Yep; Gotta Watch the Smart Ones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Department of This is Surprising Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Nothing Adds Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Department of Always use the Right Tools

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

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

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

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

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

Until Nelson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Destruction_of_HMS_Queen_Mary

And here’s HMS Indefatigable going down:

HMS_Indefatigable_sinking

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

InvincibleBlowingUpJutland1916

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

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

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

Get the Popcorn Ready

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Grace, Cheap and Otherwise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harrison Bergeron, Call Home

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In this morning’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung there’s an article on the educational practice once (and perhaps still) referred to here as “mainstreaming.”  The title pretty much says it all:  “Inclusion: the Great Illusion”.

This is the basic outline of the story.  Up until 2009, when Germany signed the UN Convention on Human Rights, “special needs” children (as if there has ever been a child that did not have special needs; show me a child who requires absolutely nothing out of the ordinary — in any respect or for any reason — and I’ll show you a freak of nature) were sent to schools with other children like them, where there were teachers trained to deal with their sundry problems and where the staffing levels were sufficient to handle them, both pedagogically and physically.  And where there were not other students desperately trying to take advantage of their few years of schooling to escape the traps of a world in which cognitive ability and credentialing are becoming ever more make-or-break for all segments of society.

Under the UN convention, however, schools are obliged, upon unilateral decision by the “special needs” child’s parent(s), to place that child in a regular classroom.  In a classroom with a teacher who’s been trained to teach, for example, medieval history, as opposed to how to handle a severely autistic child.  Mind you, the parents don’t have to choose to put their child into a regular class, and in truth many of them don’t want to.  They’ve seen their children, we have to presume, struggle with things that come naturally or much more easily to their peers, and how frustrating, humiliating, and self-perpetuating the cycle of always-coming-up-short can be.  I will say that the closer a child gets to “normal,” (however you choose to think of that notion) the harder the choice can be.  You are morally convinced — you will go to your grave convinced — your child is capable of better things than he’s achieved thus far.  You know that if he’s not put with “normal” children then he will not have a chance to learn from them, and of course you realize that children learn a tremendous amount from each other, even in terms just of the academic material, to say nothing of the social skills your child will need to survive as an adult on his own.  You have this feeling in your bones that if your child is put on the “special needs” track then it will be a permanent, irrevocable sentence of mediocrity.  You’ll do anything not to see your child, whose talents and “special” needs you get to see in the smallest detail, daily, forever doomed to be something less than he has in him.  If it sounds as though I speak from some experience here, there is a reason for that.

And the law’s response to the schools who point out that this child is not only not getting anything out of being in a “regular” class, but rather is doing little more than destroying the educational opportunity of the 90% of his fellow students who aren’t so handicapped, is: screw you, buddy; deal with it.  Isn’t that special?  A bunch of lawyers, politicians, and “human rights” activists have decided how schools must function.

Predictably, it’s playing merry hell with the German school system, one of that country’s prides and joys.  For those who don’t keep up with these things, for generations the German schools have been divided, tracked, or whatever.  After a period of basic education (“Grundschule”), the children are divided into three groups.  Those whose abilities suggest they’re not going to need a bunch of schooling beyond the basics, for example manual laborers, low-level clerical, or industrial workers, are placed in the “Hauptschule,” which terminates after ninth grade or so, after which they will typically be placed into a commercial or industrial apprenticeship program and, with a bit of luck and a following wind, embark from there upon a career for which their academic and technical education has fully suited them.  The next level up, for those who are going to become technical workers, mid-level bureaucrats or officials, and so forth, such as dental or physicians’ assistants, for example, is the “Realschule,” which goes (I’m working from memory here, so don’t tax me with inaccuracies) until 11th or 12th, after which they too will head for such additional vocational education or training as may be appropriate to their desires and abilities.  The top level, the “Gymnasium,” runs through a 13th year.  The last two years the student selects two subjects, “Hauptfächer,” for concentration.  Back when I attended a Gymnasium in the early 1980s, my 11th grade class was taking English, French, German, mathematics (calculus), history, chemistry, physics, phys. ed., geography, biology, and religion (either Catholic or Protestant, according to the parents’ choice).  By the time you get out of Gymnasium your level of academic attainment is going to put you very close to what the best American universities produce by the junior year.

