The Economist Gets It Wrong

This is almost becoming an evergreen post title.  Once upon a time, The Economist was a serious magazine (it describes itself as a newspaper, by the way), to be taken seriously.  It was not at all unusual to open an issue and see letters to the editor from senior sitting cabinet ministers of serious countries.

Not, as Inspector Clouseau would say, any more.  I let my subscription lapse quite a few years ago, and nowadays I mostly read it on the throne in the gents’, here at the office.  I forget just when they went to being a shill for the usual drearily predictable far-left wing causes.  I’ve commented on the style manual apparently in effect at the place, under which every article on no matter what topic has to be tied somehow back into How Awful Global Climate Change is and why it would be real swell if we all just blew up the entire world economy on the off-chance that we might influence the “average global temperature” by two degree . . . 125 years from now.  Or something.

This year they’ve gone all-in to elect Her Herness.  Every week’s edition is full of how horrible it would be if Donald Trump is elected because he says such Mean Things and he’s so tacky and “thuggish” and so on and so forth.

If The Economist has done any extensive reporting on Her signing off on 20% of U.S. uranium production to the Russians, at a time when Her husband was being paid several hundred thousand dollars to give a twenty-minute speech to a Russian bank in Moscow (I mean, for God’s sake, even The New York Times reported on it, it was so egregious), I’ve not seen it.

If they’ve seriously analyzed the detailed report of the FBI director, in which he very meticulously went down each and every element of multiple federal felonies, showing that She checks every single box . . . and then recommended no prosecution, the week after Her husband and the U.S. Attorney General just happened to have a lengthy pow-wow in a private jet (of course! “global climate change” is only a problem when one of the unwashed masses wants to let off a little carbon), it’s got by me.

If they’ve mentioned the time gaps in Her e-mails that she (falsely) represented as being Her complete work-related e-mails — gaps when She was documented as being overseas, and there are days when there’s not one single stinkin’ e-mail in the pile she produced (fancy that: the U.S. Secretary of State is overseas on official business, and not one solitary work-related e-mail is sent to Her or by Her for multiple days, when over Her tenure She averaged 21 per day) . . . I haven’t seen a word of it in their pages.

Just another example: At the same time that Her department is squeezing the government of Sweden on its joyfully doing business with countries which are among the strongest, most active sponsors of world-wide terrorism — including specifically Iran — Her husband sets up a fund-raising arm in Sweden that collects a cool $26 million, and Bill Himself pockets $750,000 from Ericsson, which had been selling communications equipment to Iran for use in that country’s security services.  Almost immediately after Bill pockets his three-quarters of a million dollars for a few minutes’ speech, the U.S. State Department backs off Ericsson, allowing it to “police” itself.

Look:  The Economist is perfectly entitled to pick a side and to toss away its 170-plus years’ reputation for the sake of the ideology of the moment.  I’d wager I’m not the only person who has watched what they’ve made of themselves over the past 20 years, and has decided their subscription just wasn’t worth it (it isn’t cheap and never has been).  They can do without me, and seem to be doing fine.

But I do get fatigued by their relentless propaganda.

The cover story of the July 30, 2016, edition is “The New Political Divide,” in which, in the editorial leader (for those unfamiliar with the magazine’s layout, they lead off each week with a series of editorials, the lead of which is the cover story; then there are the letters and news blurbs; then comes a longer article on specifically the cover story) for which we are informed:  “The conventions [Republican and Democrat] highlighted a new political faultline; not between left and right, but between open and closed.”  By “open” they mean specifically open borders and free trade.  They identify Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as being the hucksters for “closed” and  Her as at best “equivocating.”

I don’t necessarily disagree with the proposition that, all else being equal, the free movement of people and goods across what are, after all, only man-made lines is a Good Thing.  I don’t even disagree with this statement:  “The multilateral system of institutions, rules and alliances, led by America, has under-pinned global prosperity for seven decades.”

Where The Economist goes off the rails is in the bait-and-switch of its analysis.  The key word here is “global,” but not in the sense that they wish us to take it — that is, “world-wide”.  Yes, the post-World War II prosperity has become world-wide, and even over just my own adult life has accelerated beyond any measure that could reasonably have been hoped for it at my birth.  It’s just amazing.  But:  The mood that has fueled the rise of Donald Trump is not an antipathy for “open” but a resentment that the benefits of “open” have become, over recent years, anything but “global,” at least not in the sense of “commonly shared by everyone”.

You see, there is a wide perception — and one backed by reality, unfortunately — that the population has become separated into two groups.  One the one side are those groups who bear the chief burdens of “open,” and on the other those who enjoy the bulk of the advantages.  The floods of illegal immigrants from Mexico and points south, and who are supposed now to receive work permits, driver’s licenses, welfare benefits, public housing rights, and so forth, are not competing for jobs, housing, and economic stability with those who most strenuously advocate their continued tide.  It’s pretty safe to say that not a single staffer at MSNBC is going to lose out on a job or promotion to an illegal immigrant.  Nor will a single government functionary.  Nor will a professor at a college.  Or a lawyer.  Or a doctor.  Or an accountant.  Or . . . well, you get the picture.  But the guy who drives a truck delivering auto parts to dealers around Little Rock, for example?  His livelihood is at stake when someone able (because living with three generations of four separate families, all wedged into a three-bedroom house) and willing to work for 40% less than he’s been making now has a work permit and doesn’t have to fear deportation when he gets his commercial driver’s license.

By like token, it doesn’t take much persuading to convince our out-of-work former factory worker that the rules by which China is allowed to play “international trade” are so stacked that he’s just plain screwed, now and for all time.  The guy who used to work making machine components has watched his company shut down the factory because of over-regulation, higher taxes, increased labor costs (only a small portion of which our hypothetical worker can trace into his own pocket, by the way), or whatever, and then move production overseas.  Company’s now doing fine; our Worker, not so much.

And then, of course, he sees the wealthy and prominent scofflaws doing as they damn well please, while his kid gets ground up in the juvenile justice system over a playground fight.  He sees Her getting caught red-handed compromising our national security, and likewise getting away with it.  He hears stories of enormous banks pushing loans to people they know can’t afford them, and then when the borrowers go belly-up, the banks thoroughly gun-deck the foreclosure process . . . and nothing seems ever to happen to them.  They remain as big as ever, and he hears the sums of money — tax money, his tax money — shoveled out to them to keep them afloat.  He hears a presidential candidate dismiss his concerns as “clinging to his guns and religion.”  He hears his home, his family, the world he grew up in and would like to pass down, to some degree at least, to his own children dismissed as “fly-over country”.  He is told that he is a bigot if he dares to question the wisdom of the Elites.  He is — at least if he is white — constantly accused of something called “white privilege” and for the life of him he can’t understand what’s “privileged” about having gone to work at age 16 and paid for every damned thing he owns out of his own pocket.  He notices that the people pasting these labels on him seem to be doing conspicuously better than he and his family are.

Precisely how reasonable is it not to expect a population so treated to embrace someone who promises to Change It All?

What The Economist seems to forget is that once upon a time most of a country was pretty easy to convince of the benefits of free trade.  In 1906 the Liberals in Britain blew up the Unionist Party in a general election.  The Unionists had pinned their flag to protectionism.  The Liberals wrapped them in the issue and rode to a landslide victory.  People can understand the benefits of free trade . . . when those benefits can be shown to benefit themselves in ways they can see.  It’s when “free trade” is used as a cover for the Insiders to get fat while the rest of the joint goes without that people turn away from it.  It’s the perception — and especially when that perception increasingly tracks reality — that the world is rigged against them that will turn people against that system, time after time.

I suggest it’s not just generic “inequality” that has got Americans up in arms this year.  America has never really done envy very well.  For decades the socialists would complain about how they just couldn’t get much traction here, setting class against class.  In America, they found, even the poor were determined one day not to be poor, were pretty OK with a system that would let them one day not be poor any more, and in fact even become well-off, and expected one day not to be poor. And they expected their children would not remain forever poor, forever shut out from opportunity to better themselves.  But what Americans can’t stand is a scam, a fraud, a rigged game of heads-She-wins-tails-you’re-a-bigot-and-lose-your-job-to-someone-whose-very-presence-here-is-a-crime.

But then again, no one at The Economist is going to lose his job to some government-backed factory in China, or to some guy who gave the finger to the country’s immigration laws and now has a work permit and lives in public housing.  No child of a staffer there is going to be rejected by a college because X% of the class entering places are now reserved for children of a certain color, or from special places, or whose parents speak very specific languages, or who engage in peculiar — very peculiar — behavior.  They know how to work the system and its rules; their children will do just fine.  Our truck driver from Arkansas?  His 17-year-old daughter is trying to navigate a house of mirrors and he can’t help her and he knows it.  You really want to piss a man off?  Set his child up to lose out and then keep him from pitching in to help.  And then rub salt in the wound by lecturing him on how contemptible he is while you’re doing it.

Yes, there’s a political divide out there, but it’s got bugger all to do with the one The Economist preaches to us.

Variations on a Theme by Ferguson

As I think I’ve mentioned on this humble blog before, the most interesting part of the U.S. Department of Justice report on the Ferguson, Missouri riots was not the racial aspect of what the Ferguson police department were or weren’t doing (and certainly not the conclusion that the officer was perfectly justified in shooting dead a violent felon who’d already made one attempt to seize the officer’s weapon and use it again him).  It was the degree to which Ferguson monetized its city court system and by extension its criminal law powers.

