I don’t care who you are, this just ain’t right.  Some Chinese artist put this . . . representation on a ladder in Kassel, in Germany.  Presumably he was permitted to by the authorities, which I deduce that the place is irretrievably lost.  I didn’t see any mention of the reactions of the unfortunates in the building at whom this . . . representation is leering.

Um, are you planning on finishing that hoagy?

Which is to say, the outcome of last night’s “debate” really didn’t reveal much new about either candidate, did it?  At least not to anyone who’s actually been paying attention for any length of time.  The feller who is supposedly just the most gosh-darned brilliant person who’s ever so far debased himself as to condescend to accept the same office Washington and Lincoln held (though not quite so ineffably sublimely masterfully as the current feller has done) turns out to be an inarticulate, arrogant, sneering, stumble-bumpkin when he’s not reading some 30 year-old’s word from a Telepromptr.  And the other feller is someone who knows how to take a stack of data and tell you where your firm is going off the rails, and make a bunch of working-the-levers recommendations.  The one feller’s arguments rested a bit much for comfort on trotting out bogey-men (Trump! etc.); the other’s, on the I’m going to do X, Y, and Z.

Errmmmm, a bit of news for both of them:  Neither one “is going to do” a damned thing.  Either will at most to propose some things to Congress which, by the time it’s done larding it with pork, carving out exceptions for its pet constituents/donors, and pasting sympathetic children’s names all over the bills (e.g. “Little Patti’s Budget Reconciliation, Cosmic Justice, and Omnibus Prevention of Playground Bullying Act of 2013”), will if we’re lucky accomplish zero.  If we’re not lucky it will just make it all worse (cf. Dodd-Frank).  Well, there is a slight difference; if the one feller wins he just won’t bother with that silly ol’ outdated Congress thing anyway.  Flash of pen and another ream or seven of executive orders come down.  Mandatory birth control irrespective of religious belief?  That’ll seem tame in a second OPromptr term.

Much as it pains me to admit that any publicly touted slogan is actually correct, the “Character Counts” tag has it right.  No one, not these candidates, not any of the pundits, not any voter, not any illegal voter — no one knows precisely what challenges the winner is going to be confronted with over his term.  We can be fairly confident of some of them: a nuclear-armed Iran; a rising tide of Islamofascism; a bankrupt entitlement system; a tax code that is pretty good at punishing success but not so good at funding the government; an entrenched bureaucracy that is likely to do a good deal of whatever the hell it wants no matter what any particular president says (we should never forget how much of the damage done to the Bush 43 presidency was accomplished by leaked information from outfits like the CIA, information that was leaked precisely to undermine the president and his agenda).  But in truth no one really knows.  Remember when George W. Bush’s Big Legacy was going to be No Child Left Behind?  When we’d got out of the nation-building business?

And it’s there, in the area of character rather than competence, that neither candidate is without genuine cause for concern.  The incumbent is . . . well, he got his political start (as in his very first fundraiser) and his early mentoring from a fellow who in his youth “declared war” on the U.S. and who with his friends actually set bombs which actually blew up and actually wounded and killed people (including fortunately some of those friends).  This fellow — who happens to be one of OPromptr’s few Old Guard associates whom he’s never thrown under the bus — to this day remains sneeringly proud of what he and his buddies did, and has in fact since his protegé’s election said in so many words that (i) he doesn’t regret what they did, and (ii) in fact he rather thinks they should have done a great deal more of it.  This president is a fellow one of whose first actions in office was to travel abroad to slime his country in a part of the world in which that is one of the unforgivable sins.  All he bought himself was contempt, for himself and for us.  This is a feller who’s run an administration marked by truly extraordinary corruption: $535 million “loaned” to a company that was already going under, but was owned by a major campaign bundler, and the “loan” was subordinated to the owner’s equity; complete failure to investigate Jon Corzine, (still) a major campaign bundler who personally presided over what may be the single largest private theft in modern history; leaning on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (illegally, the statutes specifically prohibit such outside influences) to gut the pensions of the thousands of non-union employees of Delphi, while topping off the UAW pensions of ditto; and let’s not forget Operation Fast and Furious, in which the U.S. government, with approval at the highest levels, got into the illegal gun-running business into a neighboring country, without that country’s knowledge or consent.  And then we have the more purely political corruption: a senior advisor accepts $100,000 from a shady foreign power to make two — two! — speeches right before he takes office as such advisor; the president himself offers to sell out national interests for political gain, begging Putin, who still thinks of himself as a Chekist, to go easy on him until after the election, after which he’ll have “more flexibility” to give him what he wants; the administration deep-sixes an oil pipeline through areas already criss-crossed with such lines, and by curious coincidence one of his most prominent supporters just happens to own a railroad a large portion of whose business is hauling oil from one of the areas that would have been served by that pipeline; the administration defies court orders to process and issue off-shore drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico, while yet another billionaire supporter invests in the much deeper-water Petrobras field off the coast of South America.  And so on.  This may be just about the most personally corrupt administration since Harding’s.

