadium where weather conditions are consistently dry

This history of significant external variance undoubtedly explains why the AFL has a longer season than required for a passable skill-to-luck ratio. In addition, on softer surfaces football was less physically taxing than the present-day game, as seen by players frequently playing mid-week Foster’s Cup matches as well as weekend premiership matches. More than that:

1. even a minor reduction in games would be extremely unpopular with football fans, as demonstrated in the 20-game 1993 season
2. a reduction to 10 or 12 games would require a radical restructuring of the AFL’s season
3. many pairs of teams would – as in the NFL between 1978 and 2001 – go up to twenty seasons without opposing each other
4. it is highly plausible that the game would become even more vigorous and physically demanding with only half as many games, so that the reduction in injuries would be much less than Cherin-Gordon supposes (this also applied to the NBA)

Most likely, only major increases in severe – likely only in career-ending – injuries would cause the AFL to reduce the number of games on its schedule. This is plausible in an even hotter and drier climate than observed today thanks to Australian and Gulf Cooperation Council greenhouse pollution. However, if a shorter season be judged inevitable it could create a vicious circle of harder, more anaerobic play and more injuries, because if AFL players knew they had only 10 or 12 home-and-away games to play, they would almost certainly play harder than they do now knowing they have to get through 22.

Rarity of full-period prime denominators in rational approximations of irrational numbers

Ever since, a few months ago, I began to discover that – in addition to the very well-known approximation of 22/7 for 𝜋 – other irrational numbers had frequently used rational approximations, I have been struck by one fact: that full-period primes occur very rarely as denominators in such fractions, especially in the most useful rational approximations for hand calculations.

In order to test this hypothesis I have compiled a representative selection of irrational numbers in the table below, useful rational approximations for these numbers, and the periods of these rational approximations. For most numbers the most common rational approximation has been used; in certain cases like the square root of 6 and 𝜋, I have given more than one rational approximation, with that with the larger denominator naturally more accurate.

Number	Decimal expansion	Rational Approximation	Period	Prime factorisation of denominator	Character and type of prime factors
√2	1.4142135623730950488016887242	99/70	6	2•5•7	Composite Full-period and terminating factors
√3	1.7320508075688772935274463415	97/56	7	2•2•2•7	Composite Full-period and terminating factors
√5	2.2360679774997896964091736687	161/72	1	2•2•2•3•3	Composite Short-period (unique) and terminating factors
√6	2.4494897427831780981972840747	49/20	0	2•2•5	Composite Terminating decimal
		218/89	44	89	Half-period prime
√7	2.6457513110645905905016157536	127/48	1	2•2•2•2•3	Composite Short-period (unique) and terminating factors
√10	3.1622776601683793319988935444	117/37	3	37	Short-period (unique) prime
√11	3.3166247903553998491149327366	199/60	1	2•2•3•5	Composite Short-period (unique) and terminating factors
∛2	1.2599210498948731647672106072	63/50	0	2•5•5	Composite Terminating decimal
∛3	1.4422495703074083823216383107	75/52	6	2•2•13	Composite Half-period prime factor
∛4	1.5874010519681994747517056392	100/63	6	3•3•7	Composite Half-period and short-period (unique) factors
		227/143	6	11•13
∛5	1.7099759466766969893531088725	171/100	0	2•2•5•5	Composite Terminating decimal
∛6	1.8171205928321396588912117563	467/257	256	257	Full-period prime (accurate to 1-in-33,629,323!)
∜2	1.1892071150027210667174999705	44/37	3	37	Short-period (unique) prime
∜3	1.3160740129524924608192189017	25/19	18	19	Full-period prime
		229/174	28	2•3•29	Composite Full-period, short-period and terminating factors
21/5	1.1486983549970350067986269467	85/74	3	2•37	Composite Short-period (unique) and terminating factors
21/12	1.0594630943592952645618252949	89/84	6	2•2•3•7	Composite Full-period, short-period and terminating factors
𝜋	3.1415926535897932384626433832	22/7	6	7	Full-period prime
		355/113	112	113	Full-period prime
e	2.7182818284590452353602874713	193/71	35	71	Half-period prime
ee	15.154262241479264189760430272	197/13	6	13	Half-period prime
		2849/188	46	2•2•47	Composite Full-period prime factor
e𝜋	23.140692632779269005729086367	1481/64	0	2•2•2•2•2•2	Terminating decimal
ln 2	0.6931471805599453094172321214	61/88	2	2•2•2•11	Composite Short-period (unique) prime factor
log10 2	0.3010299956639811952137388947	59/196	42	2•2•7•7	Composite Terminating and squared full-period prime factor

If we study this table, we see that, for whatever reason, there seem to be very few full-period prime denominators. The two well-known approximations for 𝜋, one approximation for the fourth root of three, and one remarkable approximation for the cube root of six are the only exceptions. [The cube root of six – which has minor notability as the geometric mean of 1, 2 and 3 – I did not originally intend to include but decided to do so because the approximation ⁴⁶⁷/₂₅₇ is so amazingly accurate, being superior to the famous Milü approximation for 𝜋].

