For Britain: good news, bad news

The New Neo Posted on by

First the good news: Kate is pregnant again.

Now the bad, which seems potentially a lot bigger than the good: is Scotland about to leave the fold?

We are on the verge of trashing our global name and brand in an act of self-mutilation that will leave our international rivals stunned, gleeful and discreetly scornful…

What we are fighting to protect is not so much the Act of Union of 1707, or even the United Kingdom. The Government has decided that in the event of the Scots voting to break away, the “UK” will simply refer in future to England, Wales and Northern Ireland; though no one seems to have a clue exactly what this truncated state will be called. No: the entity under mortal threat next week is Britain itself. You cannot refer to a state called “Britain” unless you include Scotland, because it is a basic fact of geography that Britain comprises everything from Land’s End to John o’Groats…

Take Scotland away from England and you are losing a critical part of our political nomenclature. There was no British government before the union with Scotland; there was no British electorate; there were no British interests. There was England and Wales, and there was Scotland. Take away Scotland, and we destroy Britain.

The sun is slowly setting—or maybe not so slowly.

More here:

The prospective victor, the uncrowned king or future president, looks to be Alex Salmond. He has persuaded fellow Scots that the English do them down. His is the usual nationalism built on grievance and self-pity. A socialist on top of that, he keeps promising equality and justice and prosperity, none of which he can deliver. Nationalists and socialists are proven carriers of disease, not doctors. Currency, debt repayment, banking, defense, membership in the EU, are among the unknowns. Expropriation of Scottish estates seems quite likely. The English will have to live through the malign consequences to the pound, the flight of the disillusioned away from Scotland, and all the economic, social, and psychological consequences of rejection.

And to think that this creepy and outmoded manipulator could well go down in history for doing what Philip of Spain, Napoleon, and Hitler couldn’t do: bring down Great Britain.

Not with a bang but a whimper?

Being right about an Iraq pullout

The New Neo Posted on by

Romney was right about the Iraq pullout.

George W. Bush was right about the Iraq pullout.

I was right about Obama’s intention to pull out of Iraq, which he had expressed time and again even before he became president (see also this about the consequences of withdrawal).

But before we all applaud ourselves for our prescient brilliance, let me just say it took nothing of the sort to have made the prediction. It merely took not being a liberal or a leftist to have the ability to see the dangers and state them.

The probable repercussions of a total withdrawal were obvious. Anyone who didn’t see them was in purposeful and aware denial, or lives in a fantasy world. The first group is the knaves, the second the fools.

The legality of stripping terrorists of citizenship

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that Ted Cruz has suggested that Americans who fight with ISIS be stripped of citizenship, there’s been a spate of articles questioning whether this is legal, such as this one at Hot Air. And at American Thinker, Rick Moran has written:

Currently, natural born citizens of the US cannot have their citizenship revoked against their will. It is unclear whether Cruiz’s bill would supercede the denaturalization law. It is also against international law to strip an individual’s citizenship if they are not also a citizen of another country. In other words, the US cannot create a “stateless” person that no other country would accept.

I’m not a legal expert, but it seems to me there is plenty of basis for Cruz’s bill. I’ve written on related subjects twice before (albeit somewhat cursorily), here (when Joe Lieberman made a similar proposal to the one Cruz is suggesting now) and here.

The relevant law is this statute originally from the 1940s, as well as several subsequent SCOTUS cases.

Back in 2010, when Lieberman was talking about something similar to Cruz’s current proposal, pundits seemed pretty clear on its legality. For example, John McCormack of the Weekly Standard had this to say, after citing the controlling statute:

Here’s where it gets more complicated. You would still have the right to contest this in court. And if you did, the burden of proof would be on State — not on you — to persuade the court that your involvement with a terror organization is sufficient to justify taking away your citizen status.

Bottom line: Lieberman’s law can’t keep you out of court against your will if you want to contest efforts to strip your citizenship. And chances are that if you were already facing other charges — plotting or executing a terrorist act — you would be simultaneously tried for that in civilian court, too, even as State continued to try to revoke your citizen status.