For several decades there has been a fourth track, the “Gesamtschule,” in which the children are not segregated by academic ability but rather just lumped in together, much like an American high school.  The Gesamtschulen have never really won the respect of German society.

But there’s a further wrinkle.  You don’t finish up your Gymnasium career by passing your classes and tottering across a stage to get a piece of paper to go in the bottom of a drawer in your parents’ living room.  At least not if you have ambitions of further schooling, either at one of Germany’s universities or their “Technische Hochschulen,” the latter of which produce the German engineers who have established “Made in Germany” as the quasi-gold standard of excellence enjoyed for generations now by that country’s products.  No:  After completing your 13th year, and successfully passing all your classes, you get to sit for a battery of written and oral examinations known as the “Abitur.”  A perfect score is 1.0; it runs down to 5.0, which is failing.  There are no do-overs, like with the SAT or ACT.  You have precisely one chance to do as well as you can.

And this is where the rubber meets the road.  The Abitur is given at the state level, meaning every graduate in Bavaria who chose, for example, math and physics as Hauptfächer is going to be taking the same examination.  Additionally, there is a great deal of standardization across states, with the specific end in mind that if you pull a 1.7 on your Abitur in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, that should be sufficient indication of pretty much precisely the same performance as a 1.7 coming out of Bremen or Hessen.  And the purpose of that, Best Beloved, is because there is tremendous competition for slots in the most sought-after fields at the top universities.  Some fields, such as law and medicine, are even the subject of a “numerus clausus,” a closed number.  I don’t know what it is now, but back in the mid-1980s, when I was studying at the University of Freiburg, the number for medicine was something like 1.2.  In other words, if you pulled a 1.3 you weren’t going to be a doctor.  Period.

The competition doesn’t stop there, either.  A few years ago Germany realized that it could have a passel of pretty good universities, with none really of world-class rank, or it could devote increased resources to those universities which were nearly world-class, in order to get them there and keep them there, and let the others make shift.  School snobbery made me pleased to note that Freiburg made the cut.  I don’t know whether the Technische Hochschulen underwent the same triage, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

The opening paragraphs in the FAZ piece are about a child (name changed, of course), whose “special” needs include not only cognitive but social-emotional development.  His behavior in class is described.  Such as climbing over desks and chairs, beating on his schoolmates to the point of bruises, spitting pieces of paper he’s chewed up, pouring out a bottle of apple juice on his desk, then running around the classroom, smearing his classmates with it.  The teacher is at his wits’ end; he was trained to teach, not to cope with a semi-savage (I know that characterization is brutal, but there’s no other way to describe a child who behaves like that, for whatever the reason may be).

Now there is a family in Baden-Württemberg whose Down-syndrome child they wish to send to the Gymnasium.  Understand that for non-“special” needs children it’s the teachers who make the go/no-go decision on which children are eligible for the Gymnasium.  For “special” needs children, the parents have, apparently, an absolute right of determination.  And this child’s parents are determined that he will attend the Gymnasium, even though they concede he has no expectation at all of completing his Abitur.  He can’t even read properly.  But, according to his parents, “all his friends” are going to the Gymnasium, so by God he’s going as well.  [As an aside, it speaks well for his Gymnasium-bound friends that they are friends of this child.]  Thus far the Gymnasium, which understandably does not wish to become a special-educational institution, has successfully resisted.  If the law is as explained in the article, though, that won’t go on.

The article quotes the cost of maintaining parallel special-education schools for children who need them, and at the same time hiring on sufficient trained staff to accommodate the “special” needs children whose parents decide screw ’em all, Little Heinz is going to the Realschule notwithstanding he can barely sign his name and physically cannot sit still for more than seven minutes without climbing — literally — over the furniture.  They’d need 9,300 extra teachers and handlers, at a cost of €660,000,000 per year, just in the “normal” schools.  If you keep the special-education schools open as well (remember that three-quarters of all “special” needs children in Germany are not being mainstreamed by their parents), the annual cost balloons to €3.3 billion.  With a graying population and looming social welfare outlays, the money simply is not there.

