Maybe I Need to Re-Think my Position

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A couple of years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court over-turned a death sentence.  If my memory is correct (and I can’t say with certainty that it is, because I don’t follow such things very closely and in any event I’ve slept since then), the perp had committed a murder for which he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.  Given how hard it is to be sentenced to death, it must have been a genuinely horrible crime.  Here was the kicker:  He had been a minor when he committed the crime.  He was tried as an adult.  As I recall, the court had no problem with the decision to try him as an adult, or with the conviction itself.  But it reversed the imposition of the death penalty on (and you’re really taxing my feeble mind now) 8th Amendment grounds, or maybe it was 14th Amendment grounds.  Whatever.  There was a good deal of outrage at the time because the majority opinion specifically rested not so much on American principles of justice and notions of constitutionally permissible state action, but on supposedly international notions of “justice” and what the rest of the world allegedly might think about it.

Back in the 1950s, Chief Justice Earl Warren — a fathead by any reasonable standard — claimed for the court the status of seers, and further effectively ruled that the court’s fevered imaginings had the force of constitutional law.  In Trop v. Dulles, 78 S.Ct. 590, an army private who deserted his unit, in wartime, had been court-martialed and convicted and had been, as prescribed by Act of Congress then in force, deprived of his U.S. citizenship, applied for a passport, which was denied on the basis that he was not a U.S. citizen.  He alleged that denationalization was a “cruel and unusual punishment” proscribed by the 8th Amendment.  Warren agreed.  “The Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”  No.  Seriously.  This kind of claptrap passes for constitutional jurisprudence in some quarters.

So it is now with reference to some mystic chords of memory (to borrow one from Lincoln’s First Inaugural) running from the Supreme Court, not to whoever the hell it is in the American polity who determines what is “decency” and how its “standards” “evolve” over time and in which direction (remember that’s very much a two-way street; there was once a time in Germany when trucking millions off to be summarily executed by reason of where they went to church would have been stoutly rejected), but rather to those folks’ international counterparts that we are to derive the extent of our constitution’s mandates and proscriptions.  Color me chauvinistic, but I’m just not sure that’s a real sound idea.  I mean, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, in large areas of the world it’s considered well within the boundaries not only of “decency” but “honor” as well to slit your teenage daughter’s throat because you disapprove of her boyfriend.  In India these days it sure seems to be within standards of public decency to gang-rape not only the local women but tourists as well.  I defy those black-dressed boobs on that bench to articulate for me a morally defensible, logically delimited algorithm for deciding just which standards of international “decency” and notions of “justice” should be engrafted onto a constitutional system that’s done just fine without them for over 200 years, and which we ought to leave be.

On the other hand . . . .  There generally is an other hand, isn’t there?

From 2010 to early 2012, the president of Germany was a chap named Christian Wulff.  He resigned in February of that year in the face of criminal charges of corruption stemming from his days in the government of Niedersaschsen (Lower Saxony).  Without boring Gentle Reader with details, it was a long, drawn-out affair only slightly less salacious than the investigation and impeachment proceedings against Clinton.  They actually took Wulff all the way to trial, earlier this year.  He was acquitted by a jury.

Now a formal request has been made to initiate criminal and disciplinary proceedings against the prosecutors.  The accusations fall into two groups.  The first relates to the relentless pursuit of Wulff himself, with numerous examinations of witnesses, searches, and ever-new, and uniformly irrelevant, avenues of inquiry opening up and being pursued doggedly to their dead-ends.  A large amount of what the prosecutors dredged, plowed, and (see below) leaked, it is alleged, really had nothing at all to do with what Wulff was accused of having done.  Here in America we would call that malicious prosecution, or abuse of process, or most colloquially, “Easter-egging” or “witch hunt.”  The purpose of this ever-expanding dragnet was, according to this accuser, not the illumination of public corruption but the keeping alive of the investigation for its own (political) sake.

The second group of accusations relate to the usual leaking of sensitive personal information, none of it germane to whether Wulff was or was not guilty of public corruption, but the intent and effect of which was personal and political embarrassment.

In short, the German prosecutors are accused of what American prosecutors routinely do.  Only this time, if the justice minister of Lower Saxony bites, the hunter may become the hunted.