The portion of the statute that revoked citizenship for voting in a foreign election was declared unconstitutional in 1967 in Afroyim v. Rusk, but it’s not the least bit clear that this would apply to the part of the act that involves fighting for a group that is engaged in hostilities with the US government. This is how the relevant portion of the statute reads:

a) A person who is a national of the United States whether by birth or naturalization, shall lose his nationality by voluntarily performing any of the following acts with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality”” …

(3) entering, or serving in, the armed forces of a foreign state if

(A) such armed forces are engaged in hostilities against the United States, or”¦

(7) committing any act of treason against, or attempting by force to overthrow, or bearing arms against, the United States, violating or conspiring to violate any of the provisions of section 2383 of title 18, or willfully performing any act in violation of section 2385 of title 18, or violating section 2384 of title 18 by engaging in a conspiracy to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, if and when he is convicted thereof by a court martial or by a court of competent jurisdiction.

(b) Whenever the loss of United States nationality is put in issue in any action or proceeding commenced on or after September 26, 1961 under, or by virtue of, the provisions of this chapter or any other Act, the burden shall be upon the person or party claiming that such loss occurred, to establish such claim by a preponderance of the evidence. Any person who commits or performs, or who has committed or performed, any act of expatriation under the provisions of this chapter or any other Act shall be presumed to have done so voluntarily, but such presumption may be rebutted upon a showing, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the act or acts committed or performed were not done voluntarily.

It seems to me that there is a strong argument that such provisions get around the requirement that an act of relinquishing citizenship should be voluntary by creating a rebuttable presumption that such enlistment (in a group such as ISIS) constitutes evidence of an intent to relinquish citizenship.

Cruz is a lawyer, and he addressed the issue of voluntariness (which was the issue in the 1967 case Afroyim v. Rusk, where voting in an Israeli election was judged not to automatically constitute such a voluntary renunciation) this way:

Americans who choose to go to Syria or Iraq to fight with vicious ISIS terrorists are party to a terrorist organization committing horrific acts of violence, including beheading innocent American journalists who they have captured,” Cruz said in a statement.

“There can be no clearer renunciation of their citizenship in the United States, and we need to do everything we can to preempt any attempt on their part to re-enter our country and carry out further attacks on American civilians.”

Afroyim, which appeared to state that Congress could not revoke citizenship without an individual’s consent, was added to in 1971 by Rogers v. Bellei, which limited it to natural born citizens. What’s more:

Although Afroyim appeared to rule out any involuntary revocation of a person’s citizenship, the government continued for the most part to pursue loss-of-citizenship cases when an American had acted in a way believed to imply an intent to give up citizenship””especially when an American had become a naturalized citizen of another country. In a 1980 case, however””Vance v. Terrazas””the Supreme Court ruled that intent to relinquish citizenship needed to be proved by itself, and not simply inferred from an individual’s having voluntarily performed an action designated by Congress as being incompatible with an intent to keep one’s citizenship.

In Vance, the issue of proving voluntariness was addressed as follows:

The Supreme Court overturned portions of an act of Congress which had listed various actions and had said that the performance of any of these actions could be taken as conclusive, irrebuttable proof of intent to give up U.S. citizenship. However, the Court ruled that a person’s intent to give up citizenship could be established through a standard of preponderance of evidence (i.e., more likely than not) ”” rejecting an argument that intent to relinquish citizenship could only be found on the basis of clear, convincing and unequivocal evidence.

So the idea that it is not within Congress’s right to revoke citizenship for acts that are so extreme they could arguably be seen as meeting that requirement seems incorrect to me. I would even go further and say that fighting for ISIS meets the more rigorous requirement of “convincing and unequivocal evidence,” although that’s not necessary under Vance.

