Author Archives: Countrylawyer

What is it With These People, Ch. 2

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Recently I (here) spent some time looking at the left-extremist incapacity for making an argument without making up the data.  For that matter, I also commented here about at least one incident on the other pole of the spectrum.  It appears that neither “side” is immune from the temptation to manufacture support for their arguments.

The point of distinction between the two sets of history mills (to borrow a favorite Mark Twain expression), Gentle Reader, is that — at least as to the latter-linked topic — the underlying argument is actually valid, namely that what is commonly referred to as the “food stamps” program is organized as if for inefficiency and abuse.  The subjects touched upon in the former-linked post are just false.  Marx was wrong on the facts, so he and Engels just made them up.  This Piketty fellow, the left-extremists’ new media darling, is wrong on the facts, so he just cooked his books to make his argument.  Sacco and Vanzetti were actually guilty.  And so forth.

Now we’ve got Little Michael Bloomberg and his anti-civil-rights movement, Everytown for Gun Safety, putting out the terrifying statistic that, since the Sandy Hook massacre (on 14 Dec 2012) there have been 74 “school shootings,” with the clear import that My God we’ve got to disarm the lawful gun-owning public.  And so forth.  To give it its due, this particular organization of Bloomberg’s doesn’t appear, thus far, to be actively engaging in criminal activity, like his Mayors Against Illegal Guns (e.g. sending straw buyers to other states to make illegal weapons purchases).  It’s just confining itself to the usual left-extremist playbook of making up data.  From its report linked above, “Data: Incidents were classified as school shootings when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds, as documented in publicly reported news accounts. This includes assaults, homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings.”

Little Mike is correct that if you include every incident in which a firearm went off — even by accident — inside a school building or on campus, then you can get some pretty sobering numbers.  So where’s the dishonesty?  The first point of dishonesty is conflation.  Notice how the goalpost is carefully moved.  Sandy Hook was a shooting.  People were shot, and over two dozen actually killed.  But what does it take to make it onto Little Mike’s List?  That “a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds.”  A lawful concealed carry permit holder dropping his weapon on the parking lot while going to secure it in his trunk before going to see his child’s principal makes the list, if the gun goes off when it hits the ground.  Someone carelessly leaving a round chambered in one of the high school rifle team’s weapons and having it go off in the armory makes it onto the list.  And so forth.

More subtle is the false equivalence suggested between what happened at Sandy Hook and these other firearm discharges.  Why use Sandy Hook as the measuring point, after all?  There was nothing that changed about the legal or operational landscape on or about 14 Dec 2012.  Guns didn’t suddenly become more prone to discharge, nor did ammunition become significantly more deadly.  The legal atmosphere more or less fizzled as people began actually to look at what the Sandy Hook perp did and why, and to ask themselves exactly how banning guns or any category of them would have helped.  You know, common sense (to borrow an expression from the Everytown report) questions that a reasonable person might ask himself before he launches a frontal assault on a civil right that was written into the Constitution.  And so next to nothing changed there, either.  Use of Sandy Hook as datum for this list is intended to communicate the point that these other firearm discharges are of the same character of what Lanza did at Sandy Hook.

So are they?  Short answer:  No.  At least one free-lance journalist went back through and identified no fewer than 33 of these incidents that don’t pass the Sesame Street test, in that they simply aren’t anything like some person (crazy or not) coming onto a school campus for the purpose of randomly shooting children and teachers.  The 33 questionable incidents range from a guy who was chased onto school premises by the police and shot a student accidentally to one where a 19-year-old was shot over a dice game . . . in the parking lot . . . at 9:00 p.m., to one where the shooting didn’t even occur on campus at all, to a fistful of kids who decided to commit suicide on campus (in at least one incident in front of the class) to the usual crop of gang-related and/or drug-dealing activity.  CNN also fine-toothed the list and came up with . . . 15 incidents which factually resembled the Sandy Hook tragedy.  And those 15 (enumerated and briefly described over at CNN) aren’t even necessarily what you’d describe as “mass shootings.”  By CNN’s analysis, almost exactly 80% of Bloomberg’s list is bogus.

As has been correctly noted, however, 15 is still 15 too many.  But when you compare apples to apples on this kind of an issue, the non-solution of infringing on a constitutionally-guaranteed right loses a lot of its weight when you start asking what to do about it.  No one, and I mean no one, is suggesting that any of these bans will in fact stop the Adam Lanzas of the world and pointing to any kind of data that demonstrate so much.  I haven’t seen, heard, or heard of anyone showing how any of the stated policy goals of Bloomberg’s criminal or non-criminal organizations will in fact prevent the seriously crazy or seriously criminal from arming themselves as they see fit and doing as they please, until stopped with counter-force.

The whole argument behind the Bloomberg agenda rests on nothing more than, “We’ve got to Do Something!!!!”  Because scary guns.  Or something like that.  Again, let’s go back to the Everytown report.  This is the totality of its argument as set forth on the linked page:  “Since the December 2012 shooting in Newtown, CT, there have been at least 74 school shootings in America. How many more before our leaders pass common-sense laws to prevent gun violence and save lives?Communities all over the country live in fear of gun violence. That’s unacceptable. We should feel secure in sending our children to school — comforted by the knowledge that they’re safe.”  Notice how the world of the factual “laws to prevent gun violence and save lives” is juxtaposed with “live in fear,” something “communities all over the country” are supposed to be doing (although I’ve yet to notice any such fear around here), and “feel secure,” which is something we’re all supposed to be entitled to do.

The whole exercise is a great big let’s-do-what-makes-us-feel-good-about-ourselves campaign.  If we do, we’ll “feel secure” about sending our children to school.  Except we aren’t secure, and neither are our children.  Not from the Adam Lanzas of the world.  We can lock up every last 1st grader who chews a pop-tart into the shape of a pistol, and it’s not going to prevent another Sandy Hook.

I much more greatly fear the psychological abuse of my children by their (well-meaning, let it be said) teachers than I do some random crazy who strides onto the school grounds and opens fire.  My relative fears of such occupy their respective positions on the What Keeps Me up at Night List not because I discount the possibility that my child may be wounded or killed by an Adam Lanza.  It’s because I know that there is nothing I or anyone else can do to stop an Adam Lanza, short of shooting him once he starts.  It’s because I know that even if an Adam Lanza actually makes into the school and actually begins killing, the odds of any particular child (my own or anyone else’s) falling victim are still pretty slim.  To compare another context:  In an honest-to-God battle, where both sides are armed and killing is the whole point of it, a unit that loses 20% in killed or wounded is considered to have been savagely used.  Even if 80% aren’t killed or wounded, the unit is thought to have been so badly mauled that it will typically be sent to the rear to reorganize and reinforce before returning to the war.

To go back to Sandy Hook:  This was among the very worst school shootings ever, anywhere (outside Russia at least).  Lanza killed 26 and wounded two.  As of the end of November, 2012, there were 456 students enrolled there, served by however many teachers, administrators, and staff.  Lanza killed 20 children (if you add the two wounded in that makes 22), or just over 4.8% of the total enrollment.  Meaning 95% of those children survived without a scratch.  At Columbine I can’t find enrollment data for April, 1999; Wikipedia.org reports it currently at 1,700.  Let’s assume it was 1,300 at the time of the massacre.  The perps there, who may have been psychopaths but certainly nowhere nearly as crazy as Lanza, methodically shot 13 people to death and wounded another 21, for 34 total.  Out of a student population of 1,300 that works out to just over 2.6%, meaning that over 97% of the students that day escaped without a scratch.

None of the above is said to diminish the loss of those killed or wounded.  The very thought of something happening to one of my boys is enough to make me nearly physically ill, and I have no reason to suppose that any other parent or family member out there would not feel the same.  Nor is it said in disregard of the emotional trauma of the survivors, both those who are direct witnesses and those who aren’t.  Single-trauma events, however, are something you at least have a fighting chance of working through.  The survivor of a rape can never be expected to “get over it,” and the suggestion that she ought to is monstrous.  On the other hand, she is by hypothesis alive and what is her possibility for forging a meaningful and useful life, with some degree of spiritual wholeness, relative to the victim of a gang rape, or someone held in sexual slavery for years on end, or who has been sexually abused over a course of years, and those the most formative years of her life?  Phrased slightly differently, all rape is evil, but if you could somehow know you were to be a victim and if you had to choose, which would you choose?  The survivors of Sandy Hook, Columbine, the Amish school shooting (which had a much higher death toll as percentage of enrollment) will carry the scars of those days until the end of their own.  But with effort, and contemplation, and the spiritual presence and assistance of friends and family, they do have a reasonable shot at living “normal” lives.