But more to the point, what if it were there?  Those children in that Down-syndrome child’s classes are going to be held back in their own academic progress.  The article quotes two teachers, one from Bavaria and one from Lower Saxony, and both agree that the “special” needs children in their classes absorb 90% of their energy.  So what happens to their “normal” classmates when, after six or seven years’ of having teacher devote his efforts to the children who will never complete their Abitur?  What happens when they compete, nationally, for the strictly-limited field of their choice?  What do you tell them when, having cherished a dream all their life long of being a doctor, they bring home that 1.3?  By what right have you sacrificed their life’s ambition to your —  your, Gentle Reader — theoretical determination of abstract “justice”?  That Down-syndrome child will go on to be what he will be.  Maybe he’ll become a productive member of society (many do), and maybe he won’t.  But he would have done that no matter what; he certainly will not have needed to spend years at a Gymnasium for it.

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” as a famous advertisement once (correctly) proclaimed.  This cock-eyed UN-functionaries’ policy may as well have been designed to accomplish exactly that: the wasting of human potential so that a tiny subset of parents can feel good about themselves and their children.

Harrison Bergeron has gone to school.

Well, This Explains a Lot

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Via Instapundit, here’s a NYT write-up of a tony party among the 0.0001% that recently went down in New York City.

It was hosted by Tina Brown in honor of some “artist” who carves sculptures from wood using a chain saw.  Lest Gentle Reader imagine this is really some edgy, transgressive expression of profound truths, you can go to pretty much any redneck arts-n-crafts expo across the South and find guys who do exactly that.  They don’t even rate a breakfast at Waffle House.

Quite apart from the tone of self-congratulation that oozes from the article and seems to have caught Instapundit’s eye was the reference to the artist’s husband, “Zbigniew Brzezinski, 86, the former national security adviser to Jimmy Carter.”  That is mentioned as if to awaken our respect.  The NYT reports him as “regal[ing] guests with off-color stories about the current state of counterterrorism.  ‘I am so annoyed by the fear-mongering,’ he said. ‘Sign this, sign that. So now I sign things “Osama Bin Laden.” And I haven’t been stopped once. Doesn’t that tell you something about the idiocy of the whole system?'”

He says this as if it’s either clever or funny, or even illuminating about his central point (assuming he has one, which from the conduct of foreign relations in the Carter administration (either its original iteration or its current one), is not readily apparent).  Would, perhaps, he have signed himself “Walter Model” while the 101st was surrounded at Bastogne?  Because I have news for you, you washed-up relic of four of the most disastrous years (except for those beginning January 20, 2009) of the last fifty in this country:  Notwithstanding your understudy went squawking about the place in 2012 bragging that Al Qaeda was on the run (right before they slaughtered an American ambassador), they’re very much still in the field against us.  And they’re very much still intent on killing Americans and Jews wherever they can find them.

I’m big on P. G. Wodehouse (who had his own problems with making light of an enemy during wartime, by the way).  One of my favorite lines comes from his chapter “14 Days Without the Option,” in which Bertie and a friend have been arrested for trying to steal a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race Night.  The problem was the policeman was still in it, and Bertie and his buddy are now in front of the magistrate.  Bertie’s friend, who actually smote the bobby, is given fourteen days without the option, after which the beak turns to Bertie (I’m working from memory here, so forgive any inaccuracy in quotation):  “As for the prisoner Leon Trotsky, which I am constrained to say I believe is a false or fictitious name . . . .”

Taking that cue, when I am asked to give a dollar or whatever it is for this-that-or-the-other charitable purpose, and in consequence to get my name on a cut-out shamrock, or bootie, or whatever symbol, for the store to paste up in its window, I generally give the name “Leon Trotsky,” or “Vyacheslav Molotov,” or some such.  I know that both Trotsky and Molotov were about as blood-soaked as two humans could be, and that uncounted millions died at their hands.  On the other hand, I am not doing it to be clever in the context of something like the physical security of my fellow Americans.  I am not doing it to express either support for our country’s enemies, contempt for those persons’ victims, or to undermine legitimate efforts to further the interests of our country.  I am doing it (i) in homage to Wodehouse, and (ii) to avoid my name appearing in a self-congratulatory light.  And I’m just some redneck from out in fly-over country, so no one is going to pay the least attention to what I do.  The NYT isn’t going to splash what I do across its society (or whichever) pages, presenting me as someone to emulate.

Following in the Master’s Footsteps

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Years ago, while studying in Germany, I ran across a reference to some interesting research that had been done by East German scholars.  What they’d done was go to London and try to replicate the research that Marx had done to produce Das Kapital, among his other words.  What they found was that Marx had pretty much gun-decked (as we say in the navy) the whole thing.  Falsified data, misrepresented the contents of sources, and so forth.  It’s stuck in my mind all these years because I couldn’t believe that the East Germans would have let these guys go to London for that purpose in the first place, and secondly that they’d have let the results leak out.