On the other hand, the other fellow, while so far as is known a sterling fellow personally, shares some frames of reference that I don’t find wholly assuring.  He’s a manager.  That’s good.  It’s also not so good, because the management of a firm, or a collection of firms, or even a state of the union, is a task lesser by quantum orders of magnitude than somehow keeping an enterprise like the U.S. federal government out of the ditch.  Managers, at least those I’ve known, have a susceptibility of varying strength to see the world in terms of one-to-one (I know I’m over-simplifying here) correlations of Problem:Solution.  The smaller the enterprise, and the more limited the scope of its mission, the more valid that framework is.  General Motors can “solve” a problem with much greater comprehensiveness and predictability than, say, Massachusetts.  The latter can do so much more so than, say, the Department of Defense.  The DoD can do so more easily than the fellow hunkered down in that Oval Office trying to make sense of it all.

Managers, or rather people who think of themselves as managers, are highly exposed to the temptations of hubris.  It is so easy to lose sight of the fact that there are in fact no “solutions” but only trade-offs.  It is also easy to forget that what Hayek identified as the knowledge problem never goes away.  The more you attempt to accomplish the more information becomes necessary to make the best choice and avoid the worst.  The problem is that the more information you need the less likely you are to obtain a great enough proportion of it that you can avoid making a bloomer. 

A guy who owns a factory making, say, bass boats, is going to have to make decisions in the absence of complete information.  That’s part of life and certainly part of business.  But he’s going to come a great deal closer, a great deal more often, to achieving a sufficient level of knowledge relevant to his decisions than the CEO of Ford will (the Edsel was the most heavily consumer-researched vehicle in history on its introduction).  The guy owning the bass boat factory will have a much less difficult time predicting the outcome of his management decisions than his Ford counterpart, and both of them will have a cake-walk compared with some guy in the Oval Office.  People who think of themselves as “managers,” especially if they’re phenomenally talented, are much more exposed to overlooking what they don’t know, what they in fact can’t predict.

I will offer an illustration that is precisely on point.  OPromptr’s modest self-assessment notwithstanding, he’s probably nowhere near the brightest guy ever to win that office.  The strongest contender that I can think of for that honor was an internationally famous engineer, whose services were actively sought literally all over the planet.  He was the last president born in a log cabin, an orphan, and he’d become fabulously wealthy off his chosen occupation.  Working for the Red Cross he’d successfully coordinated the feeding of the entire civilian population of an occupied nation in the middle of combat operations, through a sea blockade and behind “enemy” lines, for years.  He’d been Secy of Commerce during a rapidly expanding economy.  He never met a problem he couldn’t solve.

His name was Herbert Hoover.  For a decent overview of how he did in responding to the 1929 crash, and just how badly out of his depth he was (and never seemed to realize, more than a little like OPromptr), I highly recommend Amity Schlaes’s The Forgotten Man.  It’s an economic history of the Great Depression, from its roots in the late Coolidge administration, through Hoover’s bumbling, to Roosevelt’s disastrously driving the stake ever deeper.  Executive summary of thesis:  The 1929 crash was a much over-due market correction, which produced a recession.  Hoover’s fumbled response morphed a recession into a depression, and Roosevelt’s socialistic and ham-fisted mismanagement and machinations turned a depression into the Great Depression.  She does a particularly good job at explaining the depression-within-a-depression of 1937, a point that lefties like Krugman never quite seem to get around to explaining away.

So my worry with OPromptr is that I have no confidence at all where his loyalties lie, and so far as is known there is no level of political or personal corruption in his associates and his political allies which he will not cheerfully endorse, subject only to the requirement of keeping the dollars flowing.  My worry with Romney is that he’ll turn out to be another Hoover.

No amount of “debate” is going to change either of these leopards’ spots, and one of the is going to be the next president.

Why yes, thank you; I would like another drink.

