I Wonder if the Supreme Court Heard These Arguments

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When the parties were arguing for or against the notion of homosexual “marriage.”

Via Instapundit, we have a contribution from Breibart.com’s British site.  “Attack of the Killer Dykes!” doesn’t really sound like much more than click-bait as a headline, but what caught my attention was the squib:  “Lesbian violence is poorly understood because it is poorly researched, and poorly researched because it makes the gay lobby deeply uncomfortable. We’re not supposed to admit that any kind of gay relationship might have a dark side. It’s all unicorns and Mariah Carey, as far as charities, politicians and the media are concerned.”

So I clicked through and read the article.  While reading it I realized it was written by a British author (references to “mum” and English spellings like “colour” were give-aways) before I noticed the Union Jack on which the Breitbart logo was superimposed.  In truth, even had the URL not contained “London” and had there been no conspicuous non-Americanisms in the text, I think I’d have figured out it was a Brit just by the unapologetic tone of the piece, its willingness to call things by their correct names, its vinegar-laced humor, and its playful use of cacophemism.

Examples:

“If you’ve ever heard of a gruesome murder in your neighbourhood in which the short-haired victim was beaten savagely with a rolled-up copy of Saga magazine and then strangled with a jock strap, it’s probably not some terrifying new sadistic white male serial killer, but rather another dyke domestic that got out of hand.”

“We know, for instance, that black women experience intimate partner violence at rates 35 per cent higher than white women. And those girls know how to swing! So the real figure for lesbian batterings is much higher than we know.”

“It’s not like they’re in it for the sex. Maybe it’s the faint whiff of cat sick, maybe the chafing of polyester bedsheets, but it’s well known that lesbians stop having sex after the first few months and retreat into hobbies like softball, vegetarianism, penis envy and Twitter.”

“Who knows. Perhaps these women don’t know what they’re getting themselves into, and imagine that lesbian relationships are a blissful domestic idyll, rather than the hellish reality of being kicked to death by someone in sensible shoes.”

Maybe it’s because as an American I’ve just been brain-washed into thinking in terms of identity politics, but reading the article I was thinking this guy’s laying into the homosexuals with perhaps excessive vigor.  Got me to thinking just who he is.  So I clicked through on his byline link at the top of the article.  Milo Yiannapoulos is his name, and he seems to be regular Breitbart.com contributor.  He’s got some hilariously truthful articles there, like his “A Lexicon of Social Justice“.  Some favorite entries from which:

“Dominant culture
 The stuff people actually like. Not to be confused with taxpayer-funded lesbian performance art, which would surely break all Box Office records if only more people got to see it.”

“Glass ceiling
 My career isn’t doing as well as I think it should be, because I’m an insufferable, hateful, jealous bore, and I am looking for someone to blame.”

“Transgender
 A psychiatric disorder reimagined as a ‘civil rights issue’ because we’ve literally run out of things to complain about.”

Read, as Instapundit frequently encourages, the whole thing.

But what really caught my eye were two other of his articles that also showed up:  “I’m Sooo Bored of Being Gay” and “Kids Need a Mum and a Dad,” in the latter of which he describes himself as a “party-hard homosexual.”  Do what?  Having read both of them it seems to be the case:  His piece on lesbian (and to a lesser extent, male homosexual) domestic violence isn’t just some hit-piece content “sponsored” by the Westboro Baptist Church.  Whatever his stated reasons for his homosexuality may be (in his “Sooo Bored” he makes a joking reference to having decided to be homosexual in order to offend his parents), and whatever his thoughts may be about the implications his life choices (I’m willing to accept that homosexual inclination is something you may be born with, but living as a “practicing” homosexual, just like living as a “practicing” heterosexual, is very much an affirmative choice) for his personal existence, he goes out of his way not to wear blinders about that part of the world he lives in.

I like someone who makes an effort not to entertain illusions about himself and those things he chooses to be a part of.  I’m in large measure something of a redneck.  I’m also an introvert, a P. G. Wodehouse fan, and something of a school snob.  At least as to that last, I know I ought not be, and I know that school snobbery is more than a little bit like people who manage to work into every damned conversation the fact that 35 years ago they set their high school’s single-season passing yardage record.  Pathetic, in other words.  I freely acknowledge the underside of redneckery; I admit my inclinations, to the extent that I have them, in those directions; and I likewise confess myself not always having the moral strength of character to resist them.  And so forth.  With Wodehouse there arises within one the warm glow of the Initiate.  One goes through life feeling alternately pity and scorn for those who have never heard of The Great Sermon Handicap, or drunk with The Oldest Member, or who have never gone into a bar, looking for a brass foot rail with a silent prayer to St. Galahad Threepwood in their heart.

[You can’t grow up reciting the General Confession from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and still cherish an unblemished self-image:

“Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men; We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, By thought, word, and deed, Against thy Divine Majesty, Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, And are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable. Have mercy upon us, Have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; For thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, Forgive us all that is past; And grant that we may ever hereafter Serve and please thee In newness of life, To the honour and glory of thy Name; Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”]

So I went back and re-read the article on lesbian domestic violence.  I even clicked through on the link to the Puffington Host article cited.  “Shocking” statistics on domestic (or what now seems to be called “intimate partner” violence, presumably to cover as well those couples who beat, torment, and kill each other without ever actually shacking up together) are paraded before us.  [Aside:  Any headline which contains the word “shocking” is to be treated as presumptively heralding an out-pouring of mountebankery until proven otherwise.  The Weather Channel’s website is especially offensive in this particular, and the only reason I still patronize them is because I haven’t found one that’s easier to use and not just as bad or worse.]

The PH’s article starts off, predictably enough, with some nice context-free false equivalence:  “The number of American troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2012 was 6,488. The number of American women who were murdered by current or ex male partners during that time was 11,766. That’s nearly double the amount of casualties lost during war.”  How many different individual American servicemembers were in Iraq and Afghanistan during those twelve years, in places where they were realistically exposed to combat operations?  Maybe a few hundred thousand?  And how many different American women during that same period were in adult (in other words, post-high-school) relationships with men during that period?  Maybe 100,000,000 or more (a girl ten years old in 2001 would have been 22 in 2012, so you’ve got the better part of an entire generation of female Americans added to the population pool during that time)?  Also overlooked is the fact that American troops are, you know, armed to the teeth to protect themselves, while tens of millions of women were denied their most basic civil and human right — self-defense — by the sorts of anti-gun demagoguery pumped up by precisely outfits like the Puffington Host.  Whatever.

Then we get to the statistics.  I am entirely comfortable each and every one of those numbers quoted by the PH is valid, in the sense that it is a usefully accurate quantitative measure of the sociological phenomenon described.  On the other hand, you have to pay very close attention when left-extremists begin citing statistics.  Thomas Sowell years ago drew attention to the archetypal technique employed to confuse the discussion of X of Y per unit of Z.  When attempting to extract money from the productive classes in order — allegedly — to fight black poverty, the figure of black income-per-household is cited to paint a picture of continuously unfolding disaster; when what is desired is to show the effectiveness of various “affirmative action” and racial preferences and thereby extract money from the productive classes to hand it over to what Sowell helpfully describes as the “pet constituencies,” the figure of black income-per-capita is given.  And never is highlighted the distinction between the two.

The PH’s statistics are mostly strictly American numbers (there are a couple which are expressly world-wide figures, and several that specifically reference the U.S., but most are silent).  But let’s put some context underneath it all.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, on Census Day in 2010 the gross U.S. population was 308,745,538.  Their age-and-sex data shows that 156,964,212, or 50.8% of the total, were female.  Of those women, 16,322,308, or 10.4%, were born in 1940 or earlier.  That’s helpful to keep in mind, because I’m going to suggest that, whether better or worse, the world inhabited by adult women before 1960 was qualitatively different from that developing and existing after 1960.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but there was a lot of shit doled out to women back in the day which is now recognized much more widely, and sincerely, as just unacceptable than it used to be.

A further note on the PH’s numbers.  You’ll observe that not many reflect the data on heterosexual “intimate partner violence” experienced by men, although there is quite a bit of data out there on the subject.  It shows that men experience it at rates very similar to women, although the injuries suffered by women tend to be more severe (as you’d expect, given the physiological differences between the sexes).  Just by way of example, the U.S. Secretary of Defense the other day announced the annual sexual assault data for the U.S. Armed Forces.  More men reported unwanted sexual contact during the previous year than did women.  Huh?  Further, when you factor in the personal violence experienced by men of all sorts, you begin to realize that American women, even when you include their personal physical risk from their “intimate partners,” are overall safer in their persons than men are by several orders of magnitude.

38,028,000 women have experienced some form of “intimate partner” violence at any point in their lives.  That makes 24.2% of all women who have experienced it, ever.  I’d be interested to know the age break-down of that 38 million.  If it’s concentrated in the upper age ranges, what that tells me is that the problem is getting better instead of worse.  If the other way around, then we need to be asking ourselves why, in a post-1960s world, when overall violence of all types is going down, this one subset of it should be getting more, rather than less, prevalent.

1,509 women were killed in 2011 by men they knew, of whom 926 were killed by an intimate partner (who was, we are invited to assume, male).  That’s 926 women killed in one year, out of roughly 157 million women, or 59 ten-thousandths of one percent of the female population.  During 2002-2009, there were an average of 3,533 non-boating drowning deaths per year, 80% of whom were age 15 or over, and 80% of all of whom were male, meaning an average of 565 or so women ages 15 or over in the U.S. died each year by drowning.  In fact, women overall have a higher risk of death by drowning than men.  Booze, the by the way, figures in 70% of all drowning deaths (no sex-correlation is given for that data point).  The FBI shows 2,813 total female homicide victims for 2011, so familiar killers accounted for 53.6% of the total, and intimate partners for 32.9%, or almost exactly one-third.  But this is why the PH really should have put some context around it:  In 2011, there were 9,829 male homicide victims, almost 3.5 times as many.

And now we get to see some subtle presto-chango from the PH:  Every minute 20 “people” are the victim of intimate partner violence.  Well, how many of those 20 are female and how many male?

4,774,000 women will “experience intimate partner violence” during the course of a year.  Let’s couple that with 1 in 4 women will experience “severe” domestic partner violence, and 1 in 7 men will experience “severe” domestic partner violence.  “Severe” is not defined, but I’m going to assume that it is, well, severe enough to require medical attention.  Thus, a scratched male face would not be severe, but a spiral fracture of a woman’s forearm, or a female shoulder wrenched from the socket would be.  What I’d like to see is a male counterpart to that 4,774,000 figure.  Why the “severe” comparison but no gross-numbers comparison?  Well, the latter comparison is meant to suggest that men are overall exposed to less domestic violence, when all it really does is highlight the entirely expectable result of the overall physical strength imbalance between the sexes.  Including the male-victim gross numbers would make that plain.  And left-extremists are never, ever about being plain.

40-45% of women in “physically abusive” relationships are raped and/or sexually assaulted during the course of the relationship.  What does “physically abusive” mean?  Does it mean a relationship in which there has ever been a manifestation of physical violence, ever, or does it mean more than X instances of physical violence total or at least X instances during any particular period?  By the way, note that over half of physically abusive relationships don’t result in a sexual offense.  Does that throw any light on the feminist claim that rape is not a sexual offense but a power-relationship offense?  I mean, trying to think my way into the head of a man who’d make a habit of beating his woman — surely about as crude an expression of power-exploitation as you can imagine? — if rape is just one more aspect of power-exploitation rather than an expression of perverted sexual lust, would I not have frequent recourse to it?

And then we get to Yiannapoulos’s cited figures:  2 in 5 — that’s 40% — of male homosexuals will experience intimate partner violence during their lives.  That’s a two-thirds greater statistical likelihood for them than for all women as a group.  Among lesbians, fully 50% will experience “domestic violence” (which the PH goes out of its way to assure us may not be “intimate partner” violence . . . why tell us that, and why not just give the “intimate partner” data?) during their lives, exactly double the overall female population expectation.

Perhaps inadvertently, the PH then provides some context to that 38,028,000 figure, although they shove it in way at the bottom of the column so as to discourage the comparison.  World-wide, not 24.2% of the female population can expect to experience intimate partner violence, but full 70%.  Suddenly all us Awful Americans don’t look so bad.  I have just one question for the pro-al-Qaeda left-extremists:  Does female genital mutilation of small girls count as “domestic violence”?

Another article linked by Yiannopoulos contains some alarming data points.  Somewhere between 17% and 45% of all lesbians report being the victim of at least one act of violence perpetrated by a female partner.  That’s from somewhat less than to almost double the rate of “intimate partner violence” — 24.2% — reported with respect to the gross U.S. female population.  Here’s another: 30% of all lesbians report being the victim of an act specifically of sexual violence by a female partner.  Here we’d better remind ourselves that how the surveyor defines things like “sexual assault” can produce any number desired by the study.  It’s how, for example, we get that 25% of college women will be the victim of sexual assault or worse during their time in college (which is the same as to say that a college woman experiences the same risk of sexual assault during a four-year period that all U.S. women experience of intimate partner violence over their entire lives).  I’d like to see the number of heterosexual women who would report positive according to the same criteria; how would that compare?

The long and short of Yiannapoulos’s article and the others he links to is that homosexual relationships are much more prone to violence than heterosexual relationships.  Period.  That situation seems hard to reconcile with the notion that they are functionally and therefore morally indistinguishable from heterosexual relationships.  That in turn suggests that maybe, just maybe, a state’s refusing to give homosexual relationships equal legal stature by calling a homosexual couple “married” is not just an exercise in bigotry, but may well be very concretely supported by specific physical data.  If the numbers Yiannopoulos cites are good numbers, then I think any constitutional argument about homosexual “marriage” must ask whether it is a legitimate state objective to refuse to encourage domestic relationships so markedly more violent than traditional arrangements.  The state cannot effectively forbid those or any other sort of human relationships; not even the Nazis with the death penalty for “racial defiling” could do that.  But does the fact that the state cannot as a practical matter, and ought not as a legal matter prevent them from arising necessarily command the result that therefore the state must encourage them by granting them a privileged legal status (which is what marriage in fact is)?

That’s not a bigoted question to ask, any more than it is unreasonable to ask whether terminating a biological parent’s rights in respect of his or her minor child by reason of the parent’s drug abuse, or running with violent felons, or other behaviors demonstrably hazardous to small children is a lawful exercise of the state’s protective function in respect of its citizens.

Somehow I don’t reckon any the Supreme Court is going to pay much attention to those data.

When Brilliant People Say Silly Things

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Don’t get me wrong.  Stacy Chou, featured in this article in the most recent edition of Wired, has not only an undergraduate degree but also a master’s in computer science, with a specialty in artificial intelligence.  Her day job is coding for Pinterest, and she interned at Google and Facebook before signing on as one of the first 15 employees at Pinterest.  She’s got chops, in other words.  I’m quite satisfied she’s brilliant in ways I don’t even suspect a human can be brilliant.

I’m just some ol’ redneck.

But Comrade Chou is also an “activist.”  And how, whom, or what does she activate?  Well, she’s trying to increase the number of women employed as engineers in Silicon Valley.  Among the 200-odd smaller tech firms who voluntarily responded to a survey she’s organized, she found — just to what extent can this have been news to her or anyone else? — that only a tiny number of the engineers were women.  Sound the diversity klaxon!

She’s also trying to recruit more women directly into her company.  This summer, 21 of 57 interns scheduled to work for Pinterest are women.  And she trots out:  “It’s still not enough.”  Enough?  For someone as hyper-intelligent as she is, she seems to understand very little about either basic human nature or the demographics of the world in which she works and moves.

For starts, specific humans are not random events.  Each of us in the product, to a greater or lesser extent, of everything that has happened to us, every decision we’ve made over the course of our entire lives up through today, starting with the family we were born into and continuing on until this morning.

Secondly, Pinterest and its peers aren’t just hiring people to work the loading dock.  Their hiring criteria are painfully exacting.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but there aren’t a whole lot of Stacy Chous out there to hire, of either sex, of any race, of any age, of any ethnic or national background.  Period.  With folks like Mlle Chou, you’re talking three standard deviations above the mean just in raw mental horsepower, and that’s before you even get to the questions of talent and inclination.  Yes, it’s possible today for people in that field to work closely together from all over the world (a cousin of mine works from home outside San Francisco and his immediate boss works in London; the rest of his team is similarly scattered about the globe), but you still have to find them first, and that takes proximity.  The world is a huge place and the gross number of humans with the requisite mental capacity is finite.  A half-percent of seven billion humans (gross population isn’t at that level yet), which is actually a bit more than the proportion of the gross population at 3+ standard deviations above mean IQ, is 35 million (that same proportion of the U.S. population shakes out to roughly 1.65 million), and those people are scattered everywhere from villages in sub-Saharan Africa to Central Asia to Polynesia to Scandanavia to Dothan, Alabama.  The likelihood of any single one of them finding his or her way to Silicon Valley and even scoring an interview at a top-level tech firm is dauntingly, vanishingly remote.

Thirdly, no one at Pinterest or anywhere else in Silicon Valley is going to hire someone to learn computer engineering on the job.  That’s called learning how to shave on someone else’s face and Silicon Valley has no more money for that sort of indulgence than any other industry.  Nor are they likely to hire someone who’s just a pretty skilled engineer.  They’re looking for the very top layer of the very upper-most crust of the most talented people in the industry.  They’re looking for people who can strap themselves in and immediately launch down the catapult.  Those people don’t just coalesce from thin air sometime during their senior year at college.  Those are the people who’ve already been doing this sort of stuff, not only at school but also as a hobby, in clubs, on their own, for years before they ever darken a door in Silicon Valley.  They’re the kind of people for whom computers and programming are not just a field, but a vocation.  I’d bet that if Mlle Chou polls this summer’s interns, she’ll not only find out that most if not all of those 57 have — just for giggles — written multiple apps of their own, but that a large portion of them wrote their first apps before their junior year in high school.  It takes a long, long time for the talents and drive Pinterest and its peers are looking for to grow within any person.

All of which is to say that the pool of eligible hires for any serious firm in Silicon Valley is not only going to be minuscule, but it will be, even more so than in any other industry, incredibly self-selected.

And here we get to ordinary human nature.  It is neither more nor less an undeniable fact that girls, beginning right at the point in life when that sort of fanatic devotion to an activity begins to manifest itself (my hobby — my consuming passion — from the time I was in 7th grade was designing ships; had I been able to do calculus I’d have majored in naval architecture and this blog wouldn’t exist), girls self-select out of the STEM fields.  They just do.  Sure, some of it’s cultural, but unless Mlle Chou’s got plans she’s not sharing with us, neither she nor anyone else in Silicon Valley is going to be able to change the cultural forces to which 6th grade girls are exposed, either here in the U.S. or in any other country.  Some of it’s not cultural; a few years ago Larry Summers posed the question why there are so many fewer women at the very top of the field of (I think it was) mathematics than there are men.  He posed the question of whether there might be a sex-correlated difference in talent at that level.  Notice he did not say, “women can’t do math” or anything of that nature.  He merely speculated that — at that very highest level of achievement — there may be some physiological sex-correlated achievement differential.  He was crucified for even asking the question; lost his job, if Gentle Reader will recall.  You don’t, however, have to do a whole lot of digging to find credible support for the notion that female and male brains are adapted to different modes of thought and reasoning, that these adaptations lend themselves at different levels to different fields of human endeavor, and that these adaptations express themselves in the differing frequency of the voluntary pursuits of women versus men.  It’s just that simple.

So for Mlle Chou to say that X out of Y engineers’ being female is “not enough” is to assume any number of facts that not only aren’t in evidence, but rather are directly contradicted by some of the most basic facts which are.  Additionally, how the hell can you tell when the number of people exhibiting any arbitrarily selected characteristic is “enough,” when you’re talking about recruiting from a tiny talent pool for an incredibly demanding job?  You know when you have “enough” women, or “enough” blacks, or “enough” Jews, or “enough” left-handed people, or “enough” Pacific islanders?  You have “enough” when your team has sufficient talent to get the job done, right, on time, and within budget.  Then and only then can you say you’ve got “enough” of anyone.  If you can do all that, then, irrespective of what it is you’re looking for, you have enough of it; if you can’t do that, you need more talent and more dedication, not more women.

But then again if Comrade Chou had said that, she wouldn’t be featured in Wired, would she?

If Comrade Chou wants to recruit more women (or more of any arbitrary and largely irrelevant characteristic) into her job field, bully for her.  If her employer is OK with her doing that on the company’s dime, that’s fine too.  It’s their money to squander.  If I were the company’s general counsel I’d jolly well see to it that any such recruitment effort gets assayed over a Bunsen burner to make sure the company doesn’t get itself sued into oblivion by someone not wearing Mlle Chou’s favorite sort of genitals (this is California we’re talking about; if Comrade Chou fails to hire a man who’s had himself surgically mutilated into resembling a “woman” because he’s, you know, still a man, then God help her and her employer).  But to say that some X specimens of anything out of Y total employees is “enough” or “too many” or “woefully inadequate” is nothing more than silly.

Once again we see demonstrated that awe-inspiring levels of intelligence and garden-variety silliness are not mutually exclusive traits.

This Scarcely Required Clairvoyance, But Still . . .

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Back at the end of February I linked to an article in The Washington Post about the failure of the Clinton Foundation to disclose some pretty hefty contributions from foreign governments and other foreign affiliates to the Clinton family’s slush fund charitable foundation, all at a time when Hillary Clinton was U.S. Secretary of State and those foreign governments or nationals were actively engaged in discussions with the United States, through the latter’s Department of State, for various sorts of things, generally involving trade concessions, greasing the skids for foreign business interests to do business in the U.S. or with U.S. companies, and so forth.

In my post on that article I lamented that the sleuths had followed the money trail only part of the way.  Specifically I noted that asking where the money came from is only part of the question, and that equally important is the issue of where the money has gone, since “charitable foundations” so easily lend themselves to what ordinary speakers of English would describe as money-laundering.

Some of that sleuthing has now been done, as well as additional digging on the sources of funds.  At the risk of understatement, what has come to light thus far is several orders of magnitude worse than what I’d have imagined back in February.

For starts there’s the Canadian mega-donor, who was flying Bill Clinton around on his private McDonnell-Douglas MD-87.  Frank Giustra first met the former president in 2005 and they quickly became buddies.  Over the years Giustra’s committed in the neighborhood of $100 million to the foundation, placing him firmly among the largest individual donors.  Since 2005 the plane has been used 26 times for foundation business, frequently ferrying Clinton around the world.  None of those trips, each of which is a contribution by a foreign donor, has previously been reported, by the way.  The Washington Post has a nice write-up on the plane and the connections between the Clintons and Giustra.

It’s about well more than an airplane, however.  It seems that Comrade Giustra set up his own “charity” in Canada.  That “charity” has donated quite a bit of money to the Clintons’ slush fund charitable foundation.  There was a 2008 written agreement between Hillary Clinton, the Clintons’ foundation, and the incoming administration of Dear Leader, in which Hillary was to serve as secretary of state, to disclose all foreign donations to the Clintons’ foundation.  Well . . . its seems that while the donations from Giustra’s foundation are disclosed, the identities of over 1,100 foreign donors to Giustra’s foundation remain secret.  Which is to say that without popping open the lid on the Canadian’s foundation we have no way of knowing on which foreign governments’ or actors’ payroll our former U.S. Secretary of State is.

But it gets better.  Ol’ Comrade Giustra owned huge uranium mining interests, including mines in Kazakhstan he acquired in 2005 in a $500 million deal . . . a deal finalized within days after he personally visited with the Kazakh president . . . in the company of one Wm. Jeff’n Clinton, erstwhile U.S. President.  Now, let’s not overlook that in 2005 Clinton was just a former president and his wife a junior senator from New York.  On the other hand, everyone and his cousin knew Hillary was running in 2008 and already three years earlier had been anointed with the mantle of “inevitability” (Dear Leader, of course, hadn’t got that memo).  The Kazakh deal made Giustra a major world-wide player in the uranium mining industry.  The next year Giustra made a $32.7 million donation to the Clintons’ foundation.  But of course Giustra and Clinton both deny Bill had anything to do with getting the deal closed.

Oh, but it gets better.  Let’s follow the thread some more.  In 2007, Giustra merged his uranium mining company — UrAsia — with a company called Uranium One.  Uranium One also happens to control about 20% of America’s domestic production of uranium, a strategic mineral.  Uranium One was headed by a buddy of Giustra’s.  During Hillary’s tenure as U.S. Secretary, Uranium One decided to sell itself to the Russian government in a series of transactions running from 2009 to 2013.  The sale of a company that controlled that much of American uranium required the approval of the U.S. Department of State.  While this deal was being reviewed by State, the chairman of Uranium One donated some $2.35 million to the Clintons’ slush fund foundation, and one of the Russian bankers working that end of it engaged Bill Clinton to deliver a speech in Moscow.  For a nice $500,000 fee, among the largest he ever got.  The State Department approved the deal.  During the deal, Comrade Giustra — remember him? — arranged for senior officials from Kazatomprom (it was involved in the deal from the Kazakh end of things) to visit with the former president at his house in New York.  Confronted with questions about the visit, the Clinton Foundation reflexively lied and said the visit had never occurred . . . until the reporter from The New York Times observed there existed a photograph taken at the meeting, at which point the story changed.  Yes, the meeting had taken place.

That same NYT reporter is the author of a pretty damning report . . . in The Grey Lady, of all places.  “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal” is the headline, which pretty much sums it up.  Recall that this wasn’t a one-off thing.  It was sequence of transactions and during the entire period the cash kept flowing.  Moreover, the State Department was involved in substantially more than just signing off as Russia acquired control over 20% of U.S. production.  Remember those mines in Kazakhstan that Giustra had bought right after a visit from Bill Clinton to the Kazakh president?  Well, those mines were the crown jewels for Uranium One.  Rosatom (the Russian government’s entity) was only interested in the deal if it knew that it could get clear title to those mines.  There was only one problem, however:  In June, 2009, “Mr. Dzhakishev, the head of Kazatomprom, had just been arrested on charges that he illegally sold uranium deposits to foreign companies, including at least some of those won by Mr. Giustra’s UrAsia and now owned by Uranium One.”  Uranium One’s stock value dropped precipitously on the news.  Oopsies.  It turns out, by the way, as we now know from Wikileaks revelations, that the arrest was all part of a Russian move to force acquisition of those Kazakh assets.

So what do you do if you’re Uranium One?  Right:  You call up the U.S. embassy in Kazakhstan and pressure it to get involved.  From the NYT:  “It was against this backdrop that the Vancouver-based Uranium One pressed the American Embassy in Kazakhstan, as well as Canadian diplomats, to take up its cause with Kazakh officials, according to the American cables.  ‘We want more than a statement to the press,’ Paul Clarke, a Uranium One executive vice president, told the embassy’s energy officer on June 10, the officer reported in a cable. ‘That is simply chitchat.’ What the company needed, Mr. Clarke said, was official written confirmation that the licenses were valid.”  Remind me again why the United States embassy to a foreign country is being asked to vouch for the validity of mineral concessions in that foreign country, granted by that country to a corporation that is from yet another foreign country.  On June 10 and 11, 2009, those U.S. embassy officials met with the Kazakh government, and three days later Rosatom closed its first acquisition, of a 17% interest.

And who was the U.S. Secretary of State during this period?  Oh, right:  Hillary Clinton.

Less than a year later, Rosatom made an offer that would give it a 51% stake in Uranium One.  That created some waves in Washington.  There is, it seems, an outfit called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.  This not some toothless haven for people to whom the president owes the odd political favor.  The members of this committee include the U.S. Attorney General, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Director of Homeland Security, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Energy . . . and the Secretary of State.  And they certainly take their jobs seriously.  From that same NYT article:  “When a company controlled by the Chinese government sought a 51 percent stake in a tiny Nevada gold mining operation in 2009, it set off a secretive review process in Washington, where officials raised concerns primarily about the mine’s proximity to a military installation, but also about the potential for minerals at the site, including uranium, to come under Chinese control. The officials killed the deal.”

The Russian deal sailed through, at a time when the Clintons were raking in millions of dollars from people directly interested in the transactions.
“Amid this influx of Uranium One-connected money, Mr. Clinton was invited to speak in Moscow in June 2010, the same month Rosatom struck its deal for a majority stake in Uranium One.”  That would be the $500,000 speaking fee.  But not to worry:  From the NYT, we learn that, “In a statement, Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, said no one ‘has ever produced a shred of evidence supporting the theory that Hillary Clinton ever took action as secretary of state to support the interests of donors to the Clinton Foundation.’”  Well, that’s reassuring.  Notice, by the way, that he does not say it didn’t happen; he says no one has “produced a shred of evidence” that it happened.  You really do have to parse these people’s words carefully.

If we want to find out if there is any evidence of such goings-on, I guess all we need to do is examine in detail the written record of Hillary’s tenure at State, including specifically all of her e-mails (given the amount of time she spent on the road while in office, she must have spent a phenomenal amount of time communicating by e-mail), and then maybe we’ll get a better feel for whether or not basic human nature and simple calendar-reading is misleading us here.  Oh, I forgot:  Hillary has destroyed all original evidence of her electronic correspondence while Secretary of State.  It was stored on a private computer server in a closet in her personal residence.  She has now wiped the hard drive, after having her personal staff — not even representatives from State — determine what to turn over and what not to.  As someone recently observed, not even Nixon physically destroyed the tapes.

[As an aside:  This computer server in the closet of one of the Clintons’ unused bedrooms (or wherever it was) was most emphatically not secured to the level required for cabinet-level correspondence.  As a practical matter what this means is that there are, in places like Russia, China, very likely India, and elsewhere complete images of that entire drive in the hands of people who are no friends to the United States.  Were — God forbid — Hillary to be elected president as she believes herself entitled, we would have the U.S. President subject to blackmail by any of several implacably hostile foreign countries (and that ignores the near-certainty that it’s not just those governments who have possession of the incriminating evidence, but also private criminal organizations).]

And the above is just one of the stories of where the money has come from.  Where is it going?

Well, damn little of it is going to charitable grants (“programmatic grants” in the language of the foundation’s Internal Revenue Form 990s) to third parties.  To be precise, from 2008 to 2012 inclusive, the foundation’s own disclosure show $500 million raised (and remember that number is dishonestly low, because they didn’t disclose many millions of dollars from foreign governments and others with business before Hillary’s State Department), and of that a whacking $75 million, or 15%, going to charitable grants.  Some $290 million, or roughly 60%, isn’t even categorized on the returns, it seems; it’s just listed as “other expenses.”  Really?  You have a charitable foundation that wants to toot its own horn for doing good — and they all do that, every last stinkin’ one of them — and yet it modestly declines to describe the charitable operations or purposes for 60% of its gross expenditures over a five-year period?  Please do not insult my intelligence.  Right at $110 million went to employee salary and benefits.  Color me skeptical, but I have a hard time accepting as reasonable that 20+% in wages, salaries, and benefits for an organization that does not produce or market anything of its own.

Well, don’t they do a huge amount in-house?  Must a charity implement its charitable purposes by giving money to other organizations?  Cannot it get down in the bilges and (in the words of the late Fleet Admiral Fisher) “stoop to oil their hands”?  Let’s take a look.  From the same author as the above-linked article in The Federalist, we have this article as well.  By the numbers:

“While some may claim that the Clinton Foundation does its charity by itself, rather than outsourcing to other organizations in the form of grants, there appears to be little evidence of that activity in 2013. In 2008, for example, the Clinton Foundation spent nearly $100 million purchasing and distributing medicine and working with its care partners. In 2009, the organization spent $126 million on pharmaceutical and care partner expenses. By 2011, those activities were virtually non-existent. The group spent nothing on pharmaceutical expenses and only $1.2 million on care partner expenses. In 2012 and 2013, the Clinton Foundation spent $0. In just a few short years, the Clinton’s primary philanthropic project transitioned from a massive player in global pharmaceutical distribution to a bloated travel agency and conference organizing business that just happened to be tax-exempt.”

Now, there was some reorganization behind the changes in those numbers.  In 2010, the Global Health Access Initiative, which had previously been within the umbrella of the Clinton Foundation and which had been the vehicle through which most of that pharmaceutical and care partner expenses were run, was spun off into its own entity.  The above numbers, showing those expenses going from $126 million in 2009 to $1.2 million in 2011, reflect that.

What was left?  Well, the Clinton Global Initiative, most of whose expenses are planning and staging the annual do of the . . . Clinton Global Initiative.  Then there is the Clinton Presidential Center, which is mostly the presidential library in Little Rock.  The other main programmatic expense is the Clinton Climate Initiative.  And what is its charitable function?  Well, the problem is that according to its CEO, Ira Magaziner (we first heard his name back in the early 1990s as one of the architects of Hillarycare), it’s not charitable at all.  Do what, you say?  Let’s let Ira tell it for himself.  From an article in The Atlantic in October, 2007:

“The climate initiative, in typical Magaziner style, has many moving parts, including technical assistance to cities, networks for sharing best practices, software to measure progress, financial support, and a full-time foundation staff member assigned to each city. But the make-or-break component is a plan to re-equilibrate the market for energy conservation. ‘What we’re doing is jump-starting— accelerating—market forces,’ Magaziner told me.

<snip>

That would be step one. Step two, in Magaziner’s vision, is to channel a Niagara of private capital into the effort. Energy-saving technologies typically cost more up front but less over time. ‘So what we’re going to be doing is setting up a financing mechanism,’ he told me. The foundation would help cities borrow in the securities markets against future energy savings. ‘The whole thing is bankable,’ Magaziner said. ‘It’s a commercial proposition. This is not charity. The whole concept of this is that the market itself over some period of time is going to deploy all these energy-saving things. The problem is it will happen slowly and gradually.’ The foundation hopes to reduce decades to years, and years to months.”

OK then.  Can anyone say, “unrelated business taxable income”?  Now, with the Clintons, as with all politicians, you have to ask yourself who is to benefit from the deal.  The Clintons are accepting all kinds of money from all manner of unsavory foreign donors.  They are turning it around and pumping it into — what? — his presidential library, an annual piss-up and meet-up, and some spectrum of “green technology” firms about which we know really nothing.  Where does it go from there?  Well, we have some idea of what may well be happening.  Our template is the Solyndra fiasco.  That was the one where the U.S. government subordinated $535 million in “loans” to the equity position of major donors to Dear Leader’s campaign and related supports.  Solyndra was a “green technology” start-up.  Or little Bobby Kennedy’s outfit (the name escapes me at the moment), the public filings of which indicate that its entire business plan is to live off government grants.

How much money goes to which firms, upon what terms, and what are the political donation patterns of the principals and senior management of these operations?  That will need to be the next step, drilling down to find out how much of this cash gets recycled back to the Clintons, either in “speaking fees” for Bill, or contributions to Hillary’s presidential bid.

The 10th Amendment Revisited

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Via Instapundit, we have news that the governor of Tennessee (Instapundit’s home state) has signed a bill — SB 1110 is the bill designation — which prohibits use of state assets or personnel in the enforcement of certain federal firearms laws.  Over at Breitbart.com’s Big Government, we have a brief write-up on the Tennessee bill, as well as a similar measure recently enacted in Indiana (the Indiana law relates only to regulation of sawed-off shotguns).

The comments to the Breitbart.com article seem to fall into two camps, those who view such laws as attempted “nullification” of federal statutes, and those who see such laws as a state standing up to the federal government’s over-reach.  Among the former we have —

“These nullification laws are sedition and you people commenting on this story are encouraging insurrection. There is no 10th Amendment because the supremacy clause can be used at any time to nullify any law passed by a state. State laws designed to defeat Federal Law is nothing more than a throwback to when Confederate Traitors tried to destroy our nation. Like those traitors in the past, Union Blue will put you in the ground in order to save the Union. There are far more people who still love this nation and will not tolerate a collection of stupid America haters.”

And among the latter we have . . . well, we have just about the balance of the commenters on that post.

For reference purposes, the text of the 10th Amendment reads, in its entirety:  “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”  The commenter quoted above seems to misunderstand the functioning of amendments in general in relation to the base document.  To the extent that the 10th Amendment and the Supremacy Clause conflict on an issue, the amendment trumps.  Were that not the case then the following provisions of Article IV Section 2 would still be the law, notwithstanding the 13th Amendment:  “No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.”

Also beyond the comprehension of the above-quoted commenter is the operation of the Supremacy Clause.  That clause only operates within the scope of the powers “delegated to the United States by the Constitution”; it is not an independent source of federal authority.  It is why the federal government cannot prescribe the qualifications of voters in individual states, except to the extent that a state’s voter qualification law violates the due process or equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment, or effectively denies voting rights based upon “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”  Thus, a state may disqualify felons from voting, and a federal statute attempting simply to over-ride that proscription would not trump based on the Supremacy Clause (depending on how it was crafted it might stand a chance under the 14th Amendment, however).

I’ll also point out that the text of the 10th Amendment, drafted by, debated, voted upon in Congress, and ratified at the same time and by the same people as those who produced and ratified the 2nd Amendment, sort of puts the lie to the notion that when the 2nd Amendment protects the right “of the people” to keep and bear arms, what was really meant was the right of the states to create a militia.  No; those drafters understood the distinction between “the people” and “the states.”  In fact the rights of “the people” (and that’s always how it’s referred to, never as “individual persons” or “persons” or “individuals”) are mentioned something like eight or nine times in the Bill of Rights, such as the 4th Amendment, which provides, in full, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”  If you want to read the 4th Amendment in the same manner as the anti-gunners want to read the 2nd, you would have to conclude that only those “persons, houses, papers, and effects” at the time in the custody and control of the states are secure against unreasonable searches and seizures.  So presumably my birth certificate would be so secure, or the possessions of a prisoner would be secure.  The rest of us are on our own, because the expression “of the people” refers only to collective actions exercised by and through the intermediation of a state.

Errrmmmmm . . . . not.

But I digress.  Let’s look at specifically what the new Tennessee statute prohibits and what it does not affect.  As an initial matter, I’ll note it’s poorly drafted.  The bill’s two substantive subsections are both single sentences, and they both share a common verb:  “shall be allocated.”  Huh?  A quick search on Westlaw for variants of the verb “allocate” in Tennessee’s constitution turns up one hit from the text, in Article 11 Section 5, relating to lotteries (apparently it took an amendment to that state’s constitution to permit a lottery).  There’s also an attorney general’s opinion that turns up as a citation to that section, to the effect that lottery proceeds have been “allocated” within the meaning of the text when they are placed in a separate fund for the purposes referenced.  That still tells me not a whole lot.  So you can appropriate and expend state assets for “the implementation, regulation, or enforcement” of federal statutes and regulations regarding certain aspects of gun ownership, so long as you do not assign those assets to a specific fund?  Moreover, how in God’s name does a state “allocate” funds to the “regulation” of “any federal law, executive order, rule, or regulation” regarding gun ownership?  And for that matter, what if we’re talking about a court order?  Under the text of SB 1110, the State of Tennessee could appropriate and expend state funds for the implementation of a federal court order regarding gun ownership.

This bill has all the earmarks of something put together by an amateur draftsman who then found a sponsor to slap his name on it.

So much for the poor grammar and drafting.  What sorts of “federal laws, executive orders, rules, or regulations” may Tennessee not “allocate” either its “public funds” (subsection (a)) or “personnel or property” (subsection (b)) to “implement, regulate, or enforce”?  These:  “regulating the ownership, use, or possession of firearms, ammunition, or firearm accessories.”  What’s not on that list?  Design; manufacture; sale, trade, or other commerce (whether intrastate or interstate); transportation (again, either intra- or interstate); taxation.  Those are some pretty sizable areas within which the State of Tennessee is not refusing its cooperation with the federal government.  In fact, if you think about it, those areas of gun rights with respect to which Tennessee is declining to serve as the federal government’s errand-boy are precisely those rights guaranteed to Tennessee’s individual citizens by the 2nd Amendment; they are more or less the components of “keep and bear arms”.

Strange as it might be to realize it, but whoever wrote this bill, while not being a very competent draftsman, nonetheless displays a very fine constitutional sensibility.  The state is refusing to participate in federal attempts to circumscribe citizens’ constitutionally protected rights.

Our commenter quoted above also seems to labor under some confusion about what precisely is a “nullification statute.”  A true nullification statute states that a law of another jurisdiction (in this case, federal) is ineffective within the boundaries of the state.  Thus, a federal employee who attempts within the state to enforce the nullified law does so at his own risk.  He is nothing more than a thief, an assailant, a trespasser, and is liable for civil and/or criminal prosecution as such in the courts of the state.  At the risk of pointing out the obvious, this new Tennessee law does nothing of the kind.  It would, for example, prohibit Tennessee from turning over any gun-ownership data on its citizens to any federal database.  It would prohibit federal access to its database of concealed carry registration.  It would prohibit a local police department from seizing firearms or accessories based upon a violation of federal law (or a conviction of a federal offense, even a firearms-related offense, although it could deny voting rights to that same convicted federal felon).

All of which is to say that this bill does and will create some interesting outcomes in law enforcement, but I’m just not seeing how this is treasonous or “anti-American” or somehow usurpatory of any lawful claim of federal supremacy.  I guess you can reasonably debate whether it’s a good idea or not, but then that’s why we have a 1st Amendment, isn’t it?

 

Gallipoli

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Today is This past Saturday was the 100th anniversary of the initial landings by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps on the Gallipoli Peninsula.  [I started this post timely, but wasn’t able to finish it on the day.]

The invasion was the brain-child of Winston Churchill, at that time First Lord of the Admiralty.  He had realized that Turkey, so far from being a side-show which could only diminish Britain’s strength in the decisive theater (i.e., the Western Front), was in fact the fragile and barely guarded back gate to core of the Central Powers.  Take Turkey out of the war and suddenly you have year-round unimpeded supply of Russia (already acknowledged to be the weak link in the Allied camp) and you out-flank Austria.

And in early 1915, the Hellespont and the Sea of Marmara were a loaded gun at Turkey’s head.  The Gallipoli Peninsula, which runs from northeast at the landward end to southwest where it juts into the Mediterranean, was a rugged place of arid uplands, very little settlement, and — most importantly — ancient forts with antiquated guns and very limited ammunition supply.  Across the Hellespont, on the Asian side, were equally antiquated, equally poorly-supplied forts.  Not only were they critically short of ammunition (which fact was known to the Admiralty through its Room 40 decrypts, themselves a result of SMS Madgeburg‘s capture by the Russians, with its code books intact), but the guns they had were not capable of piercing the armor of a modern dreadnought . . . with which the Admiralty was richly supplied.  Even its King Edward VII class of pre-dreadnoughts were more than up to the task of running the forts.  The navy’s ability to run the forts was vital, since the Hellespont at its narrowest point is just a mile across — point-blank range for any artillerist who isn’t a cross-eyed lunatic with the delirium tremens.

Churchill and the admirals decided the Navy could do it alone.  They were right.  After a concentrated bombardment on March 18 by a combined Anglo-French fleet which pulverized the forts into powder and almost completely exhausted the forts’ ammunition supplies, the fleet was poised to strike the dagger into the heart of the Ottoman capital.  In fact the Ottoman government began to evacuate Constantinople.  [N.b.  Constantinople was Constantinople from 335 or so until 1453, just over 1,100 years.  The Turk has had the place not quite 600 years.  When they’ve had it another 500 years I’ll call it whatever the hell they want me to.  Until then, it’s Constantinople.]

And then it happened.  A Turkish mine-layer had laid a single line of mines along the shore, just at the edge of the channel.  If I recall correctly, it was only a half-dozen or ten mines; the rest of the channel had been swept by the Royal Navy’s minesweepers (navy vessels, but manned, for some incomprehensible reason, by civilians).  First a French battleship, the  Bouvet, struck a mine and sank with most of her 600 crew still aboard.  Then it was the British turn:  HMS Irresistable struck a mine, as did HMS Ocean, which had been sent to assist.  Both ships later sank.  HMS Inflexible, one of the Royal Navy’s original I-Class battlecruisers (two of the four of which came to grief at Jutland).  The navy backed off.  The minesweepers’ crews weren’t willing to brave the fire from the mobile shore batteries, which targeted them using searchlights on the shore, both to light up the sweepers and also to blind them.  The navy high command also got cold feet.  It was decided that the job was not to be done by naval power alone.  Troops would be landed.

And this is where Lord Kitchener comes into the picture.  To summarize the picture in spring 1915, nothing happened in the British army unless Kitchener signed off on it.  Nothing at all.  Lord K of K was not only the Secretary of War, in in the public mind he was the very face of the British land forces.  And Kitchener was a Western Front man, heart and soul.  He didn’t want any British soldier shot needlessly unless it was in one of his battles.  And he profoundly viewed a campaign on Gallipoli as being not his battle; in fact, he viewed it as being the Royal Navy’s battle.  He’d not approved landing troops in support of the navy’s initial efforts.  Even afterward he, too, went hot-and-cold about providing supporting troops.  The ANZACs were already in Egypt, staging and training for further transport to France.  It was hard to deny them to the campaign.  But he at first resolutely refused to consider sending in other troops, only later on to relent and send in additional divisions.  [One of them, the 29th, not only got itself shot to pieces at Gallipoli, but also got itself pretty badly knocked about on July 1 at the Somme; the Royal Newfoundland Regiment was nearly annihilated, and it was among the 29th Division that large numbers of troops in subsequent attack waves were shot down before they even could get to their own front-line trenches.]

Just about not a damned thing was done correctly on April 25, 1915, or at any time later, until the final withdrawal from the peninsula.  Between the mid-March naval attack and the landings over a month later, the Turks poured everything they could into beefing up the defenses, re-supplying the forts, and generally getting ready.  And they were ready enough, even if just barely in places.

Incredible as it seems, the British command in the field seems to have had no particular notion of what should happen once the troops and such modest equipment as they could handle got ashore.  By the end of April 25 there were literally several thousand British troops milling about on the beach because no one had thought to get them to the top of the cliffs.  Elsewhere, where individual commanders had taken some initiative, the British had made some progress up the slopes, although not uniform.  Mustafa Kemal’s troops held, however thinly; in some places they were reduced to bayonet charges when the ammunition ran out.

The overall British commander of the operation, Gen. Sir Ian Hamilton — a buddy of Churchill’s from way back in the Boer War — seems to have believed himself capable of running an amphibious operation followed by a protracted land battle from first a battleship and then the island of Lemnos.  Hamilton finally got himself fired, the new commander more or less taking over for the purpose of liquidating the front.

While excoriated for many years — in many households in Australia and New Zealand his name is still seldom uttered without a curse — Churchill’s conception of the Central Powers’ vulnerability at Constantinople was spot-on.  I’ve seen it described as the single master stroke of strategic thinking on either side of the entire war, and while I suppose you could quibble here and there, I’ve never seen anyone else attempt to identify a plan or an operation that, had it been vigorously prosecuted and properly supported, had the potential to be a game-changer on all fronts at once, which must be something like the philosopher’s stone of military strategy.  The concept was brilliant, the execution tragically bungled.  Why?  The problem, other than on-site incompetence staggering in its blindness, must in part be laid at the feet of the British system of governance.

But first, a word on the incompetence:  In fairness it must be conceded that the Gallipoli landings were the world’s very first industrial-scale opposed landings.  No one had ever done it before.  But in truth, how much imagination was required to understand that if your landing beaches are at the foot of cliffs, you’ve got a preciously small window of time to get yourself and your artillery to the top of those cliffs, and that until you get there you’re utterly vulnerable?  The value of high ground has been known since organized warfare began.  How hard could it have been to understand that aggressive advance, always a critical component of any attack, would be all that much more crucial under the situation that they had to have known awaited them?  And while we’re on the subject of the situation they ought to have understood awaited them:  One area in which Churchill’s aggression betrayed the entire plan was in the disastrous wait between March 18 and April 25.  Had the full might of the Mediterranean Fleet and the land forces been hurled on the peninsula at once, with no advance warning, there is a good chance that, however poorly led the troops were, the objectives would have been met, the shore batteries harassing the minesweeping operations suppressed, and the fleet sailed triumphantly into the Golden Horn.  But at that time Kitchener wasn’t willing to cut loose the ground forces.  Churchill’s failure was that rather than wait it out and maneuver Kitchener into consenting, he bit down on Fisher’s claim that the fleet alone could get the job done.

This last point highlights the institutional weakness of the parliamentary/cabinet system of governance as a war-fighting structure.  Lord Kitchener was Secretary of War; Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty.  Both were therefore cabinet members, and thus equals.  There was no person in the government who had coercive authority over either of them.  The British cabinet rests, even now and much more back then, upon the notion of “collective responsibility,” according to which no major decision is made until the cabinet as a whole can agree, with the dissenters having the choice to shut up or resign.  In many instances this arrangement is a positive strength; it permits ministers to resign on points of principle, without destroying their public careers (they remain members of Parliament, and in fact tradition accords the resigning minister a free shot on goal in the form of a speech on the floor of the House), and without foreclosing their re-ascent into the cabinet under other circumstances, as has happened repeatedly over time.  But where there is no agreement — as there was not on whether or how to attack the Dardanelles — and where you have a fundamentally weak Prime Minister (and Herbert Asquith was nothing if not weak; there was almost no principle he would not sell out, no colleague he would not under-bus, in order to stay in office), you get actions like the Gallipoli campaign.  In the American system a president would have had the ability to inform Kitchener that he had one of two choices: find X troops and get them to the theater, or go look for another job.  Churchill could have been forbidden to proceed without land support.  Asquith, even assuming he had had sufficient hair on his balls, could do neither.

In the aftermath of the failed campaign, the cabinet underwent a fundamental reorganization, with an inner War Cabinet effectively assuming control of the British war effort.  Churchill was made the scapegoat, and although a parliamentary inquiry more or less pinned the blame where the bulk of it lay — squarely on Kitchener and his refusal to act in good faith support of the effort — by the time its conclusions were drawn events had moved on.  Churchill was serving in the trenches in France, in the front lines and under fire.  Kitchener went down on June 5, 1916, when HMS Hampshire, carrying him to a meeting with the Russians, struck a mine and sank.  And then of course, on July 1, 1916, the Somme fiasco started.  By the time Haig finally gave it up as a bad job that November, the quarter-million dead and wounded of Gallipoli were dwarfed by the 624,000-odd of the Somme.

In Australia and New Zealand, however, the memories of Gallipoli remain.  The utter futility of the campaign repeatedly rose like a specter to haunt Churchill in all his future dealings.  It was the recollection of Gallipoli that lead General Marshall to declaim point-blank and to Churchill’s face, with FDR present and watching, “Not a single American soldier is going to die on that goddam beach,” when Churchill was plumping for an invasion of Rhodes in follow-up to the victory in North Africa.  It was at least in part the recollection of Gallipoli that made Churchill so reluctant a participant in Overlord.  How would he face the nation if a second expeditionary force was hurled back into an ocean?  The Americans, having had the luxury of observing and learning from Gallipoli, as well as much practice in the Pacific theater in their own war, were much more eager to shoot the dice.  The Americans were determined to launch a direct invasion of northern France, and Churchill could either get on board or see his role as an Allied leader further diminished.  So he got on board.

And for the Aussies and the Kiwis?  Gallipoli became their Valley Forge, and forge them it did.  Some time between April 25, 1915, and December of that same year, something happened on the hillsides in that miserable corner of hell.  While before they had been from Australia or from New Zealand, after Gallipoli they were Australians and New Zealanders respectively, on a mythical level, on a level at which nations are born.  That spirit was communicated back during the war, and brought home by the survivors afterward.  No more would Australia or New Zealand be off-shoots of some mother country.  “Back home” could never again be some island off the northern coast of Europe.

In the first episode of Ken Burns’s The Civil War, during an interview with Shelby Foote, he observes that you cannot understand the United States without a firm understanding of the Civil War, in that the Civil War “made” the United States in a way that no other trauma of our existence has.  I think you can say the same thing about the Gallipoli campaign for Australia and New Zealand.

So I hope everyone had a Happy ANZAC Day.  I sure did.  Unfortunately about the closest I could get were a few Foster’s oil cans (and those not even brewed in Australia).  Ended up being in a couple of bars that night, and not one of the bands could play “Waltzing Matilda.”  A shame.  But at least for a few moments, the memory of the ANZACs was honored, half a world away.

Well played, the ANZACs.

The Long Tail Lashes Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cue the squawks about “debtor’s prison.”

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

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

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

But what about that exception?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things That Must be Repudiated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Evidence, as if Needed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bang the Tin Drum Slowly, Ch. 2: Some Answers, Some Questions

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I’d thought of doing this as an update to my earlier post on the death of Günter Grass, but as it turned out longer than I’d planned, I figured I’ll just do it as a separate post.

The question about whether Grass’ Waffen-SS unit engaged in war crimes is not an idle one.  In today’s FAZ we have a report on an appearance at the University of Frankfurt by one Robert Hébras, who was among the very few survivors of the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Limousin.  On June 10, 1944 units of the Waffen-SS armored division Das Reich rolled into town, herded the townspeople into the square, separated the men from the women and children, and then proceeded to massacre 642 innocent civilians.  The men were shot in the lower body after being crowded into in a barn, which was then set on fire over their heads.  The women and children were burned alive in a church (and shot if they tried to escape the flames).  Here’s the Wikipedia write-up on the event; it does not mention a single hanging among the perps.  Shameful.  Did Grass have anything remotely like this on his conscience?  Even a random civilian bicyclist stood against a tree and gunned down?  Maybe a gang-rape of one of the eastern Untermenschen?

It appears that at least someone in fact has attempted to figure out just what the 10th SS Armored Division (“Frundsberg,” named after a famous 16th Century commander who directed his cavalry to get off their horses and fight on foot, after the fashion of the Swiss) was up to.  It was formed in 1943, with the bulk of its recruits coming from the Reichsarbeitdienst, the labor organization into which Grass was drafted.  So that would seem to bolster rather than cast doubt on his claim he was a draftee into the Waffen-SS.

We do know something of the division’s next-to-last commander (up until May 1, 1944, in other words well before Grass would have joined the unit):  Karl von Treuenfeld was a material participant in the 1942 retaliatory crimes against the Czechs for the killing of Reinhard (“Hangman”) Heydrich (q.v: Lidice).  After getting cross-ways with the Gestapo later, he was transferred to the Waffen-SS.  Eventually he was captured by the Americans in Italy, and committed suicide in 1946.  Men with clean consciences had nothing to fear from the Americans in 1946, although it isn’t clear whether what suggested to him avoiding too narrow an inquiry into his war-time deeds was on the one hand his participation in massacring Czechs or on the other his actions in command of the armored unit, or both.

In early summer 1944 the division had been transferred from the Eastern Front to northern France, where among other jobs it was involved in resolving the Falaise Pocket battles.  How it behaved itself in northern France is at least hinted at by its last commander’s receipt, in 1984, of a commemorative medal from the city of Bayeux (of the tapestry) “in the spirit of Franco-German reconciliation.”  It is difficult to think that a French city would so honor the commander of any enemy unit which had earned the reputation for serious misbehavior towards the civilian population.

In December, 1944 the unit participated in defeating Operation Market Garden, its commander receiving swords to go with his earlier award of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.

We next see the division around Colmar in January-February, 1945, fighting against the U.S. 6th Army in the Colmar Pocket.  Grass may well have been with the unit by this point.

After that the unit was transferred to the area of Cottbus, in the far east of what became the Soviet Occupation Zone East Germany, where its peculiar job was to stand by to mount a rescue operation to Berlin to grab Hitler out from in front of the Soviets, a mission which never came to pass.

About the only thing that can be said with certainty is that during the time when we know Grass would have been with his unit, it was stationed in Germany or in areas which Germany viewed as its own (e.g. Colmar).  Thus there would have been much diminished opportunity for doings such as Oradour-sur-Glane.  On the other hand in the late winter and spring of 1945, as Nazi Germany was coming apart at the seams, with hostile armies over-running its borders east and west, we must bear in mind it was awash in slave laborers, prisoners of war held in slavery, and political prisoners and offenders (as tyrannies circle the toilet bowl they if anything step up their repressive measures against their own populations).  This was a time in Germany when you could find yourself shot more or less summarily for “defeatism” if you observed that the “Final Victory” seemed somewhat less likely now that your town, well inside Germany proper, was within ear-shot of the Soviet artillery barrage.  It was a time in which prisoner camps were liquidated, the inmates shot and burned and the facilities razed; in which factories were destroyed to deny them to the enemy (and their slave labor forces likewise either marched off barefoot in the dead of winter or shot outright).  There would, in other words, have been ample opportunity for Grass to have participated in atrocities, atrocities which have never seen the light of day.

Complicating things is that there is no extant official war diary for the unit.  For the internal workings of the unit and its constituent units we’re more or less cast upon third-party sources or the veterans’ own narratives.  History is not only written by the victors; it’s written by the survivors generally. Anyone want to bet how many surviving veterans of the Frundsberg Division there were in 2006, when Grass finally poked his head up out of his biographical burrow?   How much of the Frundsbergers’ history has been written out of existence by its survivors?  You have to assume that the men in the unit, to the extent that they privately recorded any misdeeds, would have found it expedient for those written records to disappear after the war.  Likewise they would have joined the German national omerta about their war-time activities, and so not be eager to mention too loudly their personal recollections (like Grass, in other words).

How many potential third-party witnesses would there have been in 2006?  Where prisoners and slaves were liquidated there would be no survivors to tell the tale.  In areas where the civilian population had, to the extent possible, already fled there would be correspondingly fewer civilian witnesses to survive.

In the end we are left with only a concrete data point, and an inference, and a question.  Data:  For over 60 years Günter Grass repeatedly spoke and wrote about the Nazi years in Germany and Europe, without once fully and accurately describing his own participation in the events of those years.  Inference:  He had some positive reason to desire that story not be told.  Question:  What was that reason?

Unless some soldier’s diary surfaces, or that of a civilian, or a box of documents gets discovered in a barn somewhere, we may never know the answer.