An Iran deal edges closer

The New Neo Posted on by

There have been no special announcements today regarding the Iran talks, at least as I type these words. But there are such deeply ominous rumblings that I feel I must start a new thread, because reports since yesterday are that an Iran deal is nigh.

David Gerstman has a post about it at Legal Insurrection entitled “Awaiting historic sellout of Israel by Obama-Kerry.” Yesterday at Powerline, Scott Johnson introduced his post on the matter this way:

As we reach the round number of 10 in this series of email reports by Omri Ceren from Vienna, we approach the catastrophic conclusion that has been implicit from the beginning…

I want to pause for a moment to admire the succinctness of that phrase, “the catastrophic conclusion that has been implicit from the beginning.” That says a lot, not just about the nuclear talks with Iran but about so many things that have happened during the Obama administration—from the first faroff rumblings of trouble, to the slow steady approach, to the fights between those who would support and those who would oppose—with the latter every now and then thinking that maybe, just maybe, the attempt to prevent whatever dreadful thing the left was pushing this time would somehow prevail.

Sometimes the efforts did prevent it (remember card check?), but far more often they did not. And even when the opposition did manage to block a plan of Obama and his supporters, he often would accomplish his goals anyway through some other method, usually involving executive action or secret sabotage (IRS investigations of Tea Party groups, for example).

So here we sit, waiting. When will the announcement come? And what will the details involve? No reports—even from those who support Obama—mention the sort of things one would want to see in any deal, so there is no reason whatsoever to imagine they will be there.

Scott Johnson of Powerline has been on the case for quite some time, and you would do well to read two pieces he wrote today, this and this. From the latter:

Like the Munich Agreement, this deal is a disgrace, but it is worse. We don’t have the excuse of a lost generation that persuaded the British to avert their eyes from the grim necessity to confront Hitler’s evil intentions. We have no such excuse and we understand Iran’s evil intentions. Indeed, they may be harder to miss than Hitler’s…

The deal will finance Iran’s development of nuclear weapons and other terrorist activities. Despite the vacuous talk of a ten- or fifteen-year period of protection, the deal will leave Iran free to take the money and run. It therefore facilitates Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Iran will become a nuclear power with our assistance…The deal in process must be the worst agreement in history; it is certainly the worst agreement in American history.

I agree with almost everything in that quote. Unfortunately. And I hope we’re wrong about the dire consequences, both to America and the world.

I wrote “almost everything.” With what do I disagree? This: “We don’t have the excuse of a lost generation…” He is correct that we don’t have the same type of lost generation. We are not recovering from World War I. But our younger generation is lost in a different way. It was voters under 30 who voted for Obama in such high numbers that they made the difference in the 2012 election. Those are the voters who have been most deeply marinated in the leftist educational system, and it has rendered them “lost” in a way that may have irrevocably changed this country and the world.

[NOTE: For opinion from Israel, see this and this.]

Marriage Newspeak

The New Neo Posted on by

Aleister at Legal Insurrection reports on a campaign to eliminate the words “husband” and “wife” from federal statutes:

More than two dozen Democrats have proposed legislation that would eliminate the words “husband” and “wife” from federal law.

Those “gendered terms” would be replaced by “gender-neutral” words like “spouse” or “married couple,” according to the bill from Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif.

“The Amend the Code for Marriage Equality Act recognizes that the words in our laws have meaning and can continue to reflect prejudice and discrimination even when rendered null by our highest courts,” Capps said. “Our values as a country are reflected in our laws. I authored this bill because it is imperative that our federal code reflect the equality of all marriages.”

I can well imagine a time—and that time is probably not too far away—when the words themselves will be considered unacceptably bigoted. I have noticed a trend in that direction, with plenty of liberals I know referring to husbands or wives, boyfriends or girlfriends, as “partners.” Several times I’ve been confused by it, thinking the person to be referring to a business partner or a gay relationship, and been mistaken. In one case, I knew a women for several years, during which she had always referred to her live-in significant other (whom I’d never met) as her “partner.” Imagine my shock when I discovered, after years of assuming she was in a lesbian relationship, that the partner was a man!