But the sustained, day-in-day-out, relentless demonizing of my sons’ maleness?  By the very people (the teachers) whose sole function in their lives is supposed to guide them to being their most complete, most productive, most honorable selves?  These processes include the subtle and the explicit messages that There’s Something Wrong With You Because You Don’t act Like Little Suzy, and the medication, and the “counseling,” and the disciplinary processes, and the disparate grading.  That last happens, folks, by the way.  Girls routinely are graded better on the squishy stuff like “classroom participation,” because they don’t blurt out answers, they stay in their seats, they are more tractable.  When a large portion of the students’ grades is on exactly such criteria, what does that do to the grading curve, class standing, and all the other gates a student now has to navigate successfully if he is to have a chance at the space-limited, extremely competitive later opportunities?  With each advancing grade, your opportunities are more and more expanded or limited based on what happened in previous grades.  Don’t get into the advanced math section in 3rd grade, and you won’t be there in 4th either, which means that you won’t be doing algebra in 5th or geometry in 6th, and so by the time you get to high school, AP calculus is a shot that simply isn’t even on the table for you.  So when you go to apply for college and your pool of applicants from all over the country has 70% in it who took AP calculus, what does that do to your chances?  Parents, or at least those capable of thinking things through in advance, understand that these days.

I don’t have the time to link to all the stuff out there on what is driving the very observable and alarmingly steep drop in male life achievement, both in purely academic or occupational terms but also in terms of human fulfillment.  Falling rates of marriage — at all — falling rates of involvement in their children’s lives, falling labor force participation, you name it:  America’s males aren’t doing well, and all the information points to school, and specifically very early school, as being the place and time where they begin not to do well.  Why should that be?  Why should a country whose males have done some pretty damned awesome stuff over the generations suddenly see the current crops all go slack?  Those are all questions for other posts.

But every last one of those dynamics is something that I know for a fact is happening to my boys and will continue to happen to them.  I know for a fact that the effects of what is happening to them are cumulative and except in the rarest instances irreversible.  My sons can never go back to 2nd grade.  Once they’re in high school either they’re eligible for those classes and programs that will open doors (or at least not close them off), or they won’t be.  It will be too late.

But I’m not supposed to worry about what is happening to my sons in school (no less), day by day, or its effects on their likelihood of living lives that will permit them to  be the men God gave them the ability to be.  Rather, I’m supposed to grasp for an illusory feeling of “security” by sacrificing my own and my children’s rights — including their right to defend themselves from the Adam Lanzas of the world.  The argument for that sacrifice is quite simply a lie.  You cannot call it otherwise.

Beware anything that cannot be sold without lying to you.  Even if it’s for your own good.

Surely Ordinary Judgment is a Prerequisite, No?

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We keep hearing, from the usual suspects, how we’re not supposed to pour scorn on Hillary Clinton for . . . well, for pretty much anything.

The White House travel office debacle, in which she had most of the senior staffer fired so she could hire her buddies?  Yawn.  Her getting fired by her boss, the House Judiciary Committee chief counsel, because she hid documents and files, with the intention of denying the right to counsel and then pretended they didn’t exist?  So what?  Her doing pretty much exactly the same thing with the Rose Law Firm billing records — claiming they were “lost” for months and months, until they mysteriously surfaced . . . in her private office?  War on wymyn, obviously.  Her willing participation in the destruction of women who had the temerity to suggest that her husband (now disbarred for perjury) was a lying sack of shit who preyed on female employees?  Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.  Asking just what the billy hell she as Secretary of State was doing in the weeks and hours leading up the slaughter of a United States ambassador in Behghazi?  What difference does it make, at this point? to coin a phrase.  Her famous expression of contempt when someone pointed out to her that Hillarycare would bankrupt enormous numbers of small businesses (by the way, that snort was: “I can’t be responsible for every under-capitalized business in the country.”)?  You didn’t build that anyway, buddy.  Leaving out of her memoirs her time as a U.S. senator?  Racism!

None of her prior behavior, in other words, is supposed to be relevant to whether she ought to become the most powerful person in the world, a position in which even tiny character flaws become of critical importance to billions of people all across the globe.  It’s grotesquely unfair that anyone would even mention these “speed bumps” on the road to Hillary’s Apotheosis.  Gentle Reader may not even have realized it, but even The New York Times has been transgressing.  Seriously.  That hard-hitting journalistic watch-dog that has well earned its reputation for shining an unblinking — an absolutely unblinking, I’ll have you know — light on the misdeeds of politicians of all stripes, has been unfairly going after Poor Hillary.  So she sends some of her goons to have a little sit-down with them, to make sure they don’t stray from The Narrative.  According to The Washington Free Beacon:  “Sources said the meeting included Clinton advisers Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, as well as Times Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan and national political reporter Amy Chozick, who has been on the Clinton beat for the paper.  During the closed-door gathering, Clinton aides reportedly griped about the paper’s coverage of the potential 2016 candidate, arguing that Clinton has left public office and should not be subjected to harsh scrutiny, according to a source familiar with the discussions.”

So the NYT — a corporation, by the way — sits down to make sure they’ve got their story straight with a candidate for the presidency (kindly do not ask me to accept the proposition that she’s not running).  This would be the same NYT which has assured us that permitting “corporate money” in elections — unless it’s from the lamestream media or labor unions, of course (their money apparently is of a different character) — is just the harbinger of the End of the Republic dontcha know.  This would be the same corporation as to which the prohibition on coordinating outsider participants’ actions (and money) with the candidates themselves remains in effect, even after Citizens United (which was, by the way, about a film critical of . . . Hillary).

All that, however, is just the icing on the cake, so to speak.  My antennae went up when Huma Abedin was mentioned as being one of Clinton’s advisors present.  Huma is most widely known for having entered into a marriage of convenience with one of the most distasteful members of Congress, someone so egregious that, although a Democrat, he can’t get elected even in New York City any more.  She not only entered into a marriage of convenience with this ass-hat, she bore his child.  All in eery resemblance to her mentor, Hillary.  Most of the commentary about this woman is of the salacious kind, speculating that she’s actually Hillary’s homosexual companion &c. &c. &c.  You know the script.

What is much, much more bothersome than how Huma chooses to get her jollies is her politics and her family’s politics.  In fact, in many ways it’s kind of convenient that the public kerfuffle about her, her husband, and her bedroom preferences is of the potty-mouth variety.  It conveniently distracts from the serious concerns about her politics and associations.  To sum it up, both from her own actions as an adult and by her intimate family connections there is no reason to suppose that this woman is anything other than a Muslim Brotherhood operative.

Here’s a long post by Andrew McCarthy over at Ordered Liberty.  To borrow from the Blogfather, read it all.  All of it.  And follow the links.  First: the top-level summary:  “Soon, however, it was demonstrated beyond cavil that Abedin herself, like other members of her family, has a disturbingly close association with Abdullah Omar Naseef – a wealthy Saudi financier of al-Qaeda and Brotherhood eminence.  At that point, most of the craven GOP emirate stuck its head back in the sand with hopes that the issue would just go away, while the Left reverted to its knee-jerk ‘McCarthyism’ shrieks — along with the demeaning characterization of Abedin, who is actually a top policy adviser, as a flunky who merely helps Madame Secretary decide which ‘handbag’ goes best with that day’s outfit.”  I’ve pulled the links in that quoted language, but please go there and click through.  It makes for some extremely sobering reading.

The one thing which runs true through Islam is that, like other cults (Jim Jones, anyone?) and criminal conspiracies (e.g. the Mafia), once you’re in you don’t get out, or at least not out alive.  Even that poor Christian woman in the Sudan who was born Christian is considered an apostate because the Religion of Peace still considers her one of their own.  And she was condemned to death for it.  See also, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who lives under armed protection for her apostasy.  I therefore refuse to consider the possibility that this Abedin woman has abandoned the politics and active associations (we’re not talking about just beer-drinking buddies, people) which she took with her for twelve years, from the time she first went to work in the Clinton White House in 1996 until she joined Hillary at State in 2009.  Please do not insult what little intelligence I enjoy by asking me to pretend that is likely or even possible.

Were Clinton to be elected, and were she to keep this Abedin woman by her side, it would not be the first time that an enemy agent has been insinuated into alarmingly senior positions.  Harry Dexter White was only one of many.  But this would be the first time that an organization actively considering itself in a shooting war with the United States has placed an operative literally at a president’s elbow, and with privileged access to that president’s ear.

