Report: voice recorder incidates pilot was locked out of cockpit

The New Neo Posted on by

According to The New York Times, a “senior military official involved in the investigation” of the Germanwings air crash has described an extremely disturbing scenario during the last eight minutes of the flight:

…[O]ne of the pilots left the cockpit and could not re-enter.

“The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door, and there is no answer,” the investigator said. “And then he hits the door stronger, and no answer. There is never an answer.”

He said, “You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”

If this is correct, it indicates a situation that chills the blood to even imagine: the frantic pilot unable to get into the cockpit in order to avert the disaster-in-the-making. The question, of course, is whether it was deliberate on the part of the person in the cockpit, or accidental. The first would make that person a terrorist, the second would mean that some accident or sudden illness had rendered that person unconscious and unable to let the other pilot in.

But how do cockpit door locks work? Even without terrorism, why would door locks be designed so that if for some reason the pilot remaining in the cockpit is incapacitated, there is no way for the other pilot to enter in what would clearly be an emergency? No one seems to be all that clear on how it works, but here’s some information:

The cockpit door automatically locks, and in most situations, anyone outside the cockpit needs to have permission from the pilots inside to enter, the video explains. Pilots in the cockpit need to move a switch to the “unlock” position to open the door.

In the case of “crew incapacitation,” there is an emergency access procedure: someone outside the cockpit must punch an emergency code into the door access panel, then can enter 30 seconds later if there is “no action from the crew.” The video seems to imply that someone inside the cockpit could override that emergency action, but that is not entirely clear.

What I take from that is that in the case of involuntary incapacitation the system would work quite well and the outside pilot could enter after 30 seconds. But if the inside pilot didn’t want anyone to enter, he/she could block that entry. If this is correct, there are only two possibilities I can think of for the Germanwings crash: either the system malfunctioned, or it was terrorism on the part of the pilot who remained in the cockpit.

Iran is calling the shots

The New Neo Posted on by

On reading this, I marveled anew at the fairly obvious fact that Iran considers itself to be in the driver’s seat on these negotiations. Its leaders know that the US is groveling and desperate for a deal, any deal, no matter how lousy.

There’s no reason for this, either, except that Obama considers a deal to be the crown jewel of his glittering foreign policy. And in John Kerry he has finally found the perfect partner for the endeavor.

Kerry is one of the few people in American public life I detest as much as I do Obama, and my feeling for Kerry is of much longer duration, predating even my political change and going back to the days of his Vietnam testimony before Congress. That feeling has only grown more intense over time. Actually, although many of you may think this odd, the two men remind me of each other—in their opportunism, narcissism, pomposity, belief in their own brilliance, duplicity, and willingness to betray their country. Obama has had much more political success than Kerry because of the “likeability” factor as well as his cachet as the first black president, and Obama is much more bold. But Kerry is the perfect lackey for him.

The Iranians know with whom they’re dealing. They obviously have no respect for either of them, nor for the UN. And why on earth should they?:

An Iranian official on Tuesday rebuked the chief of the U.N. atomic agency for demanding snap inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites, saying the request hindered efforts to reach an agreement with world powers, state TV reported.

The United States and five other world powers face an end-of-the-month deadline to reach a framework agreement with Iran on its nuclear program. Western nations suspect Tehran is pursuing a nuclear weapons capability alongside the civilian program. Iran denies such allegations, insisting its nuclear activities are entirely peaceful.

Earlier this month Yukiya Amano, the head of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, said Tehran should agree to snap inspections to reassure the international community.

Iran’s nuclear spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi said Amano’s comments harm the delicate negotiations. “It would be much better if Amano only talked about the IAEA’s seasonal and monthly reports,” he said, according to state TV.

One of the main motivations for the Iraq War was that Saddam Hussein had refused to cooperate with inspections of WMD programs. That’s been de-emphasized by those who were against the war, and has been almost forgotten. All of this—as well as the fact that under Obama we pulled completely out of Iraq and signaled our inability to follow through—has indicated to countries such as Iran how fundamentally unserious the West is right now about either enforcing such inspections or stopping enemies who wish to get such weapons. Leaders like those of Iran have no trouble perceiving such weakness, which smells to them as the scent of blood to sharks.

Bergdahl charged with desertion

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s about time:

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who was recovered in Afghanistan last spring after five years in captivity, faces charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, his lawyer said Wednesday.