In the title of this post I mention Newspeak, Orwell’s name for the language changes fostered by the totalitarian regime in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The purpose of Newspeak was to limit freedom of thought and label unacceptable concepts as “thoughtcrime” and almost literally unthinkable. But in recent years I’ve often felt that our society is going more in the direction of Huxley’s Brave New World, in which the dystopia is clothed in a kinder, gentler facade:

Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. But there were also husbands, wives, lovers. There were also monogamy and romance.

“Though you probably don’t know what those are,” said Mustapha Mond.

They shook their heads.

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.

“But every one belongs to every one else,” he concluded, citing the hypnopé¦dic proverb.

The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.

* * * * * *

“But after all,” Lenina was protesting, “it’s only about four months now since I’ve been having Henry.”

“Only four months! I like that. And what’s more,” Fanny went on, pointing an accusing finger, “there’s been nobody else except Henry all that time. Has there?”

Lenina blushed scarlet; but her eyes, the tone of her voice remained defiant. “No, there hasn’t been any one else,” she answered almost truculently. “And I jolly well don’t see why there should have been.”

“Oh, she jolly well doesn’t see why there should have been,” Fanny repeated, as though to an invisible listener behind Lenina’s left shoulder. Then, with a sudden change of tone, “But seriously,” she said, “I really do think you ought to be careful. It’s such horribly bad form to go on and on like this with one man. At forty, or thirty-five, it wouldn’t be so bad. But at your age, Lenina! No, it really won’t do. And you know how strongly the D.H.C. objects to anything intense or long-drawn. Four months of Henry Foster, without having another man”“why, he’d be furious if he knew ”¦”

* * * * * *

“Think of water under pressure in a pipe.” They thought of it. “I pierce it once,” said the Controller. “What a jet!”

He pierced it twenty times. There were twenty piddling little fountains.

“My baby. My baby ”¦!”

“Mother!” The madness is infectious.

“My love, my one and only, precious, precious ”¦”

Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty”“they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?

Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in 1947-8 and published in 1949. Brave New World was written in 1931 and published in 1932, but set about five centuries from now; I think Huxley underestimated the pace of change.

Masterpieces, both.

[ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that I may need to make explicit something that I think is already implicit here but might not be at all clear. This change in the traditional terms “husband” and “wife” is not supported by all gay people, many of whom are happy to finally be able to use the word. But the change in terms—spearheaded by the left, make no doubt about that—is part of a general plan of the left to change the definition of marriage and all it implies, and to reduce the power of the individual family and of individual choice as a whole, while adopting the guise of supporting the family by extending the right to marriage to gay people.

It’s an interesting act of jujitsu. After all, won’t extending marriage to gay people enhance the traditional concept of monogamy in marriage? Doesn’t it strengthen marriage?

It may strengthen something called “marriage,” but that “something” is less and less likely to include either the practice of faithfulness or even the goal of faithfulness as part of marriage. Of course, this trend was well underway long before marriage was something to which gay couples aspired, but the anti-family trend (as Huxley well recognized in the early ’30s, as seen in the excerpt from his work) has long been part of lefist social engineering. Many gay couples are not even aware of this, but leftist activists certainly are.

Countries which have legalized gay marriage are also countries in which the marriage rates had already fallen, cohabitation rates risen as well as unwed births, and marriage had more often been delayed till after children are born. Stanley Kurtz and others attribute the continuation of this trend to gay marriage, but I actually tend to interpret the statistics along similar lines as this author in Slate, who crunches the same numbers and asserts that these changes had been happening for quite some time anyway and that gay marriage was not particularly causative. I think statistics bear that argument out, but it is irrelevant to my point, which is that these trends are part of an inexorable assault by the left on traditional ideas of marriage and all it has stood for.

And the fact that fidelity has always been something that a significant number of people violate doesn’t change the fact that infidelity has been increasing, and that gay marriage probably will have the effect of undermining fidelity further if male gay activists such as Dan Savage get their way and there are more of what he calls “monogamish” relationships (here’s a summary—at a Christian website—of gay activists’ arguments for infidelity in marriage).

It’s all part of the same trend that has resulted in the legalization of same-sex marriage, and language changes are used to solidify the process.]

“Etudes”: dueling mazurkas

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written about the ballet “Etudes” before, but now I want to hone in on one of my very favorite parts of it, the mazurka, in particular one of the male solos.