. . . I swear I didn’t see an advance copy of this post, about the “culture of cheating” at Stuyvesant High School before I put up that last post.  I ran across this post on plagiarism at Amherst this morning, and had thought about doing yet another update to add the link, but seeing two such posts on the same day seemed to suggest it might merit its own post, in a lions-and-tigers-and-bears-oh-my sort of way. Hence:

Let’s be honest about what we’re talking about here.  Pretty much every last one of the students at Stuyvesant would be a legitimate contender for valedictorian at almost any other high school in the country.  You don’t just get randomly zoned for Stuyvesant.  It’s one of those things on your high school transcript that admissions officials at every half-way decent college in the western world will recognize.  No kidding; I’d wager that a graduate could apply to Balliol and whoever it is who decides such things would know what Stuyvesant means on that applicant’s grade sheet.

So when cheating is simply viewed as a fact of life by such a large proportion of the students, that’s a problem.  These are the kids who oughtn’t need to cheat, or feel the need to cheat.  They’re the kids who are supposedly bright enough to understand on a moral plane why cheating is wrong, why it is corrosive to the very system that they are relying on to give them that leg up.  They’re supposed to understand on some level that if word gets around that cheating is how it’s done at Stuyvesant, suddenly that magical name to obtain the lustre of which they and/or their parents have sacrified so much in terms of time, money, and energy . . . becomes nothing more valuable than a high school diploma from P.S. Whatever-the-Hell.

Apparently they’re not.  Or rather, they’ve illustrated once more, for even the slow-witted out there, that “education” and morality are entirely severable concepts.  I mean, if “education” were enough in itself to guarantee a world of amity, progress, civility, and elevation, then we’d never have had a Nazi Germany.  The national socialists would never have been voted into power by the people who were at the time probably the most over-educated, over-cultured crew on the planet.

But in truth the rot evidenced by this article goes even deeper.  One of the reasons, the many reasons, why the Soviet Union fell apart was the universality of “tukhta,” sometimes spelled “tufta.”  Navy veterans will recognize it as the systematized practice of “gun-decking.”  Solzhentisyn, Shalamov, Dolgun, and Bardach, and the others cited in those men’s books, all contain descriptions of the practice, or illustrations of it, or recount themselves grasping at it to “fulfill the norm” and so avoid starvation and death (it’s not a coincidence, surely, that almost all the survivors’ memoirs are written by prisoners who managed to spend large portions of their sentences in the camps working in the medical wards). 

Under tukhta as practiced, a work gang was supposed to produce so-and-so-many cubic meters of timber per day, or however many cubic meters of ore at the pithead, or X-hundred bricks, or whatever else.  The daily norm was set by a person known as the “norm setter” and a norm setter was the difference between life and death.  They usually opted for hopelessly optimistic norms, which meant the prisoners had no realistic way to fulfill them, which under the system introduced into the camps by Naftaly Frenkel produced a concomitant reduction in caloric intake for the work crew falling short.  So what to do?  One stole from other work crews (especially the Article 58s); one bribed the tally-man (shades of the Banana Boat Song); one just falsified the documents.  And so one’s own crew was credited with a fulfilled norm or even better, an over-fulfilled norm which meant “Stakhanovite rations” for the fortunates.  As for the crews whose output got stolen?  In the language of Gulag, “You die today; I’ll die tomorrow.”  But wait, what happens when the timber, several thousand cubic meters short, is sent downstream to the mill and they’ve got papers showing all that timber that’s simply not floating out in the river?  Answer:  More tukhta.  And when it comes time to load it onto freight cars or barges?  The same.  And on and on and on.  A huge proportion of the Soviet population learned to survive on tukhta.  It wasn’t that they perceived it as a response to a “system intended to grind them down,” as the poor little students at Stuyvesant complain.  Successfully practicing tukhta was in the most literal way imaginable the difference between surviving your “tenner” or your “quarter,” or ending up as a corpse forever frozen in the permafrost of the Kolyma basin, or in some clearing in the taiga.

What tukhta meant was that in the Soviet Union, you couldn’t trust anything or anyone, beyond what you actually could see with your own eyes and touch with your own hands.  At all.  If I contract for so-and-so many tons of sand suitable for mixing the cement on my project site, how can I be sure my vendor does not deliver me something that is 30% cinders, ground glass, or something else?  How do I know that my foreman has not been paid to turn a blind eye as the defective material is mixed up into something I think is “cement” but is really just holding the concrete blocks apart . . . for the moment.  Come to think of it, how do I know the building I live in was not built to such “specifications”? 

There’s a telling scene in MiG Pilot, the story of Lt. Belenko, who flew his MiG-25 to Japan in the 1970s.  He was quite literally a poster boy for the Soviet Air Force, one of their elite.  Had he stayed in and not fallen afoul of some political trap, he likely would have worn multiple stars. There’s a description of the apartment assigned to him.  Neither the building nor his apartment would have passed electrical or plumbing codes in any western country, in any jurisdiction.  Its masonry would never have been accepted by any sober architect and engineer.  And that’s what they had available for the cream of their crop.