Law is nothing if not complicated, and I’ve done only a little over an hour of research to write this post. So I could easily be missing something. But I’d be surprised if Cruz has missed much; I have a lot of respect for his legal acumen. I haven’t been able to find the text of his proposed bill, and I suppose if it tries to automatically revoke citizenship for fighting for ISIS it could run into some trouble, and SCOTUS might rule that unacceptable, based on past precedent. But those cases didn’t involve acts that were even remotely similar to fighting for a terrorist group such as ISIS.

[ADDENDUM: A little more Googling has uncovered Cruz’s bill. It updates the wording of the statute I quoted in my post, to include phrases such as “or a designated foreign terrorist organization” and “or intentionally targeting nationals of the United States for acts of terror.” In other words, it basically seems to be making sure the person doesn’t have to be fighting in the army of a conventional state for the statute to apply.

Seems pretty noncontroversial to me, and it certainly doesn’t alter the right to rebut the voluntariness of any revocation of citizenship involved.]

Mandy Nagy of Legal Insurrection…

The New Neo Posted on by

…has been taken very very ill. If you’re the praying type, please pray for her safe recovery.

Mandy (aka Liberty Chick) has been a very important part of the Legal Insurrection blog. I post there quite often, and although I’ve never met Mandy I’ve corresponded with her often and with pleasure, and of course have read many of her posts.

You can read a great deal more about Mandy and her many impressive accomplishments here and here.

The rise of the childish nose

The New Neo Posted on by

Why want Kate Middleton’s nose, of all things?

She’s a pretty young woman. But her face is lovely as a whole, and IMHO her nose is not her best feature, nor is it a particularly interesting example of its genre. It’s somewhat bland and a mite childish. But I suppose that’s what people want these days.

katenose

I’ve noticed both in life and on websites that what people request through plastic surgery is to look generically pretty rather than idiosyncratically gorgeous or elegant or distinctive or distinguished or even themselves. There are celebrities who defied the trend, though, and are the better for it. Streisand was one of the first, and Meryl Streep comes to mind too.

If you go to plastic surgery sites and look at the before/after photos, it’s clear that some people have very unfortunate “before” noses (and often the chins to go with them), and their desire for a fix is understandable, whether you approve or not. But the majority were fine before, and IMHO look worse afterward.

Take a look at the following, which are quite typical. The original noses look just about right for these women’s faces, distinctive and not the least bit disfiguring or Cyrano-like. Why would people with these noses go through the hassle and danger and expense of surgery? Is it just conformity to the childish ideal? It’s not that they look bad afterward; they just look homogenized. The last one in particular is puzzling:

nose1

nose2

nose3

nose4

nose5

So, about those German Jews prior to World War II

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday’s post on the percentage of Jews in Germany prior to WWII (about .75%) engendered a few questions in the comments section that I figured were interesting enough that they deserved a post of their own.

First we have “matthew49,” who asks:

By “just prior to WWII” many Jews had already left Germany. Likely the percentage of Jews in Germany in 1933 was significantly higher than in 1939. Do you have a number for the pre-Nazi Jewish percentage of the population?

Good question, and I wasn’t sure of the answer. The link for the .75% figure (totaling about 500,000 Jews), just said this was the German “prewar” population of Jews. What actually seems to have occurred was this according to the Holocaust Museum. Apparently that 500,000 (.75%) figure represented the pre-Nazi figures. The great majority of the Jews of Germany had emigrated in a series of waves prior to the 40s, with great difficulty because of strict quotas around the world. By 1941 it was impossible to leave, but those who remained were predominantly the elderly.

In fact, the vast majority of Jews who were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust were rounded up from the other countries of Europe and especially eastern Europe rather than from Germany, although the remaining German Jews were killed as well,and some of the Jews caught in other countries had originally escaped from Germany. Ann Frank and her family were examples of the latter; although they were residents of Amsterdam and hid there, they had emigrated to Holland from Germany in 1933, not long after Hitler come to power.