“Etudes” is a ballet choreographed in 1948 by Harald Lander, a Dane, and originally performed by the Royal Danish Ballet. I like the music. I like the slightly folkdance-y feel of some the choreography (a mazurka was originally a Polish folk dance) mixed with the strict and demanding classicism.

And I always like to compare and contrast one dancer’s performance to another.

So first we have the Royal Danish Ballet’s 2005 performance, featuring a man I believe is Kenneth Greve (all big hunky Danes look alike to me, although they all look pretty good). The Royal Danish Ballet has a long tradition of elegance, clean and simple lines, and restraint, and this clip shows off those qualities. The whole video is well worth watching, but I call your attention to the part that has the variation I’m going to compare, minutes 0:51 to around 2:40. Note that at one point in the middle of his variation he seems to be getting a mite behind the music and has to play a bit of catch-up:

Now we have his Danish predecessor Eric Bruhn, from the mists of antiquity: 1969. I remember Bruhn well; he was considered one of the greatest dancers of his time. His style was very different from that of today’s dancers—very restrained, very precise, very refined and controlled. It’s seemingly unemotional, but I prefer to call it Apollonian as opposed to Dionysian. Unfortunately this clip is of abominable quality, so much so that even I—as familiar as I am with Bruhn and his work—am not completely sure it’s Bruhn I’m watching here who does the main solo. At any rate, whether it’s Bruhn or Flindt (more likely the former), observe how he never sacrifices musicality for the sake of technique (the part to focus on begins at 1:38; for some reason I was unable to change the start time when I embedded it):

Bruhn is one of very few dancers in all the versions of the variation that I’ve watched (and I watched tons more than appear in this post) who does his double air turns on the music (at 2:13, for example) and doesn’t lag behind. Also, watch him finish the pirouette sequence and then have the presence and balance to do a little developpe to the front with an accent right at the end of it, smack on the music at 1:50.

The following is a 2007 performance by the Russian dancer Vladimir Shklyarov of the Mariinsky Ballet (the sequence begins at 0:15). In the Russian style, he is very flamboyant and dramatic; exciting. In the modern style, he is very exaggerated and elastic yet strong. However, in his eagerness to strut his stuff, his musicality suffers and he sometimes lags, especially towards the latter part of the variation, where at moments he appears to tire. This causes a disconnect (for me, anyway) rather than expressing the seamless whole of dance, dancer, and music:

Lastly, we have Jeffrey Cirio of the Boston Ballet, whose performance I’ve seen in person and enjoyed tremendously. He doesn’t have the natural advantages of some of the other dancers—he’s short and doesn’t have that elegant long line. Alas, this video (the only one of him doing this that I could find) was taken from a bad angle and has extremely poor lighting, too, so you can only see only a pale (literally) version of what made his performance so fine. Nevertheless I think you can still tell how musical he is; he doesn’t fight the music at all like some of the others. He also demonstrates an impressive combination of expressiveness, excitement, strength, and ease of technique (he never ever seems to be straining for his explosive effects) that is rare. And he lends the dance that slight “character” folkdance-y flair that gives it a special oomph:

Do you have a favorite?

Illegal immigration, crime, and statistics

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night I was thinking once again about Donald Trump’s statement that rapists are coming into this country—not about the political ramifications, or about Trump’s candidacy (I’m not a Trump fan), but about the question of whether it’s true, and if so what it means.

Now, on a certain level of course it’s true. It would be bizarre if, among the many millions who have entered this country illegally, there wasn’t a single rapist. So of course there are rapists. The question is “how many?”

Or is it? There’s also the question of what would be an “acceptable” number—is there such a number, or is “one” too many? Another question is: is the percentage of rapists among the population of illegal immigrants higher than it is in the general US population? How do we determine this, and can we?

To do so, the very first statistics you would need are reliable figures on the number of illegal immigrants in the US, and although there are figures (see this, for example), it is the very nature of illegal immigrant numbers to be uncertain, since many of those who enter this country illegally live under the radar, which would make statistics-gathering more difficult.