The Soviet Union literally fell apart, physically and politically.  Think about it:  A sovereign nation, without a single foreign troop on its soil, possessed of the world’s second most-powerful military apparatus, and with hordes of sympathizers in the opposing camp, hangs it up, shuts out the lights, and goes home because the train just won’t move any more.  A huge, an enormous part of the explanation lies in the practice and internalization of tukhta by the general population.

Within the past several months it has come to light that LIBOR, one of the world’s most-frequently relied upon benchmark interest rates, has been thoroughly cooked for years now.  In fact, it turns out that our current Treasury Secretary (you may know him as TurboTax Tim), when he was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, knew that LIBOR was being gamed, and said nothing about it.  Nothing.

China’s economy is showing signs of unravelling.  Over at Zero Hedge they’s got a disturbing post on the phenomenon of phantom collateral for massive bank loans.  Either the stuff just doesn’t exist, or the would-be secured creditor discovers that its collateral has been hypothecated eleven times already.  Those loans are now bad loans.

And all of this, every damned bit of it, is nothing more than adults spinning out the same dynamics we see going on at and discussed in reference to Stuyvesant High School.  As a final bit of encouragement, may I add that these children, for whom cheating is simply a tool in the box to be deployed or not according to whatever calculus they find expedient, are among the ones who one day will occupy positions that will affect each and every one of us others?  At some point will the rest of us become like the dog in the fable, that watched as its fellows gobbled up his master’s meat and finally decided that if the meat was gone in any event he might as well get his?

So seems to be the conclusions suggested by the charts produced by the Cato Institute here. 

I find these charts tantalizing on several levels.  One thing I’d like to know is whether the SAT scores were normed to account for the test having been (famously) dumbed down some years ago.  If they have not been, would the trend lines be even as level as they are?  Would they not much more likely have a downward lurch to them?  I of course took the “old” test more years ago than I care to admit any more, but from what little I’ve seen, heard, and read of the “new” test, the raw scores are not equivalent.

Secondly, ought “scores” to be rising at all?  I mean, you can only teach a given person so much in the setting of a classroom, and the fact that you might be able to get Little Johnny over the hump if you exposed him to the full force of one-on-one or tiny group tutoring really doesn’t tell you a whole lot about what you can reasonably expect from him in a classroom, from a teacher with a room full of other kids also to attend to.  The SAT scores are also way too much subject to being gamed.  Back when I took the test, if you wanted a prep course and you didn’t live in a larger city, you were pretty much out of luck.  Nowadays, when an SAT prep course is only a few clicks away on the internet, and huge amounts of money and energy are spent reading the tests’ tea leaves, to say that SAT scores are flat may only be telling us that we’ve run up against the upper limit on what can be done with gamesmanship.  Subject to the self-selection bias noted in the article, every test cohort will have a statistical distribution of ability, and that distribution will be reflected in the test scores.

The national whatever-it-is scores are the ones which suggest the more important questions.  Why are the scores largely flat?  Are the scores flat because the complexity of the test has been adjusted upward?  Is this national level of aggregation even useful?  How about breaking the scores down by some of other benchmarks: class size, median teacher salary (expressed relative to local median income), school size, gross population of local school district, local median income as a proportion of national median income, number of post-bachelor’s hours of course work per teacher, percentage of classroom teachers as proportion of total school system non-maintenance employment, amount of school funds spent on marquee sports (football, baseball, softball, basketball, soccer) as proportion of overall school system spending?

I’d also like to figure out a way to put a reliable metric on some of the intangibles, like average minutes per week spent learning about global warming, or “diversity,” or “inclusiveness,” or “community service.”  It seems to this lay person that with all the other nonsense that teachers are being required to teach these days, instead of their field — I mean, what the hell does “diversity” have to do with chemistry?  Either a student can calculate the amount of heat that will be released in a particular reaction or he can’t.  Might it not bear investigating?  Subject/verb agreement is not inclusive or exclusive, and in any event the solution of an integral function has zero to do with whether this year’s arctic ice cap is changing faster or slower than the antarctic ice cap.  Picking up litter, or scrubbing graffiti out of housing project stairwells, or raking some little old lady’s front yard are all laudable tasks, but how do they teach a student to distinguish between correlation and causation?

