Category Archives: Current Events

Happy Birthday, Trofim Lysenko

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Today is Trofim Lysenko’s birthday; he was born on this date in 1898.

Never heard of him?  Don’t worry, most in the West haven’t.

He was Stalin’s pet scientist.  Decided Mendel was wrong about inherited traits.  According to Lysenko, you could alter genetics by environmental influence.  Very handy, that, when you’re trying to convince Stalin that you can grow grain in climates and seasons in which it won’t grow.  In Ithaca, New York, in 1932, one of his fellow Soviet scientists reported, with a straight face:  “The remarkable discovery recently made by T D Lysenko of Odessa opens enormous new possibilities to plant breeders and plant geneticists of mastering individual variation. He found simple physiological methods of shortening the period of growth, of transforming winter varieties into spring ones and late varieties into early ones by inducing processes of fermentation in seeds before sowing them.”

The fellow from whom that last quotation comes, Nikolai Vavilov, paid with his life for his subsequent disagreement with Lysenko.  He was arrested in 1940, sentenced to death in 1941, and died — apparently of starvation — in GuLAG in 1943.

Lysenko came up with all manner of whack-job pseudo-scientific claptrap, and rammed it down the throat of Russian science with a bayonet.  According to the Wikipedia write-up, dissent from his theories was formally outlawed in 1948.  Solzhenitsyn ran across several — including Vavilov — who similarly paid with their hides for the sin of crossing the politically decreed “scientific” orthodoxy of Trofim Lysenko.

Lysenko’s ascendancy lasted through the late 1950s.

Why is it important that we recall Trofim Lysenko today?  When we have mainstream politicians and widely-regarded pundits openly calling for the criminalization of disagreement with the theory of anthropogenic global warming — or “climate change” or whatever it’s called this month — we must remember that we are listening to the intellectual and moral heirs of Lysenko.  This is all the more so when someone points out that, from analysis of U.S. climate data from 1880 to the present, over 90% of the U.S. data which is presented to “prove” AGW has been monkeyed with, and is not, in fact, the raw data.  It’s been estimated, modeled, or just made up.  From the linked article’s conclusion:

“The US accounts for 6.62% of the land area on Earth, but accounts for 39% of the data in the GHCN network. Overall, from 1880 to the present, approximately 99% of the temperature data in the USHCN homogenized output has been estimated (differs from the original raw data). Approximately 92% of the temperature data in the USHCN TOB output has been estimated. The GHCN adjustment models estimate approximately 92% of the US temperatures, but those estimates do not match either the USHCN TOB or homogenized estimates.”

From the e-mails and documents released as part of what’s come to be called “ClimateGate” (I wonder if Liddy et al. are tortured in their sleep by this plague of -gate nonsense terms visited on us year in and year out), Gentle Reader will perhaps recall that the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit brought someone in to try to reproduce the raw historical data on which it — and most of the rest of the climate science world — relies.  The problem, it seems, is that they’ve so thoroughly corrupted their data, and were so careless in preserving their original data, that it’s impossible to replicate their results.  That’s probably an over-simplification, but the key bit is that after two or so years of trying their own numbers guy threw up his hands in despair and quit.  Said it couldn’t be done.

Thus what we’re left with is a mountain of corrupt historical data, current data that is likewise manipulated to match models’ predictions, contradictory real-world observations (shrinking ice cover at the north latitudes, and record increases in the southern, shrinking glaciers, 17-year non-warming periods when all the models tell us that, with carbon dioxide levels relentlessly increasing, we should be absolutely cooking) . . . and scientists and politicians carping on how we just need to turn over more money and more power to them, and all will be made well.  Oh, I did forget to mention that we also got to see, as part of ClimateGate, numerous climate scientists scheming behind the curtains to stack journals’ editorial boards and peer review processes to suppress publication of scientific literature skeptical of their conclusions?

And we’re supposed to use the coercion of the criminal law system to punish anyone who dares to question the politically established orthodoxy?  Remind me again how that worked out for Soviet science.

Trofim Lysenko is dead and in his grave, but his ghost stalks the halls of climate science to this day.

[Update 05 Oct 2015]:  As if on cue, two European research foundations, one French and the other German, recently released a study on the production of isoprene in the uppermost film of the ocean surface.  I’m no chemist, nor of course a climatologist, but isoprene, it seems, has a strong effect on cloud formation, and cloud formation is intimately connected with a cooling effect on the global climate.  (Yes, that’s grossly simplified, but then if you want to read the full study, here’s the link).  The study, by the way, was funded by a grant from the European Research Council, not the Koch brothers.

Up until now, the assumption has been that isoprene is formed by plankton in sea water.  But let’s get it from the horse’s mouth:  “Previously it was assumed that isoprene is primarily caused by biological processes from plankton in the sea water. The atmospheric chemists from France and Germany, however, could now show that isoprene could also be formed without biological sources in surface film of the oceans by sunlight and so explain the large discrepancy between field measurements and models. The new identified photochemical reaction is therefore important to improve the climate models.”

How big a discrepancy?  “So far, however, local measurements indicated levels of about 0.3 megatonnes per year, global simulations of around 1.9 megatons per year. But the team of Lyon and Leipzig estimates that the newly discovered photochemical pathway alone contribute 0.2 to 3.5 megatons per year additionally and could explain the recent disagreements.”

In other words, a newly-discovered photochemical, abiotic source of an important aerosol precursor looks as though it may be contributing up to almost 200% more isoprene globally than current climate models assume.  Note the low end of the estimate, by the way.  I wouldn’t suppose that the global output of this newly-discovered source would remain stable year-on-year.  But when you need to update your climate models (which still cannot explain the 17-year “hiatus” in observed global warming) to account for up to triple the previously-assumed amount of an input that counteracts the principal effect of your model’s core variable (carbon dioxide in the atmosphere), I suggest two thoughts for the curious-minded:  1.  What else do the models inaccurately assume or simply not account for at all, and is the failure attributable to scientific malfeasance or garden variety ignorance of a phenomenally complex process?  2.  Does not the climate alarmists’ dancing around these models as if they were sacred totems have more than a slight whiff of the Israelites’ worship of the golden calf?

But remember, class:  There are public figures in the United States who want to use the physical coercive power of the criminal law system to suppress disagreement with these climate models.

Trofim Lysenko rides again.

[Update: 11 March 2016]:  Didn’t believe me, did you, Gentle Reader?

Turns out the U.S. Attorney General has taken a serious look at prosecution of oil companies for daring to disagree on the very unsettled state of whether and to what extent fossil fuels cause “climate change,” at least to the extent that the climate is in fact changing in ways and at speeds that cannot be explained by reference to the earth’s climatological history.   Video at the link.  With bonus for invocation of dear ol’ Trofim.

Did I Miss the Coverage?

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You know, the big news story where a supertanker ran aground somewhere in the Great Lakes and spilled 230,000 barrels of dumb-ass into the water?

From Chicago we have WGN television wishing everyone a Happy Yom Kippur, displaying a yellow star with the German “Jude” (“Jew”) on it.  The star was the same star which Germany made the Jews wear up until their extermination.  Mind you, this isn’t some crappy little community access channel in some backwoods hamlet.  This is The Television Station run by one of the country’s largest broadcasters.  Layers of editors and fact-checkers, dontcha know.  And their excuse?  From their general manager and news director:  “WGN General Manager Greg Easterly and News Director Jennifer Lyons said the picture came from its image bank, and they ‘failed to recognize that the image was an offensive Nazi symbol.'”

