The New Neo

Why was Martial Simon free to kill Michelle Go?

Posted on January 18, 2022 by neoJanuary 18, 2022

More on the killing of Michelle Go, who was pushed to her death this past Saturday in front of an oncoming New York subway train, can be found here:

[New York’s Asian[] Community leaders said that even if Saturday’s fatal attack was not motivated by racial hatred, it added to a sense of palpable fear among Asian-Americans.

“This is horrifying. It’s a horrible attack on yet another one of our citizens,” said Wai Wah Chin, charter president of the Chinese-American Citizen’s Alliance of Greater New York. “This has to stop.

Prevention is worth a pound of cure. There were police officers in the Times Square station where the killing occurred, but I doubt they’re allowed to arrest someone for being a public nuisance – which was what Simon had previously been until the fatal moment that happened in an instant. Simon (previously referred to as “Martial” because earlier news reports had his first and last names reversed) had a lengthy history of mental illness and criminality, and it’s not as though the state hadn’t tried to intervene previously:

“He’s been on medication for over 20 years and in and out of mental hospitals in New York,” a woman who identified herself as Martial’s sister, Josette, told The Post.

But there are limits to how long someone can be kept in a mental hospital for merely being crazy, and it’s also very expensive. Treatment with drugs often helps when the person is in the hospital, so authorities can’t justify keeping the person much longer. But on release he or she often stops taking the drugs.

This is just plain tragic, for everyone involved (in particular for Michelle Go, but not just for her):

Josette Simon wept as she recalled she once even begged a hospital to keep her troubled brother locked up after his life was derailed by mental illness.

“He was a hardworking man, he was a giving man,” Simon, 65, said through tears of her younger brother, Martial Simon, 61.

“Somehow, in his 30s, something happened and he lost it,” she said. “He kept seeing and hearing people after him. One of my sisters took him in. He stayed, and then he said, ‘I have to go back to New York.’ “…

Josette Simon, who lives outside Atlanta, Ga., said her brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, with his conditioning worsening after their mother died 23 years ago.

“She was taking care of him,” Simon said. “She had to call the police on him a couple of times, but after that, he went downhill. He’s been in and out of mental hospitals at least 20 years.”

And here it is, just as I suspected emphasis mine]:

“I remember begging one of the hospitals, ‘Let him stay,’ because once he’s out, he didn’t want to take medication, and it was the medication that kept him going,” his sister told The Post.

Schizophrenia is generally incurable. These situations are rather common. You can’t keep everyone locked up forever against their will, and fortunately most people with schizophrenia will never become violent. But they are somewhat more likely to become violent than people without the illness, although it can be hard to predict who will be the ones to harm others:

Although the majority of patients with schizophrenia are not actually violent, an increased tendency toward violent behaviors is known to be associated with schizophrenia. There are several factors to consider when identifying the subgroup of patients with schizophrenia who may commit violent or aggressive acts. Comorbidity with substance abuse is the most important clinical indicator of increased aggressive behaviors and crime rates in patients with schizophrenia. Genetic studies have proposed that polymorphisms in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene and in the catechol-O-methyltransferase gene are related to aggression…Management of comorbid substance use disorder may help prevent violent events and overall aggression. Currently, clozapine may be the only effective antipsychotic medication to repress aggressive behavior.

Good luck with any of that once the person is outside the hospital.

Simon also had a criminal record, although it doesn’t appear to have involved actual violence (it may have involved a threat of a gun that didn’t exist, however). Reports on the exact charges differ, but here’s one:

Martial has a criminal record with at least three arrests going back to 1998, when he was busted for robbery, with the latest coming in October 2019 for criminal possession of a controlled substance. He served two years in state prison for attempted robbery and was released in August 2021, state records show.

That last robbery was unsuccessful (in another account, I read that the person ran away). But here we have “controlled substance,” so Simon probably was abusing some sort of substance, which would have increased his risk for criminality.

What to do with someone like that? Even before Bragg became the DA, Simon’s crimes don’t appear to have warranted very lengthy sentences. And although he was insane, it was probably only when he didn’t take his meds. A dilemma, indeed, because you can’t lock up everyone who fits that description on the off chance that the person will go on to commit a heinous crime.

DA Bragg gave what he considered reassurance to frightened New Yorkers:

When asked if New Yorkers had to be worried about the suspect being released immediately from jail, he said no.

It probably takes a crime of this magnitude, however, for Bragg to keep someone in jail pending trial. There is little doubt in my mind that, according to Bragg’s guidelines for charging criminals, Simon would not have gone to prison in the first place for his earlier offenses.

Curtis Sliwa – the man who founded the Guardian Angels in New York, and who recently ran for mayor as the Republican nominee and lost to Eric Adams – had some remarks, too:

Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa said he’s seen the suspect “many times” ranting in the subway.

“He will have a conversation and then all of a sudden he will have a psychotic disorder,” Sliwa said. “Again, an Asian gets pushed in front of a train.

So Simon was a fixture in that station and perhaps in others. There are many such people, more than there were when Giuliani and Bloomberg were the mayors. They created an atmosphere that it wouldn’t be tolerated. How was this done? Was it the “broken windows” policy? Here’s one opinion (from 2015):

“Giuliani is right. De Blasio is in denial,” said Floyd Parks, 60, a vagrant who was hanging around a recently broken-up homeless encampment in Harlem.

Writing in Sunday’s Post, Giuliani blasted de Blasio’s “so-called ‘progressive’ view” of homelessness, saying the city should be pushing addicts and the mentally ill into treatment, and everyone else into shelters.

Longtime vagrant Mohamed Rasul, 60, said that under deBlasio, the homeless decide their own fates.

“I’ve seen mayors come and go, and I’ve never been as comfortable as under de Blasio,” he said.

“I have choice under de Blasio, and I choose to be homeless.”

…Rasul said that under Giuliani, cops would wake him by smacking something “with a baton, shine a flashlight in my eyes and cart me off to a shelter.”

“These days, if I don’t want to cooperate, I don’t have to,” he said.

Indeed. And Martial Simon didn’t have to, until now.

Kamala’s nightmare

Posted on January 18, 2022 by neoJanuary 18, 2022

I tend to avoid watching either Biden or Harris speak, but sometimes they’re nearly impossible to avoid. The other day I heard part of an interview with Harris, and I was appalled.

I expected very little, but it was worse than I expected. She was nearly incoherent, every bit as bad as Biden, and worse because what’s her excuse? I’d seen her talk before she became VP and in the early days of the Biden administration, and although she wasn’t great at expressing herself nor was she “likeable,” her thoughts weren’t especially difficult to follow. They are now, at least when I’ve seen her.

Here an article that references the interview I saw:

Last Thursday’s interview with Craig Melvin of Democrat-friendly NBC sealed her fate. The Zen koan-like statement, “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day,” closes the case, a brilliantly meaningless platitude that seems to demand meditation, as if there must be some enlightenment lurking in the vast mental emptiness…

In the wake of the Melvin interview, the Washington Free Beacon has put together a video resembling the old Saturday Night Live segments of “deep thoughts” with genuine Kamala quotes of notable vacuity…

Here it is, although I don’t think it really captures what I mean:

Thomas Lifson, the author of the article I linked, thinks Harris is stupid. I disagree, although I acknowledge that she’s not the brightest bulb. What I think she is, is scared. Really really scared.

Based on watching her facial expressions, speech patterns, and body language, my gut feeling is that Harris is under so much pressure that she’s cracking somewhat. I don’t mean it’s nervous breakdown time; I just mean major jitters. I think Kamala senses how badly things are going. She knows she has to defend the indefensible and lacks the nimble snarkiness of Jen Psaki, the ability to lie without showing a “tell.”