We are now seeing a variation on that theme, except that now we’ve got two rent-seekers fighting over the spoils.  “Rent-seeking” is what economists call the practice, as Wikipedia.org phrases it, of “seeking to increase one’s share of existing wealth without creating new wealth.”  Among the most egregious rent-seekers are (i) government at all levels, and (ii) lawyers.  I still recall hearing a fellow lawyer gloating over some peculiarly ill-advised statute which our state legislative assembly had passed, with specific emphasis on what a boon it was going to be for lawyers such as himself.  It made for depressing listening, the more so when I considered that he was correct.  That statute was going to generate untold extra business for lawyers in situations where the world just doesn’t need lawyers to be mixed up in them.

There is a company in Utah, Corrective Education Company, which markets its services to retailers.  For retailers, Gentle Reader should understand, shoplifting is a non-insurable risk.  That means that when someone steals from them, they either get it back themselves or they eat the loss.  It is part of the reason that, as the (true) saying has it, “The poor pay more.”  They do.  They do that because in poor neighborhoods losses to shoplifting are greater, the margins are thinner, and the money to cover the losses has to come from somewhere.  So it comes from everyone paying more for the same product.

What Corrective Education Company (CEC) does is a species of what is known in civil litigation as “alternative dispute resolution,” or ADR.  The point of ADR is resolution of civil disputes is that it is faster that a full trial and the results are less subject to judicial screwing-up.  It is phenomenally popular among economic actors whose business existence is exposed to repeated risk of litigation.  CEC has taken that same concept and is applying it to criminal offenses, specifically shoplifting.

What happens is that when a perp gets caught shoplifting from a CEC client, he is offered a choice:  He can have them turn him into the police for criminal prosecution, or alternatively he can sign an admission of what he did, then go through what CEC promotes as a “life skills” course the point of which is to impress upon the perp why it’s not a good idea to be a criminal and some degree of how to avoid staying a criminal.  And the perp pays CEC, roughly $500 or so.  Some portion of that money goes to the victim, but most of course stays with CEC.  Oh, and by the way, the perp doesn’t end up with a criminal record.

This idea has sparked outrage from entirely predictable quarters.  Remember Ferguson?  Well, there is an entire host of players who feed off the criminal justice system.  Police, prosecutors, court staff, judges, and then the whole tail-end process — the probation services companies (many if not most cities contract that out, either to private operators or to larger government entities, like the state itself), drug testing companies, counselors, and other busy-bodies.  The perps pay for them too, by the way, through the assessment of court costs, fines, and fees for all those private probation service companies, drug testing companies, counselors, and other busy-bodies.  Those outfits sure as hell don’t work for free, and the taxpayers have no interest in funding them.

What made the Ferguson system so pernicious, and I can vouch that their offense was distinct only in degree, not in kind, is that when the perp who’s copped a plea so that the prosecutor and police can tick that box off as being a closed case can’t find a job because of a criminal record, or can’t hold a job because its attendance requirements are inconsistent with having to run down to his probation officer every week or however often, and so can’t pay his court costs, fines, and fees, or he’s just not making enough money to pay them, he gets cycled back through the process, spending time in jail on the way (so he loses what job he had, and now can’t pay those court costs, fines, and fees), and on and on.  Plus, he’s now got a criminal record.

By the way, the court costs, fines, and fees for even a misdemeanor offense are uniformly a helluva lot higher than $500.

At any rate, in California (Gentle Reader knew that was coming, right?), the San Francisco city attorney has sued CEC, alleging that what it’s doing is extortion, false imprisonment, and so forth.  The case was filed back in November, 2015; I just saw a television news report of it yesterday on my way through a room where a television was on.  So I decided to see what I could find out about it.  Here’s the Los Angeles Times write-up, complete with link to the complaint filed.  And here Reuters, and SFGate, with their respective write-ups.

Let’s get an idea of the scope of the problem, from the LAT:  “Last year alone, retailers lost $44 billion to theft by shoplifters, employees and vendors, according to a national retail security survey. The CEC founders have said their ‘vision is to reinvent the way crimes are handled, starting with retail theft.’”  Forty-four billion dollars literally walking out the door.  Mind you, that’s not breaking-and-entering, or hijacking the trucks carrying product.  That’s broad-daylight theft.

Now let’s hear from the city attorney who’s filed the suit:  “But the civil lawsuit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, calls the tactics ‘coercive’ and ‘deceptive’ and says the program ‘has not been approved by any California court or prosecutor.’”  Well, of course it’s not been “approved”; this is a competitor to the other side of the criminal law industry.  They’re offering first-time perp a roadway out of his pickle for $500 and six hours pissed away in a seminar.  Versus dozens of hours spent with police, prosecutors, waiting around at cattle-call court dockets, then many hundreds of dollars in court costs and fines, followed by several thousand dollars to some private probation supervisor and drug-screening company (along with the hundreds of hours pissed away dancing attendance upon them).  Whom, exactly, does Gentle Reader think the owners, management, and employees of these third-party providers support come election time?

Even more to capture the motivation behind this lawsuit, here’s a longer extract from the LAT article:

“But legal experts said that particularly in California — where Proposition 47 has made petty theft a misdemeanor — it is unlikely that police and prosecutors would have pursued it.

That makes the threat of referral for prosecution problematic, said Stanford Law School professor Joan Petersilia, who with her students is surveying the increase in diversion programs — some of which partner with for-profit companies — that have resulted from shifts in California criminal justice policy.

Petersilia called CEC’s tactics ‘just so obviously wrong’ and said they do not fit the philosophy of restorative justice, which is based on empathy for the injured party and a solution that repairs the harm.

Most of the money under this model goes to CEC, not to the retailer or injured party, she said, adding that for those with money, it is not punitive enough, and for those without, it is unduly harsh.”

“Just so obviously wrong”; that is a characterization for use by someone who doesn’t really have an argument that will stand up against being pushed against.  What is the “tell” (to use a poker expression) for what is really going on here?  It’s in the bland phrase “increase in diversion programs — some of which have partnered with for-profit companies — that have resulted from shifts in California criminal justice policy.”

This is nothing more than a fight over the money that can be extracted from petty criminals.  Remember that, for starts, such crimes are at the bottom of just about every prosecutor’s priority list.  That’s just a fact of life, both for economic and political reasons.  No district attorney has a budget that will permit him to go hammer-and-tongs after every petty thief.  No district attorney won or kept office on a campaign platform of cracking down on the gal grabbing a lip-stick on her way out the door.

Most important to remember, in deciding how vigorously to wring one’s hands at the horrors of these perps getting nabbed not by the constituted authorities but by their own victims, is that even when they are prosecuted,  all that money in court costs, fines, and fees to those “diversion programs — some of which have partnered with for-profit companies” also does not go to “the retailer or injured party” either.  It sticks with the court officials, with the penal system, with those “partners” of the criminal legal system.  So Ms. Petersilia’s crocodile tears don’t move me much.

I long ago abandoned using the expression “justice system.”  No, what we have is a legal system.  In fact, it is more properly characterized as an industry.  It feeds multiple actors, some governmental, others private.  But what they all have in common is that they all pay their home mortgages, put tires on the car and shirts on their kids’ backs off the proceeds — we may call them the back-end proceeds — of crime.  They have livelihoods for so long, and only for so long, as an endless stream of perps is dragged through a legal system which is tailor-made to extract the maximum amount of cash from them for the minimum input in time.  Take away that cash and they’ll have to go get jobs and convince others to do business with them.

CEC is neither more nor less than threatening the rice bowl of an entrenched cadre of rent-seekers.  And so I have zero sympathy for their plight.

Harriet and Andy

The news in numismatics this week is that Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, is to be booted from the face of the $20 bill in favor of Harriet Tubman, of Underground Railroad fame.

Jackson’s getting the axe for two reasons:  The present administration is determined to put a face on U.S. currency that is not a white male face, and Jackson owned slaves.  He is also warmly despised for ejecting the Five Tribes from the Eastern United States.  So he has to go.

Harriet Tubman was a leading figure in the organization and operation of the Underground Railroad, that system of hiding places and safe houses which conducted escaping slaves from their points of origin to Canada, where the fugitive slave laws didn’t apply.  It was work conducted, at least in the South, at peril of the parties’ lives, and once in the north, at peril of arrest and imprisonment.

Suffice it to say that Harriet Tubman was equipped with guts enough to equip a regiment.  If you were to set out to fill an auditorium with the Greatest Americans who have thus far lived, she’d have a seat somewhere.

And yet I do not favor kicking Andrew Jackson off the $20 to make place for her.

Why?

For starts, a portrayal on U.S. paper currency is, if you will look at it, presently reserved for people who did great deeds in their capacity as public officials, not for acts of private significance, however worthy.  The only even possible exception is Benjamin Franklin on the $100 bill, but even then, Franklin was among the United States’ most important public servants.  The revolutionary alliance with France, that enabled us to win the war for independence in the first place, was a product of Franklin’s credibility at the court of Louis XV, of Franklin’s acknowledged place in world society (he regularly corresponded, as an equal, with the pre-eminent scientific minds of his generation).  Even before the war, he represented several colonies in London, and it was his personal experience of vituperation in Parliament which decided him that continued affiliation with Britain was not a workable long-term solution.  Later, he was a key player in the constitutional convention in 1787.  So even though he never held any public office under the United States Constitution, he was one of the men but for whom that compact would never have come into existence.