Absolute immunity for prosecutorial abuse is a purely judge-made doctrine (did we mention how many judges are former prosecutors?).  It has no foundation in statute or constitutional law.  It has no basis in simple logic.  The dynamics of over-indictment, succinctly described in The Blogfather’s wonderful and highly readable article “Ham Sandwich Nation,” 113 Colum. L. Rev. 102 (2013), is just the tip of the iceberg.  The distressing fact is that a prosecutor who decides to ruin someone’s life either for personal or political reasons is nearly impossible to bring to book.  For every Michael Nifong (he of the Duke lacrosse-rape abomination) there are scores if not hundreds of prosecutors who use highly politicized and publicized prosecutions as nothing more than rungs on their ladders of advancement.  It is all too easy to end up bankrupt, unemployable, one’s family ruined, and generally a social pariah without even getting to a trial, much less being convicted, and with no recourse at all against the person for whom you were nothing more than a canvas on which to paint his “tough on crime” slogan.

Lest one think that this sort of thing just does not happen, I refer Gentle Reader to the story of what FDR’s Internal Revenue Service did to Andrew Mellon, who had been Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury.  The whole sordid story is told in Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man, which I’ve already linked to a number of times, but which deserves to be read very carefully.

So it will be interesting to see whether these prosecutors in Germany have to answer, personally, for their misbehavior.  If so, then perhaps this precedent will be useful in arguing for some of them evolving international standards of decency to be imported into American law.

Don’t Mention the War

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That used to be what Americans and Britons were advised in post-1950s Germany.  Especially the decades during which one was likely to meet, socially or professionally, or just out and about, Germans of a certain age who, as Paul Fussell observed while teaching at Heidelberg for a year, were strangely silent about just what they’d been doing from . . . oh, say . . . 1938-45.

As that generation dies out [n.B.  What might turn out to be one of the last Nazi war criminals — a former guard at Auschwitz and Buchenwald — has been arrested in Philadelphia and is being deported back to Germany to stand trial.] it appears that there are still things you cannot mention in Germany.

Things like where immigrant criminals come from.  From the FAZ we have this report.  A woman “from an immigrant family,” but who is a German citizen, is raped.  She knew her attacker (a German), although they apparently had no connection (specifically, no prior or current romantic connection) otherwise.  She reported the crime and an arrest warrant issued.  The perp hoofed it.  Yesterday four men, two from her family and two Germans, found him in a parking lot near the French border.  They beat him to death (and good for them, I have to say).  [Update (20 Jun 14):  It appears that it was the woman’s 17-year-old brother, and he stabbed the perp to death . . . 23 stab wounds.]  All four have now been arrested.

Nowhere in the article do they mention where this woman’s family came from.  [Update (20 Jun 14):  This article corrects the oversight; she came from Lebanon.]

I’ve posted earlier here about the concerns in Germany about the rise and dynamics of a parallel justice system among immigrants of specific groups, specifically groups which just happen to follow the Religion of Peace.  There’s all this hand-wringing about “parallel justice” among certain specific groups, and yet when instances of it occur, it’s as if there’s no connection at all.  Silence.  It’s as if the entire German media industry is experiencing the Butterfield Effect.

Don’t mention the war.  Don’t mention where they’re from.

[Update (20 Jun 14):  With today’s article in the FAZ, linked above, it appears that this post is largely mooted.  One interesting thing mentioned in the article is that the woman’s family appears to have lured the perp, whom the police somehow couldn’t find, to the parking lot where they killed him.  They got a buddy to arrange a bogus drug deal, using unspecified social media.  The article also mentions that the police didn’t bother with a wire tap, didn’t put out a BOLO, and weren’t themselves monitoring the perp’s social media — although the article specifically recites that they could have.  The woman’s brother — and good for him, allow me to repeat — got understandably pissed that the police were dragging their feet.  So he did their job for them.  It’s a shame that he’ll be tried there, and not here, because if I were defending him I think I’d go with justifiable homicide as a defense.  And I bet most juries around here would agree.]

For the Last Time

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Just 199 short years ago today, something stopped that had been going on almost uninterruptedly for . . . oh . . . something on the order of 500 years.

On 18 June 1815, for the last time, a fully-sovereign France and Great Britain fired on each other in anger.  I use the expression “fully-sovereign” because I distinguish the Vichy forces’ opposition to the TORCH landings in 1942 as being acts in the capacity of agent for their Nazi overlords.  Let’s think about that for a moment.  At least since Edward III asserted his rights to the French throne in 1337 the English and the French were at each other’s throats.

Several of those wars were world-transformative, in the most literal sense of the word.  The Hundred Years War, launched by Edward III all those years ago, produced among its longer-lasting side-effects a functioning parliament in England.  Edward was repeatedly forced to grant concessions to the Lords and Commons to obtain money for his war-making.  In fact the very notion of no taxation except upon consent is a principle first firmly established in the course of that conflict.