No guys, the swastika you can call “an offensive Nazi symbol” (you mean there’s such a thing as a Nazi symbol that’s not offensive?); the star they made little Jewish children wear sewn to their clothes so the SA thugs would know whom to beat to death in the streets in broad daylight is a specific reminder of the most determined effort — “so far,” we now have to add, in light of Dear Leader’s handing the keys to the nuclear arsenal to Iran — made to exterminate an entire people.  The swastika was worn by millions — the Nazis shoved it onto everything — who had nothing to do with murdering the Jews or anyone else.  If you served in any public office, or if you were drafted into the armed services, you would have worn on your person somewhere that symbol.  Pope Benedict XVI would have worn it, however briefly, when he got roped into the fray in 1945.  You have, in other words, to read something else into the swastika’s symbolism to get to “offensive” (I mean, no one views symbolism of Imperial Germany as “offensive,” and they fought against us and lost a war just like the Nazis did).  But that yellow Star of David, with “Jude” blazoned across it, meant and means exactly and only one thing.  It was the device by which a murderous regime publicly marked its victims.  Do not, please, degrade its meaning by calling it “an offensive Nazi symbol.”

And across the little water, so to speak, we have from Ontario a member — vice-chair, in fact — of a school board (!!!) and a candidate for parliament, who a number of years ago made a joke about a photograph taken at Auschwitz.  She likened whatever it was to phallic symbols and . . . well, honestly, the point of her joke, which she made on a friend’s Facebook wall, escapes me.  I’m not sure if she was trying to send up pretentious artistic gobbledy-gook, parody the sexualization of every-damned-thing in daily life by the folks we now know as “social justice warriors,” or lampoon “the patriarchy” or whatever.  Someone doing oppo research discovered the post, got it out there, and the predictable shit-storm ensued.

I’m going to reserve judgment on the propriety of her joke.  Yes you can make the point that some things simply should not figure in humor.  Ever.  And if such is the case then Auschwitz is certainly on that list.  Even if you’re the sort who’s not willing to go that far, unless you’re clearly using that imagery to attack something contemptible (see my list of possible explanations of what she might have been getting at, above), and make sure it’s not even remotely debatable that you’re not laughing at or about Auschwitz and what it symbolizes, but rather your true target, then it still has to be considered in pretty bad taste.  And maybe even then you ought to come up with something else equally outlandish to use — you know, something that doesn’t have the stench of six million murder victims to it — to talk about phallic micro-aggressions of the patriarchy.  Or something like that.

But no:  What really has made my head explode was this statement coming from the vice-chair of a school board:  ““Well, I didn’t know what Auschwitz was, or I didn’t up until today,’ she said in an interview Tuesday night. Johnstone, who appears to be in her thirties, said she had ‘heard about concentration camps.’”

Jesusmaryjoseph, as the Irish would exclaim.

This depth of ignorance is just about beyond words.  What, I mean, can you say in response to someone who’s managed to get past elementary school without knowing at least what Auschwitz was and what occurred there?  It’s not like you have to know everything about the Holocaust, its causes and course.  Just like you don’t need to know everything written about the GuLAG in order to appreciate the Soviets’ starving and working to death tens of millions of their fellow citizens on trumped-up charges.  But how do you, in the 21st Century, construct a moral framework for your existence without tying the abstract “I’ve heard about concentration camps” to the concrete physical “and this is the most notorious surviving example; it really happened”?

Compare, by the way, the ignorance of the vice-chair of her local school board with the degree of engagement exhibited by this teen-aged girl from Alabama.

Depressing Predictability

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From The New York Times, via Urgent Agenda, we have “What Happened to South African Democracy?” a depressing look at the reality of life in ANC-dominated South Africa.

First, some props to the ANC as it was run by a post-release Nelson Mandela.  I’m sure that “mistakes were made,” as the usual phraseology will have it, in the transition from apartheid to democracy; unless the Second Coming in Something Other Than Wrath happens, you cannot up-end the fundamental structure of any society without someone, somewhere, in some official capacity making some degree of a pig’s breakfast out of something.  So perfection is not the standard by which to judge how South Africa transformed itself.  Think only of the smooth, error-free process by which the U.S. transformed its formerly-slave-owning society to one in which slavery was, overnight (on an historical time horizon) outlawed, and you get sort of a notion of how sobering was the challenge for South Africans of all ethnicities.

But this is the Big Thing to keep in mind in thinking about how they responded to their challenges:  In South Africa they resisted the temptation to exact government-sanctioned vengeance.  Names were named, and deeds called by their correct labels, but there were no Soviet-style Revtribs or Cheka troikas doling out “revolutionary justice” in execution cellars.  I cannot recall which book has the picture, but in a history of the Soviet Union that I have somewhere, there is a picture of a Polish officer in the Russian Army, surrounded by his troops.  He’s hanging by one ankle from a tree branch, naked, and from his anus there protrudes a very long shaft of what is probably a lance of some description.  Being an officer he would of course have been some sort of nobleman, and his troops peasants.  His troops stand around, some looking at him hanging there, others at the camera.  Yes, the ANC had (and has) an ugly underside —  “necklacing,” for example, in which a bound victim has a car tire put about his neck, it is filled with gasoline, and then set alight — but in point of fact once the ANC came to power it chose a path other than as chosen by the communist states from whose doctrines its leaders had initially taken their inspiration (Mandela as of his arrest was a Marxist).  And for that they deserve a large measure of respect.

But it’s one thing for the dog to catch the car, and something entirely different what he does with the car once caught.  And he must be judged on both.

In this latter respect the ANC has squandered much, it seems, of its moral capital.  A good deal of that frittering has occurred as the fallout from governmental encroachment on individual liberties, usually as the result of the dynamics of patronage and the distortions it brings to policy.  To take but one example, there arises the question of leadership in villages which are still by and large tribal enclaves.  Should leadership be elective (democracy) or vested in tribal leadership (ethnic)?  For the central government the question is not just one of local sensibility.  You see, an Established leadership can be corrupted much more easily from the center than can an elective leadership.  And so we see the spectacle in South Africa of the attempt to foist non-elected leadership in the tribal areas.  From the NYT article:

“While sections of the political elite have tried to manipulate the politics of ethnicity to bypass democracy, many at the grass-roots level have opposed these moves. Popular opposition killed the Traditional Courts Bill. Last month, a community in the Eastern Cape won a court battle to elect its own leaders, rather than have them imposed. It cannot be right, the court agreed, that the people of the Transkei region ‘enjoyed greater democratic rights’ under apartheid ‘than they do under a democratically elected government.’”

The “Traditional Courts Bill” was an effort, sponsored by the prime minister, to create a separate legal system for what the article refers to as South Africa’s “Bantustans.”  Under that jolly little piece of legislation, unelected tribal chiefs would have been vested with authority as “judges, prosecutors and mediators, with no legal representation and no right of appeal.”  Hey! that’s why Nelson Mandela rotted all those years in prison, right?  So what’s going on?  This is what’s going on:

“Corruption expresses the way that state patronage has come to define politics. Politics in South Africa today ‘is devoid of political content,’ in the words of a former A.N.C. activist, Raymond Suttner. Instead, ‘it relates to who is rising or falling, as part of ongoing efforts to secure positions of power and authority.’ Using corrupt resources to win favors from different social groups and factions has helped entrench a dangerous cronyism in national politics.”

Gee whiz, who could have seen that coming?  I’ll tell you.  A British doctor who writes under the name Theodore Dalrymple.  I have a couple of his books, the first one I bought being Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, a collection of essays.  Among them is “After Empire,” his description of his experiences as a newbie doctor in what was then Ian Smith’s Rhodesia.  As the Blogfather would say, by all means Read the Whole Thing, but here’s the guts of one of the article’s less encouraging observations:

“Unlike in South Africa, where salaries were paid according to a racial hierarchy (whites first, Indians and coloured second, Africans last), salaries in Rhodesia were equal for blacks and whites doing the same job, so that a black junior doctor received the same salary as mine. But there remained a vast gulf in our standards of living, the significance of which at first escaped me; but it was crucial in explaining the disasters that befell the newly independent countries that enjoyed what Byron called, and eagerly anticipated as, the first dance of freedom.

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason: they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province. An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family. Mere equality of salary, therefore, was quite insufficient to procure for them the standard of living that they saw the whites had and that it was only human nature for them to desire—and believe themselves entitled to, on account of the superior talent that had allowed them to raise themselves above their fellows. In fact, a salary a thousand times as great would hardly have been sufficient to procure it: for their social obligations increased pari passu with their incomes.”