And although I’ve found figures on the percentages of the prison population that consist of illegal immigrants (more later on that), they tells us little about what violent crimes they are committing—for example, rape, for which there don’t seem to be separate figures on illegal immigrants (at least, I haven’t found any). And how many of their crimes are reported, if they are often committed against other illegal immigrants, who may be loathe to go to the law for help?

You can see the problem. It’s quite substantial. And yet to have an intelligent and informed discussion about illegal immigration, one would need to know these things. What’s more, when you try to find the research and the statistics, you discover (as I have) that often categories are lumped together in a way that makes them less meaningful, such as all “immigrants” (both legal and illegal), all “crimes” (rather than a breakdown of types of crime), and a failure to differentiate among countries of origin. In addition, as with all research of this sort, how the figures are obtained is very important, but in order to find that you have to get the original research rather than summaries or references in the newspapers. It is arduous, time-consuming, and difficult, and sometimes the information is unobtainable by the layperson.

We know a few things, or assume we do. We know that illegal immigration has been growing in the last decade or two not just in absolute numbers but as a percentage of the US population.

We know a few things about illegal immigrants and crime. We know that cartels from Mexico are heavily involved in the drug trade and that they use Hispanic communities to hide in and provide cover and foot soldiers. But are these legal immigrants? Illegal? What percentage of the drug trade do they represent?

Here is a report with some examples of the type of thing I mean; you can see some of the problems demonstrated in the bullet points. As a further demonstration, let’s take this 2007 NY Times article, which is an attempt to debunk statements made by Lou Dobbs in 2003 such as “One-third of the inmates now serving time in federal prisons come from some other country,” and that illegal immigrants were “an increasing part of America’s prison population”:

In 2000, 27 percent of the inmates in federal prisons were noncitizens. Some of these noncitizens were illegal immigrants, and some were in this country legally. In 2001, this percentage dropped to 24 percent, and it continued dropping over the next four years, falling to 20 percent in 2005.

Bottom line: illegal immigrants make up significantly less than a third of the federal prison population, and the share has been falling in recent years.

So Dobbs was wrong in saying in 2003 that a third of the inmates in federal prison were foreign-born (if that is in fact what he said). Depending on what year he was referring to, it was actually either a quarter or a fifth, according to the statistics—both of which are much more than the percentage of foreign-born people in the country, which the article quotes as being 6.9%. So Dobbs was correct in principle but wrong in detail. And the author of the article is mixing apples and oranges when he writes, “Bottom line: illegal immigrants make up significantly less than a third of the federal prison population…” But he’s already said that the Dobbs quote about a third of the federal prison population was about foreign-born people. He’s not quoted as having given any figure for illegal immigrants, just that they are “an increasing part” of the prison population, which they are—although a significant amount of this increase represents the increase in illegal immigration as a whole, and a significant part also represents prisoners who are in prison for immigration violations.

I could go on discussing the Times article and picking on this and that, both in the article and in what Dobbs purportedly said. But my point is that we don’t have anything close to precision or even something definite here about what’s actually going on. That would take time, an interest in accuracy and truth (dream on, you say), and reliable figures, as well as an audience that understands statistics, and how many do? Not many.

The best site I’ve found so far for relevant-seeming statistics on the subject is this one. It’s not perfect, of course, but it contains data from the United States Sentencing Commission’s Monitoring of Federal Criminal Sentences from 1991 through 2007. Go to the link to read the whole thing, but I’ve excerpted some of the more interesting points here [my own comments are in brackets]:

—Hispanics represented 40% of all sentenced federal offenders in 2007, the single largest racial and ethnic group among sentenced federal offenders. [This figure is much higher than those mentioned either by Dobbs or by the Times (which included all foreign-born), but it obviously includes those Hispanics who were born in this country and are citizens, which would naturally make the figure higher than just illegal-immigrant Hispanics or just foreign-born Hispanics.]

—More than seven-in-ten (72%) of Hispanics sentenced in federal courts in 2007 did not hold U.S. citizenship. They accounted for 29% of all federal offenders in 2007.[This answers how many were non-citizens, and it also is close to the one-third that Dobbs mentioned, although he said it a few years earlier, and he was speaking of all foreign-born offenders rather than just Hispanic non-citizens.]