Eugene Fidell, Bergdahl’s attorney, told The Washington Post that his client was handed a charge sheet on Tuesday. Army officials announced they will provide an update in his case at 3:30 p.m. at Fort Bragg, N.C., but declined to discuss new developments ahead of the news conference…

The charges come after a lengthy investigation launched last June after his recovery and a review by Gen. Mark A. Milley, the commanding general of U.S. Army Forces Command at Fort Bragg. Bergdahl has faced a slew of accusations from his fellow soldiers that he abandoned them on the battlefield and caused a manhunt that diverted resources from the war effort and put lives in danger.

Bergdahl will faces charges under articles 85 and 99 of the military’s Uniform Code of Military Justice, Fidell said.

I imagine there’s an interesting tale of the fight by the Obama administration to keep this day from ever happening. This could get very, very interesting.

More on the Germanwings crash

The New Neo Posted on by

Facts learned today:

Witnesses who saw the plane right before the crash report it as having been intact. So a bomb catastrophic enough to blow part of the plane off could not have been the problem.

Despite the lack of a message from the pilots during the eight-minute descent, the instruments were still functioning well enough to have been “automatically relaying its altitude, airspeed and heading to air traffic control” the entire time. And yet there seems to have been no attempt by pilots to maneuver it, or even to slow it down. It crashed into the mountain at very high speed.

The plane was an Airbus A320, which is highly automated:

Last year an Airbus A321 owned by Lufthansa went into a sudden descent at 31,000ft, falling at the same rate ”“ 4,000ft per minute ”“ before the crew managed to regain control.

The European Air Safety Directive said in that incident the aircraft’s angle of attack sensors had become blocked and tricked the computer into thinking the aircraft was about to stall.

The EASA said that in that situation: “The flight control laws order a continuous nose down pitch rate that, in a worst case scenario, cannot be stopped with backward sidestick inputs, even in the full backward position.

“This condition, if not corrected, could result in loss of control of the aeroplane.”

That would be my leading theory at the moment, because of the rate of fall and the fact that it’s a very similar plane of the same series. Although the authorities keep saying terrorism is unlikely, I certainly don’t think it can be ruled out, either. Cockpit intrusion? Also, the names of the pilot and copilot have not been released, and that could have some significance although I wouldn’t bet on it.

It was initially reported that the black box had been found missing its memory card, but that report has been contradicted:

The director of the lead investigating agency said today that they have recovered an audio file from the black box of the downed Germanwings flight but have not found the second black box from the Airbus A320 that crashed in the French Alps.

This comes after French Prime Minister Francois Hollande said at an earlier news conference when he said that crews had found the exterior of the black box but not the module that contains the memory equipment, though a the director of the Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses (BEA) went on to deny any such discovery.

“We have not localized the black box,” said BEA Director Rémi Jouty. “We have not found any debris of the black box and in the history of air accidents we know about … [we] don’t remember any recorder broken into little pieces.”

I really really hope the audio file yields much useful information, and that the flight recorder is also found.

The latest in my Comcast saga

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been having connectivity and slowdown issues since last fall. You’ll find my November post on the saga here, but I thought I’d give you an update.

For various reasons, although there are alternatives to Comcast where I live, they aren’t very good ones. So I kept working with Comcast. They gave me two new modems along the way, and in addition I tried buying one myself, but nothing helped. Every now and then the whole problem would go away for several weeks, and I’d fool myself into thinking they’d fixed it. But then it would return.

So a couple of days ago I called them again, although talking with them is a bit like wrestling with alligators. The task was to convince them to send still another service person here and investigate more thoroughly (one had visited back in November and found nothing wrong). They keep trying to say it’s my computer that’s at fault, but I pointed out that my computer seems to do just fine when it’s away from home.

So yesterday the guy came, and you won’t believe what he found. Or maybe you will.

A segment of cable that was part of a grouping running to the modem had been hooked up backwards. I don’t know the terminology for the thing, but it was white and about a foot long. He said that the “in” end had been put where the “out” should have been, and vice versa. Both ends were clearly marked. All he did yesterday was to unfasten that thing and reverse it and voila! Instant improvement, which I hope will last, although it will take a few weeks to know for sure.

So, to summarize: the last Comcast service person—the one who had brought me the spiffy new modem—fastened it in wrong, in an egregious error. In fact, the new guy said he was surprised I’d been getting any service at all, there was so little signal coming in.