But it was even so.  I can no longer recall where I came across the reference to that research, and being 20 and stupid (and with way too much beer to drink) I was too indolent to go and run it down on my own and see what these scholars had actually reported.  Marx’s little honesty issues aren’t confined to German language reports any more.  Paul Johnson (whose magnificent The Birth of the Modern I’ve re-read probably north of a dozen times since I bought my copy in the summer of 1993) wrote a book, Intellectuals, in which he excoriates a good crop of the leftists’ sacred cows.  It’s been a while since I bought and read my copy (maybe I’ll re-read it, starting this afternoon), but as I recall he outlines not only Marx’s overall fraud, but mentions specific instances of it as well (e.g., Johnson quotes the actual words of sources which Marx intentionally and repeatedly mis-quoted).  And of course the actual behavior of dear ol’ thoroughly-bourgeois Marx to those around him, including the only proletarian that he actually had any meaningful contact with, comes in for some pretty stern treatment.

Suffice it to say that the entire marxist edifice rests on fraud and some pretty basic misunderstanding of the physicalities of producing goods and providing services in any group of people much larger than a stone-age band of hunter-gatherers.

All of which is by way of background to the uproar unfolding around this French marxist and his book.  His name, in case you’ve been in solitary confinement for several months, is Thomas Piketty.  He has written a book, Capital in the 21st Century, in which he concludes that (i) “unequal” concentration of wealth is inherently objectionable, and (ii) it is inherent in the nature of capitalism, as practiced nowadays, to exacerbate the unequal concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthiest.  In support of that second conclusion he offers a mass of data, graphs, charts, and so forth.  As the left’s favorite mountebank, Paul Krugman, claims, “It’s true that Mr. Piketty and his colleagues have added a great deal of historical depth to our knowledge[.]”  Krugman admonishes us sloped-brow-bitter-gun-clingers, “[I]f you think you’ve found an obvious hole, empirical or logical, in Piketty, you’re very probably wrong. He’s done his homework!”

From Piketty’s conclusions he offers a number of suggestions for how to go about counteracting capitalism’s inherent tendencies towards objectionably disproportionate concentrations of wealth.  I say “disproportionate” because I do not understand that he argues for the complete abolition of capitalism, or (at least not in so many words) the introduction of socialism, which means that he must necessarily be willing to accept some disproportionate concentrations.  So must Krugman, by the way; I’ve yet to hear of his coming out in favor of expropriating George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, Laurie David, Algore, or any of the other left-extremist billionaires who back him and his notions.

I’ll leave it to Gentle Reader to plow his way through Piketty’s book.  [Note:  In linking to the Amazon.com page for his book I violate one of my informal little rules on this blog.  Except in the rarest instances I don’t link to books I haven’t read myself.  Something as long as a book is generally too complex and too nuanced to comment about if you’ve not made the effort to read it, so unless I specifically observe otherwise, if you see a link to a book, you can assume I’ve read the thing, and generally more than once (if you would talk to a friend more than once, why wouldn’t you read a book more than once?).]

Piketty’s got only a little problem.  He’s not the only one who has done his homework.  Others have also done his homework, and what they’ve found about his presentation of his research is very much in keeping with the marxist antecedents of his thinking.  It turns out that Piketty’s had his hand in the data jar, and to more than a little extent.