—Between 1991 and 2007, the number of Hispanics sentenced in federal courts nearly quadrupled (270%), rising faster than the number of offenders sentenced in federal courts over this period and accounting for 54% of the growth in the total number of offenders. [If this number rose so dramatically, we can assume that the number of illegal immigrant Hispanics in prison also rose, since they are now such a high percentage of the whole.]

—Among all Hispanics sentenced in federal courts in 2007, 48% were sentenced for immigration offenses, 37% for drug offenses and 15% for other offenses [So it’s not just immigration offenses Hispanics are being sentenced for; over 50% are sentenced for drug and “other offenses.” But the very important question: how many of these Hispanics sentenced for drug and “other offenses” are illegal immigrants? And what are those “other offenses”? How many are violent crimes, how many are rape?]

—Much of the increase in the number of Hispanics sentenced in federal courts has come from a rise in the number of offenders sentenced for immigration offenses between 1991 and 2007. [So there is no question that a significant amount of the increase involved immigration offenses. However, the report ends in 2007, so the statistics don’t cover two very important phenomena: the recent surge of illegal immigration, and the fact that under the Obama administration, many illegal alien criminals are being released from prison.]

There’s lots more, of course. But that will have to do as an illustration of the problem—not just the problem of illegal immigration, but the problem of figuring out how much and in what way it affects crime in this country.

Another psychopath: James Hammes

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a truly fascinating article (link found at American Digest), which describes an embezzler who went on the lam and was finally caught after six years of running.

Did I write “running”? I actually meant “hiking”—because what Jim Hammes was doing for most of that time was hiking the Appalachian Trail and becoming a well-known and affable figure there. Oh, and he was also growing a big long beard, which made him virtually unrecognizable. He was caught, however, by someone who recognized him from a program on TV, although the photos on the program hardly resembled the man he had met. There was just something about the eyes—

I said it was a fascinating story, and it is. But the reason I’m writing about it here is that it turns out that Hammes (trail name: “Bismark”) wasn’t just an embezzler of eight million dollars. He was most likely a wife-murderer, too, and if so his crime seems to have fit the pattern I laid out in my recent post “psychopaths who murder their parents.” That is, he is a person whose specialty was a financial or property crime, and who had never shown any prior propensity for violence, who then murders a family member (in this case his wife) because that person was starting to be on to the criminal’s game and he/she fears being exposed and caught.

For a psychopath, whose question for every human he/she encounters appears to be “What can you do for me, what have you done for me lately, and how can I take advantage of you?”, it seems a no-brainer to kill the person close to you who might no longer be useful and might even be about to get in your way.

[NOTE: You may disagree that Hammes is a psychopath. I’m not entirely sure, myself. But the portrait painted in the article makes me think he most likely is.]

Obama in a nutshell

The New Neo Posted on by

In short: he’s a community organizer. Please read the whole thing.

And in 2008 when Americans heard Obama describe himself that way, the vast majority didn’t understand that it meant the opposite of what it appears to mean.

[ADDENDUM: Plus, why has Obama been silent on the murder of Kathryn Steinle? The question almost answers itself, but here’s an answer if you want it made explicit.]

Ringo at 75

The New Neo Posted on by

This guy has found the fountain of youth:

ringo75

It’s certainly not from a lifetime of clean living, although he went on the wagon in 1988:

Starr was the only Beatle who accepted the presence of Yoko Ono and when the band split in 1970 he was the only member to remain close to the other three while they fell out. In part, you suspect, it was because he was so easy to like and had a habit of summing up a situation in the simplest terms.

…It was after the band broke up, John Lennon was murdered and his surrogate “family” ”“ as he called it ”“ disintegrated that his problems began…

in 1981 he married a bona fide Bond Girl, the actress Barbara Bach, who had starred in The Spy Who Loved Me and to whom he remains devoted.

Together the couple set about living it up. There was said to be no rock and roll party in Los Angeles if Ringo wasn’t there, and by the mid-Eighties he was downing a bottle of Mumm champagne before lunch and rounding off his day by consuming more nefarious substances.

He once said he wouldn’t go out because you’d have to be in the car for 40 minutes without a drink. He’d started drinking in the mid-Seventies, replacing cognac with brandy Alexanders, and then when his addiction really escalated wine, often sinking 16 bottles a day.