Why does Clinton keep her around?  I’m not aware of any behavior from her — other than her hostility to Israel, which sets her apart from her cultural and political allies exactly not at all — to suggest an underlying sympathy with the Muslim Brotherhood, in contrast to Dear Leader, who expressed “relief” when it took over in Egypt.  But let’s go ahead and ignore all the peculiarities created by her association, such as the apparent coordination of the Benghazi attacks from Egypt, Clinton’s strange lassitude in protecting American assets in Libya from known threats, and then her knowingly lying about the nature and organization of those attacks, repeatedly attributing them to some penny-ante film-maker when she had long since known the truth.

Let’s write all that off to unfortunate coincidence and look just at the appearances, for God’s sake.  The American lamestream media may be willing to fly cover for her, but does she truly think the rest of the world’s press is as supine as its American cousins?  The British press in particular has a generations-old tradition of truckling to no one, at home or abroad.  When NATO allies are struggling with organized criminal activity from the Religion of Peace, and trying desperately to keep the lid on massive unassimilated populations, does Clinton really think they’re going to turn a blind eye to a Muslim Brotherhood operator in the Oval Office?  Pray do not forget, Best Beloved, the extent to which our intelligence operations’ effectiveness depends on  the sharing of information with our allies.  Does Clinton actually think that those allies are going to share critical and sensitive information with an America that has a direct line back to the Brotherhood?

If the past thirteen years have suggested anything, it’s that no American president can go it alone for any prolonged period.  One of the larger sticks that the lamestream media and its Democrat bosses used to beat Bush 43 was that our allies weren’t with us.  Dear Leader, the Light Warrior Himself, has discovered that the rest of the world thinks he’s a joke, and that in consequence he can accomplish nothing beyond platitudes.

Granted, Hillary’s got more raw intelligence in her fingernail clippings than Dear Leader has ever suspected might exist, but our greatest presidents have not been our most intelligent.  They’ve been those with the most profound judgment.  How in the world is keeping this Abedin woman in her vest pocket evidence of any sort of good judgment, at all?

I guess we’re supposed to ignore that as well.

 

A Tacky Quibble

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I’ve now been sent more than one link to this photo essay from the International Business Times, showing a series of then-and-now photographs from the Normandy landing sites and their immediate vicinity.  The photography is pretty well done, and of course the contrast between what was going on that day 70 years ago today and what goes on there now is moving on any of several different levels.

So it’s tacky of me to quibble with it.  But I am — or try to be — a stickler for saying things correctly, and not over-blowing statements.  I do experience something of a jolt when I see a statement like this:  “On June 6, 1944, Allied soldiers descended on the beaches of Normandy for D-Day, an operation that turned the tide of the Second World War against the Nazis, marking the beginning of the end of the conflict.”  What I have an issue with is the expression “turned the tide of the Second World War.”

Taking nothing away from the men who stormed ashore there, and the men who died trying, and the men who suffered and died to make the whole thing possible although they never got close enough even to see a smudge of France along the horizon, but whatever else it did do, the Allied invasion of France in June, 1944 did NOT “turn the tide of the Second World War.”  Germany had lost the war.  She had lost it no later than the surrender at Stalingrad.  Her last major offensive in the East was a distant memory by summer, 1944.  Even had the U.S. and the British (among whom I include the Canadians, the Aussies, and the Kiwis) not succeeded in opening a second front in the West, the Soviet Union would have gone on to defeat Germany.  Would have taken longer, and a lot more Germans and Soviets would have died.  But the swastika would have come down all the same.

What D-Day very much turned the tide on was the post-war world.  Had Stalin defeated Hitler with his own troops the only ones with boots on the ground, does anyone really think he would have handed over any portion of Germany to the Western allies’ control?  Would he even have allowed France or Italy to enjoy any independence?

The Yalta Conference, at which the boundaries of post-war Europe were carved up, and the Eastern Europeans cynically (or cravenly, take your pick) handed over to Stalin was held in February, 1945, by which time the Red Army was in Prussia proper, the Ardennes offensive in December, 1944 had collapsed, and even Hitler had to have known it was game, set, and match.  Even with the Western allies standing on the Rhein, practically, Stalin still plucked the goose pretty thoroughly.  What would have happened at a Yalta Conference with Eisenhower sacked, Montgomery running about the place whining that it was all Patton’s fault, and Stalin having his communist operatives in the French underground scoping out locations for the new NKVD execution cellars?  Would there even have been a Yalta Conference?  Why should there have been, under those circumstances?  Stalin sure as hell didn’t care how many Soviet soldiers he got killed on his way west (after the war he sent most of the ones who’d seen the west to the Gulag camps).  What incentive, from his perspective, would he have had not to tell Roosevelt and Churchill, “You know what?  I’ll just take whatever my troops can conquer.  You promised me a second front and I don’t see a second front.  All bets are off.”  Even if the U.S. and Britain had pulled out of the European war Stalin still would have marched into what was left of Berlin.

D-Day made sure that such a scenario never had the chance to occur.  The men whose corpses washed gently to and fro in the surf made only a hypothetical material contribution to defeating Hitler.  But their lives were not given in vain.  Oh no:  They made sure that there would in fact be a free Europe when the war was over.  The hundreds of millions of Europeans who have lived in freedom since that day owe those freedoms to those men and their comrades who came after them.

And for that, we will forever remember and honor them.

Twice Exploited

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I firmly believe there are comparisons which are beyond humans’ capacity to make moral distinction.  “Which is worse?” we ask, and forever people will parse the tiniest facts.  Today, the 70th anniversary of D-Day, is as good an occasion as any to point out that the which-was-worse industry has an inexhaustible mother lode in the Stalin-Hitler comparison (on which I commented here).

One of the worst indictments of Southeast Asian societies — apart from the tens of millions of corpses intentionally done to death by their elites — is their enthusiastic embrace of the sex industry.  From organized brothel tours for middle-aged Japanese businessmen to being a mecca for American pederasts, that part of the world has a stinking, suppurating sore right spang smack in the middle of its face.  And of course notwithstanding the occasional hunk of red meat thrown to the activists — the token raid on some out-of-the-way bordello — you have to take as a given that officialdom is thoroughly compromised.  The industry could not function as prominently as it does were they not in it up to the elbows.

I suppose you could make the argument that if those societies want to legalize the sex trade in whatever manner they please, we in the West ought to kindly bugger off.  There are in fact legitimate arguments you can make along those lines, and some of the people making them are women who are actively engaged in the sex trade themselves.

Whatever else might be said for or against the industry generally, I think you have to draw the line at recruiting by kidnapping or sale.  [And for me as well, recruiting by caste.  There are castes in India the females of which are prostitutes.  That’s what they do, it’s what they’re destined to do from the moment of their birth.  I decline to accept that as a valid cultural expression.  But that’s just me.]  Kidnapping or sale into prostitution, however, I would submit are 100%, no-counter-argument-valid, off-the-charts unacceptable.  Everywhere, by anyone, under any circumstances.  Those are not, by the way, peculiar to Southeast Asian societies or the modern world.  Mark Twain writes of the slave markets — and the girls for sale there — of Constantinople in The Innocents Abroad, in 1867.  In Rome slave girls were regularly bought and sold for such purposes.  For centuries the Tartars raided deep into Russia, looking for pretty girls to carry off.  I would suggest, however, that so far from legitimizing by association the practice, the existence of those practices are indictments of those societies, and reasons to damp down any cultural admiration for them we might otherwise feel.

Let’s go ahead and damn the kidnappers, the buyers, the brokers, the brothel owners who will whore out a captive 13-year-old, and the customers who leeringly keep the whole ship afloat.  While she may have come from a brutal world (her family may have had the choice between selling her into prostitution or watching her starve to death), while she may exist in a brutal world even outside the special hell that is her life, I think we all can agree that the people who do to her what is done to her are guilty of sins for which they will one day have to pay, if not in this world then in the next.

These girls and women are subject to the worst exploitation of their physical persons, which is about all they have in this world.  How contemptible is it, then, that they are not only directly exploited by their captors and their captors’ customers . . . but indirectly by those who nominally are there to help them?