The other public servants scarcely need introduction.  Washington?  Father of the country.  Lincoln?  His deeds require no justification for the reverence in which we hold his memory.  Hamilton?  Father of our national economy (and also a key player in the constitution’s birthing).  Grant?  If being the key commander in winning the Civil War doesn’t merit his place, what might?  On coinage the pattern is similar.  Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson.  Eisenhower, who held together the Western allies in defeating Germany.  The two heads I don’t really understand are Truman’s on the dime and Kennedy’s on the half-dollar.

There is a single exception, and one that never took off:  The Sacagawea dollar (by coincidence I happen to have one in my pocket at this moment).  But even she has a claim to a service in the public interest:  It was she who guided the Corps of Discovery (better known at the Lewis and Clark Expedition) over the western mountains, who was valuable in securing for them the safe passage from the tribes whose lands they crossed.

Now let’s think of why Jackson might be on the $20 bill.  He was the founding light of the oldest continuing political party in American history.  Being a party hack doesn’t really merit a spot on the currency, though, does it?  Victor of New Orleans?  Well, as every school child knows, that battle was fought after the peace had been signed, although the point has been made that it in fact was not, in all likelihood, totally irrelevant for that reason.  There is strong reason to believe that Britain, had it been in possession of the mouth of the Mississippi, would not have surrendered it willingly after the war, which would have utterly changed the complexion of later American development.

No, I think Jackson earned his spot on the $20 bill when he stared down the South Carolina nullifiers.  As Gentle Reader will recall, a protective tariff had been adopted for the benefit of northern industrial interests.  The new imposts had the desired effect, of making imported manufactured goods more expensive than domestic production.  The burden fell hard on the Southern agricultural interests, because of their dependence upon their trade relationships with the British to move their cotton crop.  They bought a large proportion of their manufactured goods from Britain as a result of that trade.

Needless to say, the Southern interest was outraged at the new tariff law.  South Carolina announced an intent to “nullify” the federal statute.  It even passed an ordinance declaring the law to be unconstitutional and null within its borders.  It just was not going to apply in South Carolina (sort of like all these bullshit “sanctuary cities” that have announced that the federal immigration statutes don’t apply within their city limits — San Francisco is very much in the slaveholders’ tradition in this respect).

Let’s pause for a moment and take stock of where things stood during the Nullification Crisis:  In 1832-33 the United States was still a comparatively weak country, a comparatively small country.  Its parts were not yet bound by an enormous rail network, and outside the coastal plain there weren’t even all that many canals.  Large areas were still virgin wilderness (that situation applied far longer than one might expect: not far from where I live there is a county in which there were still over 100,000 acres of virgin hardwood in 1910).  The forces of cohesion in the country were still fragile, and there were still many powerful actors in the world who would have rejoiced in a failure of what was then known as the American Experiment.  This was still a world in which people’s demands for written constitutions were believed to be, and were treated as, an act of rebellion.  In fact, the Revolutions of 1848 in Central Europe were based in large part on precisely that — demands for written constitutions to tie down monarchs’ privileges.

[By the way, note what this understanding of constitutionalism has to say about the notion of a “living constitution.”  Until the U.S. Supreme Court got into it, everyone understood that a written constitution was written for the precise reason that its meaning did not morph over time into whatever you wanted it to say.  The U.S. Constitution was a revolutionary document for exactly the reason that it was written and its meaning did not change to suit the whims of the ruler of the moment.  The idea of a “living constitution” in which no provision has any permanent meaning does violence to the very concept of a constitution, and until the American left got at it, was universally understood to do so.]

The United States with its written constitution was a direct and immediate threat to all those crowned heads in Europe who fiercely resisted the pressure to shackle themselves to a written document with ascertainable substance.

Had South Carolina succeeded in openly defying the federal government as to Congressional action in respect of a matter unambiguously placed within its constitutional competencies — the regulation of trade with foreign nations — the American Experiment would have failed.  The country would not have survived, and there would have been no Underground Railroad because the borders would have been largely closed off.

Jackson was having none of it.  Congress authorized the Force Bill to compel South Carolina’s compliance with the law.  But of course, it would have been Jackson as commander-in-chief who would have been charged with implementing that, or not, and if so, how vigorously.  And what was Jackson’s position?  Well, a visitor from South Carolina asked him if he had any message he’d like to send to the good folks back home.  Jackson gave it to them with the bark still on it:  “Yes I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.”

South Carolina knew he meant every last word of that promise.  Compare and contrast Dear Leader’s “red line” in Syria that wasn’t.  South Carolina knew what it had to expect from Jackson, and a compromise was reached.  Syria knew what it had to expect from Dear Leader, and it has acted accordingly.

Jackson, in short, did no more and no less than save the union in 1832-33, at a time when there was an immediate danger of its dissolution.  For that, he more than deserves his place on the $20 bill.  Whatever Harriet Tubman’s private courage and dedication to the cause of human liberty may have been, her life’s work simply does not rise to that level of national significance.  The Underground Railroad never would have changed a damned thing about the institution of slavery; there is no way on earth they could have spirited enough slaves out of the South to make any but the most minuscule dent on the institution.  It took a civil war to make that happen, and had it not been for Jackson’s stance in the face of the nullifiers in 1832-33, there never would have been the northern industrial and demographic powerhouse twenty years later which tore the poison lance of slavery from the national body by main force.  Just wouldn’t have happened.

If you absolutely want to have Tubman’s face on U.S. currency, bilge either Truman or Kennedy, preferably the latter.  But to degrade the man whose courage saved the country betrays a profound ignorance of American history.

My Own Identity

Gentle reader will have observed, perhaps, that I quite carefully avoid writing about topics, or mentioning searchable data, which would permit me to be identified.  This is not accidental; I decline to expose myself to the kind of internet harassment which is now a standard part of the generic toolkit which today’s leftist carries with him.

But today . . . today, I will reveal Who I Am.

Before we get there, though, I want to share a few thoughts on what has become (in)famous across America as “H.B. 2,” or House Bill 2, the legislative designation for the statute which recently became law in North Carolina.  Here’s a link to their legislative website that has the full text of the statute.

Several of my leftist Facebook friends have been feverishly posting all manner of tripe about how the thing is Just Such a Terrible Assault on the Very Humanity of these poor souls who once upon a time were more honestly called “cross-dressers” or “transvestites,” but now, in a dreary attempt at linguistic promotion to a scientifically valid category, call themselves “transgender.”  Now, mind you, they still have either an X and a Y chromosome, or two X chromosomes, just as they did the day they were born.  In many cases they will still be wearing a penis and testicles underneath their hot little black dress.  But they’ll be dressed to the nines to look like a woman.

They are to be pitied more than censured.  Dressing up to pretend like that is just pathetic, as it speaks to a self-dissatisfaction so profound that you have to wonder how they face the world each day.  You don’t have to be a narcissist, but how much would you have to hate yourself not even to like what sort of human you are, so much that you priss about in public wearing heels?

“Identify”:  That’s what we’re told these poor creatures are doing; they’re “identifying as” whatever it is they claim to be.  By which they mean “self-identify,” because of course biology has identified them as male or female.  Yes, I’m perfectly aware that there are children born with bits and pieces of both, but we call those sorts of things “birth defects”; there are a tiny number of those born per 100,000 live births; and there’s a very well-regarded organization — the March of Dimes — which takes it for its mission the avoidance and correction of such birth defects.  We’re not talking about adults with uncorrected birth defects.  We’re talking about adults who want to play-act at being what they’re not.

And of course, there are the cross-dressers who, for want of a more gentle expression, are neither more nor less than sexual deviants.  They don’t “identify” as this-that-or-the-other.  This is just how they get their jollies.  Excuse me if I’m not impressed.

In any event, North Carolina passed a statute which does three principal things.  It requires schools which have bathrooms, locker rooms, and other spaces in which it is reasonably foreseeable that a student will be in whatever stage of undress, and which spaces are capable of being used by more than one person at the same time, to designate such spaces as being for the use of either but not both males and females.  [Single-user spaces are not required to be so designated.]  And it requires them to permit the multi-user spaces to be used by, and only by, persons whose biological sex, as indicated on their birth certificate, matches the sex designation of the space.  The bill requires “public agencies,” which are defined so as to include pretty much every governmental actor other than schools, to make similar sex and use designations for their own multi-user bathrooms and changing facilities.  For both schools and public agencies there are exceptions — pretty narrow, to be sure — to the use restrictions.  Finally, the bill prohibits localities — cities, counties, and their respective agencies — from requiring private actors, principally contractors doing business with those localities, from establishing, as a condition of doing business with the local government, a duty to permit cross-dressers from using whatever multi-user space they please at the moment.

That’s it.  The legislature wished to exercise its absolute prerogative to centralize decisions such as that at the level of the state.  And then it exercised its authority to set the ground rules for the entire state.

I’ve read that statute through multiple times and I’m just not seeing the hatred in it.

Oh, but you see, the hatred is in my refusal to accept as legitimate your little game of “today I’m a girl.”  No you’re not, and I have zero moral obligation to play-act along with you.  If you’re so damned proud of who and what you are, then own it.  It’s like homosexuals who want you to call them “gay.”  No, you’re not “gay,” you’re homosexual.  If you’re so all-fired-up proud of it, then call it by its right name.  Don’t hind behind a euphemism.  More to the point:  You have no legal right to demand that I play your games, that I adjust my life to make room for what you do with your genitals to get yourself off.