“I got involved with a lot of different medications and you can listen to my records go downhill as the amount of medication went up,” he once said. “I’ve got photographs of me playing all over the world but I’ve absolutely no memory of it. I played Washington with the Beach Boys ”“ or so they tell me. But there’s only a photo to prove it.”

However, it was only when he began to worry that he couldn’t stop drinking that he sought help. Seven years after their marriage, he and Barbara booked into a drying out clinic in Tucson, Arizona. “I’m not a violent man,” he reflected recently, “But I was getting violent. And it was just painful, waking up in the morning and starting drinking again.”

Sixteen bottles of wine a day doesn’t seem possible. Sixteen wine-sized bottles of water a day doesn’t seem possible.

[NOTE: More on looking young and seeming young.]

Dylann Roof and the gun purchase

The New Neo Posted on by

In this post I asked the following question about the Charleston shooter: “how did Roof evade the background check if in fact he purchased the gun himself?”

Now comes an answer—except it’s not much of an answer at all:

The man accused of killing nine people in an historically black South Carolina church last month should not have been able to buy a gun, the F.B.I. said Friday in what was the latest acknowledgment of flaws in the national background check system.

A loophole in the check system allowed the man, Dylann Roof, to buy the .45-caliber handgun despite his having previously admitted to drug possession, the bureau said.

“We are all sick this happened,” said the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey. “We wish we could turn back time.”

The article goes on for a while longer, but never explains what that loophole might have been and how it worked. This article, however, goes into it a bit more:

He said Roof went to a West Columbia, S.C., gun shop on April 11 to buy the gun. Under federal law, the FBI had three days to block the purchase.

But an FBI examiner in West Virginia failed to get notice of a March drug arrest of Roof that would have likely resulted in Roof being disqualified from purchasing the weapon…

Comey said the drug charge itself would not have automatically blocked the sale. But if examiners had talked to prosecutors, they would have learned that in the police report Roof admitted he had possessed the drug. That confession would have been enough to deny the gun sale, Comey said.

So, it seems that (1) there was a law on the books that would have, and should have, stopped the sale (most likely) had it been followed; but (2) there was a slip-up where the information either was not entered into the database or was not noticed or accessed if entered. The FBI examiner “failed to get notice”—what on earth does that mean? Do they even have a clue what happened, or do they know and they (or the newspapers) are being cagey about saying, because the truth reflects so poorly on them?

But the third time’s the charm. In this article we get a glimmer of information about how it happened:

Comey said, the FBI background check examiner who evaluated Roof’s request to buy a gun never saw the arrest report because the wrong arresting agency was listed on the list rap sheet that she reviewed.

I’m not quite sure what that means. Why does the arresting agency matter? Isn’t it done by name and address of the person applying, and isn’t the check for a rap sheet nationwide? What difference does the arresting agency make? Does it mean she saw that Dylan had a drug charge against him but couldn’t locate what agency to call about it? What kind of system is this? And I bet the database is rife with similar typos and careless errors.

This news will not stop the drumbeat of partisan calls for more gun laws. Why not just enforce the ones we already have? I know, I know; it’s not about that, it’s about getting more of those laws on the books in order to stifle second amendment rights.

Trial by agency

The New Neo Posted on by

The case of the Sweet Cakes bakers in Oregon who were ordered to pay $135,000 damages for not baking a cake for a gay wedding, and to also submit to a gag order, seemed unusually Draconian to me. I hadn’t read about it in detail, but I figured it had something to do with the liberalism of the Oregon courts. That turns out to have been incorrect, as this article by David French makes clear, because the case never was in the court system at all.