And the same dynamic played out among the political classes after independence:

“It is easy to see why a civil service, controlled and manned in its upper reaches by whites, could remain efficient and uncorrupt but could not long do so when manned by Africans who were supposed to follow the same rules and procedures. The same is true, of course, for every other administrative activity, public or private. The thick network of social obligations explains why, while it would have been out of the question to bribe most Rhodesian bureaucrats, yet in only a few years it would have been out of the question not to try to bribe most Zimbabwean ones, whose relatives would have condemned them for failing to obtain on their behalf all the advantages their official opportunities might provide. Thus do the very same tasks in the very same offices carried out by people of different cultural and social backgrounds result in very different outcomes.”

I’m going to state that what that NYT article is describing is not much more than the playing out, on the South African stage, of the social dynamic Dalrymple observed all those years ago in Rhodesia.

Lest Gentle Reader get the impression that Dalrymple is just another White Man’s Burden sort of neo-colonialist who’s demonstrating for the Xth time that the wogs simply are incapable of self-government, I really encourage Gentle Reader to read the entire article.  Dalrymple’s very up-front in pointing out that the social dynamics which render the African nation-states peculiarly susceptible of political and economic corruption serve a very positive function in enabling the peasants — who still form the overwhelming majority of the populace — to survive in an environment that is hostile on any number of levels, all the way from its climate to its economic policy.  “Of course, the solidarity and inescapable social obligations that corrupted public and private administration in Africa also gave a unique charm and humanity to life there and served to protect people from the worst consequences of the misfortunes that buffeted them.”

And so what is Dalrymple’s “solution”?  Well, he doesn’t really offer one.  He does point out that the crux of the tragedy — and you cannot read that article and come away without the sensation that he perceives what he’s describing as a tragedy in its classical meaning — was the imposition of the national-state model on a continent whose social systems were not and remain not suited for that framework.

“In fact, it was the imposition of the European model of the nation-state upon Africa, for which it was peculiarly unsuited, that caused so many disasters. With no loyalty to the nation, but only to the tribe or family, those who control the state can see it only as an object and instrument of exploitation.”

This does not bode well for South Africa.  And it does not bode well for Africa in general.  As Thomas Sowell has pointed out in any number of books and essays, the history of the human species is a history of the exploitation of the lesser-organized by the greater-organized groups, whether it was 12th Century England swallowing 12th Century Ireland, or the 19th Century United States scattering to the winds the aboriginal populations (Gentle Reader will recall that Tecumseh’s coalition was well-nigh the only one of its kind, and it was only that coalition that was able, until he was killed at Fallen Timbers, to stave off the white tide . . . although on numbers alone the outcome was inevitable), or the 19th Century colonial powers gobbling up Africa itself.  Even a numerically smaller group can successfully challenge a larger, established group, if the disparities in political organizing capacity are there.  Think of how Rome became mistress of the entire Mediterranean world.

Now think what happened to the peoples of the former Austro-Hungarian empire, a state which fractured into constituent, mutually-hostile ethnic groupings.  Franz Joseph it was, I think, who allowed that upon dissolution of his empire all that would happen would be that all these groups so clamorous for independence would merely become the playthings of greater powers.  And so it occurred.  Unless Africa can find a way either to move from its present social structures to a set more suitable for maintenance of a nation-state, or alternatively find some Golden Mean to straddle the two worlds, then what is likely to happen to the people when these nation-states implode?

[As an aside, and as perhaps a post topic for another day, I’ll toss the question out to Gentle Reader to what extent any of the dynamics observed by Dalrymple in Rhodesia and elsewhere in Africa, and by the NYT’s man-on-the-ground in South Africa today, would have had any play if the U.S. had permitted its aboriginal tribes to remain as they were pre-Trail of Tears, living in a parallel legal universe, but otherwise among the majority population.  Extra-territoriality, in other words, the same system which the Western powers rammed down Imperial China’s throat.  No state which is in fact sovereign concedes extra-territoriality to any group; it is simply inconsistent with the assertion of sovereignty.  That’s a point I seldom see made in discussions about Jackson’s decision not to concede that to the Cherokee, and Supreme Court opinion be damned.  For that matter I’m not sure how you can square the 14th Amendment with the assertion that the Cherokee ought to have been allowed to remain as they were.  Either there is One Law for all, or you’re just pretending at Equal Protection.  And either there is a Supremacy Clause or there is not.  Imponderables.]

Behavior This Brazen Makes You Think

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I haven’t run across any U.S. reporting on this yet — which is odd, considering its scope — but the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is all over it, and understandably so.  Volkswagen, which by any standard has to be considered the flagship German auto manufacturer, has been caught not just fiddling its U.S. emissions testing, but outright gun-decking it.  And that’s not all, it seems.

For those of us who are not initiates into the dark secrets of the EPA and its functioning, automobile manufacturers in the U.S. are required to “self-certify” their products’ compliance with applicable environmental and other regulation.  In other words, much like our tax system, in which the taxpayer completes his own return according to the statutes and regulations prescribing how it is to be done, and desperately hopes he doesn’t “win” (which is to say, “lose”) the audit lottery, the automobile manufacturers undertake to test their products to EPA-defined protocols and report the results truthfully.

In addition, before they’re ever allowed to put a specific model car on the market, they have to tell the regulators (not sure whether the NHTSA or the EPA, or both) exactly what materials they propose to use in that model.

Well, to put it mildly, VW has been caught, and has now admitted to, lying through its teeth on both scores.  It designed into the on-board computer which controls the engine and emission-control systems a sub-program to sense when the vehicle is on a test rack versus when it’s actually being driven, and so to alter the tuning and performance characteristics that it passes the EPA emissions requirements, when in fact it doesn’t as you drive it down the street.  How it worked was simple; under normal operating conditions certain portions of the emissions controls were simply shut off; on the test rack they operated.  [Aside:  The FAZ article does go out of its way to point out that U.S. emission standards are far more restrictive than European; in Europe a car may put out 80 mg of nasty per kilometer, the EPA only permits 70 mg per mile (which is 1.609 km).  Multiply the European standard by 1.609 to convert to miles and you get 128.72 mg, an almost 84% increase.]  The models in question are principally the Jetta, the Beetle, and the Audi A3, each as configured with the “clean diesel” powerplant.  In addition, it seems that VW did not build its cars in conformity with the materials lists provided to the government in connection with the applications for approval for sale.

Oopsies!!!

They were originally caught back in 2014 by the California emissions-control weenies, which, working with the University of West Virginia (you can almost sense the revulsion the Californians had to feel even to be talking with someone in — ick!! — West Virginia, poor dears), figured out how to get genuine data from actual cars.  The FAZ article speaks of the discovery occurring “in the course of regular testing” of, “among others, also models by VW.”  The California regulators notified VW as well as the EPA.  VW instituted its own examination to replicate the California findings (isn’t that precious; they wanted to see why their fraud had failed).  California warned them that if things didn’t shape up pronto, it would be required to issue a massive recall of the affected vehicles.  This was in December, 2014.

VW in fact instituted that recall “voluntarily,” and informed everyone concerned that everything was now hunky-dorey.  So, having given the assurances, beginning in May, 2015, VW’s vehicles were then re-tested, including protocols “specially designed” for this particular testing.  Geez, guys; couldn’t you have seen this coming?  Get caught lying and you think that no one’s going to go the extra mile to make sure you’re not lying any more?

Sure enough, at the beginning of this month VW formally admitted to all concerned that nothing had changed and they still were running the offending control systems.

So now, in addition to actually having to recall the vehicles, they’re also looking at a fine in the $18 billion range.  That’s $18 billion.  Compare that with the fines imposed on the financial services industry titans whose monkey-shines contributed to tanking the U.S. economy for the better part of eight years (hint: the hurt is going to be much worse for VW).  In beginning trading Monday in Frankfurt VW’s shares were down by as much as 23%; as of right now (roughly 10:30 Central) they’re down just over 19%.