What is it about left-extremists?  Why do they experience this compulsion to make things up?  To borrow a line from Krugman, “Why, it’s almost as if the facts are fundamentally not on their side.”  Projection, anyone?  I’m not foolish enough to come out and say that no author, scholar, or other person on the opposite side from the extreme left has ever fudged the numbers or even made them up wholesale.  But I’m not aware that any of The Giants on the side of human freedom — Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman come to mind — has ever been caught out just cobbling together bullshit out of thin air.  I’m not aware that anyone has revealed fraud from the skeptical side on the scale of the University of East Anglia, which claims to have “lost” its original data, and the e-mails from which include one from the fellow they hired to come in and fix their data.  After something like two-plus years he gave up, and made the statement (to them, by the way, and not publicly) that they had so thoroughly and so irrationally manipulated the data — just adding things and stripping them out, with no reason or pattern — that it was no longer mathematically possible to reproduce what the numbers had originally been.  For a good compendium of articles going all the way back to the original e-mail leak, I strongly recommend a search on Instapundit under “climategate.”  Or how about Marc Bellesiles, whose “research” on gun ownership in early America was so fraudulent that he not only got stripped of his Bancroft Prize, but actually was fired from his tenured faculty gig?  Or how about Steven Leavitt’s slander of John Lott?  Lott, Gentle Reader might recall, was the scholar who published a paper in which he correlated wider private ownership guns and looser personal-carry laws with a drop in violent crime.  Leavitt (most widely known for his Freakonomics) apparently made two claims about Lott: (i) that a specific paper of Lott’s was not peer-reviewed, and (ii) that Lott had hosted a symposium to discuss the issue but had not solicited contrary opinion to participate.  As reported at Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Mr. Lott’s lawsuit alleges that Mr. Levitt defamed him in a 2005 e-mail message to Mr. McCall (who, contrary to what was reported in an earlier version of this blog item, is not the same John McCall who once taught Mr. Lott at the University of California at Los Angeles). In that message, Mr. Levitt criticized Mr. Lott’s work as guest editor of a special 2001 issue of The Journal of Law and Economics that stemmed from a conference on gun issues held in 1999.

The letter of clarification, which was included in today’s filing, offers a doozy of a concession. In his 2005 message, Mr. Levitt told Mr. McCall that ‘it was not a peer-refereed edition of the Journal.’ But in his letter of clarification, Mr. Levitt writes: ‘I acknowledge that the articles that were published in the conference issue were reviewed by referees engaged by the editors of the JLE. In fact, I was one of the peer referees.’  Mr. Levitt’s letter also concedes that he had been invited to present a paper at the 1999 conference. (He did not do so.) That admission undermines his e-mail message’s statement that Mr. Lott had ‘put in only work that supported him.'”

You can quibble about the niceties of the second assertion; if only people whose work supported Lott submitted their work, then it would naturally follow that only “work that supported him” got “put in.”  You could make the same statement about a conference on the boiling temperature of water at sea level.  But the first concession?  Why didn’t Leavitt just come out and say, “I am a liar”?  Because that’s what he did; he made a material statement which he knew to be false when he made it; in fact, he had peculiar knowledge of its falseness.

What is it about these people?

My Own Modest Proposal

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Over at The Atlantic, via Instapundit, we have a call for judicial fixed terms and, more importantly, a single such term.  Specifically the author advocates a single 18-year term for appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court. Occasion for the cogitations is the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education (sometimes referred to as Brown I) decision which ruled that as at least to public schools, separate was inherently unequal and thus could never satisfy the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirements.  Our author praises the unanimous decision, specifically for the unified front it gave the judiciary in the face of the inevitable ructions which were sure to follow it.  I’d not heard this part, that the court took two entire years to craft a decision that all nine justices could agree on.  The author describes a forum he attended at Yale at which a group of lawyers who had been clerks to those justices talked about the deliberative process and so forth.  All very cozy, and I’m sure it was full of mutual congratulation, as such things drearily are.

What’s not mentioned is the extent to which the process that produced the Brown decision departed from all recognized standards of judicial ethics.  Years ago in law school I first ran across mention of this; not anticipating the internet (perhaps because I didn’t work for Algore at the time?) I didn’t note the citation to it.  But what happened was this:  Brown I was argued twice.  Thurgood Marshall argued for the plaintiffs and John Davis (of Davis & Polk) for the defendant school board.  What I read way back in law school was that at that first argument Davis kicked Marshall’s ass all over the courtroom.  Davis was the pre-eminent Supreme Court litigator of his day; my understanding is that to this day he holds the record for most cases won in that court.  Marshall was just no match for him.  It was Frankfurter who wanted to have the case re-argued, a decision usually presented as being a stalling tactic for the court while it tried to cobble together a unanimous opinion.  But it actually seems that there was another, more sinister purpose:  The order for re-argument “invited” the federal government to submit an amicus brief.  Frankfurter did not disclose to his colleagues that he had been and proposed to remain in close contact with a former clerk at the solicitor’s office, discussing and in fact feeding him in painstaking detail what arguments to use.

Here is one mention of the incident (first page only, the balance apparently being behind paywall).  And here is another. And here is another, over at SSRN.  Since the source of all these is the same — the former clerk himself, in an article published in 1987 in the Harvard Law Review — there doesn’t seem to be much doubt that it happened.  To put it mildly, “[t]his sort of ex parte communication is considered a violation of legal ethics.”  This apparently did not distress either justice or clerk:

“‘I have no easy, snappy response to that view.  In Brown I didn’t consider myself a lawyer for a litigant.  I considered it a cause that transcended ordinary notions about propriety in a litigation.  This was not a litigation in the usual sense.  The constitutional issue went to the heart of what kind of country we are, what kind of Constitution and Supreme Court we have: whether, almost a century after the fourteenth amendment was adopted, the Court could find the wisdom and courage to hold that the amendment meant what it said, that black people could no longer be singled out and treated differently because of their color, that in everything it did, government had to be color-blind.’ He said that he would not defend his discussions with Frankfurter in technical terms.  ‘I just did what I thought was right,’ he said.”

Well.  How about that?  He just followed his “revolutionary consciousness,” to use the expression favored by his philosophical forerunners, the Cheka revolutionary tribunals who scourged the land in 1918-21.

Why are the above reminiscences by a lawyer who should have been disbarred, about a justice who ought to have been impeached, important now?  Because our author over at The Atlantic specifically praises the court that rendered Brown for being politicians.  “The Warren Court that decided Brown had five members who had been elected to office—three former U.S. senators, one of whom had also been mayor of Cleveland; one state legislator; and one governor. They were mature, they understood the law, but also understood politics and the impact of their decisions on society. As a consequence, they did not always vote in predictable fashion.”  He contrasts that with today’s court:  “Now, zero members of the Supreme Court have served in elective office, and only Stephen Breyer has significant experience serving on a staff in Congress. Eight of the nine justices previously were on U.S. courts of appeal. Few have had real-world experience outside of the legal and judicial realm.”

Our author does not stop at just praising specifically politicized jurisprudence when he agrees with the outcome.  He excoriates what he calls politicized jurisprudence when he disagrees with it.  The lengths to which he goes are truly remarkable.  Let’s let him speak for himself:

“Roberts is political in the most Machiavellian sense; he understood the zeitgeist enough to repeatedly assure the Senate during his confirmation hearings that he would strive to issue narrow opinions that respected stare decisis and achieved 9-0 or 8-1 consensus, even as he lay the groundwork during his tenure for the opposite. His surprising ruling on the Affordable Care Act was clearly done with an eye toward softening the criticism that was sure to come with the series of 5-4 decisions on campaign finance and voting rights that lay ahead.”

Get that?  Way back in 2012 Roberts was just a-scheming away, smoothly allaying fears that his politicized judgments would be obnoxious for the lefties, all the while plotting to give free rein to his politicized jurisprudence to run the opposite (wrong) way, because he just knew that all them decisions was going down on 5-4 splits.  To borrow a line from Peanuts, good grief.  Notice, by the way, that he’s also implicitly accusing his dear lefties on the court of the same sin; how else could Roberts have just known that there would be four dissenters in each of those cases?

The solution is to limit tenure on the high court bench to a single 18-year term.  Stagger the terms, so that you won’t get George W. Bush some future president able to stack the entire court during his term(s).

Being the good lefty, our author overlooks the most powerful argument in favor of limiting the time anyone gets to park himself on that bench, even though he states it himself.  To see what I’m talking about, let’s do just a teensy-weensy little editing:  “Few have had real-world experience outside of the legal and judicial realm.”  And there you have the central indictment of the judiciary, certainly at least the federal bench at its senior levels.  Huge numbers of these people are life-time government hacks (no other way to describe them).  They’ve not had to make payroll from their own pocket.  They’ve not had to choose whether to let someone go, cut everyone’s pay a bit, or not make their own house payment.  They’ve not lain awake nights praying that they can get a case settled before their child needs braces, or that the leaking head gasket on that old car will hold out just a few weeks more, so they can replace the office computer server.  In short, they have only the most theoretical notion that any mommocked-up decision of theirs will have any material consequences.  They’re philosopher-kings.