On the other side of the Channel, as Barbara Tuchman points out in A Distant Mirror, the war consolidated the French monarchy and territorial integrity, and introduced a new force into the political fabric of Western Civilization, one pregnant with implications for the future: nationalism.  Oh sure, there were places where tribal loyalties could and did combine to produce momentary politico-social cohesion against outsiders.  Think Scotland, and specifically the Scotland of Edward’s day; it was Edward’s father, the ill-fated Edward II, whom Robert the Bruce demolished at Bannockburn in 1314.  But that’s the whole point:  the Scots’ loyalties were tribal, meaning that creating a coalition capable of prolonged, bitter resistance to a non-Scottish force was problematic to say the least.  Over the course of centuries the English time and again were able to splinter them to bits and conquer them piecemeal.  Before the 100 Years War, “France,” as a concept, existed scarcely outside the area immediately surrounding Paris.  One was Provençal, or Burgundian, Breton, or whatever.  “I am the Lord of Coucy,” proclaimed the builders of the castle at the symbolic center of Tuchman’s book.  Indeed what allowed England to wage war so successfully for so long was that the English were not fighting “France” so much as a succession of highly frangible coalitions of French nobles.  The crucible of a century’s fighting ended that.  By the time England was pared back to Calais, France as such was a unified state capable of mobilizing the population and resources of a comparatively vast (certainly in comparison to just about everyone else on the western European continent) territory.

The long wars of Louis XIV established Britain, as she by then was, in what became her traditional role of Paymaster of Coalitions.  Certainly Britain fought on the continent against Louis, but it was the decades of repeatedly having to assemble and keep in the field massive coalitions of widely disparate allies that cemented Britain in its position as power broker.  It wasn’t the first time Britain had played that role; we think of its underwriting of the United Provinces in the 80 Year War for independence from Spain.  But there were two aspects of that involvement that, I think, set it a bit apart from the long struggle against Louis.  Britain’s backing of the Low Countries was first and foremost a religious war, which Britain involved itself in because Spain during those years was actively attempting to crush the Reformation in England.  Secondly, the relationship was dyadic; on the one side England and on the other the Dutch.  The wars against Louis covered far more territory and involved much larger groups of very different combatants.  Is it so unreasonable to suppose that a talent for coalition building and maintenance somehow made it into the English political DNA over the course of those years?

The Seven Years War found Britain once again at the financial center of a shifting coalition of forces the only constant in which was that England and France were always on the opposite sides.  It also made Britain a truly world power for the first time, when it snapped up nearly all of France’s overseas possessions.  All of North America east of the Mississippi, north of Florida and the mouth of the river, and — at least once you got to the Great Lakes — all the way west to the Pacific.  The Indian subcontinent.  And sundry others.  On the other hand, the financial burdens of winning that war lead Britain down the entirely reasonable-seeming path of Why Shouldn’t the Colonists Help Pay For It All?  With results in the form of the American Revolution too well-known to mention.

After only the briefest respite after the American Revolution, in 1792 France and Britain were at it again, and would remain so until this day in 1815.  That conflict did two things: It ensured the critical thrust to the incipient Industrial Revolution in Britain, and by utterly destroying French and Spanish colonial power (Spain never recovered from its conquest by France and the civil war that ensued, and sure enough, by 1820 its remaining significant American colonies were sloughing off like dead skin), it ensured that for nearly 100 years the world was Britain’s oyster.  No one at all seriously challenged its position atop the world economic system until Germany emerged in the 1880s.

Now, Waterloo did not suddenly make France and Britain such bosom buddies that all was kiss-in-the-ring ever after.  Even though they fought in tandem against the Tsar in the Crimea in the 1850s, as late as 1898, when Captain Marchand and his troops marched into Fashoda, a general shooting war could have erupted on any number of occasions.  It took Admiral Tirpitz and Wilhelm II, his dupe, to accomplish the final reconciliation in 1904 in the form of the Entente Cordiale.  I’ve made my observations on that here.  Wilhelm and his ministers were so confident of the depth of Franco-British enmity that they were dumbfounded when it happened.  The United States making common cause with Iran will scarcely be more flabbergasting to our world than was the spectacle of France and Britain formally and actually abandoning an antagonistic posture nearly six centuries old.

The fact still remains, however, that this day in 1815 was the last time (apart from the peculiar circumstances of TORCH) that France and Britain traded mortal blows.  Which of the surviving soldiers on that muggy June day in Belgium could have known to look out over the fields writhing with wounded and littered with dead men and animals, to say nothing of the blasted remains of muskets, cannon, limbers, wagons, and farm buildings, and think to himself, “Today ends nearly five centuries.”  Who could have known, as Marshall Blücher and Wellington shook hands after the battle, and the old soldier greeted the Iron Duke with, “Quelle affaire!” that the next time Prussian and Briton would shake hands as friends and allies would be 140 years later, upon the West German rump state’s entry into NATO?

Happy Waterloo Day.

Some Stories are Their own Commentary

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The observation underlying the basic idea was sound.  Silicon Valley has an enormous concentration of extremely high-earning males relative to the number of females.  So what to do?  Right.  Fly out a bunch of women.

Oh dear.  What can you say that doesn’t scream itself from the words of this story?  Just what did any of the people involved in this fiasco actually expect?

From the Department of be Careful What You Wish For

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A couple of years ago, swarms of people with some truly confused understandings about law, economics, politics, and basic human nature decided it was time to go for a camp-out.  In downtown New York City.  Yes, we refer Gentle Reader to recollections of those days of THC-laden fumes, bull-horns, vandalism, sexual assault, attempted terrorist bombings, bodily functions and sweat, and sordid ordinary greed that called itself the Occupy Wall Street movement.  In the weeks and months after their initial attempted colonization of the city’s financial district, they spawned numerous copy-cat “occupations” in other cities around the world.

For those still interested (both of you), they’re still around, and even have a website and everything.  It’s here.  To get a true flavor of what passes for thinking over there, Gentle Reader can click on the “Action” tab on the banner and then go around the pinwheel chart on the page.  I looked for a “blow up bridges” link in the “tactics” portion of the wheel, but didn’t find one.

Let’s ignore the movement depositing its money into Amalgamated Bank, which as of fall, 2011 was controlled by an SEIU affiliate and was circling the toilet bowl operating under an FDIC consent order, largely as the result of having invested $800 million in Countrywide Home Loans mortgages.  You’ll remember Countrywide, won’t you, Gentle Reader?  Countrywide was by a wide margin the leading private originator of subprime home loans — loans to people who had little likelihood of being able to repay them.  Loans that are now characterized as exploitative and conclusive evidence of the “1%” plundering The Working Man.  And shit.  Seems the SEIU was just jim-dandy getting in on a slice of that plunder, and the Occupyistas were happy to send them their business.  By the way, Amalgamated was rescued by the sale of roughly 40% of its shares to Ron Burkle (billionaire and Big Time Democrat) and Wilbur Ross (another billionaire, although he backed Romney in 2012).  Amalgamated became the Democrat National Committee’s sole lender in 2012.  And so on and so forth.  In short, business is business, even for outfits whose stated mission is “world revolution.”

At the risk of understatement, the Occupy loonies having served their purpose of re-electing America’s first explicitly anti-American president, they’re about as relevant today as the Wobblies.  So why am I devoting bandwidth to them?

Because today is June 17, after all.

On June 17, 1953, in the Worker’s and Peasant’s Paradise, more formally known as the Deutsche Demokratische Republik — the German Democratic Republic: East Germany in round numbers — and more informally among West Germans of a certain generation as the Sowjetische Besatzungszone or the SBZ — the “Soviet Occupation Zone” — the rest of the world got to see how movements like the Occupy Wall Street outfit get treated post-revolution.  The preceding day in East Berlin construction workers had finally had enough of the privations, oppressions, and exactions of Sovietization.  As happens with dreary predictability, the government had announced forthcoming increases in “work norms” with no corresponding increase in pay.  Work more, same income.  So on June 16, they went on strike.  The next day they were joined by other groups of workers.  For 1953 in still-devastated Central Europe, news of the goings-on spread amazingly rapidly throughout most of East Germany.

On the morning of June 17, the workers began to march towards downtown East Berlin.  The government pretty quickly decided to use force to deal with the protests and, the times being what they were, they turned to their Soviet occupiers for help.  Roughly 20,000 troops and 8,000 police, complete with tanks and so forth, turned out, and the fun began.  The total numbers of killed and wounded is somewhat vague, as are all numbers of victims of communist oppressions.  When you add in the subsequent executions it appears to have been north of 500.