To get an idea of just how horribly messed up things have got in this country, recently a fellow went to the University of Washington campus.  He’s a white male, roughly 5’10” tall, and obviously adult.  He asked people he ran into to explain to him, if they could, why he was not a 6’5″ Chinese seven-year-old girl.  No.  Seriously.  He did this, and those sad-sack “social justice warriors” (here’s a list of some of the most prominent, so you don’t, if you’re responsible for hiring in your company, accidentally hire any of them) couldn’t muster up the guts to tell him he was simply incorrect, that he was neither female, nor 6’5″ tall, nor Chinese, nor seven years old.  One girl politely questions whether he’s quite that tall, but that’s it.  Watch the whole video.  As the commentary accompanying the video at the link points out, these people are ripe for dictatorship.  Over at Ace of Spades, they connect the dots:

“People conditioned to accept outrageous falsehoods from people claiming to have a special right to their own reality are an existential threat to the republic. If a 5’10” white man can tell you he’s a 6’5″ Chinese girl, and you are required to believe him because each person constructs his own quantum reality moment by moment, it’s no difficult thing to also accept that killing the kulaks and putting the farms under inefficient state rule will result in a greater grain harvest.”

This is all the more true when you consider that there’s no logical boundary line between my quantum reality and yours.  You are a part of mine, and I of yours.  If I “identify” as a struggling member of the proletarian class, how am I not equally entitled to “identify” you as a member of the kulak class, whom I “identify” as my oppressors?  If I convince an entire nation to “identify” as the victim of a Diktat designed (ed: as it in fact was) for the indefinite future to suppress my people, to burden them in this world and the next with the responsibility for a war (which I “identify” as having been forced upon my reluctant Volksgenossen), where is the objection to my “identifying” whatever group I please as having sold me and mine down the river?

Do you see how hilariously funny “identification” can be?

I don’t have daughters, a fact prominent among my list of blessings.  I was terrified I might.  When, before the birth of our third son, the wife decided that with this one we were going to find out ahead of time (she was convinced her luck had finally turned and I was horrified she might be right), we went to the ultrasound clinic.  After doing the usual sorts of measurements and whatnot, the tech kind of rolled things around on the screen so we could see better and there was no doubt about what that was, showing between the femurs.  My relief was so great I exclaimed, “Hat trick!!”  That almost became his nickname.

People like the men who play-act as women are why my wife and I have not permitted our sons to go to public bathrooms unaccompanied until they were of an age to fight or flee on their own.  Remember, if this man “identifies” as a woman, then he views my son as fair game.  And for the heterosexual pervert who simply wants to prey on women and especially small girls, how much of a leap is it for him to dress up (hell: he needn’t even do that; he can just say he “identifies” as female and it’s open season in the girl’s locker room) in order to gain access to his victims?  He’s already a monster and knows it; why should a little rouge and eye liner upset him?

The retort is made that I’m tarring all the transvestites with the same brush.  I’m not.  In no way am I saying that every man who insists on using the women’s room is a pervert who’s just trolling for his next victim.  What I am saying is that there will be some.  And I cannot know, until it is too late, whether this particular man is or is not among them.  You know, we don’t screen every last passenger who gets aboard an airliner because we think everyone is a terrorist; we screen them because we don’t know that they aren’t.

So who am I?

Well, I “identify” as the Emperor Napoleon.

I demand that I be treated as the Emperor Napoleon, conqueror of Europe, may rightfully expect to be treated.  I demand that I be given whatever works of art I demand for my imperial collection (got my eyes on a couple of Vermeers from the Met).  I demand that the commanding officers of the armed forces recognize in me their commander-in-chief.  The laws of course do not apply to the emperor, so we may dispense with that.  And every, but every woman is mine by right of sovereignty.  You, o peons, may address me (while averting your plebian eyes, of course) as “Your Imperial Majesty” or simply, in later conversation, just as “Your Majesty.”  I demand that airplanes, buses, elevators, and all other forms of public accommodation shall await my pleasure.  You must treat me according to my royal station; we royalty suffer untold pangs of degradation when our sacred persons are denied the recognition that is lawfully ours.  You non-royals simply don’t understand.

If some nasty ol’ 6’4″ hairy-legged man in sensible shoes has the right to cop a squat beside your eight-year-old daughter, then I have the right to be the Emperor Napoleon.  There is no defensible moral or functional distinction between those positions.

Of Green Bananas

If I were Amr Adeeb, host of the — apparently popular — Egyptian talk show “Cairo Today,” I’m not sure I’d be buying any.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has an article in today’s edition about a rant Adeeb recently went on.  He took the opportunity to speak some home truths about Islam.  Not “extremists” or “people who are abusing the name of Islam,” or such claptrap, but Islam itself.  His co-host, Emad El-Din Hussein, tried to stem his tirade, without success.

They were right in the middle of their show, and, almost like those first rancid burps and watering mouth you get right before you begin to vomit up everything you’ve eaten since last Tuesday afternoon, he bubbles up:  “This won’t make many people happy, but these perps were quite clearly Muslims.  Everyone is saying these terrorists weren’t Muslims.”  Then the first projectile irruption:  “No!  You lie!  They are Muslims and they are among us!”  His co-host interjects:  “But who taught these attackers?  Where do the Muslims in Britain and France get it from?”

Another plume erupts, spattering the far wall of the room with great gobs of stinking Truth:  “They get it from Islam!  These horrible things come from our religion; our religion is full of these inhuman things.”  His co-host tries the PC-approved approach:  They were individual perps.  Not true, counters Adeeb.

Suspicious, perhaps, that the inevitable post-mortem investigations and revelations will reveal her to be an imbecile, co-host then trots out the canard that These Poor Muslims are Just Being Misused.  Adeeb coats the carpet eight inches deep in Honesty, well over his co-hostess’ dainty shoes:  “Nonsense.  This is an integral part of Islam.  We grow up with these lessons, that is a part of our diseased psyche.  For these people it is OK to kill non-Muslims.  Don’t tell me that the IS aren’t Muslims; no one can misuse you when you are healthy.”

And it goes on:  “Why does this only happen with Islam?  Always it’s us, Islam.  We have a problem with our religion.  We cannot live in harmony with our religion.  Wake up finally and recognize this reality.”

Adeeb and his wife are both television co-hosts, and very popular it seems.  They came to prominence in the latter days of Mubarak’s regime, and were vehemently opposed to his Muslim Brotherhood-sponsored successor, Mursi.  When Mursi was toppled they were vocally supportive of it.  Wonder what they’d have to say about our would-be president’s Muslim Brotherhood operative whom she keeps at her side.

I don’t speak the language, but this appears to be the video of his rant.

This is what “speaking truth to power” sounds like.  Not the crybully whine of Someone Chalked a Political Candidate’s Name on the Sidewalk and now I Have to go Suck my Thumb in my Safe Space.  Not piling on some plumber who dared suggest that a candidate’s promise of re-distributive Marxism might not be a good idea.  In going off as he did, Adeeb did neither more nor less than quite literally render himself a marked man.

Given how Islam reacts to people who dare — even indirectly — to suggest it may, in the language of the American kindergarten, “have issues” (ask Salman Rushdie if you don’t believe me, or Ayan Hirsi Ali), were I this ol’ boy I’d make sure I re-ran all the background checks on my personal security detail.  I’d update my estate planning documents.

And I might reconsider whether I wanted to buy that next bunch of green bananas.

Oh, Well, but Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln

What’s the play actually about, anyway?

Sometimes you come across something that, almost in passing, so glaringly reveals an underlying truth about its subject matter that it takes your breath away.

This week some random guys who adhere to no identifiable ideology or religion just randomly decided to light off a couple of bombs in Belgium.  It was a bad week for workplace violence, in other words.  And in other news, the president enjoyed yukking it up at the ballgame with a murderously oppressive regime.  But I digress.

In follow-up to the Brussels bombings, this article ran in USA Today.  The headline sort of tips the author’s hand:  “The Quran’s deadly role in inspiring Belgian slaughter,” by a fellow identified as Nabeel Qureshi.  From his self-description and how he relates his family background, he seems to be one of those adherents of the Religion of Peace that is being referred to on that silly “Coexist” bumper sticker.  His father spent a career in the U.S. Navy, starting as a seaman and retiring as a lieutenant commander (which, by the way, tells you his father must have been pretty hot stuff, to make it that far up from that far down).  “As a Muslim growing up in the United States, I was taught by my imams and the community around me that Islam is a religion of peace. My family modeled love for others and love for country, and not just by their words.”

All to the good.  I’d have no problem with him, or his family, for my next-door neighbors, any more than I’d object to any other American family.

But let’s let Comrade Qureshi tell it himself:

“As a young Muslim boy growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, it was impossible for me to look up a hadith unless I traveled to an Islamic library, something I would have never thought to do. For all intents and purposes, if I wanted to know about the traditions of Muhammad, I had to ask imams or elders in my tradition of Islam.”  That is, as he notes, no longer the case.  Just as the Bible’s translation into the vernacular enabled the masses to access for themselves just what exactly scripture has to say about any particular thing, without the interposition of the clerisy, so today’s Muslim masses can look it up for themselves.

And just what are they finding?  Why, they’re finding the same things that Qureshi did, once he no longer was reliant upon his elders and imams.  “Yet as I began to investigate the Quran and the traditions of Muhammad’s life for myself in college, I found to my genuine surprise that the pages of Islamic history are filled with violence.”

Do what?