Why this should be so is an interesting question. It is possibly because the way in which the continued fractions used to find such approximations as ⁴⁶⁷/₂₅₇ for ∛6 would add factors in the finding of “common denominators” needed for addition of fractions, although I have not checked this yet.

A final proof the “March on Canberra” is a quarter-century and counting overdue

According to a new paper in the journal Nature, regardless of what the rest of the world does, record-breaking temperature rises are already inevitable until 2040.

At the same time, the Sydney Morning Herald is noting a zero-emissions plan for Britain – whose parity emissions per capita are minimally four times those of Australia – as Australia approves the polluting Adani coal mine. There is – and was even before last month’s surprise election – a certainty Australia will expand fossil fuels whilst the EU moves to zero-net-emissions.

Many (including my brother) naïvely believe that Australia will eventually be condemned as a pariah state for expanding fossil fuels. Nevertheless, this viewpoint overlooks demographic reality. Australia already has substantially higher total fertility than those nations most advanced in decarbonisation. Recent trends towards lowest-low fertility in Finland (from 1.9 to 1.5 children since 2010) and other European nations whose fertility was the least low during the 2000s suggests that Morrison’s policies will widen this gap.

The fact is that – as I have emphasised for two decades – Australia must ecologically have by far the lowest emissions per capita in the world. This demand places human energy consumption upon its natural biological “footing”. Environment, Capitalism and Socialism demonstrated three decades ago that the money existed to finance a rapid transition to a carbon-free Australia as early as 2005 or 2010 – were major polluters taxed severely enough.

As Dimitri Lafleur has partially shown, a carbon-free Australia would remake the world economy by:

1. radically limiting energy and materials use on a global scale, especially in desert nations with naturally low-energy ecologies and zero hydropower potential
2. shifting “developing” economies towards renewable energy once they do not have cheap fossil fuels from Australia and the oil states
3. shifting energy-intensive industries towards those (Enriched and Tropical) nations with large resources in hydropower
4. shifting agriculture towards the high-latitude nations with youngest and most fertile soils
1. this would occur because land clearing is a major source (around 20 percent) of greenhouse emissions in Australia
2. also, Australian soils are thirty thousand times older and more weathered than soils of most other Quaternary landmasses
3. young, high-latitude areas are also least affected by runaway climate change shown as certain by Nature
5. shifting away from planned obsolescence towards long-lasting consumer goods that use fewer resources over the long term

What needed to be done back in the 1990s was for the globe to recognise that – regardless of its relatively small aggregate emissions that have led even environmentalists to neglect it – a rigid, zero-compromise, zero-emissions target for Australia no later than 2010 would have:

1. largely solved global greenhouse gas emissions by radically altering global development patterns
2. paid for the ecological crisis out of the pockets of those people – alongside the Arab Gulf royal families – with greatest duty and ability to pay
3. achieved this in a manner in agreement with Earth’s natural ecology (smallest per-capita energy consumption and emissions in arid desert nations)
4. in an Enriched World then and now crippled by excessive environmental regulations, which stand likely to achieve negligible global gains while Australia mines and uses more and more coal, created major economic opportunities including:
• phase-out of economically crippling Enriched World farm subsidies as Australia’s unsustainable pastoral and broad-acre farmland would be converted to ecotourism
• revitalising such industries as aluminum and titanium smelting when coal use in phased out in Australia and other nations lacking hydropower potential

Given the experiences of the past quarter-century and especially last month’s election, there exists zero possibility that Australia will ever elect a more environmentally responsive government. Thus, other countries are burdened with the critical task of clamping down on the worst environmental performer – a task entirely ignored but unless achieved even a total carbon phase-out in the EU and East Asia will achieve little in the long term.

Instead of decentralised global environmental protests (as seen in recent weeks) what was needed in 1994 and stands three decades overdue was and is a global focus upon the centre of power in the worst environmental performer: protests demanding uncompromising, rapid decarbonisation of Australia, or a “March on Canberra”. Whilst the effects would not be immediate, would be costly to the rest of the world and would need to be sustained over years and even decades, they possess potential to actually deal with the planet’s worst polluter rather than permit Australia indefinite emissions increases negating large-scale decarbonisation abroad.