I see this as some sort of metaphor for the way this country is headed. Would that the solution were as simple!

On Jews disliking evangelicals

The New Neo Posted on by

In a previous thread, commenter “Ann” offered a link to an article written in 2008 by James Q. Wilson entitled, “Why Don’t Jews Like the Christians Who Like Them?”

From the article:

Evangelical Christians have a high opinion not just of the Jewish state but of Jews as people. That Jewish voters are overwhelmingly liberal doesn’t seem to bother evangelicals, despite their own conservative politics. Yet Jews don’t return the favor: in one Pew survey, 42 percent of Jewish respondents expressed hostility to evangelicals and fundamentalists. As two scholars from Baruch College have shown, a much smaller fraction””about 16 percent””of the American public has similarly antagonistic feelings toward Christian fundamentalists.

Wilson goes on to write about a lot of things, although most of them have nothing to do with why Jews don’t like evangelicals. His main answer to that question, the one posed in the title, is “because Jews tend to be liberals.” True, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far.

Very unfortunately (and somewhat surprisingly to me), Wilson does not link the survey on which his entire premise about Jews not liking evangelicals seems to rest, nor does he give out enough information that a person could locate it (“one Pew survey” doesn’t quite pin it down, and one survey is not really much to base an entire theory on even if he did give the link). When I Googled the topic, I couldn’t find many surveys about it at all, although I did locate this one, which at least seems to be related although not precisely the same. My guess is that it’s a similar Pew survey, done in a year that’s different but fairly close in time (the one I found was done in 2014, so it’s more recent than Wilson’s article).

So I read the Pew report carefully, and it seems to me it’s pretty much “garbage in, garbage out” regarding the Jews and their opinions. The problems with it are as follows: it doesn’t define “Jews,” nor does it break them down into observant and non-observant, much less which type of observance they follow (there are ordinarily huge differences). Since many Jews in the US are nonobservant (although not necessarily atheists, which is a separate category in the survey), and even most observant Jews are reform Jews, people could describe themselves as Jewish while being basically secular and liberal. Unless the pollsters made a special effort to get Orthodox Jews in their survey (and since there is no breakdown, one can assume they didn’t pay attention to that aspect), that particular group is probably significantly underrepresented.

But perhaps more problematic is the fact that although the entire survey consists of a little over three thousand people, there are only 100 Jews. That’s not out of line with the percentage of Jews in the population—in fact, it’s slightly more, relatively speaking. But it’s by far the smallest religious group in the survey, and a small number in the sense of making it difficult to draw valid conclusions based on it. The results for such a small group are particularly prone to error, and if you look at the following chart you’ll see something interesting about the margin of error for the Jewish response:

errormargin

Plus or minus 12.6 percentage points seems pretty unacceptable for a poll. For what it’s worth (which isn’t much), the results were that Jews rated evangelicals on average as 34 on a “feeling thermometer” that goes up to 100, very similar to the score for how they rate Muslims. Jews rated evangelicals very similarly to how agnostics rated evangelicals (giving me a hint that perhaps a lot of the Jews in the survey are really agnostics), and somewhat higher than atheists did.

As a hypothetical, though, let’s just imagine that the results are accurate and that Jews don’t especially like evangelicals. I’m actually not at all sure most Jews even know what evangelicals believe in or stand for. The word sounds a great deal like “evangelist,” (same root), which traditionally has meant “a person who seeks to convert others to the Christian faith, especially by public preaching.”

With the Jews’ lengthy history of being the objects of forced or pressured or coerced conversion attempts, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to be somewhat wary of Christians you thought might be members of a group trying really hard to convert you. Unless a person is conversant with all the different Christian sects, and recent developments in Christianity—which believe me, most Jews and most non-Christians in general are not—it could sound as though “evangelicals” would be people who fit that proselytizing description. This in turn could be a fairly large part of the answer to Wilson’s question of “why” the dislike.

I strongly doubt that most Jews even know that evangelicals are their friends, or what they believe, or that evangelicals support Israel and respect Jews and the Jewish religion. Evangelicals may think those things are well-known facts, but I would wager they’re not at all well-known among Jews, secular or otherwise.