From the 1950s until actual German reunification, June 17 was the Tag der deutschen Einheit — Day of German Unity.  Beginning in 1990 the newly-reunified country moved it to October 3 (the formal Reunification Day, instead of November 9, the day the Wall fell . . . too many unfortunate associations with that day (e.g., Kristallnacht)).  A principal consequence of the June 17 Uprising and its brutal suppression was to heighten the exodus of every East German who had the gumption, prompting the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall.

I’ll make a humble suggestion, for the benefit of those three or four dozen remaining true believer Occupiers.  I think they need their very own holiday.  I think they need a holiday that will serve as their inspiration to World Revolution, and provide them a glimpse of their Paradise on Earth.

We’ll have it on June 17 (now that day’s free of prior claims), and we can call it Fools and Tools Day.

Which is Better: An Avalanche or a Glacier?

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All else being equal, in a world in which nothing is ever really certain until it’s already happened (and then sometimes not even then), I suppose you have to opt for being able to see what’s coming at you before it gets there.  All else being equal, again, I guess you would want to see what’s coming as far out as you can.  The reason for both is so that you can take evasive action, or hunker down behind whatever you can for shelter.  But what if whatever it is that’s coming your way you can neither avoid nor mitigate?

Via the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this morning, we have a report on something with the titillating name Baltic Dry Index.  Like many things with a geographic name these days, it’s about well more than just the Baltic.  It’s an index that tracks the price of shipping dry bulk commodities very long distances in ships of different classes — Handysize (35–50,000 d.w.t.), Supramax (50–60,000 d.w.t.), Panamax (the largest that will fit through the Panama Canal, it is a physical dimension rather than a load specification, although the most common size is 65–80,000 d.w.t.), and Capesize (too big for the Suez or Panama; we’re talking about something in the 150,000 d.w.t. range . . . folks, that’s Real Damn Big, by anyone’s standards).  The index measures how much it costs per ton per mile to move things like coal, ores, grains, and the like.  Things that are the basic materials used to make just about anything durable, and stay alive while doing so.  Since shipping space is a not easily expandable on a quick-turn basis (it takes a day or so to make an 18-wheeler’s cab and trailer; it takes months to build, fit out, and pass an ore-carrier), the more people want to ship and the greater amounts they want to ship, the higher the price for any given shipping route.  The less is being shipped and by the fewer people, the lower the cost.

Further, sea shipping costs are less susceptible to at least certain kinds of price distortions than other forms of transport.  I’m thinking specifically about an owner’s practical ability to withdraw his capacity from the marketplace and thereby maintain artificial scarcity.  If you don’t have enough freight to keep your locomotives and cars busy at your price point, you park them on a siding somewhere until you need them again.  Very low out-of-service maintenance.  Ditto heavy trucking.  Keep the battery charged, make sure the engine block doesn’t freeze, and have some maintenance guy come along a couple of times a month and start it up for 30 minutes to keep the seals wet.  That’s of course over-simplified, but not by much.  Ship owners can’t just pull a ship out of service when the shipping price per ton per nautical mile falls below whatever they want to charge.  A ship that is not actively loading, un-loading, or underway is a ship that is losing its owners phenomenal amounts of money.  There is a reason why you don’t see merchant equivalents of the James River Ghost Fleet.  Private owners can’t afford to keep inactive ships afloat, so they get sifted downstream through progressively less scrupulous, more neglectful owners, and generally end their days on a beach in South Asia somewhere, being chopped to bits.

In short, because the commodities whose shipping costs it tracks are so basic to so many manufacturing processes, the Baltic Dry Index makes a very reliable leading economic indicator.  Its fluctuations express themselves in the general economy with an 8-12 month lag time.

And it’s dropping through the floor.  Since the beginning of the year it’s dropped by roughly 50%, to less than 1,000.  Back in 2008 it was at nearly 12,000.  Add this to the U.S. economy having shrunk at an annualized rate of 1.0% in the first quarter, Japan cranking up its value-added tax (in the run-up to the increase’s effective date, Japan Went Shopping, delivering a (deceptive) “growth” of 6% annualized), Vladimir Putin holding a gun to Europe’s head in the shape of natural gas prices (Germany’s trade with Russia has imploded by 16% year-on-year since the onset of the latest Ukrainian crisis), and the Middle East about to explode all over everyone, and it’s hard to find something to be upbeat about.

The leading edge of the glacier is headed this way.  Fasten your seatbelts accordingly.

What is it With These People, Ch. 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely Ordinary Judgment is a Prerequisite, No?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A Tacky Quibble

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twice Exploited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damn them all, in any event.