But why the post title?  Is it really so unlikely that VW is alone in falsifying its test data?  I mean, this is just high-school-level chicanery.  How likely is it that you’re going to get by with a system that shuts off entire portions of your emission-control systems?  And if VW isn’t alone?  If it’s not alone, where are the massive fines for the other manufacturers?

I know this is pretty tin-foil-hat of me, but remember we now operate in a politico-economic system in which federal regulators are fully weaponized against political opponents.  Remember the folks who started True the Vote, whose mission is nothing more subversive than ensuring that only actual living qualified voters are permitted to vote, and then only once per election?  That married couple not only got themselves and their business audited by the IRS, but also received multiple extensive visitations from the ATF and  OSHA.  All right out of the blue, you see.  VW is a non-unionized competitor of the UAW’s hostages, also known as the Big Three.  It doesn’t matter that VW bent over backward to throw the election to the UAW when it tried to organize that plant down in Chattanooga.  In point of fact it’s still a non-union shop in a state which isn’t going to vote Democrat any time in the foreseeable future.  VW also a pretty minor player in the market, and it’s market share is such that its damage/destruction won’t really hurt many unionized/blue-state parts suppliers.  And VW is German, ergo European, and anything which harms it is going to have fall-out for Angela Merkel, who — in contrast to unrepentant tax cheat Al Sharpton — doesn’t get all that many invitations to the White House.

Somewhat mitigating my concerns on this score is the fact that it was California, not the feds, who first caught VW at it, and the fleeting reference to the snare’s having been made in the course of regular testing of multiple vehicles.  If true, commendable.  But what if not true?  Am I supposed to accept at face value the non-coordination of effort between a weaponized EPA and the most famously intrusive state regulator out there?  I wish I could dismiss such thoughts as being so far beyond the pale as to be facially not credible.

But after almost seven years of hopenchange those thoughts are not only not non-believable, they’re almost the presumptive default.  Because “fundamental transformation.”

[Update: 21 Sep 15, 1626 Central]:  Looks like I’m not the only one asking who else might have his hand in the emissions jar.  Read carefully, though, the post’s take on the potential defense available to VW:  The emission control system must produce the values “at the time of testing.”  In yet another article, the FAZ shares with us that apparently the relevant emissions standard which VW rigged its testing to comply with is something called “SULEV-II,” which only applies if the manufacturer advertises that it does.  And of course VW did.  “SULEV” means “super-ultra low-emission vehicle,” and there’s a list (no idea of whether correct or current) on Wikipedia of vehicles which deliver those emissions.  Here’s the EPA’s official chart showing the emissions standards for each category (with a bonus of California’s Air Resources Board’s corresponding requirements); SULEV-II is the fourth one down the chart.

How Not to do Reporting 101

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Can we all agree that the whole point of reporting is to answer more questions than you raise?  In this respect reporting is distinguished from commentary or op-ed pieces, or at least that’s how it ought to be.  When I read an article I actually do want my material questions to be answered and not to have to guess as what the significance of any particular statement is.  My thoughts on the point are all the more pronounced when the article in question exists on-line.  Bandwidth and storage are cheap, after all, especially in comparison with newsprint; it’s not like it’s costing you materially more to go ahead and get all the important information out there.

So when I see a headline in today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to the effect that “Every 20th Man has Paedophilic Fantasies,” and I react — as I’m sure the intention is — with disgust and alarm, I’d like to be able to finish reading the article and feel like my knowledge has expanded by some amount.  That is, alas, not the case.

Since there’s no link in the article (why? why should any on-line reporting of a study or document or video or official act ever, ever be without a link to the source?? in today’s world that’s just inexcusable) to the study cited, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version:  Lead sentence:  “Every 20th man has paedophilic tendencies.”  Got your attention too, Gentle Reader?  Over the course of four years psychologists and psychiatrists from the Universities of Regensburg, Dresden, Ulm, Bonn, and Hamburg, as well as a Turkish university, interviewed 8,700 adult males, as well as 2,000 or so juveniles, as well as conducted something like 28,000 anonymous on-line interviews.  They determined that 4.4% of the 8,700 adult males interviewed admitted to “fantasies of sexual contact” with children 12 or younger.  They found that 5.3% of 2,200 adults admitted to on-line “contact with juveniles with sexual content.”  On the reassuring side, we’re told that fewer than 1 adult male in 1,000 actually acts on his fantasies (having three young boys of my own, I do find that thought comforting).

And there the substantive reporting more or less ends.  There’s the usual outline of on-line sexual predation, with adults giving false ages and luring juveniles into their toils.  And so forth.

For starts, why the different numbers of study subjects?  Is it 28,000, or is it 2,200 “adults” or is it 8,700 adult males or what?  For something like this, is 2,200 a valid sample size?  How were the interviewees selected?  Where were they found?  Obviously if they were anonymous, then you’ve got some serious statistical analysis to conduct before you even decide that you’ve got a usefully representative sample of actual people.  And how did the 8,700 or 2,200 or however many it might actually have been get winnowed from the 28,000?  I mean, if we’re to accept that nearly 5% of adult males harbor sexual desires about sexually immature children (you almost can’t even say that without throwing up a little bit in your mouth), that’s some pretty majorly disturbing news.  I’d kind of like a little assurance that the study has statistical validity.

[Update 21 Sep 15 to add link]:  Where were these study subjects from?  Were they all in Germany or Europe?  Or in the U.S?  If this was a world-wide study population, I’d like to know how many of them were from East Asia, which after all has a paedophilia tourism industry (e.g. Thailand), and which welcomes perverted Westerners to its cities for the purpose?  How many of them are from Islamic societies, which likewise condone the practice of what we would think of as child rape?  It doesn’t take much looking to find reports of what ISIS and Boko Haram are doing to the young girls who fall into their hands, and who can cite you book, chapter, and verse from the Koran to support their actions (in fact, it’s not just ISIS and Boko Haram; it’s alarmingly mainstream in those societies).  For that matter, I’ve written earlier on this blog about the percentage of girls in (Moslem) sub-Saharan African societies who are married off as young as 11?  If you get more of things you encourage — and that’s a universally true statement about any human conduct of any kind — then before I look at a crowd of my fellow redneck males and have to wonder which 5% of them are the perverts, I want to know whether that 5% is truly a world-wide number that I need to be worried about around my boys.

Further:  What are “fantasies”?  Is it a “fantasy” to contemplate an activity that makes you almost physically ill and which you banish from your mind for that reason as soon as its mere mention occurs to you?  Or is it what I think most people would consider to be a “fantasy” — a more or less volitional day-dream indulged in for purposes of pleasure to the dreamer?

Lastly, and here I stray into the politically unmentionable, what were the sex correlations of the dreamers and the objects of their fantasies?  Here I confess that I’ve never looked up the FBI data (or any other data which may exist) on sexual crimes, and so I speak solely from what I see reported on the television (when I watch it) or read in newspapers, or run across in on-line reports (like the FAZ, for example).  But my impression is that I very seldom see a report of a heterosexual abuse case of a pre-pubescent child, and of the ones I do see, they nearly all seem to be intra-familial, and specifically to involve step-fathers raping their step-daughters.  I know my impression can’t be correct in the literal sense — too unlikely, after all.  But still, it seems that the overwhelming bulk of the abuse cases involving young children are male-on-male cases, and especially so when the perp is a serial offender.  Just by way of example, I’m entirely comfortable that there have been through the years many priests who got the young girls in their congregations out of their knickers whenever they cold, but when was the last time you saw a report of a priest that didn’t involve a string of homosexual offenses?  The homosexual priest preying on his male congregants is so common as to be a cliché (I refer Gentle Reader to the line in Frank Zappa’s “Catholic Girls” from Joe’s Garage:  “Father Riley’s a fairy / But it don’t bother Mary.”).