It emerges that the patron saint — so to speak — of the anti-sex-trafficking industry is nothing more than a fraud.  At least some of her spokespeople are frauds, coached to lie about their lives and their stories.  And why?  Well, let’s just say that Somaly Mam, whose story of sale into sex slavery turns out to be manufactured from whole cloth, has been doing herself mighty proud.  Jet-setting around the world, meeting with all the bigwigs (for which she must be appropriately dressed, of course), staying at the most posh hotels.  The book deals, the movie rights, the rubbing elbows with people whose names are household words all over the world, getting showered with awards by the likes of CNN, Glamour, and Fortune.  If the actual girls rescued from sex slavery get short shrift . . . well, Humpty-Dumpty couldn’t be put back together again, and besides isn’t there a major conference in Prague next spring we’ve got to get ready for?  At least they’re not being locked up for enjoyment by some decrepit, diseased paper-pusher from Yokohama on a package tour of Thai kiddie brothels.

The linked article over at The Atlantic deals principally with how Nick Kristof let himself get used by this woman, and how the rest of the media-war-on-wymyn industry gleefully sang her praises.  Honestly I can’t say any of that part of the story surprises me.  The manufactured hero-of-the-moment, not infrequently created by the media themselves, is of too ancient vintage to be news any more.  But what kind of a filthy bastard, what kind of human scum, do you have to be to use the juvenile sex slaves of these hell-holes of the world as your ladder to fame and wealth?

These girls are twice exploited, and I think it’s an open question which set of blood-suckers is the more cynical, the more reprehensible.

Damn them all, in any event.

Yep; Gotta Watch the Smart Ones

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Because, according to someone employed by Occidental College and rejoicing in the name of Danielle Dirks, who is identified as a professor, a student accused of sexual assault “fit the profile of other rapists on campus in that he had a high GPA in high school, was his class valedictorian, was on [a sports] team, and was ‘from a good family.'”  Ah yes:  The smart ones, the ones who can reason their way through written sexual conduct policies and have memories sufficiently capacious to keep them in mind while half-looped and trying to get some . . . those are the ones you’ve got to come down on.  Professor Dirks is an assistant professor of sociology, concerning herself “with fundamental questions about justice and inequality in America, with a special focus on racial and gender inequality.”  Which of course makes her a perfect person to evaluate whether two drunk kids screwing in a dorm room is a quasi-criminal offense.  <sound of blowing snot>

After the police investigated the girl’s accusations and the district attorney’s office determined, “Witnesses were interviewed and agreed that the victim and suspect were both drunk, however, that they were both willing participants exercising bad judgment …. It would be reasonable for [Doe] to conclude based on their communications and [the accuser’s] actions that, even though she was intoxicated, she could still exercise reasonable judgment,” and declined to prosecute for that reason (remember, Gentle Reader, that mutual consent means as a matter of law that no sexual assault took place; under civil law a “battery” is an offensive intentional touching and an “assault” is the intentional placing in reasonable fear of imminent bodily harm, and if you consent to it then it defies all logic to assert that it was either offensive or caused you fear; all of which is to say that it didn’t happen), the student accused was put through the Holder-era DOJ-mandated kangaroo kampus kourt process.

Occidental hired an outside investigator and then an outside lone ranger “adjudicator” to run a due-process-free farce in which the accused had no effective right of confrontation.  The “adjudicator” found that “more likely than not” the accuser in fact gave every indication she wanted to have sex, but that because she was drunk (so was the accused, remember) her consent was ineffective.  This is notwithstanding Occidental’s own definition of “incapacitated”:  “cannot make an informed and rational decision to engage in sexual activity because s/he lacks conscious knowledge of the nature of the act (e.g., to understand the who, what, when, where, why or how of the sexual interaction) and/or is physically helpless.”   All the above quotations are taken from this report from F.I.R.E. (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a 501(c)(3) eminently worthy of Gentle Reader’s donation and support), and at the link they quote the district attorney’s summary of the accuser’s protracted written communication with the accused, including expressing an intention to sneak out of her dorm and into his for the purpose of having sex.

Occidental expelled the accused, who has filed a lawsuit.  Bless the judge’s little pointy head, a stay has issued, so for the time being the accused is still enrolled.  The accused student has enlisted F.I.R.E.’s support, and I hope they provide it with gusto.  As their vice president’s letter to the college president observed, using the “standard” (I decline to give it the dignity of omitting quotation marks) and the evidence on hand, the girl was guilty of sexually assaulting the guy.  The college promised a response by mid-May; none has been forthcoming.

This story terrifies me.  I have, as I have mentioned repeatedly on this blog, three boys who more likely than not will attend college at some point.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but I would anticipate they’re going to want to get laid at some point along the line.  These are the stakes, though, if they either make the effort or succeed.  What makes it all the more frightening is that at least one of my boys has emotional development issues which impair his ability to read social cues.  Oh sure, he’s not a recluse, or socially inappropriate or anything, but he will never have the finely-tuned sensibilities to make on-the-fly accurate assessments of what other people are telling him with their expressions, tones, body language, meta-conversations, whatever.  He’ll have to think his way through them one step at a time, every step of the way, according to algorithms that he will have to sit down and work out.  And he will make mistakes.

Add in the complexity of not just social interaction, but sexually-overtoned social interaction, and the degree to which these judgment decisions (“Does she want to or not?”) are nearly invariably made at the very outer margins of social awareness and my boy is going to step on landmines.  Not because he’s evil or a sexual predator, but because he’s mis-read the “thanks but no thanks,” response that was given to his advances.  And he’s mis-read them not because he’s interpreting through the prism of a sexual perversion but because he lacks the wiring to read them in the first place.  As surely as night follows the day, unless one stumbles across a woman of the sort who generally does not exist off the set of a pornographic movie (I once, 25 or so years ago, saw a tongue-in-cheek article on “The Ontology of Porn,” and I wish now I’d kept it; a brief Google search was unsuccessful), he is going to end up doing something that could very easily put him on the wrong end of one of these farcical processes.

To borrow a recent observation from Instapundit, “These lawsuits seem to be a growth industry. If I were a plaintiff’s lawyer in a college town, I’d be putting ads on park benches: FALSELY ACCUSED OF SEXUAL ASSAULT? SUE THE B*ST*RDS!”  I’d not only sue the college itself, but I’d sue the accuser and every last individual involved in the process, including the Danielle Dirkses, these lone ranger “adjudicators,” and the outside “investigators.”  Remind them that “justice” necessarily contemplates the possibility that your accuser is not telling the truth, and “equality” means no one is exempt from having to be confronted by the accused.

Let’s eat into those endowments and the dear professors’ home equity in seven-figure bites and see how long before they start to push back against the DOJ.

From the Department of This is Surprising Why?

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Via Instapundit, and shamelessly to borrow one of my favorite expressions of the Blogfather:  Another rube self-identifies.

You really have to appreciate the tone of shock — shock!! — that oozes from this woman’s plea:  “‘It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,’ said Gardner, who attended both meetings. ‘I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.’”

Wait.  You mean all this stuff has to be paid for?  By me??  And I’m going to have to come up with money for it?  O! the humanity of it all!  But light rail is . . . is . . . I know a half-dozen or more people who ride it.  Sometimes.  But . . . but . . . green!  And sustainable!!  No one told me there was a trade-off.  It’s so unfair.  Social justice.  Halliburton.  Koch Brothers.  Open sesame!

At the risk of pointing out to this ol’ gal the obvious:  Things which make your city too damned expensive for ordinary people to live there do not “make this city better.”  They make it more stratified, more homogenous, more boring.  And eventually they just kill it off.

The sad part is that one has a niggling suspicion that, even if you sat down with her and went over all of it, she still wouldn’t get the nexus between what she’s been voting for and the hit to her wallet.

[Update (05 Jun 14):  A nice, succinct wrap-up on the phenomenon, from Ed Driscoll.]

When Nothing Adds Up

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We have traded five pretty senior Taliban, held innocuously at Gitmo, for one Bowe Bergdahl.

It seems there is a law on the books which requires the administration to give 30 days’ advance notice to Congress prior to any release of any of the Gitmo perpetrators.  Predictably Dear Leader did not do that.  However much it galls me to confess this, I have to say I agree with him on that one.  There is nothing — nothing at all — in the Constitution which grants Congress the authority to place such a constraint on a president’s war-fighting powers, and unlike others I do not think that the congressional power of the purse gets you there.  To put it bluntly, I do not think that Congress has the constitutional ability to decree that “no funds of the United States of America shall be expended in the defense thereof,” a proposition you have to accept if you accept that Congress could use the power for this specific purpose (there’s no logical stopping point in between).  Forbidding expenditure in the exchange of prisoners — an inherent prerogative of command — falls on the wrong side of that divide.  Like it or not, how the human scum we cooped up in Gitmo are dealt with is squarely on the war-fighting side of the ledger, and Congress has no power to fight a war.

On the other hand, as with it seems nearly everything else Dear Leader does, there is a great deal more to it than that.