Here’s a summary of the trends in Germany during the 1930s for the Jewish population of Germany:

In January 1933 there were some 523,000 Jews in Germany, representing less than 1 percent of the country’s total population. The Jewish population was predominantly urban and approximately one-third of German Jews lived in Berlin. The initial response to the Nazi takeover was a substantial wave of emigration (37,000”“38,000), much of it to neighboring European countries (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland). Most of these refugees were later caught by the Nazis after their conquest of western Europe in May 1940…

During the next two years there was a decline in the number of emigrants. This trend may partly have been due to the stabilization of the domestic political situation, but was also caused by the strict enforcement of American immigration restrictions as well as the increasing reluctance of European and British Commonwealth countries to accept additional Jewish refugees.

Despite the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935 and subsequent related ordinances that deprived German Jews of civil rights, Jewish emigration remained more or less constant.

The events of 1938 caused a dramatic increase in Jewish emigration. The German annexation of Austria in March, the increase in personal assaults on Jews during the spring and summer, the nationwide Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) pogrom in November, and the subsequent seizure of Jewish-owned property all caused a flood of visa applications. Although finding a destination proved difficult, about 36,000 Jews left Germany and Austria in 1938 and 77,000 in 1939.

The sudden flood of emigrants created a major refugee crisis…

September 1939, approximately 282,000 Jews had left Germany and 117,000 from annexed Austria. Of these, some 95,000 emigrated to the United States, 60,000 to Palestine, 40,000 to Great Britain, and about 75,000 to Central and South America, with the largest numbers entering Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Bolivia. More than 18,000 Jews from the German Reich were also able to find refuge in Shanghai, in Japanese-occupied China.

At the end of 1939, about 202,000 Jews remained in Germany and 57,000 in annexed Austria, many of them elderly. By October 1941, when Jewish emigration was officially forbidden, the number of Jews in Germany had declined to 163,000. The vast majority of those Jews still in Germany were murdered in Nazi camps and ghettos during the Holocaust.

So there were never many Jews to begin with in Germany, and their numbers declined greatly during the 1930s, although even more Jews wanted to leave than were able to do so. Which brings us to another question, this time from “DNW”:

One wonders just how the Germans, or those that did, got so worked up over the Jews. Though it seems to have been something of a tradition in Germany, and one amplified in the circles of late 19th century German neo-paganism.

There are thousands of books on anti-Semitism, as well as how it arose and solidified in Germany during the Holocaust. I can’t possibly add too much to it. But I will say that no one should ever underestimate the influence of deliberate propaganda. Germany had a fair amount of anti-Semitism to begin with (and read Luther to start to appreciate some of its antiquity and depth). But until the Nazis came to power, the Jews of Germany were among the most assimilated and Germany was considered one of the best countries for Jews.

People are generally very susceptible to propaganda, and the Nazis were masters of propaganda. Once they decided to do marginalize the Jews, eliminate them from German life, and then do away with them all around Europe, they played on the existing milder anti-Semitism that was common in Germany and whipped it into a much deeper feeling of hatred. You can find some typical documents here, and a lot more here. There were anti-Jewish books, pamphlets, posters, films, and newspapers—a true media blitz.

It doesn’t matter that the Jews were such a small percentage of the population. The better to demonize them, right?

The poor, poor, IRS…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and its beleaguered computers:

The IRS on Friday told Congress that five of the 82 people being questioned about the agency’s tea party targeting scandal lost emails as a result of computer crashes, including one official who worked closely with former IRS official Lois Lerner.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, in a report sent to the committees investigating whether the IRS unfairly targeted conservative groups in recent years, said 18 of the 82 people “had some type of technical computer issue” between September 2009 and February 2014. Five of those “had hard drive issues that resulted in a probable loss of emails during portions of the four-year period.”

The IRS didn’t just have a dog eat its homework. It was a pack of ravenous wolves.

That means that the hard drive crash rate there was about 6% in three and a half years, and 20% for serious computer problems. Remind me again, what should we trust this outfit for?

Knaves and fools. Although they may have the last laugh.

Joan Rivers, Republican

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I thought Joan Rivers was a funny comedienne, outrageous and bold. But I can’t say I followed her career very closely, or her life.

So I was surprised to read, in this warm tribute written by her friend Peggy Noonan, that Rivers had long been a staunch Republican:

She was completely open and immediately accessible. She had the warmth of a person who found others keenly and genuinely interesting. It was also the warmth of a person with no boundaries: She wanted to know everything about you and would tell you a great deal about herself, right away. She had no edit function, which in part allowed her gift. She would tell you what she thought. She loved to shock, not only an audience but a friend. I think from the beginning life startled her, and she enjoyed startling you. You only asked her advice or opinion if you wanted an honest reply…

We met and became friends in 1992, but the story I always remember when I think of her took place in June 2004. Ronald Reagan had just died, and his remains were being flown from California to Washington, where he would lay in state at the U.S. Capitol. A group of his friends were invited to the Capitol to take part in the formal receiving of his remains, and to say goodbye. Joan was there, as a great friend and supporter of the Reagans…

…[Describing a recent meeting with Rivers] She was hilarious that day on the subject of Barack and Michelle Obama, whom she did not like. (I almost didn’t write that but decided if Joan were here she’d say, “Say I didn’t like Obama!”)

She was a Republican, always a surprising thing in show business, and in a New Yorker, but she was one because, as she would tell you, she worked hard, made her money with great effort, and didn’t feel her profits should be unduly taxed. She once said in an interview that if you have 19 children she will pay for the first four but no more. Mostly she just couldn’t tolerate cant and didn’t respond well to political manipulation. She believed in a strong defense because she was a grown-up and understood the world to be a tough house. She loved Margaret Thatcher, who said what Joan believed: The facts of life are conservative. She didn’t do a lot of politics in her shows””politics divides an audience””but she thought a lot about it and talked about it.

This is very surprising to me, for the very reason that Noonan states: Rivers was in show business and a New Yorker. It’s surprising for another reason, of course: she was in show business and a New Yorker and a Jewish woman. But stranger things have happened.

I wish Rivers had done that “hilarious” comedy bit about Barack and Michelle Obama in public; I would have loved to have seen it. But I think I understand why she didn’t put politics into her act. She did speak up recently about Israel and Palestine, though, in her usual forthright manner.

And when I say “forthright,” that’s an understatement:

Not a shy lady, was she? “I’ll take over the PR”—now, that would have been an interesting proposition.

RIP.

Another reason Snowden was a traitor

The New Neo Posted on by

He helped ISIS, and this could have easily been foreseen. You don’t dump intelligence information willy nilly, and not think it will come back to bite us:

A former top official at the National Security Agency says the Islamic State terrorist group has “clearly” capitalized on the voluminous leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and is exploiting the top-secret disclosures to evade U.S. intelligence.

Bottom line: Islamic State killers are harder to find because they know how to avoid detection.

Asked by The Washington Times if the Islamic State has studied Mr. Snowden’s documents and taken action, [Chris Inglis, former deputy director of the NSA] answered, “Clearly.”

“Mr. Snowden “went way beyond disclosing things that bore on privacy concerns,” said Mr. Inglis, who retired in January. “”˜Sources and methods’ is what we say inside the intelligence community ”” the means and methods we use to hold our adversaries at risk, and ISIL is clearly one of those.”

[Hat tip: John Hinderaker at Powerline.]

And well worth it, don’t you think?

The New Neo Posted on by

Can you believe the 4K price of this dress?:

bluedress

It’s not an ugly dress. It’s just an artless dress that doesn’t seem to have much to it. It’s also the sort of dress, so common these days, that is completely unforgiving to the body. It requires physical perfection, and not an ounce of extra adipose. If you had told me it was purchased at Walmart I would believe you, so the price is simply astounding to me.

And yes, this is a post about a trivial subject. So sue me.

The enemy of my enemy: shifting alliances in the Middle East

The New Neo Posted on by

From Caroline Glick:

The Obama administration’s decision to side with the members of the jihadist axis against Israel by adopting their demand to open Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt has served as the final nail in the coffin of America’s strategic credibility among its traditional regional allies.

As the US has stood with Hamas, it has also maintained its pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran. The US’s position in these talks is to enable the mullocracy to follow North Korea’s path to a nuclear arsenal. The non-jihadist Sunni states share Israel’s conviction that they cannot survive a nuclear armed Iran.

Finally, President Barack Obama’s refusal to date to take offensive action to destroy Islamic State in Iraq and Syria demonstrates to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states that under Obama, the US would rather allow Islamic State to expand into their territory and destroy them than return US military forces to Iraq.

In other words, Obama’s pro-Hamas-, pro-Iran- and pro-Muslim Brotherhood-axis policies, along with his refusal to date to take effective action in Iraq and Syria to obliterate Islamic State, have convinced the US’s traditional allies that for the next two-and-a-half years, not only can they not rely on the US, they cannot discount the possibility of the US taking actions that harm them.

It is in the face of the US’s shift of allegiances under Obama that the non-jihadist Sunni regimes have begun to reevaluate their ties to Israel. Until the Obama presidency, the Saudis and Egyptians felt secure in their alliance with the US. Consequently, they never felt it necessary or even desirable to consider Israel as a strategic partner…

The partnership that has emerged in this war between Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia is a direct consequence of Obama’s abandonment of the US’s traditional allies. Recognizing the threat that Hamas, as a component part of the Sunni jihadist alliance, constitutes for their own regimes, and in the absence of American support for Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have worked with Israel to defeat Hamas and keep Gaza’s borders sealed.

Most Israelis have yet to grasp the strategic significance of this emerging alliance…

Israel’s strategic cooperation with Egypt and Saudi Arabia owes to their shared interests. It cannot extend beyond them…

Threatened by the axis of jihad, no Muslim government can be seen publicly with Israelis…

The Israeli-Egyptian-Saudi alliance can ensure that all members survive the Obama era.

It becomes increasingly clear that a lot of people are worried about surviving the Obama era.

The phrase I used in the title of this post in often quoted as being of Arabic origin. But it’s not necessarily so:

The proverb the enemy of my enemy is my friend suggests that two parties can or should work together against a common enemy. Although it is often described as an Arabic proverb, there is no evidence of such an origin. The earliest known expression of this concept is found in a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft dating to around the 4th century BC, while the first recorded use of the current English version came in 1884.

A similar expression is “politics makes strange bedfellows.” So does war, at times.

Statistics and the Jews

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a very early blog post of mine, from 9/10/2005. I think enough people are probably unfamiliar with it that it could bear a repeat.]

A while back, in the course of doing some research on World War II and the Holocaust, I came across a statistic that absolutely stunned me: the percentage of Jews in the population of Germany immediately prior to World War II.

Since then, every so often I will ask people if they can guess what it might have been, and no one’s ever gotten it right, or even come close.

So, what percentage of the population of pre-WWII Germany do you suppose was Jewish? Take a moment and think about it. Then guess.

Here’s another one that no one ever seems to get right: the percentage of Jews in the population of Baghdad around the time of World War I. Take a moment and think about it. Then take a guess.

Now look here for the answer to the first question (hint: it’s in the first sentence of the third paragraph).

Now look here for the answer to the second question (hint: it’s in the second sentence of the second paragraph).

Okay, let’s review. Answer to the first question: just prior to World War II, Jews constituted about 0.75% of the population of Germany. In case you’re bad with figures or think that was a typo, I’ll say it in words: less than one percent of the population of Germany was Jewish around the time Hitler rose to power.

Answer to the second question: around WWI, Jews constituted about one-third of the population of the city of Baghdad.

Most people will guess between 5 and 20 percent for the first question, and a couple of percentage points or even less for the second. You get closer to the truth if you reverse Germany and Baghdad.

What does it all mean? I’m not sure, except that it’s another case of facts sometimes being quite different than what we suppose them to be.