On a side note, and you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see it mentioned in a study like this, because it’s focused on victims 12 and younger, but does any sex-correlation which does exist alter when the victim is no longer sexually immature?  In other words, does the pervert who fantasizes about pre-pubescent boys switch hit for (post-) pubescent girls?  For that matter, of the 4.4% of respondents who admitted to un-described fantasies about sexual activity with the sexually immature, how many also entertain such fantasies about children of either sex who were pubescent or older?  And to go ahead and finish belching in chapel, of the 4.4% who admitted to such fantasies about the sexually immature, how many were sexually active in respect of adults, and of those, how many were hetero-, how many homo-, and how many bi-sexual?  A quick Google search of the search terms “homosexuality” and “paedophilia” pulls a bunch of links to articles, screeds, studies, and so forth the tenor of which is that there is no provable connection between the two.  I’d be interested to know how this study, with its 28,000 interview subjects, shook out on the point.

I’d point out here that in asking about sexual contact between adult males and girls who are post-pubescent but still have no business taking up with an older man, you’ve got some serious cultural and historical issues to deal with in analyzing your numbers.  Just by way of famous examples, I will guarantee you that of the parties and guests present at the wedding where Jesus performed his first miracle, the groom would be looking at 20+ years hard time, the bride’s parents would draw a stretch for conspiracy and accessory before and after the fact, and someone’s going down on a charge of contributing.  You’d also likely sweep in a paddy-wagon full of other married couples present for at least some of the same offenses.  To take a slightly newer example, Varina Howell was all of 17 when she met and was courted by the family’s neighbor, Jefferson Davis, who was 35 at the time.  The modern reaction is Ick!!  Yet even today the age of consent is all over the map just among the 50 states, and that doesn’t even touch on the enormous disparities on the subject that exist across the globe.  Nowadays in the U.S., if you’re a 35 year-old man mooning about a 17 year-old girl, you’ll be lucky if being laughed at for a pathetic cradle-robber is the worst thing that happens to you.  More likely you’re going to earn yourself an ass-kicking from the girl’s male relatives.  As you deserve.

But wouldn’t it have been nice if the FAZ‘s reporter had dug into the study and answered some of the above questions for us?  Or at least given us a link to where the study’s available?

Nice try, guys; try harder next time.

Oh Sure; Blame it on the Cows

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I remember years ago first reading about “greenhouse gases,” specifically the emissions from cows.  “Farting cows” was the great joke of the day, for a while.  Little did we know that we were seeing the genesis of a religious cult.

Well, the Max Planck Institut für Chemie in Mainz has released a study, authored by scientists from Germany, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S., analyzing worldwide premature deaths from air pollution in the form of ozone and particulates (I assume this is to distinguish mortality that results from actual poisons emitted into the atmosphere, in the fashion of Bhopal, for example; the synopsis at the institute’s website describes the subject of their inquiry as the “most important” airborne contaminants, however).  I ran across a write-up in the FAZ.  Here’s an English-language version of the study, published in Nature.

The authors not only calculate how many premature deaths are attributable to air pollution worldwide, but also break it down by region, country, and origin.  The long and short is that they figure 3.3 million premature deaths annually from particulate air pollution, 1.4 million of them in China and a further 65,000 in India, those two being the worst-affected.  Asia as a whole accounts for 75% of the total premature deaths.  In the EU as a whole it’s 180,000 (no figures for the U.S. are given).  The figure is 35,000 in Germany, which the authors point out is roughly ten times the total annual traffic fatalities.

The dominant proximate causes of death are stroke and heart attack, accounting for just under 75% of the total, with most of the remainder divided between bronchial diseases and lung cancer.  No surprises there.

Where the surprise comes in is when the authors analyze where the pollution is coming from.  Industry?  Nope.  Motor vehicles?  Nope.  Power generation?  Nope.  Not power generation?  Not even in China?  Not China, which is commissioning brand-new coal-fired power plants at the rate of multiple facilities per month?  None of those is the worst sinner, it seems.  The single greatest source of pollution is “household energy use such as heating and cooking,” accounting for fully one-third of the premature deaths, followed by agriculture, racking up a quarter of worldwide deaths (although in some countries — Russia, the Ukraine, and Germany — it’s near 40% of the total).  Motor vehicles in contrast only account for 5% of all such deaths each year.  In fact, industry, power generation, “biomass” burning (not sure what is included in that), and motor vehicles all lumped together only account for a third of the annual harvest.  Comparison:  Natural sources, such as dust storms in North Africa and the Middle East, account for a quarter of the total premature deaths.

The household energy use includes diesel generators (Gentle Reader must recall that large portions of the world are not served by the TVA, ConEdison, Duke Power, or NWE; ergo, if you want your perishables not to rot and the lights to come on, you have your own generator), heating, and cooking fires.  In Asia especially hundreds of millions of people still heat and cook over wood or coal fires.  Come to think of it, when I was a child I’d say a sizeable minority of people in my home county heated at least partly with wood; I know we did.

So over a half of all premature deaths attributable to air pollution from any source can be laid against people raising the morning bacon or lunch-time hamburger, or fertilizing their wheat or rice fields or paddies, and then cooking/baking it in a heated room.

A couple of things to bear in mind when contemplating this study:

First it’s a study on mortality, which is pretty easy to measure, and not morbidity, which is much harder to get your hands around.  Air pollution that just makes you feel wretched without actually killing you is still air pollution.  And what is the correct point at which “feeling wretched” should be counted as morbidity?  A day when you’re unable to function at whatever occupation you have?  What if you’re already unemployed for whatever reason (age, illness, or physical handicap)?  That shouldn’t make a difference, should it?  The same considerations would apply to a standard like “can’t function at normal capacities”; what is “normal capacities” for someone who’s 85 and retired?  And how do you measure “normal” or “capacities” for that matter?  And since morbidity can be very transient (think: there were plenty of days in Victorian London when the air was just fine to breathe . . . and then there were the “London particulars” which could and did kill hundreds at a pop), at what level of frequency do you count a person as being adversely affected by particulate/ozone pollution?  All of which is to say that this study, while about as useful as you can get the data, still under-measures the true scope of the problem.

Second, I did not see mention of how many total “premature” deaths there are from all causes, worldwide.  Bear in mind this could include infectious disease, motor vehicle accident, war, famine, or any number of things.  In fact, you could make the argument that anything other than infirmities of age or non-infectious disease should count as a “premature” death.  On the other hand, that definition may so water down the concept as to render it not really useful in analyzing what’s going on in the world and what should be do about it.  But in the absence of knowing how many total “premature” deaths occur each year, we’re deprived of a handy yardstick to measure how serious a problem is 3.3 million premature deaths from particulate/ozone air pollution.

Now for some perspective.  The worldwide “crude death rate,” or the number of deaths per 1,000 population, estimated as of mid-year, is most recently estimated at 7.98.  [N.b.  That figure comes from the CIA’s The World Factbook.  They also have country-by-country figures; those range from a high of 17.49 for South Africa to a low of 1.53 for Qatar.  The U.S. figure is 8.15, so we’re still above the global rate . . . as is Switzerland, with 8.10.  Learn a little something new every day, don’t we?]  Applied against the July, 2015 estimated gross world population of 7,256,490,011, that produces total deaths of 57,906,790.  The 3.3 million premature deaths from particulate/ozone air pollution account for 5.7% of the total, and the 2,475,000 that are from causes other than natural account for 4.27% of the total.  Phrased the other way around, over 95% of all deaths worldwide do not occur sooner than actuarially predicted as a result of anthropogenic air-pollution causes.

More to the point, if only 33.33% — 1,099,989 — of all premature deaths from particulate/ozone air pollution result from the combined effects of power generation, motor vehicle traffic, and industrial activity, then those sources account for a whacking 1.9% of gross human mortality.  Against that toll must be balanced in any intellectually and morally honest calculus the life-prolonging, life-improving effects of industrial activity, inexpensive transportation of humans and the products of their hands, and cheap energy.