I believe that Harris suspects – or fears – that, having fulfilled her ambitions and become VP, it’s an example of the Peter Principle and she’s unqualified or at least unready. Her day-to-day existence has become a bit like the actor’s dream or the student anxiety dream come to life, in which everyone is watching you and you’ve forgotten your lines or forgotten to study the subject.

For Harris, it may be some of both. I think it generally takes an extraordinary person to prepare for the job of president or vice-president. Some people are quick studies and have nerves of steel, or they’ve been major politicos for so long that they’re functioning more or less on automatic. I don’t see that with Harris, who looks and sounds frightened to me.

She remains personally ambitious, power-hungry, dedicated to whatever leftist beliefs animate her. But she’s winging it and she knows it. And it’s not turning out anything like she expected.

I know the rumors are that Harris doesn’t even try to read the position papers and briefings her aides give her. Maybe so. But anyone who passed the bar exam has to at least have the ability to study really hard. Has that skill deserted her? Perhaps. But I think part of the problem is that when a person is cramming for an exam, even if a lot is riding on the result in the individual sense, that person isn’t constantly on stage at the same time being scrutinized by the entire world and dealing with huge consequences that affect millions of people. But that’s Kamala’s situation right now, and I believe that she fears she’s flunking the test (cognitive and real-life) and will flunk it even if she crams for it.

And her supposed tutor and mentor and experienced example, Joe Biden? Completely and utterly unhelpful, except as an example of what not to do.

Open thread 1/18/22

Posted on January 18, 2022 by neoJanuary 18, 2022

Here’s a companion piece to the video in yesterday’s open thread:

Hey, why not sneak in a Bee Gees tune, who with 1000+ songs have one for everything? Originally released in 1975, this is a slightly later live version (and yes, I know it should be “just my dog and me):

Those Texas synagogue hostages apparently freed themselves

Posted on January 17, 2022 by neoJanuary 17, 2022

The initial articles’ descriptions of the end of the Texas synagogue standoff were so murky that I wondered what really happened. Had law enforcement been instrumental in freeing the hostages, or not? Had they been let go? Had they escaped? It seems to be the latter:

Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker told BBC partner CBS News the group had been praying when he heard a click that turned out to be the hostage-taker’s gun, and he and three others were held captive.

“We were threatened the entire time but fortunately none of us were physically injured,” he said.

One hostage was released after six hours, while the other three escaped several hours later.

“When I saw an opportunity, when he wasn’t in a good position, I made sure the gentlemen were still with me, they were ready to go,” Rabbi Cytron-Walker recalled. “The exit wasn’t too far away, I told them to go.”

He then threw a chair at the gunman and headed for the door.

“It was terrifying. It was overwhelming and we’re still processing. It’s been a lot,” Rabbi Cytron-Walker said.

How did the hostage-taker die? I’ve read several articles, and although it’s somewhat unclear, it appears that after the hostages had escaped, the authorities entered and killed him (although I continue to wonder if perhaps he killed himself, as sometimes happens).

More details:

Akram was a British citizen, the FBI said. He arrived in the U.S. two weeks prior to his death via New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, a federal law enforcement source told CBS News.

A British citizen of Pakistani descent. Where did he get the money to travel? How did he obtain the weapon? He apparently wasn’t on any terror watch lists, and yet this was his history:

Akram had been the subject of an exclusion order in 2001 banning him from Blackburn magistrates court after he made remarks about the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, saying he wished a court usher had been on the planes flown into buildings to commit mass murder…

A community source in Blackburn said Akram was known to behave unusually, including in and around mosques in the Lancashire town.

Not enough to stop him from getting a passport and coming here. There are probably thousands of British subjects with a similar profile – vaguely problematic and suggestive of sympathy with Islamic terrorism but nothing so very unusual.

The stated goal of his hostage-taking was to free a U.S.-trained Pakistani neuroscientist who is held prisoner in the US, having been convicted of terrorist activity. This explains why the gunman chose this particular Texas location:

Siddiqui was convicted in 2010. Now 49, she is currently being held a short drive from the Colleyville synagogue at FMC Carswell prison in Fort Worth, Texas, according to a database of federal inmates.

Dubbed “Lady al-Qaida” in the media, Siddiqui’s release has also been sought by groups including ISIS and the Taliban. When she was convicted, protests erupted across Pakistan by those who believe Siddiqui was innocent.

So this has been a big cause in Pakistan.

The rabbi mentioned something the FBI and various other organizations actually got right:

“Over the years, my congregation and I have participated in multiple security courses from the Colleyville Police Department, the FBI, the Anti-Defamation League, and Secure Community Network,” Cytron-Walker said in a statement late Sunday.

“We are alive today because of that education. I encourage all Jewish congregations, religious groups, schools, and others to participate in active-shooter and security courses,” he said.

“In the last hour of our hostage crisis, the gunman became increasingly belligerent and threatening,” Cytron-Walker added. “Without the instruction we received, we would not have been prepared to act and flee when the situation presented itself.”

Indeed.

Murder in a New York subway station

Posted on January 17, 2022 by neoJanuary 17, 2022

A 40-year-old woman named Michelle Go was killed Saturday morning by a 61-year-old vagrant who pushed her onto the tracks in the path of an oncoming train. The woman was Asian, the man black.

That NY Post writer asks a good question:

The point is this: Why are the subways so full of babbling lunatics in the first place — them and nodding-out addicts and in-your-face panhandlers and cold-weather campers who easily could find space in New York’s billion-dollar-plus shelter system, but who prefer not to?

They are there because de Blasio aggressively rejected the tough-love approach to public-space management initiated by Rudy Giuliani and maintained by Mike Bloomberg. They kept the city’s subways and terminals and parks mostly clean and safe for two decades.

The question made me think of my own experiences when I used to ride the subways as a child starting in the late 50s and going through the mid-60s. That’s a long time before de Blasio or even Bloomberg or Giuliani. Most of the time I rode the subways I was on my way to ballet class, which meant destinations that were some of the rougher parts of New York at the time (Times Square and a bit north on Broadway or 8th Avenue). I often was returning home in the early evenings.

It was a frightening experience – at least, I was frightened – because the subway seemed to me to be “full of babbling lunatics.” How full? I don’t know, but over the course of a few years I encountered quite a few on the fairly empty trains I often rode after transferring from express to local for the last leg of my subway journey.

My most vivid memory along these lines was once when the train was halted between stations for quite a while, which used to happen regularly back then on that line. A guy sitting across from me took the opportunity of the relative silence to begin a long rambling rant in which he blamed us for his various ills and disappointments, and threatened us with death. He sounded very angry, although he didn’t actually do anything but talk. There were only a few other people on the train, and no one did or said anything. I didn’t want to move away and draw his attention, so I just averted my eyes. After what seemed like a really long time, the train started up again.

I knew such people were drunk or insane or on drugs (or all three), because it was obvious. But that didn’t make them any less frightening. That’s why I was so delighted when New York was cleaned up during the Giuliani years. I’d visit my family and felt safe riding the trains, even at night – for the first time in my life, I’ll add. That feeling of safety and relief continued for decades.

I wouldn’t feel safe anymore.

There’s a heartbreaking photo of the murdered woman at that first link. I notice that the crime occurred in the Times Square station, my old stomping grounds. At first I thought that “Saturday morning” might mean the wee hours of the morning, but apparently it was 9:40 AM. Here are more details:

Before [the killing], police allege [the perpetrator] was also taunting another woman, who was able to escape unharmed. Police say that woman is not Asian.