The religious categories the survey subjects were asked to rate did not include any Protestant denominations except evangelicals, which I find to be a curious thing. Most people—even Jews—have a better idea of what Catholicism is and a long history with it, and even some of the larger Protestant denominations (although I think that’s a lot less clear than Catholicism), but evangelicals are more of a mystery. By the way, the Wiki entry for “evangelicalism” mentions that adherants “believe in the centrality of the conversion or ‘born again’ experience in receiving salvation, believe in the authority of the Bible as God’s revelation to humanity and have a strong commitment to evangelism or sharing the Christian message.” That latter part—the commitment to sharing the Christian message—could be the source of some Jews’ fear that evangelicals are people intent on converting the Jews. Although that’s not a correct perception about evangelicals for the most part, it may be an understandable one in the absence of personal knowledge to the contrary.

One last thing—the Pew survey I found asked respondents to rate religions not on a measure of liking or disliking per se, but on a “feeling thermometer” with a cold/warm scale on which 0 was “coldest/most negative” and 100 was “warmest/most positive.” Some unknown number of respondents may have interpreted that in such a way that lower scores meant that the respondent is cold towards the group because he/she doesn’t know much about the it; more of an absence of feeling than an active dislike.

Air crash in the Alps

The New Neo Posted on by

A terrible air disaster:

All 144 passengers and six crew were today presumed dead after the Airbus A320 crashed in a remote region of the French Alps en route from Spain to Germany.

One of the plane’s black box recorders has been found and will be examined immediately, France’s interior minister said.

The images emerged as confusion reigned over the final minutes of the doomed Airbus A320 after air traffic controllers claimed they received no SOS despite the jet nosediving 32,000ft in just eight minutes.

Don’t there seem to have been a higher percentage of recent crashes where the controllers precipitously lost contact with a plane that was still intact? Apparently this jet descended for eight full horrific minutes, and yet there was no communication at all. I know pilots’ first duty is to fly the aircraft, but I still wonder why there might be no word from the pilots during such a lengthy interval. Was there depressurization and unconsciousness?

At least in this case the plane’s location is known, the black box has been found, and answers will probably be forthcoming in the not-too-distant future.

[NOTE: I noticed that this was the same type of plane involved in the amazing Hudson River landing by “Sully” Sullenberger.]

In a situation…

The New Neo Posted on by

…such as this, truth is especially hard to come by:

The Wall Street Journal reported late Monday that in addition to Israelis spying on the highly-sensitive negotiations between Tehran and world powers, details were back-chanelled to US legislators in an effort to sabotage the deal intended to limit Iran’s nuclear program.

“Frankly I was a bit shocked, because, there was no information revealed to me whatsoever,” said House Speaker John Boehner

But I’ll take a crack at a guess:

(1) Israel did spy on the Iran talks. If they didn’t, they should have. The US has become its enemy, along with Iran.
(2) The US knew this, but is releasing this information now in order to further hurt Israel, and to harm some Republicans in the process. A twofer.
(3) Boehner is not actually shocked.
(4) Some details were back-channeled to US legislators. The funny thing is that the Obama administration is supposed to be giving Congress some information on the negotiations, but of course hasn’t. Now he’s peeved that the Israelis may have kept Congress abreast of his secret plans to give away the farm.

An awful lot of smoke and mirrors here, I think.

Dershowitz rips Obama on Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

Dershowitz:

I wouldn’t hire this administration to negotiate a one-month lease for me,” Dershowitz said.

He also called Obama “undiplomatic,” “petulant,” and “juvenile,” according to Noah Pollak of the Emergency Committee for Israel…

And yet, and yet—although these actions by Obama regarding Iran and Israel were totally and completely predictable, I seem to recall a certain Alan Dershowitz voted for him and vocally supported him, twice. In 2012, some of his stated reasons for that endorsement concerned wanting liberal justices appointed to SCOTUS (ironic that perhaps Obama won’t get to name any more, however, if all of them manage to hold up for the next two years). But then Dershowitz wrote the following, which was already risible in 2012 although if anything it’s even more risible now:

The case for Barack Obama also includes his approach to foreign policy, which has improved the standing of America around the world…The Obama administration has worked closely with our allies to impose the harshest possible sanctions on Iran, to depose Muammar Gaddafi and to help keep the Arab Spring from turning into an extremist Muslim winter…

With regards to Iran, which poses the most immediate threat to the security of the United States and its allies, most especially Israel, the policy of the Obama administration is crystal clear: It has taken containment off the table and kept the military option on the table…

But the best way to avoid the need for military action is for the Iranian mullahs to believe that the United States will never allow them to develop nuclear weapons. If they believe that reality then the pain of the sanctions will pressure them to give up their nuclear ambitions. President Obama has clearly stated that he is not bluffing when he says that his administration will never allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. A secondterm president generally has more credibility than a firstterm president when it comes to threatening military action…

When it comes to reenergizing the moribund peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, Romney has said that he would do nothing other than kick the can down the road.