Not to dismiss air pollution, even from farting cows, as a significant issue to the mitigation of which humanity ought to devote some of its attention and resources, but when a problem accounts for that small a proportion of total human mortality — when over 98% of deaths do not result from those causes — it does suggest that perhaps anthropogenic air pollution does not merit upending free societies and destroying significant paths of human liberty in order to mitigate its effects.

Then again, maybe I’m missing something.

Birds of a Feather

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The British Labor Party has just elected a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn.  He is, to put it mildly, not a mainstream politician.  A self-avowed socialist, he’s about as far-left as you can be in Britain and still find a constituency loony enough to send you to Westminster.  He’s so far to the left that even The Economist isn’t having him.  It describes him as “a politician who would exist, as he has in Westminster for the past decades, as a hard-line oddball on the fringes of any Western political arena,” and is so impolite as to ask, “Will Mr Corbyn, a man with links to unsavoury governments and international groups (he calls Hamas “friends”, presented a programme for Iran’s state television and recommends Russia Today, Vladimir Putin’s international propaganda network) be made privy to sensitive information about national security, as was his predecessor as leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband?”

What is truly alarming is that Corbyn won with 59% of the votes, on the first ballot.

Well, now ol’ Jeremy has done gone and farted in chapel, loudly.  At a memorial service for the RAF fighter pilots who quite literally saved Britain in 1940 from the Luftwaffe air superiority which would have enabled Hitler to move forward with Operation Sea Lion — the invasion of Britain — Jeremy Corbyn stood there, with loosened necktie and visibly unbuttoned collar, silent, while the rest of everyone present sang “God Save the Queen.”  Here’s the picture at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s report on the fiasco.  He had announced his intention to do so, what he called “respectful silence,” ahead of time.  He is, you see, an anti-monarchist (yeah . . . that’ll win your party elections in England), and didn’t want to taint himself by singing what is, after all, the lawfully established national anthem.

Here’s a bit of news, Jeremy.  This memorial wasn’t about you and your doctrinal purity.  It was about a group of terrifyingly young men, outnumbered and out-gunned, who were thrown into the scales in a last-ditch effort to keep some flicker of liberty alive in Europe.  They were all there was left, their governments — in thrall to pacifists like you, Jeremy — having ignored and in fact suppressed and lied about the activities of the Nazis for years.  The army was naked of arms; those had been left on the beach at Dunkirk.  The navy was ill-equipped for anti-air warfare and had to be kept intact to attack the invasion fleet if the air battle failed.  Bomber Command was without the means of attacking the Luftwaffe’s bases in France and the Low Countries.  Fighter Command was all there was left in the ranch.  You, Jeremy, are among the “so many” who owed “so much” to “so few.”

It shouldn’t surprise anyone, really, that Corbyn shows such contempt for the men who fought and died so that people like Corbyn can moon around Westminster, instead of pacing the yard at Dachau.  It’s what leftists do; it’s who they are.  With respect, The Economist is dead wrong about one thing:  So far from being “on the fringe” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Corbyn isn’t so much one inch to the left of the current U.S. president.  In fact, I’m wondering when he will get his first invitation to the White House, and am eager to see the pomp and honors with which he is received and embraced, in contrast to, say, Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel.

Corbyn and Dear Leader should get along famously.  Back in 2007 a then-unknown senator from Illinois stood and pointedly folded his hands below his waist while the national anthem was sung.  Our party operatives with bylines national mainstream media quickly buried the incident.  Anyone want to bet whether a Republican candidate would have got a free pass out of that?

I would express the pious hope that, having chosen someone so obviously inappropriate to lead them, Labor has consigned itself to electoral irrelevance for the time being.  But then, having just watched the U.S. Congress approve a plan to permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons for the avowed purpose of exterminating our one ally in that entire Godforsaken corner of the globe, I cannot be so confident.

When Reporters go to the Zoo

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And write about it, this is about what you’d get.  A profile article in The Washington Post about the family that Dylann Roof crashed with during the weeks immediately preceding his murderous rampage in Charleston.

The home’s occupants are, in no particular order, a twice-abandoned mother who’s working her country ass off at the local Waffle House, her three useless-as-tits-on-a-boar-hog sons, Justin, Joey, and Jacob (how cute! matching names), the slatternly girlfriend of one of them (does it matter which?), and a motley assortment of people who seem to be “staying there,” as the lower orders around here say, for different reasons and periods.

“Home” is a beat-up ol’ single-wide out in the sticks in up-country South Carolina.  It houses Mom, the three boys, the girlfriend (for the time being), and whatever dead-beat loser buddy of whichever of the three brothers feels like imposing himself on whatever the mother can earn down at the Waffle House, together with such cash-under-the-counter scrapings as come in whenever one of the boys feels like getting far enough off his ass to scratch his own fleas.  There is a dog, Daisy, whom the reporter identifies as a “pit bull puppy,” but whom the picture with the article plainly shows to be a beagle or some other hound breed.  [If that’s the standard of the WaPo‘s fact checking you might want to take at least some of the rest of the article with a grain of salt.]

They didn’t always live like this.  At one point they lived in a subdivision, in a clean house, with clean clothes, and predictable patterns to their lives.  Then the mother’s (second) husband just up and walked out.  She lost her job as a medical technician (the article doesn’t say why; it could have been any number of reasons — the medical industry chews people up and spits them out like seeds), then lost the house to foreclosure.  They moved to the trailer.

Among their neighbors back during “normal” was a kid named Dylann Roof.  Another was some kid named Shane who would “stay for weeks” in the family’s house, and later in their trailer “even though he had his own trailer by then.”  He used to get drunk and talk about doing crazy self-destructive things, like drinking rat poison.  Everyone thought he was just stupid drunk and running his mouth.  One evening he swallowed a shotgun; one of the Meek boys stole his cowboy boots from his still-blood-spattered home “as a memento.”  During his pre-homicidal visitation, Roof would get good ‘n’ drunk and talk about doing “something crazy,” and wave around his new .45 ACP (in a really interesting data point, he’d also get good ‘n’ drunk and go sit in his car to listen to . . . opera; the article doesn’t vouchsafe us which composer(s)).  At one point one of the brothers took Roof’s gun away from him and hid it.  Not because they thought he might go and calmly murder nine people in a church, but because they thought he might swallow the gun.  Like their buddy Shane had in fact done.  They gave Roof his gun back.

The article asks, not so subtly, why this family didn’t take Roof’s announcements seriously and call the cops.  I have news for the reporter:  No one takes anything about people in that world seriously.  Not even they do.  When they tell each other they love someone, it’s generally neither meant nor received in earnest; when they announce an intention to turn the page and get themselves straightened out, everyone who hears the statement knows it won’t happen.  When one of them finds Jesus, everyone mentally calculates the date when he’ll backslide and end up with another drunk-and-disorderly on an ever-lengthening rap sheet.  When one of them expresses an ambition, it’s accepted that he’ll never stir from the couch to realize it.  When one of them is drunker than Cooter Brown and allows he’s not going to take that shit from the boss/neighbor/teacher/wife/husband/police or whatever other source of momentary friction has intruded into his world, no one believes for a moment that his statement will turn out to bear any correlation with his actions.

Among the cameos put in by the rotating cast of drifters, scroungers, and layabouts is a heavily-tattooed black kid identified as Christon, who professes even yet to “love” Roof as a friend.  The value of Christon’s love for anyone can be measured by his later quotation, “I have no sympathy for people. Nobody has any sympathy for me. I care for me and me only.”  Spare me your love, Christon old man.

The only person even slightly sympathetic in the whole show is Mom.  She is shown cleaning, “constantly cleaning. She wipes the kitchen counters. She straightens the blinds. She folds up the sofa where Lindsey and Joey sleep, folds the sheet and zebra blanket, and drops them in the corner where Roof often lounged, as Jacob does now.”  She’s shown at work, exhausted and — one suspects — shell-shocked that her existence, once so . . . so . . . normal, has degenerated to the point that now they themselves are the target of an investigation by the feds in connection with this punk Roof’s crimes.  [I’d like to know just what the hell law it’s believed these people broke.  Not listening to a drunk-ass dead-beat is not a crime; it’s called ordinary common sense.]