What these charts do convey, however, is the negative conclusion that net marginal return on additional gross spending per pupil is a number soberingly close to zero.  Reasonable minds can and will differ as to why the two trend lines diverge so dramatically, but what we can’t dispute is that shovelling additional dollars willy-nilly into the system is simply not moving measurable outcomes.

On a related note, these charts do jibe with the results of a study that was done in Germany some years ago (saw a report of it in the FAZ, but didn’t print it off).  What they found was that all the traditional nostrums, all the way from per-pupil spending to teacher salary to class size had no measurable effect on student outcomes.  What they did end up recommending was delaying the triage of the German education system for a year or two, and keep all three strata of students together longer.

I don’t care who you are; this is funny. 

Happy Birthday Jerry Clower, wherever you are, born on this date in 1926.

Other than the fact that he’s side-splitting funny, one of the more impressive things about Jerry was he never used a four-letter word.  You can play Jerry Clower for your youngest children and never have to worry about what they’re going to hear.  And they’ll learn a thing or several about their native language.

Among his classic lines (too many to count) are the famous, “Well shoot up here ‘mongst us.  One of us has got to have some relief!”

A repeated theme in Clower’s work (and I think it does deserve to be considered as a body of work, every bit as much as that of some Hollywood buffoon) is the puncturing of conceit and pretense.  He tells the story of some television show that was filming at one of the grand Southern estates.  One of the fruity little Hollywood types makes the mistake of effusing over the flower beds, and says to the tiny little ancient black woman, on the staff there and to whom he addresses himself, that it looks as if “some fairy had waved a magic wand over this place” to produce all those wonderful flowers etc. etc. etc.  The woman says in fact it was even so, “an’ it had a hoe on the end of it!”  Or the time it come twelve inches or so of rain in 24 hours and they had them a flood.  All the hot-snot McMansion dwellers (although Clower was spared having to see those sprout all over the face of his beloved land) were just outraged that their houses had flooded!!  Floods, you see, are for poor people, people who live down by the levee, or in bottom land, or beside drainage ditches.  Sure enough the television talking heads were out in force, shoving microphones in the outraged faces of the Poor Victims and inquiring what had “Caused the Flood.”  Well, the Corps (or as Dear Leader would presumably say it, the “corpse”) of Engineers caused it with their dam; or the sport fishermen who wouldn’t let them lower the water enough; or all those greedy corporations.  Etc., in other words.  And then they made the mistake of asking some well-dressed boy standing by, not realizing that he was NOKD (Not Our Kind, Dear).  What caused the flood?  “I’ll tell what caused this flood:  Twelve inches of rain in 24 hours caused this flood an’ if we ever get that kinda rain again, we gon’ have us another flood.”

We need more Jerry Clowers in this ol’ world.  One wasn’t enough.

A better banana slicer!  But of course.  The reviews are worth the visit.  Not quite as hilarious as the ones for the hair remover cream which counsels not to apply to . . . errrrrmmmmm . . . sensitive areas (why is it that men in particular seem not to be able to follow that instruction?).

26 September 1902: Levi Strauss dies. What would American style be like without blue jeans? In fact, with the arguable exception of rock ‘n’ roll and Coca-Cola, Levi’s are the archetypal American exercise in cultural imperialism.

25 September 1396. At Nicopolis, now in Bulgaria, beside the Danube, a mostly-French army, including many of what can without blushing be described as the flower of high chivalry, is annihilated by the Turkish Sultan.  Barbara Tuchman’s excellent A Distant Mirror (still a standard history of the 14th Century almost 35 years after publication) closes with the battle and its aftermath.

The crusaders had put together what a later generation of English generals would, with equally high hopes and coupled with equally dismal results, term a “Big Push.” In the host are the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund (one of the last non-Habsburgs for several centuries, by the way), the Admiral of France, and dozens upon dozens of others. Some of them, such as the Comte d’Eu, were striplings who thought no more of the Turks than of the peasants back home and didn’t see why they shouldn’t be butchered with similar ease. Others, such as Enguerrand de Coucy VII, were senior statesmen who had under their belts more campaigns in the field and in the cabinet than they had hot meals on that last disastrous outing, and knew better. 

They were headed down-river to relieve the pressure on Constantinople, which their compatriots and fellow-Christians from all over Europe had managed, during the course of decades of intrigue, double-dealing, and steel hearts beating beneath stone heads so to undermine that little was left of the once-mighty Eastern Empire than the areas immediately surrounding the city, together with the odd colony or island fortress here and there. 