President Obama, on the other hand, would almost certainly try to bring the parties together to achieve a two-state solution that guaranteed Israel’s security while allowing the Palestinians to govern themselves.

If I wanted a lawyer I wouldn’t mind having Dershowitz on the case. But for anything else—well, let’s just say I’m not impressed. Obama fooled you once, Dershowitz, fooled you twice…

Although I’m picking on Dershowitz (not that he’ll know or care), he’s not alone, and I doubt I’m telling him anything he doesn’t already know. I think that’s why he’s so very angry at Obama right now: he’s made a fool out of Dershowitz. Or shall I say, a useful idiot. But you know what? I think that, if Obama was running for a third term (perish the thought), that Dershowitz would go for that football again. And again.

That’s how hard it is to change one’s political mind, especially for those who are dedicated liberals and who have gone on record for years as such. Dershowitz wouldn’t even have to renounce liberalism; all he’d have to do is renounce Obama. But in a way, that’s the first step down the slippery slope.

In no surprise at all…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Ted Cruz has thrown his hat into the 2016 presidential ring.

Early-bird Cruz is one of the smartest guys ever to run for the presidency. And I don’t think even the staunchest conservatives would be likely to question his conservative bona fides.

Although I suppose someone can find a way—and indeed, just now when I checked, I find that the paleo/Buchananesque/isolationist wing of the party seems to detest him. They think he’s too hawkish, and that too many candidates will split the conservative wing of the party (I agree with the latter assertion).

Of course, Cruz is the only declared candidate so far, so the field is decidedly unsplit at the moment. But they think he has absolutely no chance of winning and therefore should never have tried in the first place. I believe he’s certainly a long shot, but not an impossible one. I happen to like Cruz, although he’s not my frontrunner. I think he’d be a better president than senator; as senator, he’s more of a lonely voice crying in the wilderness.

[NOTE: By the way, a quick perusal of that paleo publication to see which Republican candidate they do like doesn’t reveal anyone. They seem to detest Walker at least as much as they hate Cruz, and I can’t imagine that Jeb Bush is their man. This Buchanan article makes it clear that his isolation is intact, even now, and it seems that all the conservatives and Republicans are too hawkish for him. Maybe he wants another go-round for…Pat Buchanan? Now, there’s a longshot. He’s 76 now, by the way, but it seems he’s been around forever.]

Yemen…

The New Neo Posted on by

…was touted as a success story by President Obama a mere four months ago.

Now, not so much:

The Yemeni foreign minister is asking several Gulf Arab neighbors for military intervention to stop territorial advances by Houthi fighters in his embattled country, after the U.N. special envoy for Yemen warned the U.N. Security Council that events appear to be leading the country “to the edge of civil war.”

The Houthi rebels opposed to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi are threatening the country’s security, Yemeni foreign minister Riyadh Yaseen suggested Monday.

“They’re expanding in territory, occupying airports and cities, attacking Aden with planes, detaining whom they please, threatening and gathering their forces,” Yaseen told Al Jazeera TV.

As a consequence, the US and the Brits have pulled out of the country:

Over the weekend, the United States evacuated the last of its special operations forces — including Navy SEALs and Army Delta Force troops — amid the deteriorating security situation in the country, the U.S. State Department said.

On Monday, a security source in the region familiar with the situation in Yemen told CNN’s Nic Robertson that British special forces had also left Yemen in the last few days…

Yemen has been a key U.S. ally in the fight against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, allowing U.S. drones and special operations forces to stalk terrorists in the country. Now, that arrangement is in tatters, along with any semblance of peace in the Middle Eastern nation.

Or in the Middle East as a whole, I might add.

Meanwhile, Obama goes blithely on, pursuing the great white Iranian whale of his megalomaniacal fantasies. Of course, that’s not a good metaphor; as a Moby Dick fan, I realize that Ahab wanted to destroy the whale, not to give in to accommodate, placate, and empower it.