No details are given on what lead to both marriages to break up in similar fashion, with the husband leaving.  I can imagine the second husband getting good and sick of having some neighbor kid invading his home for weeks on end, drunk, high, or both, to whoop it up with the wife’s layabout children by another man.  Or maybe he was cool with it.  Who knows.

The only knock on Mom which immediately appears from the article is her abysmally poor judgment.  Step One on her Back to Normal project needs to be to kick out everyone but the 15 year-old, change the locks, and tell little junior if he fucks up one more time, even just a little, it’s off to juvie for him and she’ll never have anything more to do with him.  The older two need to go sleep on a park bench or wherever it is until they realize that being able-bodied males and mooching off their mother who’s killing herself by inches at the Waffle House is the kind of public disgrace that no one ought to be able to endure and still hold his head up and call himself a man.  I’m sure Mom loves her boys; she’s their mother.  But hell and blast, lady, your children have got themselves and you on a path to where one or more of you is going to come to a violent end.  Stop it.  Now.  You’ve got to be the adult in this picture.

I ran across the article on a friend’s Facebook page.  His comment:  “I read this story, riveted, from front to back, in the paper this morning and decided it’s the most depressing thing I’ve read in months. These people have a miserable life, and it’s hard to imagine what could be done to help. It really does seem hopeless. And learning that people from this milieu are resorting to random violence should not come as any surprise.”

Oh dear.  Where to start with this sort of non-comprehension?  For starts, the United States is full of families who live in beat-up old single-wides out in the woods.  They’re either momentarily down on their luck or fate has dealt them a bad hand which they’ve played poorly.  But as the mother demonstrates, you don’t have to live like that.  Or as P. J. O’Rourke quotes his dead-broke Irish mother during the depths of the Great Depression, “No one is too poor to clean up his front yard.”  Living like this family does is an active choice, for which they deserve censure, not pity.  And guess what else?  The percentage of people who live like this and who “resort to random violence” is almost incalculably small.  True enough, many of them live like that precisely because they are or have been criminally violent in their pasts, but it’s generally exactly the kind of violence that’s always existed in society:  Violence among one’s own circle of acquaintance.  I can’t recall the precise number just now, but the overwhelming proportion of victims of violence personally know their assailant.  Not “random” at all, in other words.  They’re not “resorting” to it from misery or hopelessness; they’re violent because that’s who and what they are.  It’s how the world works that they live in, a world they are fully participatory in making.

All of which is to say that I know way too many people who either right now live like that, or grew up living in circumstance in comparison to which this family is on Easy Street, and who are decent, law-abiding, hard-working, community-supporting people.  In fact, not a few of them are the most hard-working and financially (for their circumstances) generous supporters of operations like the humane society, the food bank, the help center, and their respective churches.  Need a pull out of a mud-choked ditch?  They’ll be there, with their tow strap or chain and a 25 year-old pick-up truck that has its license plate in the rear window because there isn’t a bumper on it.  Church has a leaky roof?  They’ll be up there with a hammer or holding the ladder.  Dog gets dumped out on a back-country dirt road?  It’ll come home with them.  They are really ordinary folks whom you’d be happy to pass the time of day with, if you found them on a park bench beside you.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Mom in this story was one of those people.  But Jesus Christ and General Jackson! lady.  Get your worthless-ass sons out of your house.  You can’t help them until you get your own life back on track, and that’s not going to happen as long as you’re the pack animal for these thugs.

I do agree with my friend’s characterization of this story as depressing. It is every bit that.  It’s depressing because you know you cannot help these people.  Even Mom, who knows how not to live like this, has more or less chosen to do so, by permitting her useless children to create that world around her.  You cannot stop a person bent on self-destruction.

What’s striking about the newspaper article is the reporter’s tone.  It’s as if he’s gone to the St. Louis Zoo and is reporting from the primate house.  “Zerlinda, the matriarch of the band, plucks lice from the fur of Josephus, the dominant silver-back.  He occasionally gives her a smack on the head, sending her reeling.  She sulks, never for more than a few moments, then tenderly returns to her grooming.  Pluck.  Smack.  Pluck.  Every so often they will stare through the glass at us.  What in the world might be crossing their ape minds?”

The dog dies at the end of the story.

Perhaps not the End of Days

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But certainly more than slightly reminiscent of the latter days of the Roman Empire.

The other day I went to a first-run movie, a thing I seldom do.  In fact, I’ll go farther: a thing I pretty much studiously avoid doing.  But my father, who adores movie popcorn and has few other pleasures left in life other than his dog, likes to go and I go with him.  He likes to get the exact middle seats of the very top row, and grouses if there are more than four other people in the theater.  Same thing with restaurants, by the way.  Part of me delights in the magisterial disregard of the basic logic of the thing:  If it’s worth seeing, or worth eating there, people are going to go.  If you want it to yourself you more or less have to confine yourself to places and things that are not desired.  Part of me gets very fatigued with the expression “jammed up” to refer to any crowd in excess of ten.

Be all that as it may, we went to see Spy, a fairly harmless and mindless comedy vehicle for the lead actress, Melissa McCarthy (who came close to stealing the show in Bridesmaids).  If F-bombs tossed about like confetti upset you, it’s probably not a movie for you.  It certainly isn’t for younger children.

Enough of the feature.  Getting there as early as we did — and do, considering my father’s morbid fear of not getting the Right Seats — we got to see the trailers.  Among them was a trailer for what seems to be a television show, which these days is, as I understand, equivalent to saying “reality” television show.

I have very few accomplishments in life I can point to.  Among them is that I’ve never seen an installment of Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, or Jersey Shore, or Swamp People, or Real Housewives of East Jesus, Arkansas, or even much of Duck Dynasty.  All the Survivors and their interminable spin-offs have also left me serene in my pop-culture ignorance.  I now have another to add to the list.

Gentle Reader, we are about to witness a show identifying itself as Little Women: LA.  This show is about midget and dwarf women, in Los Angeles.  When one is an abnormally small female in Los Angeles, apparently the thing to do is behave trashy.  People will film you, and then (shudder) a country full of people will watch you behaving trashy.

Consider how many ideas for television shows get pitched every day in Hollywood.  Consider how many people in how many roles and with how much money and influence must all sign off on the concept, the financing, the production details and budget, the marketing strategy, and on and on and on.  Consider how few of the ideas pitched ever see so much as a minute of production.  Consider how many of the ones that actually do get so far as having a pilot filmed get canned before ever being shown.  What I’m getting at is that the tripe that makes it onto your television screen on a daily basis, Gentle Reader, is the surviving remnant of not just a mountain, but an entire mountain range of Stuff That Didn’t Make the Cut.

All of which is to say that, while we might not know their names (I’d hope they’d have enough self-respect to give false ones in the credits: “Executive Producer:  Vyacheslav Molotov; Casting Director:  Richard M. “Bingo” Little.  Editing:  Boris Godunov.  And so forth.), we know by the tracks they are about to leave across the smoldering remains of American pop culture that they do exist.  They are all the people who thought this was a Good Idea.  Stop and ponder, Gentle Reader what must have been the ones they thought too silly, too degenerate, too uninteresting to the breadth of the American television consuming public.

Many years ago, while I was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, the state legislature felt called upon to outlaw a sport, self-explanatorily identified as “dwarf tossing.”  I understand it involved, other than the physical actions which gave it its name, a great deal of beer.  I assume the dwarves were willing participants (never so familiarized myself with it as to know how they were compensated).  Can’t say that I ever saw an evening of dwarf tossing advertised on any venue I drove past (maybe I just wasn’t driving through the right parts of town in the right parts of the state), but I’m not sure how the Scourge of Dwarf Tossing came to be viewed as such a crisis.  Again, this sounds like the sort of function where one gives a false name at the door, just in case there’s a raid and your picture appears on the front page of the local paper.  Caption:  Leon Trotsky, 43, of Spartanburg, is arrested after police raid dwarf tossing den.