The original story put out by Bergdahl himself was that he’d been captured while straggling behind a patrol.  Except there was no patrol that night.  He was on sentry-duty, was duly relieved, and vanished into the night.  From CNN:  “According to firsthand accounts from soldiers in his platoon, Bergdahl, while on guard duty, shed his weapons and walked off the observation post with nothing more than a compass, a knife, water, a digital camera and a diary. . . .  ‘Any of us would have died for him while he was with us, and then for him to just leave us like that, it was a very big betrayal,’ said former U.S. Army Sgt. Josh Korder, who has the name of three soldiers who died while searching for Bergdahl tattooed on his back.”  From The Weekly Standard:  “‘You don’t mail all your personal belongings home, especially your computer. It’s not like you can go to a sports bar — there’s no sports bars over there,” says Specialist [Cody] Full [a platoon mate]. ‘You just wouldn’t give up your computer if you weren’t planning to leave. He knowingly deserted and he put countless fellow Americans in danger — not just his platoon mates.'”

Suffice it to say that, the headline in the FAZ notwithstanding (“Better, he’s a Hero”) Bowe Bergdahl is no hero.  [Update (03 Jun 14, 1525 local):  Along the lines of oopsies, the FAZ‘s newest headline on this deserter and traitor is now “Everything but a Hero”.  At least we’ve got that part straightened out, now.]

According to voice intercepts from the Taliban, he was taken while taking a dump.  Of course, that snapshot — however much Gentle Reader might have been able to do without the mental image — says exactly nothing about how he absented himself from his unit or what his intentions were.  He was walking down the road, felt the urge (remember he’d been on sentry duty and so would not have been able to make a head call for several hours), dropped ’em and was come upon in that position by the Taliban?  OK; so what?

As The Hill reports, “At least six U.S. soldiers died hunting for Bergdahl, CNN reports.  Many of his fellow troops also told CNN that they had to sign nondisclosure agreements to never share information about his disappearance and the hunt for him.”

It seems, in fact, that not just the military but other agencies as well have been investigating the events of that night and those subsequent.  The military has “a major classified file” on the subject, the existence of which has now been leaked, with the obvious purpose of encouraging a congressional subpoena of its contents.

So let’s see:  A guy takes off in the middle of the night, with everything tending towards, and nothing to contradict, the inference of an intentional desertion from his duty post in time of war (which carries the death penalty, according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice).  Multiple American troops, both regular army and special forces, are killed or wounded looking for him.  The whole thing is taken so seriously and at such high levels that there’s not just some file mouldering in someone’s office, but a “major classified file” on this jackass at the Pentagon.  The soldiers who knew him best and who were most familiar with the events of his desertion and immediately following are strong-armed into signing non-disclosure agreements (how many thousand GIs went MIA in Germany, Korea, or Vietnam? and how many non-disclosure agreements were extorted from their closest comrades?).  The deserter in question was a machine gunner.  Not exactly a high-value asset to the Warriors of the Religion of Peace.  He’s kept alive for five years, by groups who are not known for their solicitude for useless feeders from the opposite side.

It gets better.  The Bergdahls lived in Idaho, outside a small town.  The FAZ reports their house had “thousands of books” but no television.  Sounds a lot like my house, actually.  Daddy Bergdahl grows a beard “for solidarity” (as reported in the FAZ; it’s not reported with whom he was expressing solidarity), and then greets his son by video link with (in Pashto, no less), “I am your father.”  As Michael Ledeen observes, that’s just not how any normal father would greet his son.  I’ve got three boys of my own, and while they’re not old enough to have served, I can guarantee you that if I am ever in Papa Bergdahl’s situation you will not hear me constrained to identify myself as my boy’s father.  And certainly not in the language of his captors, the people who killed and wounded the Americans who went looking for my son.  Ledeen, whose initial reaction was the same as mine, professes himself to have “calmed down” a bit since then (he’s got more reliable sources than most, but I still am not comforted), but on one point I wholeheartedly agree with him:  “The people I wouldn’t trust on this one – aside from top decision makers who likely have a lot to hide – are the Bergdahls.  They’re very odd people, to put it mildly.”

It is also reported by the FAZ that Papa Bergdahl learned Pashto in order to work directly with the “captors” for his son’s release.  Or was it for some other reason?  Gentle Reader will remember that when one takes and “turns” an enemy, foremost in one’s mind is forever the question whether this is a plant.  While you can never be sure, one of the things you can do is monitor closely and control his communications.  If he’s communicating with the folks back home in his native language you can never tell if he’s using some sort of pre-arranged code-speak, or even just making “mistakes” in his transmissions that are sure to be noticed by his controllers, all for the purpose of letting it be known that They’re Looking Over my Shoulder as I Type This.  [For a fascinating look at how that sort of thing worked in the context of the SOE — and by “fascinating” I mean I read it through in the course of a single weekend — I cannot recommend too highly Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks, the SOE’s chief code-maker.]  It’s entirely logical that the younger Bergdahl, who had already learned the local language from outright sympathy with the Afghans (actually, a commendable practice and one which ought to be encouraged if you’re proposing to have your military among the people for any prolonged period), would have been forbidden to communicate with his father in English.  In other words, I strongly question whether Papa learned it to negotiate with his son’s new controllers; far more likely that he learned it in order to communicate with his son in the latter’s new language.

And after all of this, Dear Leader announces the swap in a Rose Garden presser?  He has to know that the truth will come out.  In fact, it’s already coming out.  It will continue to come out.  People who have their dead comrades’ names tattooed on their own flesh, comrades who died looking for someone now known to be a traitor, aren’t going to be scared off by some piece of paper with a promise of non-disclosure on it.  People who left arms and legs on the field aren’t going to be frightened off by your stooges in plain-clothes.  That’s something I wonder whether Dear Leader, for whom there exists nothing more talismanic than a faculty-lounge notice on the cork-board (and for whom nothing else — say for example, a lawful statute of Congress — carries more weight than something you’d find pinned to the board; that mindset is definitely a two-way street), fully understands.  President:  “But you signed a document where you promised you wouldn’t talk!!!”  Soldier:  “Fuck you, buddy.  These men were my friends.  And your traitor-boy killed them, just as much as if he pressed the detonator himself.”  However sad it may be to contemplate it, our president will never understand the logic of the foregoing exchange.  As consummately political as he is, Dear Leader has to know what’s coming.

That much said, by parading these people and making this kind of a fuss about, and that prominently, he’s bragging that he doesn’t care.  He knows that most of the lamestream media will cover for him.  He knows that the Paul Krugmans of the world will assure us it’s just some partisan witch-hunt that we sloped-browed mouth-breathing bitter gun-clingers out in fly-over country object to a deserter and a traitor being celebrated by the commander-in-chief in the White House (and you know that’s coming, Gentle Reader, don’t you?).

At this point Dear Leader’s cutting doughnuts in our front yard and throwing his empties out the window.  [Update (06 Jun 14):  And like some spotty-faced juvenile delinquent, when caught and dragged up before the judge (that’s us, Gentle Reader), he shows no contrition at all.  None.]

[Update (04 Jun 14):  And now come the reports of what sounds like efforts at collaboration between Bergdahl and the enemy.  Over at PJ Tatler, via CNN, we have this:  “Within days of his disappearance, says Buetow, teams monitoring radio chatter and cell phone communications intercepted an alarming message: The American is in Yahya Khel (a village two miles away). He’s looking for someone who speaks English so he can talk to the Taliban.”  I’m not sure what to make of that statement.  If he had been learning the local language, why would he have been looking for someone who spoke English, unless he hadn’t learned much of the language?  Or maybe he felt his language abilities inadequate?  Who knows?  For that matter, the squad mate quoted heard his own translator’s version of what someone else had said, and we have no idea to what extent that other person was paraphrasing what Bergdahl was saying.  So it’s still a mite early to tell for sure.  But one thing seems pretty plain:  For whatever reason, and with whatever intent in his heart, Bowe Bergdahl was running towards the Taliban as much as he was running away from the U.S. Army.  And that smells really bad.]

[Update (06 Jun 14):  Now a private company, run by a former senior CIA operative and doing business as a defense contractor, produces what it alleges to be reports submitted to CENTCOM as far back as 2010.  I say “alleges” because the company’s owner was indicted for lying to Congress in connection with the Iran-Contra balls-up; he was pardoned by Bush 41 while on trial.  Just like I’m not willing to give Eric “My People” Holder a pass for blatantly lying to this Congress, so I’m not willing to ignore this other fellow’s having done the same thing.

So I very much take this with a grain of salt.  This guy is a liar (otherwise he’d have gone to verdict to clear his name) but that’s not to say he’s incompetent (as is Holder), and the reports were in fact submitted.  They’re genuine in the sense that they really were prepared and really do exist.  The general commanding USCENTCOM back then denies having seen these particular reports, although I have a hard time imagining that being true, given their explosive content.

Because, you see, these reports show Bowe Bergdahl having converted to the Religion of Peace, announceinghimself as a mujahid, and running about the place with his very own AK-47.  I’m being asked to accept the bald statement that reports of active collaboration with the enemy by a U.S. service member known to have deserted a combat post, for whom we were then still actively searching, aren’t significant enough to make it to the four-star’s desk?  Pull the other one, boys; it’s got bells on it. On the other hand, the reports also show an escape attempt upon capture after which he was locked up in a metal cage.  So the contents of the reports are not unambiguous, and even if they are spot-on accurate, you still have to ask the question whether it’s fully knowing collaboration or just Stockholm Syndrome making its appearance.  Patricia Hearst, anyone?  Perhaps Hearst isn’t the best cautionary example, because irrespective of why she went over, go over she very much did, to the extent of participating in armed bank robbery with her “captors.”

No matter what the correct interpretation and weight to place on these reports, you have to ask yourself why Dear Leader’s people hadn’t reviewed every last page of this and the rest of the available information before turning over the five most dangerous Taliban in our possession, the worst of the worst.  And then trumpeting his decision to the world.  And then gloating over it, as if all he had done was “mak[e] sure we get back a young man to his parents.”]

From the Department of Always use the Right Tools

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31 May 1916.  The German High Seas Fleet is coming out, hoping to draw out some of the British Grand Fleet and pounce on it before the rest of it can come up.  Unknown to the Germans, the British, using the Room 40 decrypts they enjoyed thanks to the Russians’ having had the pluck and sense to strip SMS Magdeburg of her code books in 1914 and then the generosity to turn them over to the Royal Navy, knew precisely where they intended to go and what they intended to do.  So Jellicoe got the entire Grand Fleet underway to meet them.

The stage was thus set for the Armageddon-style naval battle that every commander since Nelson had sought.  Here a brief historical overview might be of assistance.  Prior to Nelson, battle fleets fought and had for 140-plus years fought in line-ahead formation.  To some extent it made sense because wooden warships mount their guns in broadside only, and those guns have only limited ability to be trained out of the strictly perpendicular to the keel.  The ends of a wooden ship — especially the stern — are much thinner than its sides, and much shorter.  So even though you might mount a few bow-chasers or stern-chasers so you wouldn’t be complete impotent, those guns represented only a tiny fraction of the ship’s total weight of firepower.  To put some numbers on it, of a first-rate’s 98 or more heavy guns, ranging from 18-pounders to 32-pounders, maybe a total of eight or ten would be mounted outside of the broadside batteries.  In line ahead, where each ship follows the one ahead of it as closely as it safely can, you concentrate and mutually reinforce the fleet’s individual broadsides, and you also prevent the opposing fleet’s ships from piercing the line and firing its concentrated broadside against the largely unprotected bow or (even worse) the stern, almost completely unprotected by heavy timbers.

Gentle Reader will rapidly perceive the logical development of this tactic, though, along the principle of sauce for the gander.  Both fleets adopt the line ahead.  Now, a fleet in line ahead is not going to be able effectively to pierce the opponent’s line along its length.  That would produce a geometry looking like a cross-member tire iron.  While the fleet piercing the line will be able to concentrate its fire on the ends of the ships between which it sails, the other fleet will be able to concentrate its fire on the ends of the ships nearest its line where pierced.  Stymie, in other words.  The dynamic is entirely different if you can, not pierce, but cross the opponent’s line ahead of it.  It’s called “crossing the T,” and it’s the holy grail of battle line tactics.  Of course, now you’ve crossed the T, what do you do?  You’re still line ahead, only on the other side of your enemy, and now he “has the weather gauge of you,” meaning he is upwind of you, a crucially important tactical advantage in the era of square-rigged battle fleets.

The upshot of all of the above considerations was that from its formal adoption in the 1660s all the way up to the late 1700s, naval battles, at least when on the high seas where there wasn’t a lee shore you could run your enemy onto (as at Quiberon Bay, in 1759), tended to be indecisive.  Oh sure, occasionally a ship would have the misfortune to be so disabled as not to be able to stay in line.  She’d drift out on her own and be surrounded and captured.  Beyond individual misfortune such as that, however, naval battles just didn’t decide a whole lot.  That’s not to say sea power as such was indecisive, because it very much was.  It’s just that the effectiveness of main battle fleets against each other was limited.

Still the line ahead made sense, by and large, and it made enough sense that the Royal Navy formally incorporated it into Fighting Instructions, its mandatory combat manual.  Woe betide the captain who broke line.  Woe betide the admiral who failed to maintain his battle line.

Until Nelson.

Nelson realized two things, one strategic and the other tactical.  His strategic insight was that the line ahead was never going to produce a strategic-level result precisely because it could not be expected to produce a battle where one fleet was largely destroyed by the other.  His tactical insight was that the virtues of the line of battle were strongest when the two fleets were of equal quality in seamanship and gunnery.  But if one fleet was significantly the other’s superior, then it might well be able to sail sufficiently exactly as to pierce the enemy’s line in multiple places simultaneously, and the difference in gunnery would significantly reduce the damage inflicted while doing so.  This would then place the better fleet’s ships close alongside their counterparts, where their superior gunnery stood the best chance of achieving decisive results.  Nelson further realized that, after a dozen or so years of purge, guillotine, and neglect, the Royal Navy had attained that level of mastery over the French.

The validity of Nelson’s insights was proved dramatically at Trafalgar in 1805.  Nelson divided his fleet into two squadrons, abandoned the line ahead to hoist the signal “general chase,” and then drove his fleet like two mailed fists into the straggling, disordered, bumbling combined French and Spanish fleets.  There developed a general melee in which Nelson’s parting instruction to his captains that, “No captain can do very wrong who places his ship alongside that of a Frenchman,” bore fruit.  Two-thirds of the combined fleet was sunk or captured that afternoon, and British hegemony at sea assured for another century-plus.  Nelson died that day, but not before receiving the news of his victory.

From Trafalgar onward, every naval officer in every country dreamed of another Trafalgar.  Mahan dreamed of it, and wrote it into his book.  Fisher dreamed of it, and built Dreadnought and her descendants to make it happen.  Tirpitz dreamed of it but was realist enough to understand it wasn’t likely against the British.  Jellicoe dreamed of it; Scheer dreamed of it; Beatty dreamed of it.

And in May, 1916 it seemed as though it was to happen.  Britain and Germany together floated dozens and dozens of massive Castles of Steel (to borrow Robert K. Massie’s book title), each capable of hurling up to a dozen massive armor-piercing shells, weighing anywhere from 900 to 1,800 pounds each, miles and miles, to fall onto the enemy’s decks, bulkheads, and hulls.  Their populaces had internalized the image of knights clad in armor, smiting each other hip and thigh in noble combat.

Except it wasn’t quite so.  Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty from 1910 until 1915, attempted to correct his fellow Members’ understanding.  Two modern dreadnoughts in battle, he said, were not correctly thought of as two plated and mailed knights hacking at each other with swords, but rather as two eggs striking at each other with hammers.  And by 1916 the hammers weren’t even the most dangerous threat.  Mines and torpedoes, the former more than the latter, could explode beneath the giants’ armor belts, below the waterline, and in a matter of minutes destroy the work of years.  As in fact happened to the brand-new dreadnought HMS Audacious, sunk by a mine in October, 1914, fourteen months after she was commissioned.  Admiral Jellicoe, the Grand Fleet’s commander, fully realized the peril.  Shortly after the war started he declared his belief that chasing a retreating German fleet back towards Germany was a mistake, as it was every bit as likely to be a ruse, to draw the British over minefields.  He announced an intention to avoid falling into that trap (and his stated intention received the Admiralty Lords’ blessing, it should not be overlooked).

And so the fleets sailed towards each other, through the haze and fog banks of a North Sea early summer.  The Germans had no idea of what was headed their way until the fleets’ respective scouts went to investigate a fishing trawler each sighted.  Each fleet’s closest squadron just happened to be its battlecruisers, and here is where we get to this post’s title.

Battlecruisers were, like Dreadnought herself, an invention of Admiral Jackie Fisher.  They had a dreadnought’s heavy guns, but they were to be fast, like jungle cats (in fact they were referred to, both in the press and in the fleet, in those terms).  Now folks, the laws of physics apply with even greater brutality on the ocean than they do on land.  You’ve got three things and you can’t have them all at once: guns, armor, and speed.  If you want more of one you’re going to have to skimp on the others.  That’s just the way it works.  So Fisher chose to skimp on the armor leg of that triangle.

Fisher’s original vision had been a ship fast enough to catch any major ship it could out-gun, and by like token to run away from anything that could match or out-gun it.  Logical enough, and indeed that is precisely how things worked out in the fall of 1914.  German Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s Pacific Squadron had jumped a couple of elderly British cruisers off the coast of Chile and sent them to the bottom with the loss of all hands.  So the Royal Navy dispatched two of its original battlecruisers, Invincible and Inflexible, to deal with Spee.  On December 8, 1914, they caught him making a run at the Falklands and in an afternoon’s shooting destroyed nearly his entire squadron (taking not only Spee but his two young sons down).

But o! what a difference a word can make!  Fisher permitted them to be called “battlecruisers,” and further permitted them to be regarded in the fleet as components of the battle fleet.  They were to be the fleets’ “scouts.”  But the fleet had scouts, you see.  It had shoals of destroyers and full squadrons of actual cruisers.  Ships that could out-run even a battlecruiser.  Since a scout’s whole mission is to get close enough to the enemy to figure out what’s going on (recall, Gentle Reader, that radar was still 20 years or more in the future), you don’t want a scout you can’t afford to lose.  Hard cheese on the expendable scouts, but there it is.  In short, the very worst place for a battlecruiser is in a fleet battle formation, where its speed is negated (it can’t maneuver faster than the slowest unit in the fleet), and where it will necessarily be exposed to heavy and concentrated shelling from the opposing fleet.  And that’s precisely where the British put theirs.

Without going into too great detail, Jellicoe managed to cross Scheer’s T not once, but twice that day.  With lousy visibility, poor communications (flag hoists were nearly useless and the day’s primitive radio sets tended to be knocked out the concussion of the ship’s own guns firing), and the press of fleets maneuvering at well over 20 knots each, Jellicoe managed one of the greatest sustained feats of seamanship in all naval history.  At a cost, a ferocious cost.  Full three of Britain’s deadly cats went down, each one the victim of a German shell finding its magazine.

In the below picture, somewhere at the bottom of that enormous cloud of smoke and flame, is what used to be HMS Queen Mary.

Destruction_of_HMS_Queen_Mary

And here’s HMS Indefatigable going down:

HMS_Indefatigable_sinking

And this is what is about to become the former HMS Invincible (the Royal Navy’s original battlecruiser):

InvincibleBlowingUpJutland1916

And at the end of the day, after Scheer for the second time had ordered Gefechtskehrtwendung (“battle turn”) away from the Grand Fleet, to make a run for home, Jellicoe, true to his previously stated and endorsed intention, did not follow.  The public and to some extent the brass never forgave him.  He was booted upstairs and Admiral Beatty, who commanded the battlecruisers that day, was given command of the fleet.

The High Seas Fleet never came out again in force until it did so to surrender.  For all of Tirpitz’s brilliance as a political operative and administrator, he never successfully addressed the strategic conundrum facing the Imperial German Navy:  It was bottled up in the North Sea and unless it destroyed the British fleet — which no one thought it could do — there it was going to stay.  Meanwhile the British fleet enjoyed the freedom of the world’s seas, as did its enormous merchant fleet.  Until the advent of the submarine.  Mahan’s fleet-in-being theory could not exist, in short, without reference to the hard facts of geography.

What did the British learn from Jutland?  Not enough to avoid building HMS Hood as a battlecruiser, and not enough to pull her out of service once built to bulk up her armor.  And not enough not once again to use the wrong tools for the job, sending her to her doom against Bismarck in 1941.

Get the Popcorn Ready

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. . . because it looks like we may have a show to watch.

A federal judge has rejected the IRS attempt to screen from public scrutiny how it has systematically targeted certain political groups for discriminatory treatment.  The group in this lawsuit is not a Tea Party related group, but a group whose mission is to educate the public on the actual state of affairs in the Middle East, particularly with reference to Muslim efforts to annihilate the state of Israel and slaughter such Jews as they can lay hands on.

Z Street applied for 501(c)(4) status in December, 2009, eleven months into the Era of Hopenchange.  In July, 2010, their counsel spoke with an IRS agent (whether he’s still employed there I’d like to know), who mentioned that the application was going slowly because it had been sent to Washington for “special scrutiny” as being connected to Israel and having views that “contradict those of the administration.”  Get that?  Express a view that Dear Leader doesn’t agree with and you get your very own set of legal rules you have to satisfy.

So Z Street sued.  The IRS took the positions that (i) it had no right to sue, and (ii) the IRS enjoys sovereign immunity.  Seriously.  They filed stuff in court that said that.

The court has now finally ruled that the IRS is talking through its hat.  The complaint squarely challenges the constitutionality of the process, the court ruled; this isn’t just some dispute about tax liability.

As The Blogfather has observed in other contexts, discovery in this one should be fascinating.

On Grace, Cheap and Otherwise

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This will be to some extent a riff on my last post, about the ludicrous situation in German schools where parents of a diagnosed “special needs” child have the absolute right to demand that their child be placed in regular classes in any of the tracks, irrespective of their child’s actual abilities, actual educational needs, and most importantly irrespective of the other children’s right to an effective, undisrupted education.

Later the same day I posted it I was chatting with someone who is both a retired classroom teacher and a retired priest.  I should observe that my interlocutor’s politics are sufficiently far-left that there are entire swathes of human existence that it’s no longer worth it to discuss.  The ultra-radical left position is Truth, Justice, and Light and no mere fact will be permitted to alter that conclusion.  Anyone who has ever had a conversation with a genuine doctrinaire communist will know the sensation.  This trait is sad for me to observe because I’ve known this particular person for many years now and it has only been comparatively recently that this intellectual and moral rot has set in.

And by the way, I do mean “moral” rot in every sense of the word.  It was from my interlocutor that I heard the statement that there is “no difference” between “fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Jews, and fundamentalist Muslims.”  Really? I asked.  I must have overlooked all those news reports about foot-washin’ Baptists blowing up commuter buses, or the snake-handlers strapping remotely-detonated explosive vests to retarded children, then launching them into crowded shopping centers.  By like token I seem to have overlooked the video of the Mennonites piloting airliners full of bystanders into office towers.  And who could forget the dramatic stories we’ve heard of the security forces intercepting the Hasidim on their way to the airport with suitcases full of plastic explosives?  I told my interlocutor that I had no interest in a God who could not, or a religion which does not, distinguish between on the one hand picketing an abortion clinic and blowing hundreds of people indiscriminately to kingdom come on the other.  In fact, any moral system which cannot discriminate between those two categories of action is not a serious system of thought and cannot and ought not be treated as such.

In any event, I expressed myself with some degree of acerbity on the wisdom of a bunch of UN bureaucrats, safely in their offices, decreeing that schools must be run on a transparently idiotic basis.  Well, my interlocutor puffed, after the horrors of the Holocaust it was “necessary to make a statement that there are certain kinds of behavior which are simply no longer tolerated.”  I said I thought the International Military Tribunal did a pretty good job of communicating that notion when it hanged all those perps.  I mean, snapping someone’s neck with a length of rope is a fairly unambiguous suggestion that you disapprove of something he’s done.

I then observed that the places where things like honor killings of teenage girls, female infanticide, slavery, debt peonage, and so forth are still practiced are precisely those societies who don’t give a shit what some UN scrap of paper says.  [Update (31 May 14):  And as if on cue, in today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung we have a report on yet another gang rape of two girls in India.  First they raped the girls.  Then they hanged them, still living, in a mango tree, where their bodies were found.  Five men have been arrested, including three perps and two police officers who covered for them.  The girls, whom the police when notified refused to help because they were Untouchables, were cousins . . . 12 and 14 years old.]    It’s the societies where those sorts of things are conspicuously not done which will take that UN tomfoolery seriously and attempt to live by it.  With results as shown.  It’s kind of like the (by now tired) saw that pushing gun control because criminals have too many guns is like castrating yourself because the neighbors have too many children.

This then brought forth a lecture on “cheap grace.”  Everyone wants “cheap grace,” without effort or sacrifice.  Everyone wants this-that-and-the-other, “but no one wants to pay taxes.”  Quite apart from all the other logical flaws in that argument, I observed that destroying a child’s chance to get an education so that you can feel good about yourself for “making a statement” is about the cheapest grace I could think of.  And of course the vast majority of the leftish project is precisely that:  Using the coercive power of the state to force conduct which either does nothing to remedy an ill, or which can be shown to make the problem worse than it was, but which enables the people advocating its enactment to congratulate themselves on how virtuous they are.  It is, in short, the dynamic of what William Graham Sumner called “the forgotten man”:

“As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X.  Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X. . . .  What I want to do is to look up C.  I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man.  Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct.  He is the man who never is thought of. . . .  I call him the forgotten man… He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays . . . .”

The expression “cheap grace” comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who ended his life on a Nazi gibbet.  Here’s an excerpt from his explanation of it.  He being a theologian, it is couched in theological terms, which means it suffers from a degree of fuzziness that makes it very difficult to begin from this text and arrive at a useful answer to the question, “What am I supposed to do about this?” where “this” is an actual problem facing an ordinary human in the course of an ordinary life, a life of conflicting moral obligations in irreconcilable directions.

To illustrate:  I could, for example, donate significant portions of my income to the local help center, or the local humane society, or the local pregnancy crisis center, or the local food bank, or any number of other outfits I could pluck from a simple leafing through the telephone book.  All of those organizations are immediately and actively engaged in the assistance of those of God’s creatures who either cannot help themselves or have got themselves into a pickle from which they cannot escape by their own efforts.  And I know for a fact that every last one of them is operating on a shoe-string, never more than a payroll or two from shutting the doors.  On the other hand I have three sons, two of whom have developmental issues which require specific actions by our family, sometimes by our entire family.  Accomplishing these actions requires our family to arrange its existence to accommodate some unusual demands in terms of time, location, and not least money.  It is everything we can do — and not infrequently more — to stretch things to make those accommodations.  My giving a significant portion of our family’s income to those other organizations — irrespective of their worthiness — will produce an immediate and measurable detriment to the well-being of people for whom I have the highest moral responsibility.  To the extent that Congress decides to incorporate the marriage penalty into the Internal Revenue Code that likewise would have an immediate and measurable detrimental effect on my ability to fulfill my own moral duties to my children.  A rise of another dollar per gallon in the price of gasoline would, by increasing the cost of getting the wife to work and the boys to school, materially diminish the resources which we have available to make ends meet.  By “materially diminish” I mean reduce to the point where something needed — not nice-to-have, or even pretty-significant, but actually make-or-break — goes un-obtained as a result.

My interlocutor’s argument rests on a fundamental misunderstanding.  It necessarily assumes that my “not wanting to pay taxes” is my rejection of higher moral purpose in the allocation of that portion of my life (and my wife’s) that went into obtaining that money.  It is nothing of the sort.  It is, however, the rejection of the position that someone else may legitimately require that I consume my life in the furtherance of their moral vision, in the discharge of what they decide to be my duties.

But this “make-a-statement” public policy morality is deeply confused in an even more fundamental sense.  It is recognized by every serious thinker that what we do by compulsion neither entitles us to praise nor exposes us to censure.  We recognize physical duress as a legal defense to just about everything except murder.  By like token who has not seen someone preening about his virtue in doing X, Y, or Z, and thought, “Don’t pat yourself on the back, hoss; you had to do that anyway.”  Thus by compelling others or being compelled in our turn we cannot claim any moral points.

I’m no biblical scholar, but as I recall Jesus said, “Come and follow me”; he did not send draft notices or organize press gangs.  I also have this recollection that Jesus commanded that we give our own property, not that we go out and, at sword-point, take from some to give to others — chosen by you — so you can pat yourself on the back for your magnanimity.  I don’t recall Jesus demanding of the Roman governor that he introduce laws and policies which were known to exacerbate poverty and prevent or thwart the efforts of the poor to escape it.  When Jesus preached to the fishermen mending their nets, it was not about their duty to starve their families in the name of “sustainability.”

Oh, but my interlocutor claims, repeatedly in the Bible judgment is cast on Israel as a nation for its iniquity.  Guilt and virtue are thus evidently collective attributes, and so we can comfortably apply the moral principles which govern us as individuals to entire societies, so that I can pat myself on the back for making a statement which cements misery in place and even creates more.  I suggest this approach is theologically and historically ignorant, and morally repugnant as well.  As to the latter, collective guilt is precisely the same position taken by Stalin and Hitler.  On the other side of the same coin, it would condemn as deserving of incineration every child burned to cinders in Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.  I am not interested in a theology that affirmatively blesses that outcome.  And bless it is what it does, far beyond merely mourning it as a necessary evil, but an evil for God’s forgiveness of which we had better get on our knees and pray.  According to that mode of thought those children partook, and were precisely as guilty, as the hands who turned the valves on the gas chambers at Sobibor.  Again, I’m not interested in a God who can’t tell the difference.

As to the former point, the profound ahistorical character of this traipsing off to heaven or hell under one’s national banner, I observe that until the coming of Christ, the God whom we Christians worship was the tribal God of the Jews, and was recognized as such.  The truly revolutionary nature of Christ’s coming among us is revealed in the very beginning of the story, by the angel of the Lord who appears to the sore-afraid shepherds:  “Behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy, which shall be unto all nations.”  The Good News is not confined to the Jews, or to any other people.  It is for all, each and all of us.  Jesus did not preach to the power-brokers, to the soldiers or the administrators.  Further, I am unaware of any passage in any of the Gospels or the balance of the New Testament in which the enactment of statutes is prescribed as the device by which Christianity’s precepts are to be realized.  For that matter, if salvation or damnation is determined at the level of political units by collective political action, then no Christian until the time of Constantine could expect other than eternal damnation, because until then there was no Christianized political unit.  If one is to dispute that conclusion then one must accept as true the proposition that governmental action is not indispensable to Christianity (and if it is, then America’s got trouble with its First Amendment, but that’s a rant for another day) or to salvation for a Christian.  It then follows that one must ask, in terms of any particular government action, whether that action does or does not conform to the tenets of Christianity.  And here I must refer Gentle Reader to an expression used by Jesus:  “By their fruits shall ye know them.”  Not by how they look, or how they make the orchard keeper feel about himself, but by their fruits shall ye know the tree.  It is impossible to square that notion of judging-by-what-is-done with the make-a-statement approach to public policy.

Keeping all of the above in mind and working the subject back around to it, it seems to me that to the extent that Bonhoeffer’s notion of “cheap grace” can be applied to public policy questions at all, that the logic of his thought would reject the idea that “costly grace” is to be achieved through governmental ukase.  After all, does not the entire socialist experiment (an experiment on the lives of others, let us not overlook) practically encourage the view of, “I pay my taxes; I’m done”?  [Sure enough, if you look at charitable giving in the U.S., you find it is by a wide margin greater than among societies who’ve out-sourced their virtue to the bureaucracy.]  What moral grasping-of-the-nettle does it require to fade a check to Uncle Sugar every April 15?  Is not the Christian’s perpetual prayer, “O Lord, show me Your Way”?  Why is it important that the Way be revealed to us?  It can only be important if we may — indeed must — choose between the Way of God and the way of sin, without necessarily being able to tell plainly which is which.  Of what relevance is that prayer when our choice is reduced to (i) pay your taxes or (ii) have the IRS come and pick you clean, then send you to jail?  When I am deprived by my government of the means to satisfy any of them, what moral significance is it to agonize over where my duty (about which word General Lee was spot-on right, by the way) lies as among my children, my wife, my aged parents, the people who are employed in the law firm I’m expected to keep afloat, my clients, the local charities whose board meetings are exercises in making two-plus-two come out to seven?  When you deprive me of the means to give physical form and effect to my moral judgments, you reduce my moral agency to no more than an academic curiosity.

This attribute of collectivism is no accident, either.  The aspect which makes Marxism (and other doctrines which reduce man to a component mechanism in someone else’s grand design) such a monstrous philosophical system is that it denies the moral agency of man.  I mean, think about it:  Adam and Eve were already made in the image of God.  What needed they to “be like God,” as they are told?  Knowledge of good and evil, morality in short.  It is our moral capacity, our ability to decide between what is just and what is unjust and act accordingly, that is the essence of the divine spark within us.  The entire rest of creation beyond mankind is incapable of “good” or “evil.”  When you reduce me to being a cog in someone else’s machine, whether you believe the purpose of that machine is “social justice” or “national greatness” or “forging the new communist man,” what you do is deprive me of my birthright as a child of God.

I deny you may claim “grace” from having done so.