[ADDENDUM: Michael Totten weighs in:

Far more likely than a comprehensive Houthi takeover is a new and more dangerous phase of Yemen’s endless self-cannibalization””more dangerous because this otherwise parochial and irrelevant conflict has been internationalized, with ISIS, the Saudis, and Iran squaring off against each other in yet another regional proxy war.

The Houthi movement is named after Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, an insurrection leader killed by the former government in 2004. They are Shias, but unlike the “Twelver” Shia Muslims of Iran””who revere eleven imams and await the birth of the occluded twelfth””most of Yemen’s Shias are “Fivers.” Iran doesn’t mind. From its point of view, better the odd “Fiver” Shias than Sunnis, but all that really matters is that the Houthis are willing to say yes to Tehran, its weapon shipments, and its top-notch military advisors and trainers…

The US has few friends and even less leverage, especially now that it’s all falling apart, so Washington is washing its hands and bringing everyone home. All we can really hope for there is less instability, not so much because Yemen’s local squabbling affects us””until now they hardly registered outside the country””but because dangerous adversaries that threaten the West are hoping to expand their base of operations and their ability to export malfeasance everywhere else.

We’re in the very best of hands.]

The road ahead

The New Neo Posted on by

I think that this comment from “Eric,” our resident strategist, is worth highlighting:

…[I]t’s up to the Republicans to counter the Democrats. It’s up to the Right to counter the Left.

Yes, the Democrats have been taken over by the Left, but it’s a matter of scope. The Left operates in larger scope than the Dems’ elected-office scope, ie, the social-activist scope, which is beyond the scope of the GOP.

In order for the GOP to effectively counter the Democratic wing of the larger Left, the Right must effectively counter the Left across the broader spectrum of the social cultural/political arena, and by the same token, develop the leverage to hold the GOP accountable, if not take over the GOP like the Left has taken over the Dems.

I think that says it quite succinctly.

In addition to all the anger at the GOP, there’s been quite a bit of reactive “I’m ready to give up on politics” sentiment on the right lately—a theme of depression and withdrawal. To those who say, “we vote for conservatives, but what’s the point?,” I’d answer that although I think that attitude is understandable, it could be a recipe for the triumph of evil. We don’t know what has been different as a result of voting for conservatives because we don’t know what would have happened if, for example, Congress and the presidency had been totally dominated by liberals all those years when they were not.

One thing that I think has changed is that, although conservatives don’t dominate the Republican Party, they do constitute a greater percentage of it than they did in recent decades. The solution to the problem of the GOP would be to support more conservatives, and work for that. I am quite puzzled as to why so many on the right appear to give up so easily and quickly. And if you say to me: what do you mean quickly?—I’ll point out that the left has been working for at least 150 years in order to reach the point it’s reached now, maybe even more. And working very very hard, too. I assure you they never give up, although there have been times when it must have looked to them like they were losing.

I realize that the left can point to a consistent record of long, slow victories—a steady march towards more government dependency, for instance. But that’s partly the nature of government in general and of human nature, as well as the left’s “end justifies the means” tactics.

The left has in many ways an easier road to go down because they are swimming with the tide—or what appears to be the tide—of human nature. The right has a harder task; the problem is baked in the cake, because it’s hard to convince government to control less, and to convince people to accept that government’s seductive promise to solve all its cares is a pipe dream. But it’s also human nature to desire independence. So all of this doesn’t mean that the right can’t someday reverse or at least slow and then halt that natural tendency of government and people to revert to what I’d call the “Grand Inquisitor” solution—although to halt it permanently requires more vigilance than the right has been able to exercise so far. As I wrote a while back:

There seems to be something in human nature that inclines societies in this direction. For every person who values liberty, how many are there who would prefer security (or at least what they perceive as security)? I don’t know the ratio and I think it varies over time and place, but right now the latter group appears to be markedly in the ascendance.

But the tendency is there in all times and places, and there are always those who would dearly love to exploit that tendency for the sake of power and control. Sometimes it’s done “for their own good,” and sometimes just for the sake of power and control itself and/or riches and/or glory, although they usually pretend to be more well-intended than that.

In this context, the classic passage from Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor keeps coming to mind. I’ve published it so many times on this blog I’ve lost count, but it never grows old and it never ceases to be relevant—unfortunately:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Heed this from a man who thought that the forces of liberty could fight back against the forces of the Inquisitor, and who lived his life accordingly: