Category Archives: Current Events

The Long Tail Lashes Again

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In statistics there is an observable distribution phenomenon known as the “long tail.”  I’ve seen different definitions of it as an economic proposition, and its implications for business and marketing have been the subject of a book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (note: this link violates one of my informal rules on this humble blog, viz. I do not link to books I have not read).  But very briefly stated, the “long tail” phenomenon as a matter of economics is the pattern whereby the total market (measured by income, or turnover, or whatever other measure of “success” you choose) is concentrated among a very small number of the population at the top, while by far the greatest portion of the population exists at much, much lower levels of whatever you’re measuring.  It’s called a “long tail” because that’s what it looks like if you graph it out.

The intriguing aspect of the long tail is that it is observable across nearly every avenue of economic activity you can name.  It’s highly visible in professional sports, where for every Peyton Manning or Tom Brady you’ll have dozens upon dozens of third-string tackles who maybe see a play or two a game and whose careers are over in three to five years, their knees shot and their brains addled from all the hits.  And those sods will never make a tenth annually what the “franchise players” make.  Factor in the endorsement income that a Peyton Manning makes and compare that to Sidney Schmo whose job in life is to be more or less a live blocking dummy for the starting offensive line, and ol’ Sid will not make in his life what Peyton makes in a year.

Or take a look at income distribution among lawyers.  Over at MarginalRevolution there are actually two graphs, one showing the 2010 distribution and the other showing the 1991 distribution.  Even in 1991 there was an observable tail, but by 2010 you had a tiny number with massive income, nearly no one in the middle, and then a huge gob way down at the bottom of the scale.  This specific pattern is not new at all.  When Daniel Webster announced an intention to quit teaching school and become a lawyer, he was warned off because the field was too crowded (too crowded?  back in the early 1800s?  seriously?) and he’d never make any money.  Webster’s reply has remained famous:  “There is always room at the top.”  Which is true enough, I suppose.

And now, from Britain, we discover than even writing is not exempt from the long tail phenomenon.  In Britain, according to a recently-released study, the top 5% of authors (measured by income) scooped up 42.3% of all income earned by all authors.  The median income — the amount separating the top 50% from the bottom 50% — was £10,432, which is apparently below minimum wage for Britain.  That bottom 50%, by the way, earned a whacking total of 7% of all the income earned.  Put differently, the top 5% of earners raked in right at six times the amount the bottom half did.  The commenters to the report of the study seem to break into two groups: (i) those who decry someone like J. K. Rowling making all that money while “artists” starve in their holes, and (ii) those who tell the first group to shut up and write something that someone wants to read.

I can see genuine merit in both viewpoints.  Much of what gets published these days really is tripe and nothing more, made to be “consumed” and tossed out to the next church fund-raiser.  It is justly galling to know oneself to be a finer craftsman than those one sees enjoying a degree of success one strongly suspects — with reason — one will never enjoy oneself.  On the other hand I really have no patience for the crowd that fancies itself “transgressive” or “engaged” or just simply cranks out thinly-veiled identity “narrative” crap, thinks itself artistic, and damns the world if we don’t agree.  If you really think that being a “creative” artist means your job is forever to épater la bourgeoisie, don’t be surprised when la bourgeoisie shows no interest at all in plonking down its hard-earned for your output.  If you want to write collections of short stories about women behaving poorly to the men in their lives and acting proud of it (this one conforms to my rule; I actually read this book many years ago . . . it was . . . well, it was precisely what you would have expected from its title), then I’ll remind you:  You just kissed off 49% of the human population as potential readers of your book.  And so forth.  Even good books, fascinating books — by which I mean to say the sort of books I link to in the course of this li’l ol’ blog — just generally don’t sell all that many copies, and the authors correspondingly tend to have what we can call “day jobs,” unless and until they hit that magic level where the writing fuels itself.

Writing — and the other creative/performing arts as well — are by no means the only self-congratulatory occupation to experience the ugly side of the long tail.  At one end, we have a tiny, tiny group of professors like Paul Krugman, who euchred the City University of New York into paying him well into six figures for doing not much at all other than pour forth his bile about conservatives in general or Republicans in particular.  And at the other end you have thousands upon thousands of part-time “adjunct” faculty who will never have tenure, will never have any employment benefits, will never have any hope of teaching a truly interesting course, or being offered a job more permanent than next year’s contract renewal.  People like Krugman make a handsome living decrying “income inequality.”

The long tail pattern holds true even in larger contexts.  Consider, if you will, how much of the aggregate wealth of the world is engrossed by the populations of the West, versus how much of the world’s population that works out to be.  Here’s a map dividing, just for illustrative purposes, the world into seven separate areas, in each of which are contained one billion people.  Notice that both American continents and Australia only make one billion, and to get the Europeans (inclusive of European Russia) up to the one billion mark you have to lump them in with all of the Middle East.  When you consider that “the West” is usually a short-hand reference to Western Europe, North America, and Australia, and then look at that linked map, you realize that “the West” accounts for maybe one-seventh — 14.3% — of the world’s entire population.  I’d have to say, just guessing, that we 14.3% of the population probably enjoy — create, in fact — something along the lines of 70% of the world’s aggregate wealth.  Now look at where that wealth is concentrated within those Western societies, and you see what the long tail looks like with spikes on it.

All of which gives, or should give, us pause when we hear politicians undertaking somehow to reverse a nearly universally observable statistical pattern.  Sure you may do something about “income inequality,” and you may also invent an anti-gravity belt.  You’ll just have to pardon me if I don’t buy a lot of shares on margin with you.

From the Dept. of Well, Isn’t This What You Wanted?

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A couple of weeks ago, a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina pulled over a car for having a broken tail light.

The police car’s on-board camera shows the officer go to the driver’s window and retrieve the driver’s license.  While the officer is running the license and tags, the driver panics, gets out, and runs.  Chase ensues, followed by scuffle.  Driver then hoofs it again and the police officer squeezes off eight rounds at an unarmed fleeing man.  At least one round strikes the driver’s heart and he falls dead.

Why did the driver run in the first place?  We can guess at why he might have run the second, fatal time.  He’d just had a physical altercation with a police officer.  But why the first time?  The car wasn’t stolen.  He wasn’t driving without a valid license.  He wasn’t wanted for any sort of drug- or violence-related crime.  He was a gainfully employed father of four.  Why did he run?  Obviously we can’t ask him now.

What we do know is that there were outstanding warrants for his arrest.  For unpaid child support.

I have not seen the victim’s court files, of course, and so I cannot tell you whether he had been held in civil contempt of court for failure to pay, or in criminal contempt, or both.  I don’t practice domestic law in any event, and so I have no way of telling what sort of experience he had awaiting him if he had been successfully nabbed instead of shot down like an animal.

Cue the squawks about “debtor’s prison.”

By this is meant the imprisonment of people for failure to pay money.  Of course there’s a verbal sleight-of-hand going on when you hear the left-extremists use the expression.  Genuine debtors’ prisons were prisons where you were locked up for failure to pay your lawful debts . . . to private creditors.  With one exception, on which more later, what are now being referred to as “debtors’ prisons” by the left-extremists at shops like the Puffington Host are the mechanisms for the incarceration of people who have not paid the government money.  Usually — with that one exception — what we’re talking about are criminal fines, fees, and costs, the responsibility for which is imposed as a matter of law in connection with conviction of a criminal offense or a plea arrangement in which the inducement is avoiding either a conviction on one’s record or incarceration for a conviction.  In other words, these are not people who have to go borrow some money from a title-pawn outfit to pay for the week’s groceries, discover they can’t pay, and end up in jail on a revolving basis.  These are people who have been charged with a crime and, in order to avoid the risk of even longer incarceration they agree to some sort of arrangement, maybe but not necessarily involving a guilty plea, but nearly always involving some kind of probation, for a period of time.  And they promise to pay court costs, any criminal fines, as well as the fees and expenses of the probation process (not infrequently contracted to private service providers).

Let’s leave apart the question whether the state should be contracting any portion of what is, after all, inherently a function of sovereignty — the imposition of criminal penalties.  Let’s ignore for the sake of argument whether the crimes with which these people are charged even ought to be crimes in the first place.  In point of fact until the relevant statutes are repealed they are crimes, lawfully proscribed behavior as determined by elected representatives of the people.  The people caught in the toils of the system are in fact people whose behavior has been sufficiently objectionable as to come into contact with the criminal justice system.  [Aside:  We are also ignoring for the sake of argument the phenomenon of grotesque over-charging, so tellingly portrayed in Instapundit’s own “Ham Sandwich Nation,” a practice that reliably produces guilty or similar pleas by people who in fact may well be not guilty of the crime to which they plea — or even any crime at all — but who dare not risk the decade or more in hard time if they go to trial on all the litany of offenses they’ve been charged with.]

I will admit that it is perfectly within reason to debate the idea of whether how we finance our criminal justice system is a good idea or a bad idea.  Reasonable people can in good faith disagree on whether this fines-costs-fees hamster wheel that in practice seems to feed on itself, as criminal defendants/convicts can’t pay the freight, thereby getting re-arrested, with more costs, more fines, more fees, and so forth, is a net benefit to society or not.  I will also join ranks with those who execrate places like Ferguson, Missouri, where they in exactly so many words decided to use their municipal criminal court to pay for their city, instead of taxes.

But what about that exception?

Well, yes.  That exception is unpaid child support.  The reason why the victim in South Carolina had warrants for his arrest.  Those debts are in fact owed to a private party — usually the mother.  Of course, if the mother is receiving government benefits, then federal law requires the state to seek to recover those benefits from all persons who are liable for the support of the child for whom the benefits are being paid.  As a taxpayer I don’t have any problem with this at all.  Why should some useless slug force me to pay for his baby-momma while he hangs around on the street corner drinking out of a paper bag or shooting dice in a government-provided apartment’s kitchen?

Does Gentle Reader remember one of the most popular hand-writing causes of the 1980s and 1990s — the Deadbeat Dad?  Almost weekly if not more often we got to hear horror stories about women struggling to raise children whom the fathers simply refused to support.  The fathers just walked out and point-blank refused to chip in anything, whether or not they had the ability to pay.  And the courts were letting them deadbeat dads get away it!!  I can no longer recall anywhere near the sheer number of articles in the newspaper, in news magazines, on the television which I saw on how awful it was that The Law Wasn’t Making These Fathers Pay.

And you know what?  There was a tremendous amount of truth in those stories and the conclusions we were asked to draw about the system.  The court system was egregiously lax in forcing parents of otherwise indigent children to pay up, and most of those delinquent parents were fathers.  I could spit-ball any number of theories as to why that might have been so, but for whatever reason the System was doing it, the reality was that if you were a mother of a child to whose father you were not married, you had precious few effective remedies if that father told you to go pound sand, he wasn’t paying.

And you know what else?  The legislatures and the bench listened.  Special agencies were set up, or special task forces within existing agencies were set up, the sole mission of which was to pursue deadbeat dads — and all at taxpayer expense, not at the expense of the single mother, by the way — to go after the deadbeats.  Judges got measurably less forgiving.  I still recall one day sitting in court, waiting for my client’s case to be called.  Ahead of us on the docket was a child support matter.  The father was attempting to convince the judge that your honor I Just Can’t Pay This.  The judge looked at him and said, “You don’t have to work but a half a day, and I don’t care whether it’s the first twelve hours or the second twelve hours, but you’re going to support your child.  Do you understand me?”  Another judge around here was widely known at contempt hearings for adjourning a 9:00 a.m. hearing to the 1:00 p.m. docket, and telling the respondent parent, “We’re going to adjourn this hearing until one o’clock.  At one o’clock I want you back in front of me with one of two things:  A check for <however many dollars> or your toothbrush.  Do you understand me?”  And as that same judge was wont to observe, it’s amazing how many people managed to find a money stump between 10:15 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.

So it was the South Carolina legislature’s and bench’s response to what was a very real problem that provided the background for what happened in North Charleston the other day.  Without the aggressive enforcement of child support orders, that shooting victim would not have had arrest warrants outstanding, would likely not have fled from the police or got in a fight with the officer, and would be alive and well today.  On the other hand, he can be viewed as a regrettable casualty, collateral damage, so to speak, in a battle that is much larger than he is.  It is not unreasonable or heartless or cruel to suggest that the damage avoided by that same aggressive enforcement mechanism — the systematic economic neglect and abandonment of children — is of sufficient social importance that, while we must regret this man’s death, and while we must punish vigorously the officer who gunned down an unarmed fleeing man, we still must not allow the tragedy of his death to cloud our judgment of why he needed to have those arrest warrants out.

It is simply an unfortunate truth that most of us are no better than we need to be.  Without the knowledge that non-payment equals jail time, there are just too many fathers out there who will refuse to pitch in to house, clothe, and feed their own children.  If that fear of jail time expresses itself in some non-compliant fathers not in a willingness to pay but rather in decisions to engage in demonstrably foolish behavior, like running from a cop, getting into a fist fight with him, then running again, I humbly suggest that is a price that we as a society should be willing to pay.

[Update 10:35 a.m., 21 Apr 15]:  The New York Times weighs in with an article on the dynamics of effective enforcement of child support orders.  Perhaps unusually for the NYT, the headline actually captures the essence of the process:  “Skip Child Support.  Go to Jail.  Lose Job.  Repeat.”  That about says it.

The article gives some sense of the treadmill aspect of it.  Get behind on your support payments.  Get hauled into court.  If the court determines you have the ability to pay and didn’t, then you go to jail for some period of time.  While you are inside, your employer fires you, so that when you come out you have no income to catch back up on the support obligation, which continued to accrue while you were inside.  And so forth.

I’d like to press, however, on a couple of points brought out in the article.

The initial one is that the North Charleston shooting victim, Walter Scott, lost “the best job [he] ever had” over a failure to pay support, by getting locked up for failure to pay.  That “best job” was paying him $35,000 a year in Charleston, South Carolina in around 2001-02 (to judge by the time line stated in the article).  Listen up, chief:  I was living in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1991, making right around that same $35,000, and you could more than just get by on that income.  I strongly question whether that situation would have changed by 2002.  For that matter, $35,000 is to this day right around the national median household (not per capita) income for a family of four.  So what precisely was Walter Scott doing with his $35,000 per year other than supporting his four children?  I’m going to need some convincing that his stepping onto that treadmill was someone’s fault other than his own.

The second is a bit harsher on Comrade Scott.  Apparently the mother of his first two children (born out of wedlock; the latter pair were born to his wife, from whom he later separated) was on the public tit, and Scott resented it.  Well yes, I perfectly understand that.  But this isn’t a playground argument over who has got more time on the teeter-totter.  This is about an obligation — to support your children to the best of your ability — that exists independently of anyone else’s efforts.  Just like to point that out.

The final point in the article I’d like to weigh in on is this statement:  “But experts said problems could arise when such tactics were used against people who had little money, and the vast majority of unpaid child support is owed by the very poor.  A 2007 Urban Institute study child support debt in nine large states found that 70 percent of the arrears were owed by people who reported less than $10,000 a year in income.”  Here’s a link to the study; the relevant chart is on page 22.  People who “reported”; get it?  Make that “self-reported” and you get closer to the truth of the matter.  That study draws its data from child support numbers matched to national quarterly wage and unemployment insurance data.  As the study itself honestly points out:  “Although obligors may not have reported quarterly wages or unemployment insurance, it does not mean they do not have the ability to pay any child support. Some of these obligors may be employed in areas that are not covered by quarterly wage data, such as those who are self-employed or independent contractors. Others may be working in covered industries, but they are working under the table to avoid paying taxes or child support. Still others may be engaged in illegal activities.”  Working under the table precisely to avoid paying taxes and child support?  Gee whiz, Sherlock, what was your first clue?

I once saw pointed out, many years ago and in a different context, the basic fact that you simply cannot rely on reported income figures to obtain a meaningful picture of any aspect of life in modern America.  Among the more pernicious effects of byzantine tax and employment regulations is a black-market economy that is truly staggering in its scope.  No; if you want to find out how much Group X is making, you have to measure their spending, not their reported income.  Someone who regularly spends $3,000 a month and reports income of $400 a week is lying.  Thus the Urban Institute’s (and the NYT‘s) picture of the child support system unfairly standing on the neck of the down-trodden, locking up men who truly, genuinely cannot pay to support their children, needs to be taken with several heaping tablespoons of salt.

Every lawyer out there who has practiced domestic law for so much as three weeks is familiar with the deadbeat parent who shows up in a recently-purchased, very nicely appointed vehicle, whose iPhone 6 is clipped to his belt, whose Facebook page shows him off doing his hobby (fishing on his bass boat, golfing, at the beach with New Girlfriend, or otherwise doing things that undeniably cost money), whom you’ll see cutting his yard on his zero-turn mower (check out what even a used one of those costs), and so forth.  He’s working for cash, frequently in construction, landscaping, or some other hard-to-pin-down trade.  Oh! but he’s “disabled,” walking into court on a cane . . . right before he goes out to tune up his tree stand for deer season.  Cry me a river.

I suppose it’s easy to tell where I shake out on the sympathy spectrum in respect of Walter Scott and his peers.  He sure as hell didn’t deserve to get killed, and certainly not like he was killed, but he gets very, very points from me about the arrest warrants that appear to have triggered his flight from that police officer.  And by the way, if he exhibited as poor decision-making skills in respect of his child support obligations as he did in running from, fighting with, and then again running from a police officer, just how much of a surprise can it be that he got and remained side-ways with the system?

Things That Must be Repudiated

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Today is April 20.  On this day in 1889 Alois Hitler and his wife had a baby boy.  They named him Adolf.

Yes, it is downright weird to imagine a pudgy little bundle of smiles and drool, playing with mommy’s fingers as she feeds him and tries to get him to eat his vegetables (little Adolf of course grew up to become among history’s more prominent vegetarians).

Allow me to state that I don’t think anyone will ever know, in the sense of understanding at any meaningful level, how Hitler became Hitler (or how another Adolf — Eichmann — became Adolf Eichmann).  I sure as hell don’t think that anyone will ever understand how an entire people could so take leave of its senses as joyfully (and they did it joyfully) to follow the Nazis down the path they did.  I do not think the reasoning human mind is capable of understanding evil of that depth.  I’m not even sure the people who stood by the roadside, throwing up the Nazi salute and screaming themselves hoarse as the big open-top Mercedes crawled past with the brown-haired little man with the odd haircut and funny moustache standing in the back, returning their salutes, could explain it, even if only to themselves, afterward.

Godwin’s Law has become something of an insider’s reference in the internet.  Very briefly summarized, it holds that as the length of discussion of any topic increases, the probability approaches 1.0 that someone will make a comparison to Hitler and/or the Nazis.  As a rule of thumb, this is the point at which further discussion becomes pointless, and in fact marginal intellectual return on investment turns negative.  On the other hand, the historical fact of the Nazi party’s trajectory, and the sinister enigma at its center, in fact do spread a smorgasbord for meaningful moral comparison and reflection.  I mean, generally speaking, if you find yourself proposing a moral or political position which was propounded by the Nazis, you’re very likely doing something wrong.

There are other helpful Just Don’t Go There reference points out there in history.  The other day I got to listen to someone inveighing against abolishing the federal estate tax.  I pointed out to my interlocutor all the flaws, financial, legal, practical, and moral about keeping this idiotic tax in place.  And I finally observed that if your support for keeping an extortionate tax on gratuitous transfers is just to suppress some group of society (in this case, the successful, whether they built their success on their own or not), then you’re proposing to use the tax system to punish individuals and that’s no different from how Medieval Europe treated its Jewish population.  “As a general rule, if you find yourself supporting something that closely aligns with how the medieval Europeans treated the Jews, you’re doing something wrong.”

But the spectacle of perhaps the most over-educated, hyper-cultural, super-literate society on the planet (I once saw a comparison of literacy rates among the major combatants in World War I; the Germans were head and shoulders above everyone else) willingly embracing that system just provides such grotesqueries as to be unsurpassed as a source of admonitory comparison.  I mean, how likely are we here in the U.S. to be able to draw any useful inferences from Mao’s Great Leap Forward at any but the most abstract level?  American society has never looked like mid-20th Century China.  Ever.  Not even when Jamestown was starving to death in the early years.  The vicious, degraded, semi-savage settlements that Charles Woodmason visited, and about which he so scathingly wrote, didn’t resemble that China.  Even the Russia that became the Soviet Union is sufficiently far removed from what Western Civilization has ever been that it’s hard to understand the parallels even when we observe them.

But the Germans under Hitler?  The reason why those comparisons sting is that like it or not the Germans are us.  Something like 40% of the U.S. population claims some sort of German descent.  Our university system is patterned on the Prussian model.  The modern welfare state traces its origins to 1881 when Otto von Bismarck established the first comprehensive social security system.  The outdoors Sunday as a day of healthful recreation, including especially physical recreation, in the open air is a creature of German immigrants; until then the Scotch-Irish and English had decreed that Proper Folk glumly sat around all day, reading from the Bible or being hectored in church.  We herd our tiny tots into kindergarten. We instinctively reverence our professoriate, even when its constituents have long since forfeited any reasonable claim to that deference.  And so forth.

So here I’m going to violate Godwin’s Law.

Modern left-extremist America has joyfully embraced the notion of society not atomized into individuals who may freely combine to form (and yeah, I know this analogy is clumsy, but it’s valid) compounds whose properties are not only different from their individuals elements but wonderfully, usefully so, but rather compulsorily grouped into tribes of mutually repellent elements.  The left-extremists (and here I would remind Gentle Reader that all leftists are inherently extremist) not only postulate that everyone is the member of a tribe, but they vehemently deny that the tribes can ever belong together, or mix in mutually beneficial ways.  For that matter, “mutually beneficial” is a concept they do not recognize.  In their cosmology, for any tribe to advance necessarily implies the diminution of the other tribes.  The notion that your prosperity is no cause of my misfortune thus violates a fundamental premise.  The recent silliness at a convention of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs is — while thoroughly, thoroughly silly — still perfectly emblematic.  Likewise the White Privilege Conference (I thought it was a joke when I first came across reference to it, but it’s real . . . all too real).

Compare and contrast Point No. 4 of the Nazi party program, adopted on February 24, 1920:

“4. Staatsbürger kann nur sein, wer Volksgenosse ist. Volksgenosse kann nur sein, wer deutschen Blutes ist, ohne Rücksichtnahme auf Konfession. Kein Jude kann daher Volksgenosse sein.”

Here’s an English translation of the whole platform.  Point No. 4 is rendered: “4.  Only those who are our fellow countrymen can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence no Jew can be a countryman.”

The Nazis’ official position and the modern left-extremist position coincide beautifully.  The world is divided into groups who do not overlap, whose interests cannot overlap, who can never be each other’s fellows.  Each requires for its actualization the suppression of the other(s).

In fact, examine very closely all of the specific demands of that 25-point program.  How many of them would or would not be applauded at an Elizabeth Warren rally?  At an Occupy gathering?  At a conclave of Dear Leader’s closest advisers in the Oval Office?

I’m afraid I just busted Godwin’s Law all over the floor.  My apologies.  But the fact remains:  If you agree with the Nazis, you’re very likely doing something wrong.

More Evidence, as if Needed

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That, as Instapundit has observed on many occasions, incentives work, even perverse incentives.

One of the many reasons I enjoy reading the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (other than in order to slow the atrophy of my language skills) is because from time to time they’ll have an article or series of articles on issues which we have to contend with here in the U.S.  Only here in the U.S., and especially since the advent of Dear Leader on the scene, you can’t discuss much of anything without the toxin of “race” being injected into the conversation.  Unless your position is to crank open the money spigots without condition and without consideration for the future — societal, financial, political — you’re a racist.  So it’s nice to eavesdrop on a conversation where “race” doesn’t render the substance of the debate into something like the the bastard child (no pun intended) of a fraud and a farce.  [Of course, in Germany they have, instead of “race,” the “immigration” issue that is increasingly accomplishing much the same corruption of logic.]

In Germany the national equivalent of America’s federal welfare system is referred to as “Hartz IV,” referring presumably to . . . well, whatever it refers to.  As near as I can make it out, it encompasses the whole panoply of direct transfer payments, subsidies of services, and in-kind benefits.  If I understand correctly (this may not be correct, so don’t hold me to it) it was a consolidation and rationalization of multiple formerly independently administered programs, and may have been an outgrowth of the same considerations and meta-policy decisions which produced the liberalization of the German labor and the tightening of the retirement laws back towards the beginning of the century.  Those were the economic reforms which enabled Germany to weather the 2008 melt-down much better than America, an experience which only cemented the predominance of the German economy in the EU.  Interestingly, perhaps ironically, those reforms were initiated by the SPD government then in power, a government in which several key players had been involved — some very prominently — in the 1968 student protests, which were of course explicitly Marxist in inspiration and goals.

Reality is powerful medicine indeed, even if some societies, e.g. Greece, seem to have built up immunity to it.

In any event, the FAZ recently ran a very short article to the effect that more children under the age of 15 are living off of Hartz IV than at any point in the last five years, and that fully half of them are children of single parents.  Specifically, 1.6 million under the age of 15 now derive their subsistence from the state.

Five years ago was of course 2010, in the depths of the crash.  Germany didn’t escape it, but thanks to Angela Merkel’s refusal to follow Dear Leader down the path of limitless borrowing and pouring sand down rat-holes of “shovel-ready projects” (remember them, Gentle Reader?), it didn’t hit there with anything like the ferocity it did here.  Of course, Germany also didn’t have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac consciously inflating a fraudulent housing boom, either.  In any event Germany came out of it much faster, much stronger, and the long-term effects of it seem to be much less than here.

So why has the number of children completely dependent on the state mushroomed?

Maybe it’s something as simple as when you offer people money to do things that are actually self-destructive, things they might under other circumstances avoid doing or at least defer doing — you know, like having a child out of wed-lock, or before you acquire a trade, or before you have any financial cushion built up — you get more of that behavior across the overall population than you used to.  Maybe.  Although in any particular instance you might point to any number of specific motivations, Gentle Reader must keep in mind that we’re talking about the laws of very large numbers.  Anecdote and pattern are different things; it’s why we use different words for them.

The comments to the article run from the predictable on one end to the predictable on the other.  It’s all capitalism’s fault.  It’s welfare queens.  It’s all the indigent immigrants we’re letting in with their swarms of indigent children.  It’s the dead-beat dads.  It’s our need for cheap oil (ergo: it’s fossil fuel’s fault, and therefore . . . Koch Brothers!!).  And so forth.

Articles like this one, and discussions like the one intimated in the comments, are helpful to keep in mind as we think through the same issues in the U.S.  Here’s the apparent paradox:  Increasingly generous benefits for poor children and their unmarried parents, combined with a shrinking population and repeated lamentations by industry that they can’t find good help seem to exist side-by-side with increasing and record numbers of poor children and unmarried parents.  And all without “the legacy of slavery” or the disintegration of the Black Family or “structural racism” to blame it on.  Perhaps something else is going on?  Like maybe incentives work?  Who’da thunk it?

Human nature is, after all, universal, a reality which not seldom escapes even otherwise unusually perceptive people.

Layers of Editors and Factcheckers, Perhaps

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Logic checkers, not so much.

Yesterday, when I launched the All-New (Now Featuring Moxie!) post category of Them Awful Southerners, I hadn’t suspected I might be putting out a great big ol’ jar of honey to catch me some bees.  No, I thought it would just be something I could occasionally have recourse to, sort of like Teutschtümelei (an expression I picked up 30-plus years ago from a play by either Lessing or Schiller, I forget which; it doesn’t translate very well, but if you imagine a strident form of hoaky, kitschy Americana, that would be about our modern equivalent) for stuff pertaining specifically to Germany (as opposed to just using German sources for a post on a topic of more general interest).

I may have under-estimated my powers of seduction.  No sooner do I launch Them Awful Southerners than sure enough, here comes today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with its lead, above-the-electronic-fold headline:  “Erschossen im Herzland der Sklaverei“; “Shot in the Heartland of Slavery”.  For starts, oughtn’t it read “Shot in the Former Heartland of Slavery”?  I mean, if South Carolina is the “heartland of slavery,” does that not imply that, you know, slavery is still practiced there?  I haven’t been to South Carolina since 2005, but when last there I don’t recall that being the case.

But let us not bust too hard on the reporter; he probably didn’t write his own headline.  Just because the FAZ wants to run the equivalent of “Fun Times in the Heartland of Nazism” over a report on the 2015 Oktoberfest in Munich, it’s not his fault, is it?

The text of the article must, however, be laid at the author’s feet, and he required to answer for it.  The author — who is based in New York City, which may fully explain the whole thing (here’s his c.v. on the paper’s website; he certainly appears to be someone who ought to know better than to publish bullshit like this) — has actually written two articles.  The first article is about a police officer who conducted a perfectly normal traffic stop until the driver panicked and ran, after which (i) the officer shot him down like a dog, and then (ii) attempted to falsify a crime scene.  The second article is one more tired-ass installment of Them Awful Southerners, and how we’re just lyin’ in wait for the next unsuspecting darky to happen along so’s we can lynch ‘im.  The two articles are separated by a helpful bridge in which the author lets us know everything we need to about him and his ability to think or to report honestly.

The incident happened one week ago today.  The beginning and the end of the confrontation are shown on two separate videos from two independent sources.  The first part, the stop, the request for license, registration, and proof of insurance (just like I got asked for when stopped for my last speeding ticket) all went by the book and are captured on video by the police cruiser’s on-board camera.  Significantly, the audio originates from a microphone on the officer’s shirt.  You can hear the officer indicate that he’s pulled the driver over for a broken tail-light, and then ask for license, registration, and proof of insurance.  The driver tells the cop he doesn’t have registration because he’s still in the process of buying the vehicle, at which point the cop returns to his car, presumably to run the plates.  At that point the driver gets out of the car and the cop asks him to get back in.  Which the driver does.  Then the driver panics.  He gets out and runs.

The cop and the driver are now out of frame for the cruiser’s on-board camera, but you can hear confused words and rustling, apparently as something was disturbing the officer’s body microphone.  You can hear the officer tell the driver he proposes to use his taser on him.  Which he does, without the desired effect.

At this point the second video, captured by an aware hair-dresser on her way to work, picks up.  You can see the taser’s wires deployed.  You see the driver running away and the police officer pickle off eight (!) rounds at a fleeing man.  The driver was struck five times, at least once through the heart.  He falls dead.

And this is where the officer, having already ended one life and screwed up his own, damns himself as a liar.  The by-stander’s video captures him as he turns away from his victim, goes back to where they’d been standing a few seconds before, picks something up out of the grass, and then take it over and drops it beside the corpse.  It was his taser gun.

It seems that in his initial report and his post-event write-up he alleged that the driver had seized his taser, and that he had attempted first-responder life-saving on his victim.  Neither happened.

Within a matter of a couple of days the officer was fired (not placed on “administrative leave,” with or without pay, which is the common administrative proceeding in use-of-deadly-force occurrences, until the facts are straightened out), and formally charged with murder by the district attorney general’s office.  Tellingly, as soon as the officer’s lawyer got the by-stander’s video to examine in detail, he requested and was granted leave to withdraw.

Now, every lawyer in the United States knows what happened.  The client swore up and down to his lawyer that he’d Told it Just Like it Happened in his report.  And then the lawyer takes a look at the video evidence that shows him his client just lied to him about the central fact of his defense.

To this point the FAZ has done a good job of summarizing the actual facts as they can be shown to be.

So much for the allegro of this little concerto grosso.  There then follows an adagio of a few paragraphs, consisting of the obligatory Ferguson comparison.  Although the author is finally forced to observe that the forensic evidence in Ferguson can’t be squared with the pro-criminal version of events, and contradicts the supporters of a violent felon who was shot down in the middle of attacking, for a second time, a police officer, you can tell from the author’s remaining observations that he’d just as leave not have to admit it.  Our Author states that Wilson, after the publicity exploded (which is to say, after the witch hunt started), “submerged, but found sympathizers who spread his version” of the events.  In the end, he was “believed not only by his fellow citizens on the Grand Jury,” which was “directed by the state’s attorney” (grand juries are not so directed, by the way), but also the investigators from the DOJ who “found that the credible witnesses confirmed Wilson’s representations.”  In last Saturday’s events in North Charleston, there is no video of what happened between the time the shooter, officer Scott, and his victim step out of frame in the police car’s video and when the by-stander’s video picks up.  In Ferguson, our New York City author is glumly forced to admit that officer Wilson’s claim that the thug he shot attacked him through the window of his police cruiser was “supported” (notice he didn’t say “confirmed”) by the forensic evidence. [This word choice is what poker players call a “tell.”  It allows you to read what’s going on the other guy’s mind.  Our New York City author won’t say Wilson was “confirmed” by the forensic evidence, even though (i) Darren Wilson had orbital fractures of his skull surrounding his eye, (ii) the thug’s blood was found on the inside of Wilson’s vehicle door, and (iii) all of the ballistic evidence demonstrates that the perp’s hands were not raised, but rather were lowered, and he was charging Wilson with his head down when struck by the fatal round. You know, exactly like Wilson said it happened.]  In fact the DOJ didn’t so much rely on “credible witnesses” which it “believed” over the criminal’s buddies when it formally agreed with Wilson’s “version” of events as “spread” by his “sympathizers,” but rather on the physical evidence, which was specifically cited by Dear Leader’s own U.S. Attorney General.  You’d never suspect that from reading this author’s words.  It’s very considerate for this author to provide us with such rich indication of his journalistic ethics, and in fact, his basic honesty.

In the final movement, we suddenly find ourselves 250-300 years ago in South Carolina.

This sentence made it into print in a major European newspaper:  “South Carolina is the heartland of North American slavery.”  Present tense.  “Here lived more slaves than free persons.”  At least the author got the right tense on that one.

The police forces in South Carolina “developed from patrols for catching runaway slaves.”  Wrong.  Slave patrols and the few law enforcement forces of the times were entirely different.  Slave patrols were manned — on a compulsory basis, by the way — by ordinary free whites, in much the same way that in many places way back when every able-bodied free male had to work on the public roads a certain number of days each year.  These slave patrols had no judicial functions at all, in contrast to the sheriff and his deputies, who served warrants, who levied executions on personal and real property, who ran the jail, dragged the town drunks in for a beating every so often, and otherwise did what little law enforcement went on back then.

Having conflated the historical antecedents of today’s police forces with runaway slave patrols, our author then tosses a few observations about how such patrols operated.  Whippings and the death penalty for “ringleaders” were authorized.  Of course, our author doesn’t point out that the slave patrols didn’t do the whipping or impose the death penalty.  Generally, it was the owners, post-return, who did the whipping, or for those too squeamish, turned their slave over to a public facility for that purpose (there was such a place in Charleston, and another in New Orleans, and I’m sure most every larger Southern town similarly catered to those too cowardly to look their own victim in the face).  Death penalties for ringleaders of slave resistance were imposed by trial courts (however cursory the trial may have been, it was nonetheless a formal judicial proceeding).  Although the owner was supposed to receive his property back undamaged from the slave patrol, “wanted dead or alive” was not an unusual term of capture for repeaters.

Our author then slips up and gives us another “tell” about where he got his information.  He informs us that Indians were used as auxiliary patrollers.  This comes from a misinterpretation (willful? hard to say) of the Wikipedia.org write-up on the Stono Rebellion — of 1710.  It’s less well known than Nat Turner’s of 1835, but until Turner, the Stono revolt had been by a wide margin the bloodiest slave insurrection in North America.  Here’s the author’s source quotation:  “The lieutenant governor hired Chickasaw and Catawba Indians and other slaves to track down and capture the Africans who had escaped from the battle.”  The quotation is referring to the aftermath of the more-or-less pitched battle in which the slaves were defeated (after having killed 44 whites in action against their own losses of 25).  The Indians were pretty much run out of the Carolinas by a few years after the Revolution, a point our author isn’t familiar with, and so he just assumes that Indians regularly made up such auxiliary forces.  And by the way, as the Wikipedia.org article makes plain, the participating slaves were not defeated or caught by slave patrols, but by a raised-for-the-purpose militia.  If our author knew his ass from a hole in the ground he’d understand that militias in both colonial and post-colonial eras were filled by the entire able-bodied male population capable of bearing arms.  So once more, we’re not talking about either functional or organizational precursors of the North Charleston police department.

Did we mention that Stono happened in 1710, a brief 305 years ago and a scant 40 years after Carolina Colony was first settled?  Our author’s remaining data points intended to draw a straight line between the slave patrollers and local South Carolina police forces come from . . . 1739 and 1772.  Here, I’ll draw you a picture, doofus:  In 1772 South Carolina was a loyal colony of the British Crown.  Municipal law enforcement in South Carolina has existed as long as there have been municipalities.  South Carolina’s city police departments are no more descendants of the slave patrols than is the New York Police Department, which has even today its own set of problems with its black citizenry.  New York City until the 1820s had slavery and therefore slave catchers; here’s a basic history for you to read.

The Deutsche Arbeiterpartei was founded in Munich in 1919.  Hitler, at the time working for the army, was detailed off to attend a meeting to see what sort of subversion was going on there.  He came, he saw, he took the operation over.  After a time it became the Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the NSdAP.  It took it a while to spread from Munich, but it did, and the world knows its blood-soaked history as that of Nazi Germany.

By the editorial and reportorial standards of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, we should refer to Bavaria as “the heartland of the Nazi party” and to Berlin as “the capital of Nazi Germany.”  In the present tense.

Repeat after me, class:  Not everything in the South has to do with slavery.  Just like not everything in the Federal Republic of Germany has to do with the Holocaust.  You’d think that of all places and papers, a major newspaper in Germany would know better than to try to draw straight lines between present-day misbehavior and long-ago atrocities visited upon an oppressed group.  Apparently that’s too much to expect of today’s left-extremists.

Final take-away:  The more you strain to make connections between unrelated phenomena, the more you beclown yourself.

[Update 13 Apr 15]:  For some reason the FAZ has closed comments on the linked article.  Yesterday when I came across it, there were no comments.  This morning there are maybe 12-15 total.  This is a much lower count than many articles garner.  Why shut off comments now?  I would hope that it’s because the editors realize they published what was, in its main point (the Them Awful Southerners parts, as opposed to the purely factual recount of what happened last week) a made-up piece of garbage by someone who hadn’t the slightest notion of what he was talking about and out of shame they don’t want to call any more attention to it.  On the other hand, we’re talking about a newspaper that’s already started its cheerleading for Chairman Hillary, so the more likely explanation, alas, is that having been caught out peddling bullshit, they’re reacting in the time-honored left-extremist fashion: shut down the debate when the other side starts to win.

Most of the comments are on the lines of what you’d expect from Europeans engaging in long-distance psychoanalysis of Americans, or condemning what a materially awful place the U.S. is to live because free health care! or something.  Several of the comments, however, come from Germans who claim extensive personal experience of the U.S., not only through their own travels here but also through their relatives and friends who live here and whom they visit.  Interestingly, every one of those commenters who has actually experienced America at close range calls bullshit on the white-cop-gunnin’-for-Uncle-Tom-the-runaway-slave-everyone-living-in-fear-of-being-gunned-down-while-walking-the-streets theme of the story.  Finally, I’m pleased to note that at least one of the commenters, who also claims personal experience of Charleston, points out the bogus present tense of the heartland-of-slavery claim.

One more point:  One of the commenters claims that the hair-dresser who shot the second video has stated that the officer and the victim engaged in a physical scuffle on the ground, before the video picks up.  I haven’t taken the time to track that down to see if it’s in fact the case, but it seems like it may be plausible.  Something caused her to reach for her cell phone and starting recording.  How likely is that to have been seeing a simple shoving match between a cop and a pedestrian on the one hand versus, on the other, a cop and a citizen on the ground pummeling each other?  If it’s true, it certainly puts a slightly less sinister sheen on the events.  But, and this is The Salient Point:  This officer shot eight times at an unarmed man who was in full flight away from him, and at least some of those shots were at his center of mass, which is to say potentially fatal.  The man at whom he was shooting was known to him (the officer would already have his driver’s license from the first portion of the stop), and how much harder could it have been to obtain a second warrant for his arrest?  Whether the cop was shooting in anger, or out of lack of training (or, who knows? perhaps he was acting from racialist motives), he still acted in an inexcusable fashion, and sufficiently out of line with his training and established procedures that the police department (remember they’d have taken the hair-dresser’s statement as well) fired him in a matter of hours.

So I suppose the intermediate take-away on the actual event is stand by to stand by.

Questions With Easy Answers

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Prof. Ann Althouse (whose surname I want to spell Althaus, just because) asks what will sex education look like when the government decides it’s time to encourage young women to get pregnant.  She links to a NYT article about birth rates in Europe.

The linked NYT article does discuss a few initiatives that are government-sponsored, such as in Putin’s Russia, but most seem to be from the private sector: magazines, pop culture, even churches.  There’s the obligatory pointing out that as the population ages, lavish public spending will become increasing hard to maintain, although the pollyannish NYT writer decrees that “productivity gains over time” will make up for the fact that the number of people across whom your tax base must fit is shrinking relative to the number of people drawing from that tax base.  As you would expect from anyone whose understanding of economic activity is on a par with that of a South Seas Islander devotee of a cargo cult, she doesn’t explore how productivity, which requires massive, long-term, continuous investment in both human and material capital, is going to keep going up as ever-larger slices of its returns get hoovered up by an ever-more voracious government in the form of taxation.

[Aside:  This glib assumption that productivity will continue to grow irrespective of how much flesh is carved from the body economic in taxes and regulation seems to be a blind spot of the left-extremists.  They’re perfectly able to understand that tax policies and regulation drive behavior, as with so-called “green energy” tax breaks, or other tax-based hand-outs to their favored constituencies, or the individual mandate of the “Affordable” Care Act.  But they never seem to grasp that non-targeted tax policies, such as generally higher or generally lower taxes on productivity, or generally more or less onerous regulation, also drive behavior.  Similarly, they do not seem to grasp (maybe they do; I just have never been exposed to any statement or proposal from which that grasp is apparent) that even unpredictability in these matters drives behavior.  Capital investment has very long time horizons.  In thinking about whether to spend time and money now and for the next few years on Project X, I have to achieve some measure of comfort not only about what the economic landscape looks like today, but also I have to achieve some comfort level with my assumptions about what it will look like five or ten years down the line, when I hope finally to be reaping the rewards of my investment.  The devastatingly simple truth is that you cannot keep cranking up taxes and regulatory burdens on the productive members of society without seeing massive loss — some measurable, some not: how do you measure innovations that never happen because you’ve made it not worthwhile to put in the time and money? — in the society’s aggregate well-being.  It’s the phenomenon that Amity Schlaes calls a “capital strike.”  I’ve yet to hear a leftist come right out and acknowledge that.]

Althouse asks what we can think of as the next question implicit in that NYT article:  Government looks around, realizes it has to do something about its tax base, and decides to get into the business of encouraging pregnancy among young women, that it needs to “do something.”  What does that “something” look like?

This being America, of course, we have that pesky li’l 14th Amendment which requires that what is done for one must be done for all, and so here we’ve also got issues about deciding which young women we want to encourage to get pregnant, and how we direct our efforts to them with minimal effect on non-desired target groups.  At the risk of belching in church, we do not want unmarried, unskilled teenagers getting pregnant.  We do not want unmarried, unskilled, unemployed women already on public assistance to get pregnant.