And if that reassures you, it shouldn’t. The truth is far more threatening to liberty. Our justice system, as expressed through the courts, is far from perfect, but the system of trial by extra-judicial agency or board that is becoming more and more common in these high-profile cases lacks many of the procedural safeguards that have been built into the court system over hundreds of years:

While this ruling has binding legal force, it is critical to understand that it is not the result of a conventional court proceeding. Rather, it is the product of an administrative process that is unrecognizable to those schooled in the rules and procedures of criminal and civil courts. It is a process that is rife with conflicts of interest, ideological from the start, and often insulated from conventional and appropriate judicial review. In states across the country, discrimination complaints against businesses like the Kleins’ originate not in court but instead in state agencies like BOLI or in various state “human rights commissions.” The agencies and commissions are often led by explicitly ideological politicians who make no pretense of impartiality, instead openly declaring that they’ll aggressively find and punish “discrimination” wherever it’s found. Discrimination complaints are then investigated by agency investigators, tried by agency prosecutors, and decided by agency “judges” ”” often interpreting and applying rules drafted by the agency itself. Americans have long recognized the inherent bias when one person functions as “judge, jury, and executioner.” In the administrative agencies of the deep state, a single, highly ideological entity can function as rulemaker, investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury, and enforcer.

A comment at the linked post has this to say:

To anyone who is outraged by this story I recommend Charles Murray’s latest book “By the People.” It’s on Amazon and it is the best explanation of how regulatory bureaucracies came to be part of American government. For the moment, it suffices to know that they are not constitutional (at the federal level) and that Mr. French is correct — the deck is stacked in favor of the bureaucrats. The way to beat them, according to Dr. Murray, is to raise multi-billion dollar defense funds so that everyone and every business affected by these agencies can take them to court, appeal every ruling, take the case from the administrative courts where you are certain to lose to the normal judicial system, where you at least have a chance. By doing this we tie them up in court endlessly, drain their funding for legal defenses, and eventually overwhelm them so that they can no longer enforce their ridiculous regulations. That’s a very brief description of the book — I recommend it heartily.

This is a related problem, affecting colleges. Many of the cases of false rape accusations that we’ve seen in recent years fall initially under the aegis of such bureaucratic procedures, and many never end up in the courts at all despite heavy consequences and lack of due process for the accused.

Due process actually has a purpose.

The latest on Greece

The New Neo Posted on by

France and Greece against Germany?:

You can’t exaggerate the importance of France’s decision to align itself with Greece before this weekend’s crisis meetings. As Wolfgang Munchau correctly notes in the Financial Times, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has finally succeeded in dividing the creditors. A split between Germany and France, no less, and on an issue as momentous as this — on the course of the entire European project — isn’t just any division.

Ignore all the expressions of bewilderment over Tsipras’s acceptance of terms he and his country just roundly rejected. That’s all beside the point. He had already capitulated — weeks ago — on the larger part of the fiscal obligations in the creditors’ last offer. He was holding out for a commitment to debt relief now, rather than talks about it later.

That’s the condition he’s dropped, and rightly, because a consensus has finally emerged that debt relief, one way or another, will follow if some kind of deal is done. In return, he’s secured France as an ally against Germany. That’s a pretty good deal for Greece.

Your guess is as good as mine. Actually, maybe your guess is better than mine.

[ADDENDUM: I’m seeing a lot of blinking lately: Merkel blinks, Tsipras blinks, Germany blinks, Greece blinks.]

Little Hillary

The New Neo Posted on by

Ann Althouse wonders about something Hillary Clinton said during her CNN interview. Althouse quotes James Taranto quoting Althouse on it:

As for SNL [Hillary said]: “I think I’m the best Hillary Clinton, to be honest. So I’m just going to be my own little self and kind of keep going along and saying what I believe in and putting forth changes that I think would be good for the country.”

In response to which blogress Ann Althouse quips:

Be my own little self . . . Is that something her people say behind the scenes, something like “Let Nixon be Nixon”? But Nixon never said: “I’m just going to let Nixon be Nixon.”

Never mind that, try to imagine Nixon saying “I’m just going to be my own little self.”

I’d have trouble imagining Hillary doing a little-me routine if I hadn’t heard it.

But it’s not the first time Hillary has used “little” to refer to herself, although originally she was using it to say it was something she was not. You may recall:

Note how pretty Hillary was back then, as well as how Southern, adopting the tones of the state she’d lived in for nearly 20 years.

However, not only has she proved to be exactly what she denied being—standing by her man through infidelities that were more public than the ones she’s referencing in that clip, but she found out soon enough that dissing Tammy and little women is a no-no, and backtracked:

So now she’s the best Hillary Clinton she can be—her own little self.