As if to emphasize how little they had learned since 1346 and the fiasco of Crecy, the French insisted on fighting as they had fought – and been beaten repeatedly by – the English. The French knights were to lead the field in a headlong display of what that same later generation of French generals were to call cran – guts. The Turks play them like a fiddle. Send out the hordes of lightly-armed conscripts to draw the crusaders out of their formations. Fall back in apparent (and some real) disorder, but in so doing draw the enemy into ever-deepening disorder, until over-topping a hill they see before them the might of Islam, unbloodied, in good order, and looking to do little more than wet their blades with infidel gore. 

And so it came to pass. The survivors were herded together and then, in retaliation for a similar act perpetrated on Turkish captives just before the battle, all but the most valuable hostages were slaughtered, one at a time, in the presence of the Sultan. The killing went on for hours. Then the pitiful remnant of European manhood was marched off into captivity from which many never returned, and those who did were greatly impoverished if not forever ruined. Nineteen years later at Agincourt the remnants of French knighthood were defeated by Henry V, and his son recognized as heir to the French throne. Would Agincourt have played out as it did, had France had on that field the men whose blood soaked the earth before the Sultan’s gaze? 

Nicopolis ended Christianity’s last large-scale organized effort to roll back the Ottoman tide lapping at Constantinople’s bastions. When the end came in 1453 there wasn’t much anyone outside could do any more. Another century of largely maritime war culminated in the two Christian victories of Malta (1565) and Lepanto (1571), and turned back the Turk from complete dominance of the Mediterranean basin. On land, Nicopolis ensured that further action would be fought on Christian territory, on the defensive, and with the intangible but very real disadvantage of facing an enemy that just didn’t do defeat in any lasting sense. Mohacs (1526), which saw Hungary thrown beneath the Turkish boot for 200-odd years, and the sieges of Vienna (1529 and 1683 respectively, both unsuccessful) were perhaps not “results” of Nicopolis in a strictly military sense, but Islam triumphant in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, in some cases for centuries to come, very much was. 

One of the magnificent features of European architecture is at least in part an echo of the aftermath of Nicopolis. The Turkish victory there ensured that Vienna remained an outpost city, that its role as fortress continued to transcend the mere protection of its inhabitants from the occasional rampaging army. It was, in the two sieges mentioned above, the point at which the Islamic tide from the east was turned back from Europe. The Imperial re-conquest of Hungary took until well into the 18^th Century, ensuring that (i) Vienna’s role as a strategic fortress lasted well beyond the point at which such fortifications had lost much of their significance elsewhere (witness: a large number of Marlborough’s battles against Louis XIV in the 1600s and early 1700s involved formal sieges of fortresses; not many of Frederick the Great’s battles from the 1740s to the 1760s did), and (ii) the Empire was even more thoroughly bankrupt by the end of the Napoleonic wars than the other European powers, who were by any measure poor as Job’s turkey after 25 years of nearly constant war following (in reverse order) the Seven Years’ War, the War of the Austrian Succession, the War of the Spanish Succession, and Louis XIV’s continued attempts at continental hegemony. 

So that by the 1850s, when Austria under its youthful emperor Franz Joseph finally had the wherewithal and the security to abandon its ramparts, they were able to do it up right. The demolition of the Viennese fortifications created the Ringstrasse, a parade of self-celebratory architecture the concentration of which is seldom achieved elsewhere. If the imperial residence in the old town, the Hofburg, really is a “Burg” – a fortress in itself – the Ringstrasse is a girdle of hey-look-at-me-now! imperial magnificence. 

Seven years before Nicopolis there had already been one very disastrous defeat for a Christian people, and which the defeat of the mightiest army Christianity could field at Nicopolis pretty much assured would not be undone any time soon: the Battle of Kosovo, on the Field of Crows, on June 28, 1389 (although it might also have been on June 15 under the then-prevailing calendar, or June 23). The Serbian nation was cast beneath the Ottoman harrow for centuries. Whatever the date of the actual slaughter, June 28 became their national day. It became the day on which every Serbian worthy of the name burned with resentment at centuries of foreign rule, of far-distant alien emperors disposing of the lives and fortunes of the Balkan Slavs. It became a day on which great deeds were to be done, blows to be struck for South Slav freedom (in part to slaughter the non-Slavic populations of the region, to be sure, as we’ve seen in recent years). June 28 became perhaps the least-well advised day for the heir to such a foreign dynasty to insult the memory of Kosovo by parading in high state through the streets of a town called Sarajevo just across the border, during the blazing sunshine of mid-summer in the year that has become its own metaphor: 1914.

There’s a neat site out there, Quick Meme, www.quickmeme.com, which allows folks to throw a picture up and have a caption contest. Some of their stuff is truly hilarious. Some of the pictures, however, are of, shall we say? current events.

Like the picture of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies hustling Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a.k.a. Sam Bacile, an American citizen into a squad car, shortly after midnight, for a “voluntary” ride downtown to talk with them about . . . a potential violation of his probation agreement on a bank-fraud case from two years ago. Folks, from some pretty up-close experience I can tell you that bank fraud just doesn’t put that big a blip on prosecutors’ radar screens. Not sexy enough; not enough good ink. And in no event worthy of a media-saturated midnight visit to a probationer’s house. 

For starts, with the possible exception of a fire-bombing down at the local tax collectors’ office, in a bank fraud case you’ve got perhaps the single least attractive victim imaginable (OK, Jeff Dahmer comes close). Secondly bank fraud can be stupendously difficult to prove. The ways are nearly infinite for a determined operator, especially an insider, to fleece a bank, and in the back of a prosecutor’s mind has always to be the question, “How’m I going to get the jury to see this?” Juries understand drug lords putting hits out on people. Juries understand torching one’s house for the insurance money. Juries understand a pervert who can’t keep his hands off the kiddies. But getting the jury to see a bad bank officer, a pliable appraiser, and a third party who feeds “purchasers” into the bank to buy properties at inflated prices, the mark-up to be shared around, and the purchasers assured that they can walk away from it all in bankruptcy . . . well, that’s hard to stay awake for, in the jury box. 

Which is to say that, even assuming your probation officer had office hours at 1:00 a.m., which he doesn’t, and assuming the prosecutor who took the scalp in the first place normally schedules interviews at that hour, which he doesn’t, making a movie is simply not the sort of thing you drag your con downtown to talk over in the dead of night. 

But that’s what we were told by the administration. You see, we’re asked to accept at face value that a citizen just “voluntarily” decides he’d really like to go for a midnight ride to chat about whether a particular exercise of his First Amendment rights – however tastelessly he might have done so – did or did not violate a plea agreement. Because that same administration was peddling, peddled for a week or so, in fact, the story that an attack on our consulate by a thoroughly armed mob, consummated by our ambassador’s murder and that of three other Americans, was nothing more than film criticism gone overboard. Peddled that story in the face of all the facts they had, some of which they had before the attack, peddled it in the face of the locals’ telling them that it was organized. In other words, at the time the administration leaned on the local law enforcement to drag in this citizen to rake him over the coals, it knew that its attempt to tar this man and his collaborators with the murder of a United States Ambassador was a vicious lie. 

Well, as they’d no doubt say – no doubt have said among themselves – it wasn’t really vicious. In fact, it wasn’t even personal. It was just spin. As was perceived by a participant on Quick Meme: 

When I saw that caption I was just naturally reminded of the cultural icon which popularized the expression “just business” in the American language, and I was fairly confident I could find an appropriate clip of it from YouTube. And sure enough, I was right:

I’m sure that Nakoula must be comforted to know it was nothing personal, just business, and that Dear Leader really liked him, all this time. They’re both African Christians, after all. Right?

From 1796, George Washington speaks to us today, through his Farewell Address (actually never spoken but rather printed), published 19 September of that year.  Easily available on-line, I finally read the whole thing in preparing to write this post.  It’s got some interesting things in it, some of which one would expect, but others of which were to me at least nothing less than astounding.

His first encomium and admonition were his comments about the blessings and indispensability of union to secure the new country’s independence and its people’s liberty, and the corresponding evils of sectionalism, party, and internal foreign influence.  But reading through his comments, and bearing in mind he was the chairman of the Constitutional Convention, this is what stuck out:  In multiple places Washington counsels against the pernicious seduction of disunion as being inimical to liberty.  The citizen is repeatedly warned to have no truck with those who would whisper in his ear that his region or his state would be better off alone.  Disunion is presented as the harbinger and handmaiden of liberty’s destruction.  But in no place at all does Washington say anything along the lines of, “And besides you can’t leave the union in any event.  Our union is indissoluble, eternal, and final; we’re all stuck here together, forever.”  Washington doesn’t come out and say that secession is permissible, but the whole bit about resisting the temptations of dissolution makes little sense unless you assume that it is possible in the first place.  I found that omission extremely curious, given how much space he devotes to advocating against disunion.  In point of fact he leaves it in the air.  Intentionally?  Who can tell, at this remove?  But recall how bitter were the debates over ratification.  Maybe there were questions that people sort of agreed weren’t to be asked or answered just yet.