The problem of course is that short of coerced insemination everything that government can do must fall under the category of persuasion.  Almost everything that might persuade a woman whom we would like to see reproduce will also be very persuasive to a woman whom we’d just as leave not.  There are very few criteria that you could grasp by way of selection that would hold up under the 14th Amendment.  Age would be one, but that’s very, very imperfect, because of how long a woman’s child-bearing years last.  Most of the “bad” demographic indicators — above all unmarried first birth while a teenager — are strong predictors of social pathologies even for that same woman’s children born at any time in her later years.  In other words, if you’re a 21-year-old with three children, all born out of wedlock, statistically it doesn’t much matter if your next child is not born until you’re 31:  That child is nearly as likely to experience bad life outcomes as those first three.  Harsh to contemplate, but those are the numbers.

A further thought suggests itself:  Once government gets into the business of encouraging pregnancy, you cannot avoid the issue of thinking about whom do you encourage.  This is because the answer to the question will vary depending on the political objectives of who is asking the question.  For some people, it is precisely those women who are the least likely to be able successfully and independently to raise productive members of society that will be the most-favored target group.  Think I’m talking through my hat?  As long ago as 1966, two professors writing in The Nation advocated specifically the recruitment of a government-dependent permanent underclass for the explicit purpose of forging electoral alliances to back radical-leftist political ends.  As the Blogfather would say, read it all here.  Think I’m over-stating their cynicism?  The article specifically advocates fighting against programs the effect of which would be to give the government-dependent the life skills necessary to escape that dependency.  Seriously, you have to read it to believe it.  Not since Stalin starved Russia’s peasants of their own food in order to subsidize the rapid industrialization of the cities has anyone called for such callous exploitation of an entire segment of society for one’s own political purposes.

A final thought intrudes, on the lines of there being nothing new in the world.  At least here in the United States we have a large portion of the political spectrum which joyfully reaches for the nostrums of the 1930s to address the tumults of the 21st Century.  Sure enough, it turns out that the 1930s provide us a blueprint of how to encourage not only fertility, but “public service” among the young women of society.  It was called the “Bund deutscher Mädel,” and it was the sister organization to the Hitlerjugend.  Both groups were herded apart from their parents, against whom they were encouraged to rebel, and on whom they were encouraged to inform, and were consciously thrown together, all while being constantly reminded of the duty to produce more little soldiers for the Führer.  There is a vignette in William L. Shirer where he recalls seeing the joyful romps through field and forest by the broadly smiling, lusty (not to say lustful) youth of Germany.  Members of both groups had to do a period of what we would now refer to as “public service” in some menial capacity.

None of the above thoughts provides any comfort for someone thinking about the answer to Prof. Althouse’s question.  Maybe the question is not what such efforts would look like, but whether government needs to get into that business in the first place.

But the actual answer to Prof. Althouse’s question is pretty easy, I suggest:  It would look something like Cloward-Piven, with generous borrowings from the organizational manuals of the Nazi party.

Remind Me Who’s Still Fighting the War?

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As I think Gentle Reader will have divined by now, I am from the South.  This fact causes me no shame.  There are millions of people all over the world who disagree with me on that point.  Being from the South is, in their book, inherently shameful, and people who aren’t ashamed of it should be doubly shamed.  Or something.  On the other hand, I’m not particularly cock-a-hoop about being from the South, either.  It is neither more nor less than my home and the place, among several places in the world where I have felt at home, that happens to be the place where I most feel at home.  I am entirely comfortable that there are thousands of other places where, given enough time, I could feel at home.  Providence just happens to have set me down here.

Be all that as it may (as an old priest of mine used to say . . . and by the way, he was 178 years old when I knew him in the early 1970s, was very much Old Southern . . . and he had marched at Selma, a fact he never mentioned; we only found out years later from a third party source that he’d been there):  I suspect that nearly every Southerner who ventures outside the South, or who has had close contact with non-Southerners — “Yankees” we call them, no matter where they’re from, sort of like Bavarians call everyone who isn’t from Bavaria a “Prussian” and the Amish refer to all outsiders irrespective of origin or ethnicity as “English” — shares as a common experience a number of accusations, nearly all centering on either (i) race, or (ii) what a certain generation of Charlestonians until recently referred to as the “late unpleasantness” (World War I was the “recent unpleasantness”).

Specifically, we are, so the Yankees, all secretly yearning for our lost power over the Coloreds, mourning the passing of the day when we could have any one of them who got “uppity” tied up and whipped or worse.  And of course we’re “still fighting the war.”  We hate Catholics, Jews, and any other outsiders.  We’re either too stupid to wipe our sweat off our own sister’s ass after buggering her, or alternatively we’re so damned evil-genius clever that we manage to control the whole stinkin’ country with 22 U.S. Senators and a minority in the House of Representatives.  And so forth.

Now, can you tool about the South and find people who meet some, most, or all of those descriptions?  You bet you can.  You can also — with the arguable exception of folks sporting an on-going fixation on “the war” — find them everywhere else you choose to look if you’ll be so kind as to open your eyes and ears and close your pie-hole for a moment or two.  At least some of the people you’ll find in the South who are, so to speak, more Catholic than the pope on matters pertaining to either or both race or the war are what they know in West Virginia as “come-heres,” people who have moved south from other parts of the country.

All of which is to say:  Whatever, guys.  If that’s what you want to think, enjoy your ignorance.

April 9, 2015, is the 150th anniversary of General Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia.  By that time they were so beaten down that Grant had to cough up 25,000 rations to keep them from starving after the surrender.  The men who finally ran them to ground, who had stood shoulder-to-shoulder in ranks a stone’s throw or closer apart and blazed away at them with .58-cal. rifled weapons (seriously: pace of 90 feet — 30 yards — and imagine someone pointing a rifle at you from that distance; the firing lines were that close or closer in numerous battles), receiving fire in return, seem to have thought fairly well of them.  Not that the Army of the Potomac wasn’t over-joyed to have won; not that they entertained any illusions about the cause for which Lee’s men had fought so long and so hard.  But they respected them, as only the mutual survivors of near-death experiences can.

Don’t take my word for it, Gentle Reader.  The officer designated to take the surrender — Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, hero of Little Round Top and who would, in the summer of 1914 become the last man to die of a battlefield wound from the Civil War — has left us his thoughts on the subject:

“The momentous meaning of this occasion impressed me deeply. I resolved to mark it by some token of recognition, which could be no other than a salute of arms. Well aware of the responsibility assumed, and of the criticisms that would follow, as the sequel proved, nothing of that kind could move me in the least. The act could be defended, if needful, by the suggestion that such a salute was not to the cause for which the flag of the Confederacy stood, but to its going down before the flag of the Union. My main reason, however, was one for which I sought no authority nor asked forgiveness. Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond;—was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured? Instructions had been given; and when the head of each division column comes opposite our group, our bugle sounds the signal and instantly our whole line from right to left, regiment by regiment in succession, gives the soldier’s salutation, from the “order arms” to the old “carry”—the marching salute. Gordon at the head of the column, riding with heavy spirit and downcast face, catches the sound of shifting arms, looks up, and, taking the meaning, wheels superbly, making with himself and his horse one uplifted figure, with profound salutation as he drops the point of his sword to the boot toe; then facing to his own command, gives word for his successive brigades to pass us with the same position of the manual,—honor answering honor. On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!”

Thus the men who alone unquestionably earned the right to an opinion about the men they had fought.  It is, however, precisely the respect angle of Chamberlain’s words which so galls the extreme left nowadays.  Having won is not enough for TNR.  Gentle Reader is of course entitled to come to his or her own smug opinions, 150 years after the fact, and without the stench of septic wounds or rotting human or horse flesh in the nostrils.  But I do think that the men who did achieve the result, with their own flesh and their own wounds and privations, are entitled to be heard on the subject, even now, even today.

For a worthy example of today’s left-extremist sanctimony, we have The New Republic’s modest proposal to make April 9 a national holiday.  And of course to remove from public view every name of every person who served in the Confederate armed forces, from buildings, parks, U.S. military installations, everything.  Presumably acknowledging the existence of these people in any other context than to execrate their memory is not harmonious with the vision announced by Dear Leader, and so forth.  The occasion for the article is a speech Dear Leader recently delivered on the 50th anniversary of the fighting at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma (where my old priest was, and not as chaplain to the Democrat party, either).  From the author:

“In the self-critical America of Obama’s imagination, more people would know about the Edmund Pettus bridge and its namesake. The bridge itself wouldn’t necessarily be renamed after Martin Luther King or John Lewis or another civil rights hero; because it is synonymous with racist violence, the bridge should bear Pettus’s name eternally, with the explicit intent of linking the sins of the Confederacy to the sins of Jim Crow. But Obama’s America would also reject the romantic reimagining of the Civil War, and thus, the myriad totems to the Confederacy and its leaders that pockmark the South, most of which don’t share the Pettus bridge’s incidental association with the struggle for civil rights.”

“Self-critical”?  This is supposed to be a trait which the United States shows only in Dear Leader’s imagination.  Similarly, perhaps, to the self-criticism of modern Iran.  But really, is this author so ignorant of American cultural history?  Well, yes, yes he is.  We are a people who has agonized about our personal and collective sins, about what it means to be a free citizen, rather than a subject.  We not only inherited the curse of slavery and nurtured it for another 90 years, but we also fought a vicious civil war to end it.  We have spawned more anti-vice campaigns than you can say grace over, and from the Great Revival of the 1750s to Billy Sunday drawing crowds of thousands to be told what filthy sinners they were, we’ve demonstrated an unquenchable appetite for self-criticism.  When we fought our first war for overseas expansion, there was tremendous and very public gnashing of teeth at the abandonment of our political identity as a country in it for something other than sordid gain, as detailed in Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower.  For over a century we drew back in horror at the thought of fighting on a European battlefield, only to get dragged in twice in a single generation to precisely that.  After the first time around we agonized over what role, if any, America should have in the wider world.  After the second war we got to confront an implacably hostile, murderous system of government, and we spent the next 45 years agonizing over how to fight this blood-soaked system without becoming like it ourselves.

No, when our learned author from The New Republic taxes us with a lack of “self-criticism,” he means that we fail properly to abase ourselves before the rest of the world.  We don’t have to — we’ve got Dear Leader to do that for us.  He’s gone trotting about the place apologizing for us enough to last several generations.  [Aside:  And what is it with left-extremists and “self-criticism”?  Are they all really that transparently Maoists?]

I have additional news for our author:  The Edmund Pettus Bridge gets just as much play in schoolbooks as the Civil War.  And American students ignore both just as predictably.

“It’s unfathomable that anyone today would attempt to name a new military installation, or rename an old one, after a Confederate general. But at the time these bases were named, there wasn’t nearly as much of a consensus behind the argument that the Confederates committed treason against the United States in support of a war for slavery.

That lack of consensus was an ineluctable consequence of concerted postbellum efforts to sand down the seams reuniting the states. There was a real but inadequate constituency for crushing the Southern establishment after the Civil War, and reintegrating the country under an entirely different paradigm. Instead, the North enabled the South by giving it unusual influence over shaping the official mythology of the war. Yes, the South surrendered. The states ratified the 13th Amendment. The Union survived. These facts couldn’t be altered. But memorializing the rebellion as a tragedy of circumstance, or a bravely fought battle of principle—those narratives were adopted in part for the unspoken purpose of making the reunion stick.”