“When everyday Muslims investigate the Quran and hadith for themselves, bypassing centuries of tradition and their imams’ interpretations, they are confronted with the reality of violent jihad in the very foundations of their faith.”  “The Quran itself reveals a trajectory of jihad reflected in the almost 23 years of Muhammad’s prophetic career. As I demonstrate carefully in my book, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, starting with peaceful teachings and proclamations of monotheism, Muhammad’s message featured violence with increasing intensity, culminating in surah 9, chronologically the last major chapter of the Quran, and its most expansively violent teaching. Throughout history, Muslim theologians have understood and taught this progression, that the message of the Quran culminates in its ninth chapter.”  [N.b.  The foregoing quoted language has links in it over at the USA Today website.]

Qureshi then pulls a few chestnuts out:  “Surah 9 is a command to disavow all treaties with polytheists and to subjugate Jews and Christians (9.29) so that Islam may ‘prevail over all religions’ (9.33). It is fair to wonder whether any non-Muslims in the world are immune from being attacked, subdued or assimilated under this command. Muslims must fight, according to this final chapter of the Quran, and if they do not, then their faith is called into question and they are counted among the hypocrites (9.44-45). If they do fight, they are promised one of two rewards, either spoils of war or heaven through martyrdom. Allah has made a bargain with the mujahid who obeys: Kill or be killed in battle, and paradise awaits (9.111).”

According to Qureshi, the implications of Surah 9 are acknowledged by modern Muslim theologians.  “Muslim thought leaders agree that the Quran promotes such violence.”  And there’s the rub:  The most potent recruiting tool and mechanism for radicalization available to ISIS is . . . just quoting the foundational documents of their religion.  “With frequent references to the highest sources of authority in Islam, the Quran and hadith (the collection of the sayings of the prophet Muhammad), ISIL enjoins upon Muslims their duty to fight against the enemies of Islam and to emigrate to the Islamic State once it has been established.”

And that, folks, peels away quite a bit of bullshit that’s being peddled by self-loathing Westerners.  The “extremists” among the Muslims have the theologically better argument of their “moderate” or assimilated co-religionists.  That is the irreducible fact that stares us in the face over the shards of glass and spattered bits of airline customers.

Pity the Muslims don’t have the theological equivalent of modern U.S. Supreme Court jurists to explain to them that all those words simply don’t mean what they say.  No, when ISIS wants to convince a young Muslim man that his most solemn duty is to fight, kill, and maybe die in order to subjugate practitioners of any religion other than strict-form Islam, they perversely go out and just show him the actual words and have the temerity to suggest to him that they mean precisely what they say.

Deconstructionism, in other words, hasn’t made very deep inroads into Islam.

A couple of quick points.  Islam appears to be enjoying something of the same process that Christianity went through, at least in its early phases, with the Reformation.  There was a reason, after all, why for so long either translating the Bible into the vernacular, or even possession of a translated Bible was a capital offense.  Literally.  Get caught with a Wyclif Bible and they’d make short work of you.  Step 1 of the Reformation was therefore what is now known as “disintermediation.”  It’s really not much more than the same process as online commerce.  The internet has largely dissolved the barriers between the ordinary Joe on the “Islamic Street” and the authoritative pronouncements of his faith’s founding documents.  Generally disintermediation is a very good thing.  Anything which undercuts the ipse dixit hierarchy of any one group (priests, imams, broadcast network news shows, judges) over another, by providing the people that walked in darkness direct access to ultimate authority (Holy Scripture, the Koran, multiple independent news sources, or the actual words of constitutions and statutes) is to be praised on that ground alone.  I’ll state that as a categorical.

So what is to be done if the ultimate authority commands, in pretty plain language, behaviors such as we have seen in Brussels, Paris, New York, Madrid, London, and so forth?

I honestly don’t know.  It seems to me that the fellow quoted by Qureshi has a long, hard slog ahead of him, and whether the thing is to be done at all must be seen as wholly questionable:  “Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation in the United Kingdom, has said, ‘We Muslims must admit there are challenging Quranic passages that require reinterpretation today. … Only by rejecting vacuous literalism are we able to condemn, in principle, ISIS-style slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation & other medieval practices forever (all of which are in the Quran). … Reformers either win, and get religion-neutral politics, or lose, and get ISIL-style theocracy.’ In other words, Muslims must depart from the literal reading of the Quran in order to create a jihad-free Islamic world.”  By his own words he may well be chasing a will-o-the-wisp.  What Nawaz calls “vacuous literalism” the boys of ISIS can call “the words’ plain meaning,” without strained or sophistical reading.  And slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation, and “other medieval practices” are “all . . . in the Koran.”  Well, of course they are; that’s what makes it so straightforward to convince the jihadisti that they are commands of Allah. Just read the damned words, boy, and make up your mind for yourself.

And what is this about creating a “jihad-free Islamic world” in the first place?  If jihad is part of the central framework of Islamic existence in this world, then how can you excise it and still call what you’re left with “Islamic”?  I recall once, a number of years ago, this billboard alongside the interstate in a city near where I live.  It was from one of these First Church of What’s Happening Now, where Christianity is on offer as a practical therapeutic lifestyle option.  The billboard encouraged the wanderer to come discover “a non-religious path to God.”  That is an oxymoron plain and simple, folks.  It seems as though what Qureshi is positing is the same sort of oxymoron.

The Protestant movement’s most powerful arguments rested on the elemental fact that, once translated and accessible, Holy Scripture was seen not to provide authority for quite a bit of what had grown to encrust the Roman Catholic church as an institution.  The problem today is that what the ISIS recruiters are propounding can be seen to be very much in the Koran, in exactly as many words as they’re saying.

Islam is not, in other words, a Religion of Peace, not on its own terms, read in the ordinary sense of the words actually used, without contorting them into their opposites.

The situation outlined by Qureshi makes it doubtful whether anything like a Protestant Reformation can ever be in the cards for Islam.  Accomplishing that would require millions of Muslims all over the world to believe in the in-most recesses of their hearts that the ordinary words of the foundational texts just do not mean what they so obviously say.  How do you convince people of an argument the unspoken subtext of which is: “Mohammed didn’t know what he was talking about”?  My understanding of Islamic dogma is that the Koran’s words are not actually those of the prophet, but rather of Allah himself.  Quite different from even the most literalist Christian fundamentalist, believing every word in the King James Version to be divinely inspired.  To “interpret” the Koran in a way which would allow peaceful coexistence requires you to accept either that, to some extent, Mohammed was a false prophet because he failed accurately to transmit Allah’s pronouncements, or alternatively, that Allah knowingly allowed his words to be mis-transcribed.  How can either of those suggestions be acceptable to a devout Muslim?

Not all problems have solutions.  I very greatly fear that Islam is among the problems that don’t.

Will They Play With Fire, Again?

The Supreme Court at least in its present composition has an extremely mixed track record in upholding the basic building-block notions of the U.S. Constitution.  Its two most egregious, and potentially most damaging, cases thus far have both concerned the “Affordable” Care Act.

Gentle Reader will recall those two cases:  This first decision ruled that Congress can in fact exercise powers plainly not granted to it by any article, section, clause, phrase, or word of the document, nor which can be squeezed from the document by even the most strained reasoning, if (wait for it), Congress could have enacted a penalty on the failure to abide by that illegal power grab and called the penalty a “tax.”  Get that?  The ACA imposes a penalty on people who fail to buy insurance from private insurance companies.  Congress obliges individuals to engage in commerce, in other words, rather than merely contenting itself to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes,” which is what Article I Section 8, Clause 3 actually authorizes it to do, in respect of people who are engaging in those sorts of commerce.

Not even the clowns on this court could get five votes in favor of a power to oblige people to buy a new car every three years in order to support the personal transportation industry in America.  Remember, the industry which provides the means for individual Americans to live anywhere outside the most densely populated parts of the Northeast Corridor is one the fruits of which are of much greater importance to many more people on a much more frequent basis than the activities of health insurance companies, doctors, or hospitals.  Such an enactment would avoid the “free rider problem” of people who insist that their beat-up ol’ bangers (my 2000 Chrysler Concorde, which I picked up 16 years ago yesterday with 6 miles on the odometer, rolled 235,000 miles yesterday evening) are sufficient for their needs.  We folks who persist in driving a car until the wheels fall off by doing so deprive the automobile manufacturers of the cash flows necessary to fund their research and development to comply with ever-more-stringent CAFE standards because global warming climate change.

O! but let us not lose faith in the creativity, the revolutionary consciousness (cf. Solzhenitsyn’s chapter on “The Law as a Child,” in Vol. I of his Gulag Archipelago) Solomon-like wisdom  of our judiciary.  Congress cannot make you engage in activity.  But it can tax your failure to do so (according to the RevTrib Supreme Court), and if you don’t pay the tax it can imprison you for that failure.  And here’s where Chief Justice Krylenko Roberts really extended the known boundaries of American jurisprudence.  You see, Congress didn’t call the penalty for failure to buy health insurance a tax.  The administration and its lapdogs in Congress, in lying selling to the American public this abortion of a statute, repeatedly and explicitly disclaimed that it was a tax.  But Krylenko Roberts held that Congress could have called it a tax, and because it could have called it a tax and relied upon its taxing power to exercise indirectly a substantive power denied to it by the document itself, therefore it was a tax and therefore the individual mandate is constitutional.

Wow.  I mean, just wow.  Think of all the meaningless formalities which we can, under the Krylenko Roberts Doctrine now dispense with.  The senate refuses to ratify a treaty?  No problem:  It could have ratified the treaty, and therefore it did, and therefore that treaty, “constructively ratified,” we may call it, is now under the Supremacy Clause part and parcel of the highest law of the land.  Congress refuses to fund a program — oh, say, handing money to the baby cadaver salesmen at “Planned Parenthood”?  No problem:  Congress could have called that appropriation an expenditure for “public health,” and therefore the administration can keep shelling out tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars.

But it gets even better:  Remember, the substance of the Krylenko Roberts Doctrine is that what matters in terms of the question, “Did Congress have the constitutional power to enact this provision?” is not, you know, whether the document actually or necessarily by implication grants that power, but rather whether Congress might have chosen to slap a monetary penalty (which the RevTrib Supreme Court can then call a “tax”) on a person’s conduct inconsistent with the desired behavior.  Let’s think of this in terms of the Fifth Amendment.  Oh no:  We’re not forcing a criminal defendant to testify against himself.  We’re just making him pay the additional expenses of proving his guilt without his cooperation.  I mean, can you say “externality”?  It costs money, dammit, good money that has to come from the public fisc to prove up a crime without a confession (hence, as Solzhenitsyn points out, the organs’ single-minded focus on obtaining those confessions, by means he and others (see, e.g: Dolgun) have described in detail).  So you don’t have to testify; oh no, you’re perfectly at liberty to sit there mute in the courtroom.  But by God we’re going to make you pony up for getting all those eyewitnesses in, all the forensic proof, the DNA testing, and all that.  And the beauty is that because it’s a tax (remember the Krylenko Roberts Doctrine, dear children), its imposition is utterly independent of our defendant’s actual guilt.  I mean, the money had to be spent, after all, and if the defendant is innocent, then there’s no reason he shouldn’t have testified to that effect, right?

Similarly, we’re not forcing you, Gentle Reader, to march in support of Dear Leader’s non-public deals to hand nuclear weapons to Iran.  But because the rest of the world, and especially Israel, will be much likelier to accept that deal if it knows that the entire American population is behind it, and the costs of ramming Israel’s physical destruction down its throat are much greater in the face of its opposition, we’re going to impose a money penalty (oh, we might have called it a tax, and therefore it is a tax, and therefore Congress had the power to impose it) on your failure to turn out for the scheduled Mass Demonstration demanding death for Zinoviev and Kamenev, the Trotskyite dogs and imperialist stooges immediate implementation of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.  By like token, we’re not forcing you to enroll your children in the Young Pioneers, or the Bund deutscher Mädel, or the Red Guards, but your unreasoning refusal to enroll them means that the school system must spend that much more time and greater resources educating them in Mao Thoughts the Führer’s Will the precepts of the Great Helmsman’s Short Course their civic duties in respect of the “Affordable” Care Act, and therefore a money penalty, which we might have called a tax but didn’t, is obviously constitutionally proper.

See how much can be accomplished through the Krylenko Roberts Doctrine?

The second case which Gentle Reader might recall is the insurance exchange case.  You’ll remember that, in order to compel the states to establish their own insurance exchanges under the “Affordable” Care Act, the availability of financial subsidy for the (now wildly-escalating) premiums was very carefully limited to those who purchased policies through exchanges established by “states,” which the statute very carefully defined to mean, you know, the 50 states of the union (and, I recall, territories and possessions as well).  All of those actors are, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, geopolitical entities, with physically-described borders.  They are not agencies or instrumentalities of anyone, like, for example, the federal Department of Health and Human Services.  Well, most of the states had better sense than to pour money down that rat-hole, and so Dear Leader’s administration set up a federal insurance exchange for people in those states, and then — here’s the flagrantly illegal part — began doling out money for policies purchased on that exchange.

The RevTrib Supreme Court upheld the illegal expenditure of public funds for an unauthorized purpose, because, well, Congress might have said “federal government,” or even “department,” and it was really important for this statute to work so we’re just going to act as if Congress actually had done what it didn’t do at all, namely include HHS within the definition of “state,” or alternatively just go ahead and authorize subsidy payments for policies bought through the HHS-run insurance exchange.  And lo! the outlay of billions of dollars is magically validated.

We may call this the “Statutory Error Doctrine”.  You see, when Congress has, through oversight (obviously it must have been just a drafting error, because reasonable minds simply cannot disagree on something so important, after all, as whether to plonk down billions of dollars on socialized health care, much in the same fashion as all sensible men being, per Disraeli, all of the same faith), omitted to authorize the administration to take Action X, whatever that may be, then the RevTrib Supreme Court will correct that li’l ol’ drafting error, and will supply what Congress plainly meant to have said, were it fully mindful of its duty to the Party.

Dear Leader’s administration is now advocating what we might call the “Statutory Omission Doctrine,” in which the RevTrib Supreme Court may supply, not merely a missing or obviously incomplete definition, but an entire statute which plainly Congress would have enacted, but for its truancy in obeying the Holy Writ of the Light Bringer.  You see, Congress, which under Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 has the power to “an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” and has done so.  Those rules provide for deportation and other nastiness for folks who come here illegally.  Congress has not chosen to exempt from those rules the parents of children who are, pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, citizens of the United States by right of birth.  Very awkward, by God! as the Duke of Wellington observed about William IV’s rant at the Duchess of Kent.

Some stupid redneck dirt lawyer might suppose that Congress, realizing it cannot deport minor children who are, by constitutional right, citizens and thus have a right to stay here, determined to leave in place the disincentive of family separation to discourage parents from creating such “anchor babies” in the first place.  Fine:  Your child can stay here because she’s a citizen, but your country ass is getting shipped back to Guadalajara, lady.  You’re perfectly free to take your citizen-child with you or leave her here.  If you leave her here we’ll provide for her, but you’re leaving.  Speaking as a father of three wonderful boys, I can tell you that is one powerful disincentive.  It puts, after all, the most painful burden on the only decision-maker (the pregnant woman) capable of preventing the situation from arising.  The infant cannot decide for herself, after all.  The father in fact cannot really decide.  So we’re going to make that woman wager the most sacred of human bonds against her desire to violate United States law.

Dear Leader does not like this.  He does not like this because those parents are reliable sources of money and political support.  The ones who eventually are able to vote (e.g. the anchor baby herself when she turns 18) reliably and extremely heavily vote Democrat.  So he has decided to exempt from the operation of the “uniform Rule of Naturalization” the parents of those anchor babies.  On a blanket basis.  He’s decided that the importance of keeping in place a permanent dependent class of Democrat electoral cash and support is more important than his own constitutional duty under Article II Section 3 that, “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed[.]”

Thus far he’s gone zero-for-however-many on injunctions preventing his administration from implementing this illegal program, which he calls, of course misleadingly, “Deferred Action for Parents of Americans”.  It’s not “deferred” action, but the permanent abandonment of action, and is widely known to be such.  Well, now the RevTrib Supreme Court has agreed to hear the administration’s appeal of the most recent such injunction.

We’ll have to see what Krylenko Roberts and his colleagues do.  I firmly disagree with the linked article that, “There are reasons to be sympathetic to President Obama’s efforts to overhaul America’s immigration laws. The system has been broken for decades, and political elites have proven unable or unwilling to fix it.”  It is no such thing.  It has not been enforced for decades, and this has created a painful and in many cases tragic set of facts on the ground.  But that is not the fault of either Congress or the law itself.  It is, rather, the logical outcome of hundreds of millions of politicized decisions by the ought-to-be-enforcers of the immigration laws.  Imagine if hundreds of millions of people and institutions simply refused to comply with the Internal Revenue Code.  Imagine if banks refused to produce and keep the financial records necessary to track taxpayers’ transactions; imagine if employers simply destroyed their payroll records after each pay period, and refused to remit income or payroll taxes.  Imagine if everyone simply stopped filing returns.  Imagine if all this went on, not for a season or two, but for decades.  Imagine that all this went on with the active connivance of the Internal Revenue Service.  Now, would it be intellectually or morally defensible to say that the Internal Revenue Code “has been broken for decades”?  Bullshit!  And the same response is due the claim that the immigration system is “broken,” unless by “broken,” you mean that the laws have been openly, flagrantly, and with the encouragement of government broken.  Well, yes, the immigration laws have been broken.  And for years the Fifteenth Amendment, prohibiting the denial of voting rights based upon the color of one’s skin, was openly and with the active cooperation of government “broken.”  Where is the principled argument that we should have, in the 1960s, and in lieu of adopting and ferociously enforcing the Voting Rights Act, just rolled over and allowed the South to continue on as before?

But will the RevTrib Supreme Court formally rule that, gosh darn it, this is Just So Important, and when Something is So Important, the president has the inherent power to put in place whatever program he deems expedient?  I’ll remind Gentle Reader that James II’s blanket exemptions from the religious disability laws were a principal reason (although not the final: that was the birth of a male heir) for the erosion of support which ended in the Glorious Revolution.  But will we have formally announced, with all the gravity that can be mustered by an institution which has so far beclowned itself as to rule that homosexual “marriage” is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, that when the president deems something sufficiently important, the allocation of “all” (not some, most, or “generally”) “legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States” is no longer operative?

We might call such a notion the “Constitutional Omission Doctrine,” and set it forth as follows:  “If the president shall deem an issue sufficiently important, and if the Congress shall refuse to enact such legislation as the president shall deem necessary or expedient to address such issue, then the president may act in such fashion as the president shall deem appropriate, and such action shall have the force of law.”  That is pretty much the position taken by Dear Leader and his supporters.  We have an “immigration crisis,” with a “system that is broken,” and Congress refuses to act because of “partisan gridlock,” and therefore the president has the inherent “authority to act when Congress won’t.”  Because obviously the constitution’s drafters must never have imagined that Congress and the president might disagree on a matter of significant policy.  It’s just plain as day that they never intended that the federal government might be unable to act as a president thinks it ought to act because Congress has decided an issue contrary to the president’s desires.  And if they never intended that situation to come to pass, then the conclusion is inescapable that they obviously meant to include a provision in the constitution granting the president that authority, and the fact that the drafters included no such provision is merely an oversight, a mistake.  Like defining “state” such that you can’t shoe-horn “Department of Health and Human Services” into it.  Since we have a “living document” on our hands (all those silly little words about how the document may be amended are merely illustrative of one alternative method among many, after all), the fact that a fail-safe clause is nowhere to be found in the words the drafters actually used is no impediment to our now, 226 years later, recognizing that the president in fact has such a power.

I would caution the RevTrib Supreme Court against recognizing any such authority.  Once you recognize the ability of one branch to bypass another and exercise legally binding power over an issue or set of issues which the document on its face places squarely within the remit of another branch, what is then to prevent the doctrine’s application to the RevTrib Supreme Court itself?  Obviously, after all, the drafters never intended to create a situation in which a number of unelected, unaccountable nincompoops would usurp the expressed policy decisions of the legislative and executive branches.  I mean, the whole point of freeing ourselves from a monarchy, an prohibiting titles of nobility, was precisely to ensure we never became the playthings of a court and court party.

For example, consider the Defense of Marriage Act.  Passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and enthusiastically signed by a president from the party not in control of Congress, the RevTrib Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.  We ignore the argument over whether the statute was a good idea in the first place.  Reasonable minds can differ in good faith as to whether the federal government needs to get into the business of deciding who is married and who is not, at least for purposes of federal laws where the marital status of an individual is a relevant determination.  Reasonable minds can differ in good faith as to whether marriage-is-what-you-call-it is a good policy position (I think it’s a bad policy position).  But the reasonableness and good faith of people on either side of those sorts of arguments played no part in the RevTrib Supreme Court decision.  According to it, the American people, acting through their lawfully elected representatives and approved by their lawfully elected president, did not have the right to decide the issue as they did, because the constitution does not permit that substantive outcome.

But hist!  Let us now apply the Constitutional Omission Doctrine to this dispute.  Congress determines that the RevTrib Supreme Court got its decision on the Defense of Marriage Act wrong, and because the drafters obviously intended to grant Congress the power to correct flagrantly bad court decisions (really? can it be that the drafters desired that a decision once blown should remain blown for all time, until the very institution that buggered it up climbs down and admits as much?), be it and it hereby is declared that the decision in this-that-or-the-other-case is reversed, set aside, and for naught held.  See how simple that was?  About as simple as the Democrat-controlled Congress in the late 1950s or early 1960s just un-doing Brown v. Board of Education.  Woo-hoo!  Plessy is once again the law of the land.  Gentle Reader can come of with just about any number of parade-of-horribles decisions that might fall prey to the doctrine, to the consternation of whatever group(s) or interest(s).

But Gentle Reader will tax me with hyperventilation.  Of course no Congress would ever do such a thing!  It would be politically impossible!  Never come to pass.  People would never stand for it!  And so forth.  And no administration would ignore the repeated cries for help of its overseas ambassadors, then stand by idly while an American ambassador was slaughtered like a dog and literally dragged through the streets, then send multiple representatives to lie repeatedly to the American public about why it happened.  No administration would ever weaponize the federal tax gathering apparatus to shut down the political affiliations of its political opponents, then instruct its senior administrators to destroy evidence and lie to Congress about its destruction.  We’d never have an administration concoct an attack on two U.S. warships — when no opposing forces were ever in the area on the night in question — and use that non-existent attack to obtain an authorization to wage years of undeclared but very much real war halfway around the globe.  [I’m referring, by the way, to the Gulf of Tonkin “Incident,” the non-existence of the second “attack” of which is related by no less personage than Vice Adm. Stockdale, who was in the air over the Maddox and Turner Joy that night, and in whose book he unambiguously states that the second “attack,” used by LBJ to get the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed, never happened.  He had been named in the European edition (but not, significantly, the Pacific edition) of Stars and Stripes as having been present on the scene, and he spent the entirety of his long captivity terrified that his captors would get hold of a copy of that edition, see his name, and torture out of him his recollections of that night.  But they never did.]

Who are we to say what some future president and Congress may or may not do?

The last sentence in the last book of the last volume of The Gulag Archipelago reads:  “There is no law.”  The present administration, aided joyfully by the present constellation of the RevTrib Supreme Court, have marched us a good way down that same path.  Here’s hoping they have the minimal integrity not to take us that last step.

Carousel of History?

We may hope not.

Over at Instapundit, a link, via Ed Driscoll, to a piece by one of my favorite linkees (is that a word, even?), viz. Victor Davis Hanson, “A Tale of Two Shootings“.

[N.b.  Hanson, whom I’m mostly familiar with via the internet, is a very accomplished classical historian, with a heavy sideline in military history.  I recently read — it was borrowed, so I had to return it, much to my chagrin — his The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, a comparative history of Epimanondas’s conquest of Sparta, Sherman’s march through Georgia, and Patton’s march through France in 1944.  Fascinating stuff.]

Be all that as it may, Hanson looks at two shootings:  the first, in 2014 of the violent criminal Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, and the second of Kathryn Steinle, in San Francisco.  Brown was black; Steinle was white.  Brown had just committed a robbery; Steinle was walking down a pier with her father.  Brown had just attacked and attempted to seize the weapon of the police officer who had matched him to a minutes-old radio alert of the robbery, and was shot dead in his tracks , from the front, while charging the officer.  Steinle was shot dead in the back while . . . well, while walking with her father, minding her own business.  Brown was shot by a police officer; Steinle was shot by a multiple-convicted felon whose very presence in the United States constituted a crime.  The police officer who shot Brown was white; the convicted felon who shot Steinle was Mexican, an illegal alien.

After Brown was killed in the midst of his attempted third felony of that day (first: robbery; second: attacking and attempting to steal weapon from law enforcement officer; third: second attempt to attack and steal weapon from same), Dear Leader’s administration and his political allies very carefully stoked the fires of racial hatred, and Ferguson burned.  After Steinle was shot dead by the felon who was very intentionally released by the City of San Francisco in spite of a request by federal authorities that they hold him until he could be deported (this would have been his sixth deportation), there were . . . crickets.

Hanson has the temerity once more to point out the very different treatment of the two killings, one indisputably justified (Brown’s), and the other (Steinle’s) indisputably an abomination, all but engineered by the left-extremists in the San Francisco city government.

Maybe VDH didn’t want to violate Godwin’s Law, which holds that the longer an internet discussion goes on, the closer to 1.0 approaches the probability that someone will make an explicit comparison to the Nazi era.  But since Hanson put up his post yesterday, and today is November 9, I’m going to do the belly-flop for him.

On November 9, 1938, Germany exploded.  Well, to be more precise, a segment of Germany exploded.  That segment was the segment represented by synagogues and Jewish businesses.  They were torched, their owners and congregants beaten, in many cases beaten to death.  There was so much broken glass in the streets from smashed windows that the Germans knew it as “Kristallnacht,” or “crystal night.”  Here’s the Wikipedia entry, for those curious.

Why did Victor Davis Hanson’s post on the political reaction, and the carefully orchestrated violence, in response to Michael Brown’s death put me in mind of November 9, 1938?  Because Kristallnacht too was a highly orchestrated orgy of violence in response to a single killing.  Ernst vom Rath was a German diplomat stationed in Paris.  On the morning of November 7, 1938, a Polish Jew then living in Paris a teenager, Herschel Grynszpan (he had fled Germany in 1936; after his arrest he stated that he acted to avenge the news that his parents were being deported from Germany back to Poland), shot him five times.  Rath died on November 9, by which time the Nazi powers had had time to organize “spontaneous” demonstrations of outrage inside Germany.

The destruction of November 9, 1938, was no less “spontaneous” than the observances surrounding the announcement that officer Darren Wilson, the police officer who successfully defended himself from Michael Brown, would not be indicted for any criminal offense.

Carousels are circular.  Stand in one place long enough and everything you’ve seen before you’ll see again.  Sort of makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what else from the 1930s and 40s we’re going to see again in the coming years?  Holodomor?  Molotov-Ribbentrop?  Munich? (Dear Leader sure made a run at that last by handing the Iranian mullahs a green light for nuclear weaponry.)  Greater Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere?

Sobering thinking, it is.

[N.b.  I don’t know whether I’ve pointed it out before on this ‘umble blog, but November 9 is a date pregnant with significance in German history.  In 1918, the German republic was proclaimed and the Kaiser abdicated; in 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch failed; in 1938, they put on Kristallnacht; in 1940, Neville Chamberlain, the man who more than any other enabled Hitler to become the continental-scale monster he did, finally died; and, in 1989, the Berlin Wall, the physical embodiment of the war’s outcome, came down.  Can’t make this stuff up.]

 

It Would Take a European to Concur in Both

The Frankfurt International Book Fair began recently.  It’s among the largest of its kind in the world and is regularly the setting for important doings in the world of literature and books.

This year’s fair was opened with an address from Salman Rushdie.  You’ll recall him; he was the author who found himself the subject of a fatwa in 1989 because some Islamic cleric didn’t like something he’d written.  For years he’s had to live quasi-underground, well-guarded.  Rushdie, by the way, is far from the only author who’s found himself the target of the Islamofascists;  Ayan Hirsi Ali, born Muslim and the victim of genital mutilation, has written extensively about we may gently call Islam’s woman problem.  There is now a price on her head.  To show their understanding and support for her ordeal and her courage in speaking plainly and publicly, in 2014 Brandeis University first offered and then withdrew, at the request of an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator organization (which is to say, the Council on American-Islamic Relations), the offer of an honorary degree.

Be all that as it may, Rushdie seems to have spoken pretty plainly, and in favor of freedom of expression.  The link above is to The New York Times write-up of his address.  It contains only the most bland of his statements:  “Limiting of freedom of expression is not just censorship; it is also an attack on human nature.”  True enough.  But it wouldn’t be the NYT we know and love so well if they didn’t suppress things that didn’t support The Narrative.

So let’s go to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s coverage.  Rushdie categorically denied that freedom of expression is a culturally-specific human value; it is, he says, “universal.”  In fact Rushdie characterized as “the greatest attack” on freedom of expression exactly that conceit of Western thinkers that the freedom is somehow specific to Western culture.  Ouch.  He specifically called out the rising tide of bullshit “trigger warnings” on American campuses and the general intent and effect of political correctness, which he firmly placed among attacks on freedom of expression.  And he apparently didn’t spare the examples, calling out the law students who don’t want to read case books and other materials that use the word “rape,” or the Columbia University (!!) undergraduates who object to reading classical poetry because it depicts the gods having their way with women.  And so forth.  Rushdie also called out the “remarkable alliance between parts of the European Left and radical Islamic thinkers.”  When an ideology — Islam — labels itself a religion, its enmity towards women, Jews, “and others” (homosexuals? Christians? apostates?), for some magical reason, gets “swept under the rug.”

Rushdie pointed out that while authors who are truly persecuted seldom survive, their art lives on.  He named the examples of Ovid in the Roman Empire, Osip Mandelstam’s death in GuLAG at the hands of Stalin, and one of Franco’s victims.  I will point out that he names no Western author . . . could that be because in fact we don’t kill our authors?  No matter how much they may bellyache about how awful it is to be black/Central  American/homosexual/female, etc?

In the FAZ‘s gloss, linked above, the author asserts that Rushdie’s address confronts the “error” that at the center of human are well-being and “the good life,” in which each may do as much of what he pleases as he will.  To demonstrate that this is an “error” the author cites us to the characters of slaves in Roman comedies.  They run the household, they go shopping, they celebrate; yet, they remain slaves, because everything is subject to the master’s reservation of approval (or not).  This demonstrates, so our newspaper article’s author, that freedom is not a hallmark of private action but rather of a political state of being.  And thus freedom of expression is the “test case” for freedom, because with “the impression that politics is more important begins self-enslavement.”  I do wish the editors had allowed the author to write at greater length, because I find those last sentences tantalizing.  Would it not be more correct to say that private actions are a hallmark of freedom?  In fact, the very notion of “private action” does not exist in the absence of freedom; Solzhenitsyn writes in his magnum opus of the politicization of sleep itself under Stalin.  What is more private than one’s opinions, formed from the processes of one’s own mind?  In other words, you cannot suppress opinion and expression without a receding, pro tanto, of freedom itself.

And here let’s pause again to point out that none of Rushdie’s points above made it into the NYT write-up.  Why not?  Well, what legacy media institution is more invested in precisely the kinds of self-censorship in the name of a political superstructure condemned by Rushdie than the left-extremists at the Gray Lady?  For them, the personal truly is political.

Well, so much for Salman Rushdie and his slap at the face of the apologists for Islamofascism.  From Tuesday’s FAZ we have another article, on a Pegida demonstration in Dresden.  The supra-headline is “Pegida radicalizes itself,” and for Exhibit A they trot out a photograph, at the linked article, of a toy gallows carried to the demonstration.  On it are two miniature hangman’s nooses, with — what? an effigy? a photograph? — no, with two placards reading “Reserved for Siegmar Gabriel” (actually they even misspelled his name: it’s “Sigmar”) and “Reserved for Angela Merkel” printed on them.  Take a real good look at the “gallows”:  You couldn’t hang a slab of bacon from it.  It’s a model, fer Chrissakes.

As Lutz Bachmann, the movement’s founder, correctly points out, every year during the Carnival parades around Germany there are many more explicit, and explicitly grisly depictions of currently-hated politicians.  Geo. W. Bush was a favorite target.

But hist! we must not allow this expression to stand, must we?  And sure enough, the prosecutor’s office is “investigating” the incident.  As of press time no name had been announced of who made or who brought or who was carrying the gallows and its — O! the horror — two placards.  And what is the alleged crime?  Breach of the peace through threat of criminal action, and encouragement to criminal action.  Really?  This toy gallows was being carried in the middle of a hetzed-up public demonstration; if the peace had been disrupted then precisely in what increment did that toy increase the disturbance?  And “encouragement”?  Where, exactly, is the encouragement?  Where exactly is there a statement that, “I’m going to hang Angela Merkel,” or “I want you to go fetch Siegmar Gabriel so I may hang him”?  How in the name of illogic can you get any further than, “I think Merkel and Gabriel should hang”?

Remind me again how this pursed-lipped investigation by the prosecuting attorney’s office squares with the paean to freedom of expression so praised coming from Salman Rushdie’s mouth?

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, no less than for the NYT, the commitment of Europe to freedom of expression has to be written down in the “pious platitudes” column.

This is What Surrender Looks Like

When I did my two junior years — high school and college — in Germany, I had to get used to the repeated observation by the locals on how lousy American beer was.  Not that I viewed myself as carrying any brief for the American brewing industry, or that I entertained any chauvinistic opinions that nothing about Home could possibly be second-rate to anything, and in no event objectively bad, but it still rankled.  It rankled because the observation was perfectly true, and because of the sheer repetitiousness of it.  The favorite pejorative was “Spülwasser” — dishwater.

And they were right.

As Inspector Clouseau famously said, not any more.

From today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, we have a report on the American craft-brewing phenomenon.  The report is that the number of breweries in the U.S. is now over 4,000; since 2007 the number of micro-breweries has tripled.  All this since the 1970s, when fewer than a hundred enormous breweries shared the market.  Germany has, in contrast, “only” 1,400 breweries.  Poor dears; you could drink a different beer each day for almost four years and not have to repeat.

The report points out — truthfully — that American brewers are working with much more flexible rules than the Germans, bound as they are to the Reinheitsgebot (the purity law which dates to the early 16th Century; Brussels in recent years decreed it unenforceable for beer imported into Germany, because allegedly protectionist, but just try selling a beer in Germany that doesn’t comply with the Reinheitsgebot . . . and more power to them for it; the law still, it seems, applies to German domestic beer).  One unnamed American craft beer advertises itself as having <sound of throwing up in mouth> raisin skins mixed in, to give it a fruitier taste.

On the other hand, and demonstrating commendable fairness, the article also points out that in many cases, the novel tastes don’t rely on adulterations like raisin skins, but rather on entirely new varieties of hops.  Thus the craft beers produce a wondrous tapestry of new beer tastes (assuming that’s what you’re after) without violating even the letter of the Reinheitsgebot.  The German firm which is the world market leader for hops — the Barth Gruppe — warns that this trend, which until recently simply wasn’t recognized or which was dismissed as a “bubble,” is now “irreversible.”  Because the so-called “flavor hops” are predominantly grown in the U.S., if current trends continue the U.S. will soon surpass Germany as the world’s leading producer.

“In fact:  American beers taste good.”  That sentence would never have been even whispered 30 years ago, when I was last living there, let alone written in any reputable publication (because as of then it just wasn’t true).  “The world is turning away from German beer,” the article observes.  And the final sentence, more in sorrow than in anger:  “A changing of the guard is underway.”

They may have signed the articles in May, 1945, but when one of the flagship German newspapers writes the above sentences, that’s what surrender looks like.  You can bomb their cities into rubble; you can slaughter their soldiers and sink their sailors.  That’s just a trial of raw force, after all.  You can make cars that are bigger, faster, cheaper, cleaner <cough, cough!>, or safer; all those are just trade-offs among the physical constraints of motor vehicle design.  But to beat them on quality?  In beer?  Do that and you jerk away one of the German’s central pillars of his self-image.

Here I must say that I do not particularly enjoy all this fruity-beer nonsense.  I prefer the German taste; I also am something of a Guinness fanatic.  Back in the day I drank an enormous (does the expression “enough to float a battleship” mean anything to you, Gentle Reader?) amount of Weizenbier — wheat beer — in both its Hefeweizen and Kristallklar variants.  The only American wheat beer I’ve ever found that tastes even remotely like the Real Thing is Yuengling’s “summer wheat,” which is truly awesome, but which those lunkheads only brew, as the name implies, during summer.  Ummm . . . . guys:  Weizenbier is a year-round pleasure; just ask the folks from Donaueschingen.  But de gustibus non disputandum est, I suppose; as long as you can produce that taste within the confines of the Reinheitsgebot, more power to you.

Prost!