Iran is getting the Bomb, the U.S. Supreme Court is re-writing statutes for the express purpose of saving them from the drafters in Congress, Greece has wheedled the EU, which jolly well knows better, into handing over another several billion Euros while they pass empty reform measures they have no intention of ever putting into effect . . . and we’re watching Little Women: LA.  I’ve read several books on the end of the Roman Empire, all the way from Gibbon to more recent re-examinations, but a common theme is that those responsible for keeping Rome shiny side up and rubber side down just finally gave up on it.

As I ponder Little Women: LA, I have to ask myself whether we’ve given up on this peculiar experiment in self-government.

The Stars and Bars

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Among the things going in the world while I was buried up to my eyebrows in trials was this bigot fellow sat down with the pastor and several members of the congregation at one of the most historically significant black churches in the United States, engaged in “bible study” with them for over an hour, and then shot nine of them dead, leaving two surviving for the express purpose of telling the world what he did.

This actually was a “hate crime,” if by that term you mean a crime whose underlying motive was animosity towards the victims based on something other than their actions or freely-chosen affiliations.  Like what happens to Jews all over Europe and elsewhere on a daily basis.  Like what happened to the manager of that French factory who got his head sawed off by one of his employees who propounds the Religion of Peace.  Like what happened to the dead and wounded at Fort Hood at the hands of a madman screaming Allahu Akbar! while gunning them down.

While the people of Charleston — a magical city where I was privileged to live for four years, many years ago — both black and white, showed the rest of the country how it’s done, in coming together in their grief, their outrage, and their demonstration of the very Christian virtue of forgiveness, the opportunity to strut and preen was just too tempting for the usual suspects.  Dear Leader of course chimes in on cue with the call to ignore that pesky ol’ Second Amendment, which he lards up with a slap at America and Americans.  “‘This kind of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,’ the president said. ‘Wedon’t have all the facts but we do know that once again innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.'”  Of course, this month Europe is observing the 20th anniversary of the massacres at Srebrenica.  We know Dear Leader can’t count (“all 57 states,” anyone?), but just to make it simple, this scum bag in Charleston gunned down nine people because of the color of their skin.  In Srebrenica they gunned down 8,000 men and boys because of how they worshipped.  Or how about the Christians paraded on the beach and then beheaded?  Remind me again how many that was?  Bit more than nine, as I recall.  And wasn’t it just recently that a satire magazine’s office in Paris got to experience some of that ol’ “workplace violence” courtesy of the Religion of Peace?  Twelve dead, weren’t there?

But back to the title of this post.  In the weeks since the Charleston shooting everyone and his cousin has been falling all over himself to expunge all traces of the Confederate flag from public spaces and even from commerce.  Apple, for example, has discontinued a video game app of Civil War combat . . . because the Confederate flag is depicted in it.  You don’t say?  Have they discontinued all the World War II games because you can see the insignia of Nazi Germany in them?  In South Carolina the (Republican-dominated) legislature voted massively to remove the flag from the state house, where (Democrat) governor Fritz Hollings put it in 1962.  Think about that:  The cradle of secession somehow managed to soldier along for nearly a full century without waving that flag.  Amazon and Wal-Mart do not sell merchandise depicting the Confederate flag any more. Around here where I live I can’t say that I’ve noticed either greater or lesser display of it (although I’d be guilty of over-statement to say that I’ve really been looking).

Certainly opinion in general on the flag and its symbolism doesn’t seem to have shifted much.  Fifteen years ago 59% of people surveyed (I think it was a Gallup poll, but don’t hold me to that) allowed that they did not perceive it as being principally a symbol of hatred.  In the aftermath of the Charleston shooting that’s down all the way . . . to 57%.  I suppose you can read that either of two ways: (i) Proof positive that America is an inherently racist country which isn’t willing even to give up the visible and historically undeniable symbolism of racial oppression and exploitation, or (ii) All this hand-wringing and posturing (see: Apple) is vastly over-blowing a non-issue.

I confess to ambivalent feelings about that flag.  As the reader of this blog will have observed, I’m not terribly apologetic about the South or being from the South.  I kinda like it here (as do the tens of thousands of my black fellow citizens who are moving here from the O! so Tolerant North).  So far as I know none of my Southern ancestors owned any slaves, and among my Yankee ancestors is at least one veteran of the Army of the Tennessee (excellent history of that amazing army here (I think, in fact, that my ancestor’s name even appears in it, but that’s not been confirmed); Victor Davis Hanson treats of the army’s march through Georgia in a wonderful book that — alas! — because it was borrowed, I had to return).

Did my Southern ancestors profit from the existence of chattel slavery in their society?  Well, possibly so, although I’d like to see someone try reliably to measure how much better off a small, non-slave-owning farmer in this part of the South really was because of slavery as such.  I will point this much out:  It wasn’t the destruction of slavery that wiped out such large swathes of Southerners, but the physical destruction of the war.  Before the war they’d been more or less scraping by; after the war the people whose homes and farms weren’t burnt to the ground were still more or less scraping by, and the ones whose homes and farms had gone up in smoke to make Sherman’s neck-ties were wiped out.  If slavery as such was that much the foundation of prosperity for any significant portion of the population, then you’d expect to see vastly more disruption just from abolition.

In point of fact at home I actually have a full-size, flyable (it’s of real bunting, with brass grommets) Stars and Bars.  Haven’t laid eyes on it since about 1991; it’s packed up in a box somewhere.  I have a print of a Civil War painting depicting fraternization between the lines (a genuinely common occurrence); back in the day I folded the flag carefully so a single star showed in the center, then draped it across the top of the picture frame.  So sue me.  So far as I know that flag has never actually flown or been displayed so as to be visible from outside the room where that picture was hanging.

Is it a symbol of hatred and oppression?  It sure is for some people, like that shit-bird in Charleston.  It sure is for American blacks (in contrast to that 57% figure cited above, something like 85%+ of blacks perceive it to be inherently a racist symbol), and understandably so.  I’m equally sure that for quite a number of people it symbolizes something else entirely.  That’s the thing about symbols:  The viewer reads into it what he chooses.  But mostly I’m sure that for millions of people the Stars and Bars is a whacking great pile of Get Over It Already.  Like me.  It is neither inherently racist nor inherently innocuous.

Should that flag be flown over public buildings?  I don’t think that’s appropriate, even if only for the fact that for so many of my fellow citizens it in fact does, and on legitimate basis, speak to them of racial hatred, oppression, and the entire sad story of what has happened through the years to the descendants of the Africans brought here in chains (although, irony alert! those descendants are pretty uniformly vastly better off in every material sense than the descendants of those Africans who captured their forebears and sold them into slavery).  As a government we are supposedly all for one and one for all; you shouldn’t knowingly and gratuitously offend 13% of your population.

On the other hand should all these private actors get all hyperventilated about rushing to expunge all traces of the flag?  Well, that’s their privilege, of course.  But it savors of more than just a tiny bit of moral posturing.  They were perfectly willing to deposit all those sales receipts for all those years, and somehow their black customers and their white customers always seemed to survive the trip up and down the aisles.  They’re perfectly willing to flog communist chic apparel (Che Guevara very intentionally had his office overlooking the execution yard so he would watch his victims being slaughtered day by day . . . his picture is very much still for sale on Amazon).  I’d be wiling to bet not a single World War II video game is going to be taken down at the Apple (or Google) store, just because there happens to be a swastika waving somewhere in the background.

I forget who it was who first pointed this out, or where I first ran across the observation, but it’s true, I think:  Much of political correctness is about permitting one group of white people to feel morally superior over other white people, and to parade that superiority as conspicuously as they can.

Seems to me that’s what’s going on here.

I’m not getting rid of my Confederate flag, and it can jolly well stay in that box in the attic.