Other than the transparently bogus notion of the North somehow “giving [the South] unusual influence over shaping the official mythology of the war,” (I mean, was there a vote somewhere?) my principal quibble with the above quotation, and in fact the entire article, is that those who served in the Confederate armed forces were traitors.  He’s perfectly correct, of course, that the war was, when you really pull all the onion layers back, a war to preserve slavery.  Anyone who thinks that the South would have seceded in the absence of the slavery question is deluded.

On the other hand it was also a war about the fundamental nature of the union itself.  It was slavery which made confronting that question unavoidable; no other issue penetrated so deeply into the fabric of the economy or the society that existed in the South.  But 1860 wasn’t the first time the question had come up, either.  The Hartford (that’s Hartford, Connecticut, I’ll remind the author) Convention during the War of 1812 was gathered for the specific purpose of discussing secession in response to the economic catastrophe that was that war.  The nullification “crisis” of 1832, when South Carolina did no more than what Dear Leader has done — declare entire chunks of lawfully passed statutes of Congress to be nullities — certainly pointed the way to the issue.

This author’s characterization of the Southern military as “traitors” presupposes a settled answer to the question, “Is the union indissoluble?”  There was and had never been any such thing.  I defy anyone to point to any provision of the U.S. Constitution which addresses the subject of whether or under what circumstances a state may or may not leave the union.  It sure as hell isn’t implicit in the very notion of a national government, either.

I’ll give the author a quick history refresher:  In 1787 the United States consisted, with markedly few exceptions, of a narrow string of settlements along the coastal plain, with an enormous back-country populated by hostile aboriginals, and beyond that terra incognita.  It wasn’t just some grandiloquent gesture that caused the Lewis and Clark Expedition to be named the Corps of Discovery.  We really had no idea at all of what was on the far side of that river.  For all we knew Prester John was lurking somewhere out there.  Such “roads” as existed were stump-clogged mud bogs that were in the most literal terms a threat to the lives of all who traveled on them.  Rivers ran free, meaning you floated downstream — there being no steam navigation, Best Beloved — until the next rapids, then unloaded your flat-boat and either portaged around them or, if they were too high, built yourself a new boat below the falls.  A simple letter could take weeks to make it up or down the East Coast, even; heaven help you if you were at Harrodsburg in the Kentucky wilderness.

No one knew whether it was even physically possible to govern such a vastness, with such varying climate, topography, and ways of life, as a single nation of free and equal citizens.  No one had ever tried it before.  In part of his interviews for Ken Burns’s The Civil War, Shelby Foote, whose massive three-volume history of the war I’ve read (I never thought I could learn so much about the Red River campaign), he points out that the Southern states would never have ratified the U.S. Constitution 1787-88 if they had not thought they had every right to get out if they so chose.  I have no reason to question that statement.  [Aside:  Surely someone has culled through the public statements, speeches, newspaper screeds, and so forth of the ratification process in the different states.  I would be curious to discover whether and to what extent the specific question of dissolution was broached and hashed out.]

What I do know is this much:  The man who had commanded the army of liberation, and who had been president of the Constitutional Convention, in which latter capacity he would have been present for pretty much every session, would have received the committee reports, would have listened to the delegates chewing things over among themselves not only on the floor but in lodgings afterward, or during walks in the evening, and of course as the Universally Acknowledged Disinterested Player would have been the natural person to vent one’s own thoughts to . . . he found the subject of secession sufficiently significant that he specifically addressed it in his Farewell Address, and at length.

Mind you, Washington’s Farewell was not a speech but an open letter to the American people.  Not being extemporaneous, every word in it — and everything not said about the subjects covered in it — would have been the product of hours of earnest reflection.  The Farewell was his political valedictory; he never expected to step before the national public again.  Whatever he was going to say to the nation that he, as much as any man alive, had birthed, was in his letter to his people.  Whatever he left out he had to have assumed would be forever left unsaid.  Let’s hear it from the Father of His Country:

“The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”

That is his opening paragraph on the subject of the union.  He spends the next paragraphs dwelling upon the mutual advantages of union, in commerce, in liberty within, in freedom from subjugation from without.  Washington recognizes two groups of considerations for solicitude for the union, what he calls “sympathy” and “interest,” with oddly enough the self-interest angle receiving most of his attention.

I’ll also point out, in relation to the question of whether a permanent union were even possible, Washington observes:

“These considerations speak a persuasive language to every reflecting and virtuous mind, and exhibit the continuance of the Union as a primary object of patriotic desire. Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal. We are authorized to hope that a proper organization of the whole with the auxiliary agency of governments for the respective subdivisions, will afford a happy issue to the experiment. It is well worth a fair and full experiment.”

A “full and fair experiment”; it was certainly that.  Our TNR writer would tar with the brush of treason those who eventually considered that the experiment had been unsuccessful.

But the one thing that Washington, in the eight consecutive paragraphs which he devotes to the subject of the union and why it deserved to be, had to be preserved against enemies within and without, there is one assertion he never makes.  He never, not once, states that the Constitution created an indissoluble union and that as a point of law the individual states surrendered their right to go their separate ways.  With all the other reasons of sympathy and interest that Washington laid out for the cause of union, with an eloquence latter-day politicians would do well to study (I watched some of Rand Paul’s recent announcement of his candidacy for president, and it sounded like a collection of one-liner sound bites), he never even skirts with the point-blank conversation-ending claim that the Constitution itself forbids it.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think the South ought to have lost the war, if only for the reason it was fighting to preserve a monstrosity.  I think it is a good thing that the South did lose the war, and not only because by losing the war slavery vanished from our part of the world.  I do suggest, however, that the most important outcome of the war was achieving a final, literally-sealed-in-blood resolution of the most basic of all questions about the nature of the union.  Had the answer gone the other way, then the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments would have been dead letters from their adoption, because they wouldn’t have applied in the seceded Confederacy in any event, and because if anyone up North had tried to enforce them (or any other civil rights legislation), then you would have had states splintering and re-configuring until all you had was something that looked an awful lot like Germany after the Treaty of Westfalen in 1648.

What would the world look like now, had there been only an impotent United States in 1917?  In the spring of 1918 — right about this time of year, in fact — all that stood between the Kaiser’s troops and Paris was a thin line of green American troops.  They held, just barely.  That Britain and France had lasted even that long was only because of the behemoth American economy which could churn out war material in truly mountainous quantities.  Germany would have won the war, in 1918 if not sooner.  True, we’d have been spared the second round of the conflict, but what would a European continent dominated by an authoritarian Germany have looked like?  What luck would Germany have had against the Soviet Union, if they had got into it as they did in 1941, only with no British Empire and United States to back-stop the Soviets?  It’s widely known that the Red Army and its supplies rode in Dodge trucks; what’s less known is that the foot soldiers marched in American-made felt boots.  Even less known is that the famous T-34 tank was an adaptation of an off-the-shelf design by an American; would that design have existed?

Brown v. Board of Education — assuming Kansas were still in the union at that point in any event — would have been a dead letter.  There would be no Civil Rights Act of 1964.  No Title IX.  No Social Security.  No Medicare.  No food stamps.

There would be, in short, almost nothing that either the left-extremists or American patriots hold dear, had the result of the Civil War been that the union is dissoluble, that the experiment failed, that government of the people, by the people, and for the people was to perish from the earth.

But in 1860, as leaders north and south had to make up their minds where to stand, none of the answers were known.  Robert E. Lee is merely the most famous example of someone who didn’t jump ship until his own state voted to leave the union.  Had he been in it for the express purpose of preserving slavery, it is not unreasonable to expect that he would have placed his services at the disposal of the slave-mongers much sooner.  But he didn’t.  As Shelby Foote also points out in his interviews for Ken Burns, when Lee referred to “my country,” he was referring not to the Confederacy or to the United States, but to Virginia . . . and in doing so he was merely following a convention that was not at all that uncommon at the time.

I’m not, in fact, at all averse to the notion of making April 9 a formal observance nation-wide.  Can’t say I’m all that interested in the expense of making it a federal holiday (add up the payroll expenses of one day’s pay for the civilian government and that’s what you give away, per national holiday), but it would not at all be inappropriate for us to celebrate the defeat of the Confederacy.  What I don’t agree with our Learned Author at TNR about is why the occasion is worthy of celebration.  He wants to observe it to spit on the graves of the men who marched in front of General Chamberlain that day.  I want to observe it because what April 9 marked was the opening steps in the healing process from a Civil War.

You see, Civil Wars don’t have to end like ours did, with the defeated side laying down its arms and the combatants going home, to be left in peace so long as they never raised their hands against the victors again.  Ours nearly didn’t end that way, either.  Jefferson Davis sure as hell wasn’t interested in that; General Lee received counsel to disperse his troops as guerillas.  But after Lee and Grant (and remember, this was only a few days after Grant, Sherman, and Lincoln had met at City Point and discussed precisely this issue) determined it would not so end, the war in fact stopped.  There were no more burning cities or farms.  Cattle were not slaughtered and the owners left to starve over the winter.  Even in the depths of the war specifically on the civilian underpinnings of the war, during Sherman’s march, there was no rapine, no hanging of random victims.  For all of its outrage, Southern Womanhood was never outraged, not even in places like Clarksville where the occupation was especially hostile and long-lasting.

Contrast the Russian civil war of 1918-22.  Vast swathes of the Russian landscape were reduced to howling, starving, blood-soaked wilderness.  Both sides knew there was to be no mercy for the vanquished, or their families or their homes.  And so both sides fought accordingly.  Is that how our TNR writer wishes our Civil War had been fought, how he thinks it should have ended?  In Solzhenitsyn’s chapter on the beginnings of the Gulag, on the Solovetski Islands in the early 1920s, he tells of a young man, scarcely older than a boy, who when he was arrested gave as his “profession” the answer, “machine-gunner.”  What kind of society do you imagine gets built with those stones?

Contrast the Roman civil wars, with their proscriptions and thousands of necks chopped through.  Remind me, O TNR writer, how the Roman republic came through that experience.  Perhaps our TNR writer would prefer to see the United States enjoy something along the lines of the Taiping Rebellion, with its tens of millions of dead and devastation of enormous areas of the country; hell, we know (from his fondness for “self-criticism”) what he thinks about the Chinese experience of the first half of the 20th Century.  War lords and dead peasants by the million, interspersed with foreign subjugation.  Closer to our own day, and therefore even less excusable to be found in TNR‘s cocoon of ignorance, are the ructions in the former Yugoslavia.

Here, I’ll go ahead and pose a challenge to TNR‘s advocacy of a scorched-earth ending to the American Civil War:  Point to me one single instance in all of recorded human history where a civil war that ended as this buffoon wishes ours had ended — with the losing side not merely defeated but “crushed,” an outcome not sufficiently dear to enough hearts, as this writer moans — produced as a result of having so ended a regime of peace, justice, or prosperity for the most downtrodden of society.  Does this goof-ball really think that the recently freed slaves or their descendants would have been better off in a South that looked like Tambov in 1922? or the Mongolia of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg? or Kosovo in the early 1990s? or China in the years of the Reds’ consolidation of their power after 1949?

I’m not trying to excuse the legalized oppression of Black America that descended on the South for the century after the war.  There’s no excuse for it.  It didn’t have to be that way.  But it wasn’t that way just in the South.  Let’s hear it from the U.S. Supreme Court, the Heart of Atlanta Motel case —

“This testimony included the fact that our people have become increasingly mobile, with millions of people of all races traveling from State to State; that Negroes in particular have been the subject of discrimination in transient accommodations, having to travel great distances to secure the same; that often they have been unable to obtain accommodations, and have had to call upon friends to put them up overnight, S.Rep. No. 872, supra, at 14-22, and that these conditions had become so acute as to require the listing of available lodging for Negroes in a special guidebook which was itself “dramatic testimony to the difficulties” Negroes encounter in travel. Senate Commerce Committee Hearings, supra, at 692-694. These exclusionary practices were found to be nationwide, the Under Secretary of Commerce testifying that there is “no question that this discrimination in the North still exists to a large degree” and in the West and Midwest as well. Id. at 735, 744. This testimony indicated a qualitative, as well as quantitative, effect on interstate travel by Negroes. The former was the obvious impairment of the Negro traveler’s pleasure and convenience that resulted when he continually was uncertain of finding lodging. As for the latter, there was evidence that this uncertainty stemming from racial discrimination had the effect of discouraging travel on the part of a substantial portion of the Negro community. Id. at 744.”

Jim Crow as a legal system may have been peculiar to the South, but Jim Crow as a way of doing business was nation-wide, as the testimony cited by the court amply demonstrates.  Does our TNR author really think that those practices would have been less widely spread, or more gentle, in the aftermath of a civil war ending as he wishes ours had?

Alt-history is always fraught with peril, because you’re by definition discussing something that did not happen.  I’ll say this much, though:  I am entirely convinced that for all of the failures of the post-war United States, north or south, adequately to deal with dumping several million largely illiterate, unskilled, destitute people who had to learn the most basic survival skills as free citizens into the socio-political mix, and for all the outrages committed against them and their descendants over the next century, the fact that, 50 years after the march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge we have made the progress we have (or had made until Dear Leader came long to poison the wells all over again, purely for partisan political advantage) is largely because of, not in spite of, how the Civil War was ended, beginning on April 9, 1865.

And for that reason I’m all in favor of making it a day of national thanksgiving and remembrance.

As far as the Southern combatants being traitors whose very names are or should be unpronounceable in polite society?  I suggest TNR-boy needs to get sent for some re-education, and maybe self-criticism, in a struggle session.  Just like Chairman Mao would have decreed.

 

Sometimes an Author Tells it All Up-Front

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Like in the very first sentence of the sub-headline.

From the FAZ this morning, we have the headline “Framework Agreement with Iran Greeted World-Wide.”  The first words of the sub-headline tell you all you need to know about the story:  “Except for Israel, the forthcoming framework agreement for Iranian nuclear development has been greeted positively everywhere in the world.”

Everyone thinks it’s such a great idea for the mullahs to get the bomb; everyone, you know, except for the people at whom the weapons will be aimed.  The people whom this monster-regime has promised to “wipe from the face of the map.”  The people who have six million of their co-religionists to mourn, victims done to death by the joyful cooperation of a continent full of the parents of those now greeting positively the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the most violent of the governments of the Religion of Peace.

Iran gets to keep its enrichment facilities.  Oh, but they promise to convert them to “research facilities,” get it?  Arak, their heavy water facility, is to be modified so it can’t make weapons-grade product (anyone want to bet how easily it will be re-converted right back, and in the meantime expanded, while all the dhimmi strut about and crow about the deal they’ve made?).  They “promise” (wink, wink) to reduce the number of their centrifuges from 19,000 to 6,100 (of course, they don’t see themselves as having made many promises about what kind or capacity of centrifuge will make up those 6,100, and of course we have no expectation that the technology will so far advance that 6,100 will be able to the work of the 19,000 older units, most of the “excess” of which are believed to be out of commission).  For the next fifteen years they’re only “allowed” (wink, wink) to enrich uranium to 3.67%.  And for the next 25 years it all is supposed to be “monitored” by the International Atomic Energy Commission.  Yeah, because that outfit has been so effective at keeping Pakistan, North Korea, and (but for the Israelis) Syria from developing nuclear capacity.  Here’s an English-language take on what Dear Leader seems to think he’s got for a deal, versus what the people aiming to “wipe the state of Israel from the face of the map” think the deal is.

What has happened is that we have announced that the state of Israel and its inhabitants have at the most another 25 years to live.

And in exchange for getting the green light to annihilate the only functioning democracy in that entire area of the world, what did the Religion of Peace get?  Oh, of course, we are lifting the oil embargo and other economic sanctions.  Starting now.  So that during those fifteen or 25 years Iran will be able to afford to expand and up-grade its nuclear weapons program peaceful use of nuclear power which they so desperately need, being cut off from any alternative source of energy, like hydrocarbons or solar in the middle of a desert.

Back in 2001-2003, when we wiped out two governments, one of which had attacked us on our own soil and was only by heroics of ordinary American citizens prevented from demolishing the very seat of our legislative branch of government, and the other of which gave sanctuary to all manner of people actively engaged in similar plans and activities, and which in fact was making efforts to accomplish what we’ve now permitted Iran, the world — and the Democrat Party and their operatives with bylines, by which is meant the lamestream media — huffed and trumpeted that this was just “a war for oil.”  Ignoring the fact that if all we wanted was Iraqi oil in unlimited quantities, all we had to do was drop sanctions on Saddam, they alleged that we spent all those billions and all that blood “for oil.”  They still maintain that, by the way, although ownership of the oilfields, refineries, and oil remains and has always remained in the national Iraqi state.  Period.

How do the movers and shakers in the countries that actively traded with Saddam’s blood-soaked regime under the radar, violating UN sanctions on that butcher (and with Iran as well, if memory serves), react now to the news that we’ve got Israel strapped to the gurney, and set an execution date for it?  Why, from the FAZ we discover:  “German Firms Hope for Billions in Iranian Contracts.”  War for oil my aching balls.  I’m proud to note that at least most of the comments to that last article as of right now (0948 local for me) seem to understand what’s going on, how deeply cynical it is, and what the actual stakes of this sell-out are.  “Germany is helping a state whose declared goal is the extermination of a neighbor,” is representative.  On the other hand, another commenter starts his gibbering with:  “At last we are freed from the shackles of the USA.”  Well of course, sacrificing a bunch of filthy Juden is a small price to pay to break free from the “shackles” of a country that protected your country ass for 45 years from those who would gladly have done to you what they did to your kinsmen across the Wall.  Because it’s all about you.  Of course.  Another commenter rejoices that now we’ve got Iran freed to go its way, as well as Cuba, and so all we need to do is free up Putin and all will be coming up roses.

Yeah, except for those whose death warrant has been typed up and is awaiting signature, everyone’s cool with what just happened.

[Update: 08 Apr 15]:  It’s hard to help observing that the people the most cool with the “deal” Dear Leader and Kerry allege that we got are just exactly those people who read their words, and stop the inquiry there.  If you listen to what the Iranians think they got, there emerges a picture that simply cannot be reconciled with the one being peddled by Dear Leader and his stooge.  As pointed out here, we have given them “an ayatollah three-fer. It gives them money. It gives them more time to develop nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. It also gives them diplomatic political cover to continue dithering[.]”

With Apologies to Dean Swift

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I offer my own modest proposal.

An 11-year-old Florida student shot a smart-phone video of a teacher bullying a fellow student, publicly and in the classroom.  This same teacher has a Facebook page on which she posts photographs taken in the classroom.  The school’s principal also runs a Facebook page for the school, again featuring in-classroom media.

The student shot and publicized the video, thereby getting the teacher fired — as the teacher deserved to be.  The school’s principal then suspended the student, citing an alleged violation of the teacher’s “expectation of privacy.”  In a classroom.  Full of students.  In connection with a raised-tone-of-voice, everyone-in-ordinary-earshot-can-hear exchange with a student.  A public school teacher, paid by the taxpayers’ money.  You can’t make this shit up.  The thug rocket-scientist school principal is named Traci Wilke.

Although the student’s suspension was lifted before the five days were up, you really have to ask why this transparently improper punishment was meted out to a student who did nothing more, it seems, than identify someone who needed to be weeded out from the rest of the teaching profession.  Actually, we don’t need to ask, not at all.  As the linked article describes it, this was neither more nor less than “an obvious attempt at intimidation.”  See, kiddoes?  You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.  Shut and keep your head down.  The NEA code of omerta strikes again.

It is gratifying to report that the student’s family has already hired a lawyer.  Part of any settlement agreement should requiring the principal to be fired and to execute a consent order agreeing never again to seek or accept any employment from any school or school system, at least in Florida and preferably nation-wide.  Someone whose sense of justice and propriety is so warped should never be entrusted with any group of people who by law are restricted in their ability to fight back.

But more to the point, how about this for a state-level fix?  A very simple statute:

“(a)  Except as expressly set forth in this section, all actions and omissions of any person holding any office or position, howsoever characterized, under the constitution or laws of this state, or of any political subdivision thereof, or of any agency or instrumentality thereof, in respect of all offices or positions so held by such person, shall be public matters of public import and concern.

(b)  Notwithstanding any provision of the law of this state or of the United States to the contrary, no person holding any office or position, howsoever characterized, under the constitution or laws of this State, or of any political subdivision thereof, or of any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall have or claim any expectation of privacy or other privacy interest, howsoever characterized, in respect of any matter arising from, relating to, or connected with such person’s holding of such office or position.  There shall be no cause of action under any theory whatsoever in favor of any such person for the otherwise lawful gathering, recording, storing, publication, or other dissemination of any information in respect of such person’s actions or omissions in respect of any office or position so held by such person.

(c)  The acceptance by any person holding any office or position under the constitution or laws of this State, or of any political subdivision thereof, or of any agency or instrumentality thereof, of any compensation, perquisite, or other benefit of such office or position, of any kind, character, or description whatsoever shall conclusively be deemed to constitute a waiver, for all purposes and to the fullest extent permitted by any applicable law, of any claim to or expectation of privacy in respect of such person’s actions or omissions in respect of such office or position and otherwise existing under any provision of the laws of this state or the United States.

(d)  The provisions of this section shall not supersede — 

      (i)  those provisions of the law of this state specifically exempting from public disclosure items of personal information generally exempted from disclosure pursuant to the provisions of ____________________; 

      (ii) the laws of this state in respect of defamation; or,

      (iii)  the laws of this state in respect of the permissible methods of visual or audible recording of the speech or actions of another person.”

Reference in the blank would be to the statutes containing that state’s public records disclosure statutes, and to the exemptions from them (in other words, just because you happen to be a state judge doesn’t mean your Social Security number ought to be disclosable).  On the other hand, I don’t see why that state judge should be able to claim an expectation of privacy as to any matter having anything to do with that judge’s execution of his office.

Note that “not having an expectation of privacy” is most emphatically not the same thing as “subject to public disclosure upon demand.”  A right of privacy is a right that is personal to you.  To use an example from private life:  I have no personal interest in the privacy of my communications with my clients.  Those communications are protected by the attorney-client privilege, but that’s a privilege that (a) belongs to the client, not me, and (b) can be waived by the person to whom it belongs.  Thus, our hypothetical state judge’s deliberations, either with his fellow judges (on a multi-judge tribunal), or his law clerk, or even a buddy of his who happens to be a judge elsewhere, may not be subject to forcible disclosure by some member of the general public.  But if a secretary (or law clerk, or just Joe Bloggs who happens to overhear the judge talking in a restaurant) hears the judge and his buddy sitting around a table discussing how best to screw a political enemy, or ruling a particular way in order to “send a message” to some person or group, and decides to record it, then by God that’s a public service for which the person recording should be commended (and the judge impeached and then disbarred, of course).  The judge himself should not be heard to allege that his “privacy” was invaded by someone catching him violating the trust of his office.  As Traci Wilke, whom I’ll just go ahead and declare to be the most fire-able principal in America as of this afternoon, has done.

Just my humble contribution to the good of the public.

[Update 31 Mar 15, 12:39 p.m.]:  In my discussions-in-chambers hypothetical, the judge’s not having a right of privacy in those matters is also not the same thing as public disclosure of them not being a firing offense, unless protected by a whistleblower statute or similar common law rule.  Again, it’s not the judge as an individual firing the discloser, but rather an agent of the state, and what is being punished is not some violation of the judge’s legitimate privacy interest, but rather a violation of a law to keep confidential matters that are in fact and (if otherwise lawful) ought to be exempt from public disclosure.  The long and short is that everything you do and say in your capacity as a public official belongs to your government and to the people who have constituted that government.  It does not belong to you and you have zero — absolutely bugger all — right to keep it under wraps to protect yourself.  Therefore no disclosure of it can injure you in your personal capacity.

One More Level of Unanswerable Questions

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At least part of me hopes the questions remain unanswerable.

One refers to the conclusions reached by the German and French investigators into the crash of the Germanwings Airbus flight from Barcelona to Germany.  It took off, headed briefly out over the Mediterranean, then turned north over the French Alps.  Almost immediately after it reached cruising altitude it nosed down and in a perfectly orderly fashion drove into a mountainside, killing all 150 or so people onboard.  There were no distress calls from the cockpit.

Slightly more than half the victims were German, among them a group of students from a small town in Nordrhein-Westfalen who had been on a student exchange visit.  There were fewer places available than students who wanted to go, and so they resolved the issue the old-fashioned way: by lottery.

So far they’ve found only the cockpit voice recorder.  They found the casing for the flight data recorder but the actual device itself remains missing.  If it got smacked about hard enough to break open the case I have to wonder whether the recording mechanism will have survived.

The families of the victims of course are consumed with why?  Why my child?  My husband?  My sister?  Why couldn’t they have taken the train to Barcelona?  Why was my grandchild on that flight and not one later in the day?  Those questions can never be answered.  In fact they’re pretty pointless when you think about it.  Your daughter was on that flight because she wanted to get from Spain to Germany in a hurry and there was a seat on that flight she could pay for.  Full stop.  Yes, that’s one of those things you know, in purely mental sense, but for someone who woke up this morning with an intact family and is now a widow with no surviving children, that’s not an answer.

And now we’ve got a whole litany of other, more sinister, unanswerable questions.  It appears that the co-pilot intentionally crashed the plane.  In a press conference the French crash investigators have shared the results of the voice analysis.  That they were able to do so as quickly is itself ominous, for reasons that will become clear.

After take-off, you can hear the pilot, a long-experienced aviator, and the co-pilot, much newer at the trade but well able to fly the plane, talking between themselves.  That takes up about twenty minutes.  Then the pilot excuses himself from the cockpit, apparently to use the toilet and, true to protocol, formally requests the co-pilot to take command of the ship.

Those are the last words recorded originating from within the cockpit.  There is nothing from the co-pilot, not even murmuring to himself.  You can hear the air traffic controllers attempting to contact the plane when they see it begin its controlled descent into the middle of a mountain chain.  There is no response from the co-pilot.  You can hear him breathing normally.  Apparently you can hear as the co-pilot commenced the controlled descent.  There is no sound of emergency indicators, except for — again — towards the end when the plane’s sensors trigger at the approach of ground.  There is no sound of anyone attempting to regain control of the plane.  After a brief time you can hear knocking on the (now locked from the inside) door to the cockpit, then banging.  Only towards the very end can you hear screams from back in the cabin, as the passengers awake to the fact of what’s about to happen.

According to the Lufthansa press conference, there is an emergency code to achieve access to the cockpit when the armored door is locked.  There is no reason to suppose that the pilot, outside and banging on the door, would not have entered that code.  The problem is that even that code can be over-ridden . . . from within the cockpit, but it requires an intentional pressing of a specific button to accomplish that.

According to Lufthansa, immediately after the crash they conducted an examination to see what, if any, associations might exist between the flight crew and known terrorist organizations or individuals.  According to them, all such inquiries came back negative.  It’s only been a couple of days, however, and one has to question whether such an investigation by an airline can be as complete as going back and tracking this fellow’s movements and communications for weeks.  Unfortunately in today’s world you simply cannot exclude the involvement of the Religion of Peace without pulling someone’s life to pieces and seeing where the clues lead.

Suffice it to say that, for the moment, the indications are a psychically disturbed individual.  Lufthansa has, as you would expect, a company-wide policy of mandatory reporting of unusual behaviors among co-workers.  See someone act like he may be wigging out and you report it.  That can’t be more than a very imperfect screen, though.  How many people have had a family member commit suicide or otherwise snap, and afterwards everyone sits around racking his recollection for something, anything, that might have seemed amiss . . . only to come up empty?

As it turns out, the 28-year-old interrupted his pilot’s training for a time.  He seems to have shared with a female friend that he did so for emotional reasons:  “burnout” and “depression” are explicitly mentioned.  Afterwards he picked back up and finished his training.  Lufthansa’s psychological testing of its prospective employees does not appear to have caught any anomalies, or recommended any further testing or probationary periods.  What this suggests to me at least is a reminder of how fundamentally impossible it is to get inside another person’s head and really know what’s moving around in there.  At least if he doesn’t want to let you in, and one of the characteristics of depression is a self-imposed isolation, shutting yourself in and everyone else out.

So now all the victims’ families get to add some more questions:  How did a crazy man survive the screening process to become a commercial pilot?  What did his co-workers see?  Why did he pick the flight my husband was on to decide finally to end it all?  Why couldn’t he have just jumped from the observation deck of headquarters, like a decent chap?  Why didn’t the pilot pee before they left?  How can you reach up and turn a knob 360 degrees (as apparently had to be done to commence the kind of descent observable here), knowing you’re killing 150 people who just want to get to Duisburg (correction 27 Mar 15) Düsseldorf?

[Update 27 Mar 15]:  Well, that didn’t take long.  Already there is at least one German blog that openly accuses the co-pilot of having converted to Islam during the six-month break he took in the middle of his pilot training.  I’m not linking to that site or to any translation of it, however, for three reasons, viz. (a) as easy an accusation as that is to make, and as viscerally attractive a conclusion in a world where the Religion of Peace seems to miss few chances to kill lots of innocent people, I want to see some proof of this alleged conversion before I accept it; (b) conversion is inconsistent with the story he apparently gave to a childhood friend at the time, that he was suffering from burn-out and depression; and, finally (c) when I tried myself to look at the German-language site, I got an Error 404 message.

Even more suggestive that we’re dealing with a crazy man (by the way, at least the German press is being honest enough to label him with the correct name:  “mass murderer”) is the fact that during the search of his apartment the police found (a) no suicide note and (b) no statement of religious confession;, but rather (c) a torn-up medical excuse from work, together with other evidence that Lubitz (the co-pilot) had been for some time in psychiatric treatment.  The medical excuse apparently covered a period inclusive of the day of the crash.  The airline was quick to point out that if he did not voluntarily submit it to his employer, the employer would have no way of knowing.  [I’ll observe that unless there is some exception that I’m unaware of, under HIPAA the same result would obtain for an American pilot.  Isn’t that comforting?]

In more encouraging news, at least for those who fly on American-flag carriers, the FAA has since September 11 followed a two-man rule in the cockpit.  No pilot is ever alone; if one needs to go unburden himself, one of the other flight crew comes in, the remaining (co-)pilot puts on his oxygen mask, the remaining two lock themselves in, and they jointly await the return.  In fact, pilots and co-pilots on US-flag carriers are not even permitted to eat the same in-flight meal, it seems, lest the inedible “chicken” or “beef” give both of them a fatal case of the colly-wobbles at the same time (and it’s good to see the FAA recognizing the safety implications of airline food; now if we could just get them to conclude that charging $4.00 for a 16-oz. bottle of Coke in the concourse junk food shop represents a hazard to aviation).

[Update: 30 Mar 15]:  Now it turns out that Lubitz had been mustering with the rubber spoon platoon for some time, before, in fact, he ever got his pilot’s license.  He was specifically diagnosed back then as being at risk for suicide, and was all the way up to the time of the crash in psychotherapeutic treatment (although apparently his most recent trick cyclists hadn’t noted any suicidal tendencies).  The Düsseldorf state’s attorney’s office has 100 people combing through physical and documentary evidence, interviewing people from his personal and professional circles of acquaintance.  So far they disclaim any provable motive.  Stay tuned, I suppose.

[Update: 01 Apr 15]:  Reports are now that Lubitz informed the aviation school (owned by Lufthansa) of his depressive episode in connection with re-admission to the course, from which he’d taken a six-month break.  Medical records were provided by him as well, it seems.  He claimed, however, that his condition had dissipated.  And of course, he passed whatever medical examination is required for a German pilot’s license.  His report of the episode appears to have been voluntary, by the way.

In further news, the crash site investigators have found a cell phone storage card containing video of the plane’s final seconds.  Although individual people are alleged not to be recognizable, it seems that the passengers were fully aware of what was happening and about to happen.  Screams of “My God!” in multiple languages are to be heard.

Now comes the battle of whether and under what circumstances to release the video.

On which last point I’ll observe that I have mixed feelings about the existence of this video and its contents becoming general knowledge.  However cold comfort it might be to think this about your family’s victim, in plane crashes up until now there was always the thought that, well, maybe the passengers didn’t know and so at least their final moments were not be spent in searing terror.

Where everyone is a videographer now, the existence of such evidence has to be reckoned with from here on out.  We who have not lost a friend or family member to something like this cannot truly think ourselves into the shoes of those who have, of course.  But if I were among those secondary victims, would I want to know that my beautiful teenage child, on whom I’d lavished so much affection over the years and in whom so much of my hopes for the future of my family and of the world in general were bound up, died in gut-wrenching, terrified certainty of his/her imminent violent death?  The mere suspicion that it played out that way would be bad enough, but up until now I could always tell myself that perhaps it was not so.  Perhaps she nodded off listening to her iPad and that’s how she died — with the music she loved best in her ears.  Did whoever shot this video do me any favors?

May God spare me from ever knowing the answer to that last question.