So here’s my own modest proposal.  Every judicial officer (that would include the non-Article III magistrate judges, bankruptcy judges, and administrative law judges) would have an allocation of 25 total years’ government or “non-profit” employment of any kind at any level.  Each day he spends at the public or taxpayer-subsidized teat reduces by one day the length of time he is eligible to be a judicial officer.  If he’s appointed at age 30, then at age 55 he’s off the bench, for good.  If he’s appointed to the bench at age 30, hangs around seven years, and then goes and gets a real job, at age 57 he’s got 18 years of eligibility left.  And in the intervening twenty years he’s got to see how badly things get screwed up for genuine people when philosopher-kings make a pig’s breakfast of their ruminations.  If he goes to work for some cushy “non-profit” “advocating” for “justice” or whatever the hell those outfits do for 15 years, then he gets 10 years.  It ensures turnover and it ensures, to the extent possible at all, that we will have seasoned, mature jurists and not palace eunuchs confusing their whims with constitutional mandate as is presently the case.

[Update (24 May 14):  I suppose I ought to add that segregation needed to go.  I’m not sure I agree with the proposal that separate is inherently unequal (too many counter-factuals can be heaved onto the counter for inspection for that proposition to stand, starting with the Dunbar High School that Thurgood Marshall attended).  No less-respected scholar than Herbert Wechsler famously invited the odium of all the Right Thinkers by declaring that he had racked his mind and could not come up with any logically defensible basis for the Brown ruling.  On the other hand there sure as hell is no honest argument that “separate,” as practiced by those who did so, had for its sole purpose and pretty uniform outcome “unequal.”

I think there were a very great many ways to explode the system of segregation across all of state and local law that didn’t involve doing what the Supreme Court did in Brown (which, as Ilya Somin points out, didn’t actually come out and say it overruled Plessy).

I ought to confess that I’ve never read a book-length treatment of the history of the litigation campaign that produced Brown.  My understanding, however, is that the civil rights litigants had spent years pecking piecemeal at the component systems of segregation and came to the realization that they’d spend eons doing so if they carried on that way.  So they changed strategy and went for the root-and-branch approach.  The way they went about that required the court to adopt the argument — factually incorrect and legally unsupported — that separate was inherently unequal.

Rather than do what it did, how much less violence to law and logic would it have been for the court simply to change how it read the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment and its implementing legislation?  I don’t do civil rights litigation (too much illogic to it), but my understanding is that as to “official” government action, the courts have gone to great lengths to avoid characterizing states, their political subdivisions, agencies, and instrumentalities as such to be “persons acting under color of state law.”  That’s always puzzled me because I cannot for the life of me figure out how that can possibly be correct.  If you say that “person” cannot include a juridical person then how the hell do you extend the operation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit action by corporations?  So we agree that juridical persons can be “persons” for purposes of these laws.  Why should some juridical persons be “persons” but not others?  Where is the defensible point of distinction?  The court could simply have said something along the lines of, “OK, we rule that states, their political subdivisions, agencies, and instrumentalities are ‘persons’ for all purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment.  We further rule that a person’s failure to ensure that all officials, agencies, political subdivisions, and others answerable to that person extend the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to all individuals is a ‘denial’ of equal protection or due process, as applicable, to the same extent as if that person had acted in his, her, or its own right.”

Now observe what strategic avenues that simple change in reading opens up.  For starts, you’re down to 50 lawsuits, tops, against 50 states.  In those suits you can further use all the wrinkles and fillips of states’ laws and practices to demonstrate not so much that any particular component of a state’s actions violates the constitution, but to show the comprehensive pattern of in-fact behavior that the states were pursuing for the purpose and with the effect of denying equal protection and due process rights.  You don’t have to show that each last penny-ante elementary school doesn’t have X textbooks per pupil instead of Y.  All you have to show is that this is a prevailing pattern and the effects of the pattern where it exists.  You show the conditions in segregated jails and prisons.  You show the funding patterns and student outcomes of segregated colleges.  And so forth.  This then allows the court to find that, irrespective of what may or may not be the theoretical possibilities of segregation, the actual behaviors demonstrated, taken separately and in the aggregate, constitute a clear, intentional, and effective attempt to violate the constitution.

Going that route doesn’t require you to rule contrary to observable fact.  It doesn’t require you to grind your way piecemeal, in separate litigation, through the entire apparatus of state and local government.  It recognizes the fact that a law nominally neutral on its face can easily be so administered as to violate the constitution’s mandates and prohibitions (and by the way, that does not mean that it blesses bullshit arguments like “disparate impact” analysis).  And it recognizes the conspiratorial element in the entire Jim Crow project.]