All of which goes to demonstrate two things: (i) The Supreme Court is not in fact the highest arbiter of the Constitution’s meaning; there is another tribunal, and thank God we’ve only had to litigate there once.  It took us four years to try the issue, cost us millions upon millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dead, even more wounded and maimed, and like many actions left a lot of side issues unresolved.  But we did settle the fundamental nature of the union.  (ii)  The most important outcome of that trial was not slavery’s destruction, but the preservation of the Union.  If the issue had gone the other way then the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments would have been dead letters from Day One.  Whatever was left of the country could have enacted any damned law it pleased and it wouldn’t have made a difference to those in bondage.  Washington was right: Only in union is liberty achievable.

Interesting as well are Washington’s warnings about piling up debt except in dire national emergency, and the need to pay it off ASAP so that we do not put off on our descendants the burdens we should have borne ourselves.  Even though the address has been read aloud annually in Congress, beginning in the 1860s and continuing (at least in the Senate) up until now, it doesn’t appear that many of the members of either house have been paying too much attention to that part, certainly not for the last 80 or so years.  I mean, it’s been over three years since we’ve even had a federal budget.

Nor does the judicial branch come off well from a close reading of the address.  Washington observes that the Constitution contains within it a specific mechanism for its own amendment, and that recourse should be had to that mechanism very sparingly, and only after lengthy deliberation. 

“Towards the preservation of your government, and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite, not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts. * * *  If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield.”

The fundament of our liberty is not something to be tinkered with based upon the cogitations of the moment (what he would have done with the Supreme Court’s “evolving standards of decency,” “emanations,” and “penumbras” makes for amusing thinking), because speculative opinion is almost sure to be incorrect.  As have proven to be large amounts of the court’s ruminations and announcing their own prejudices as the law of the land.  For “usurpations” read “living document,” “substantive due process,” and similar expressions.

And of course the most devastating comparisons just naturally arise when you read Washington’s evaluation of his own qualifications for the office and character of service in it, and compare them with the un-self-conscious self-evaluation of the office’s present occupant.  To wit:

“The impressions with which I first undertook the arduous trust were explained on the proper occasion. In the discharge of this trust, I will only say that I have, with good intentions, contributed towards the organization and administration of the government the best exertions of which a very fallible judgment was capable. Not unconscious in the outset of the inferiority of my qualifications, experience in my own eyes, perhaps still more in the eyes of others, has strengthened the motives to diffidence of myself[.]  * * *  Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.”

The above was written by a man who had commanded troops in the wilderness (what’s not widely known is that the first shots of what became the Seven Years War were fired by American militiamen under Washington’s command in the wilds of trans-Appalachia against French troops), who’d been a surveyor, a planter, the field commander of the entire American war effort (at a time when there was no such thing as a $600 hammer), who’d chaired the Constitutional Convention, and who then had supervised the building of the first United States government.  The present feller has never held a real job in his life that anyone knows of, and to all appearances has got where he has through indulgences (academic records, anyone?) and lies [Either he was lying that he was born in Kenya in order to get into college and get himself published favorably, or he’s been lying to the American people that he was born in Hawaii; he’s made both statements repeatedly and publicly, and both cannot be correct.].  Before he was even elected, he modestly announced that his mere nomination was sufficient to cause the world’s oceans to recede and the planet itself to cool.  Under his superintendence the unemployment rate has remained above 8% for more months (consecutive, as it happens) than under his eleven predecessors combined.

What is also interesting, and in no small measure distressing to contemplate in light of where we have come to and the terms of our public debates, are Washington’s comments about the roles of public virtue and religion in the maintenance of a free and republican government:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

“It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”

Go back and read what he has to say about oaths in court.  I remember a conversation I had in roughly 1998 or so.  This was shortly after Clinton had admitted to lying under oath about a certain blue dress.  We were assured by everyone from the NYT to NOW that it really didn’t matter that he was a confessed perjurer, because well, you know, those questions just weren’t really anyone’s business, and what does “is” mean after all and shut up.  I pointed out that once you abandon the notion that the oath a witness takes actually means he will tell the truth, then you may as well hang it up, because there is nothing at that point to separate you from the mess then prevailing in the former Soviet Union.  My interlocutor just wasn’t having it.  It didn’t matter; it was a side issue because it wasn’t any of our business and besides shut up.  And now we have the spectacle of the U.S. Attorney General lying to Congress about when he was briefed on an illegal gun-smuggling operation being run from the highest levels of the Dept. of Justice.  I’m just going to come right out and state that there is a straight line between those two data points.

In any event, Washington’s Farewell Address is a document that bears re-reading, frequently.