“He approaches her. He gets in her space. She gets very raised up, very alarmed. She tries to move away from him, and he gets close to her and she feels that he was about to physically push them onto the train. As she’s walking away, she witnesses the crime where he pushes our other victim in front of the train,” NYPD Detective Bureau Assistant Chief Jason Wilcox said.

Transit police say there were six officers assigned to the Times Square station, and two of those officers were on the platform when the incident happened.

So, police were already present, and it still happened. Police probably can’t stop something that occurs that quickly, especially it they’re not allowed to do anything proactive about vagrants or public nuisances.

The problem, as you might imagine, has this background:

When former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced he would no longer prosecute farebeating, he symbolically surrendered the subways to the lawless.

That is, if the DA doesn’t give a damn, why should criminals, to say nothing of people like Simon Martial? And now Vance’s successor, Alvin Bragg, has ratified the policy — and, indeed, has extended it far beyond simple turnstile jumping.

More here:

Sources tell CBS2 [that] Martial has a previous record of three emotionally disturbed incidents. They add he has four prior arrests, including several for robbery.

Police say there was a current warrant out for his arrest for allegedly violating his parole conditions.

Was there any attempt to find him? I doubt it. There are probably thousands of people like that in New York City. He probably wasn’t all that easy to find, since he was a vagrant, although maybe he was a fixture in that particular Time Square station and would have been easy to find.

The article mentions that “the train operator has ‘incredible trauma’ after witnessing the incident.” Of course, and the people on the platform who witnessed it probably will have trouble shaking it as well.

Officials say they’re not sure if race was an issue in the targeting. I had originally thought of course it was, but from the more detailed description of the perpetrator’s actions that day – first targeting another woman who wasn’t Asian – it sounds like his selection of the victim may have been random and opportunistic.

I haven’t been to New York since COVID began, but I know that a few years ago I started standing far away from the edge of the platform while waiting for a train – near the wall if there’s a wall, but if there’s just a middle platform between two tracks, then equidistant between the tracks. Was that during de Blasio’s tenure? I don’t know, but my guess would be that it was.

Roundup time

Posted on January 17, 2022 by neoJanuary 17, 2022

(1) Neither the FBI nor the MSM cover themselves with glory over their story of the hostage-taking at the Texas synagogue. Nor does Joe Biden.

(2) Those ballot dropboxes in Wisconsin in the 2020 election? A judge declares them illegal. A fat lot of good that does us now, especially since some higher-up court might reverse and say they were legal. Who knows what SCOTUS would say if it ever came to that? But if you read the article, you’ll see how the dropboxes could rather easily have enabled significant fraud, although we’ll never know whether they actually did – which is part of the problem: faulty or nonexistent chain of custody.

(3) Governor Youngkin of Virginia hits the ground running.

(4) Today is Martin Luther King Day, and one question I’ve had is the one posed in this NY Post editorial: what would he think of America today?

(5) Maine temporarily suspends the license of and orders a psych evaluation for a physician who went against COVID medical orthodoxy. The doctor also lied to a pharmacy about a patient’s diagnosis in order to obtain hydroxychloroquine, saying the patient had Lyme disease when the diagnosis was actually COVID, but this doesn’t appear to be the reason for the suspension and psych evaluation.

Open thread 1/17/22

Posted on January 17, 2022 by neoJanuary 17, 2022

The story of Tolstoy and his wife

Posted on January 15, 2022 by neoJanuary 15, 2022

The subject of the Tolstoy marriage came up in this thread, in the context of a discussion about Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina. In that book, Tolstoy presents a thinly-disguised more idealized version of his own marriage to his wife Sonya, told through the story of the relationship between the characters Levin and Kitty.

I read that book in high school, and I remember quite a bit of Levin and Kitty’s story. Much later I became extremely interested in the real-life tale of the Tolstoy marriage, an intense relationship that careened from love to hate and back again with some regularity, and featured the interaction of two complex and gifted individuals blessed with extraordinary energy and the ability to drive each other nearly mad.

It’s a story that’s not only fascinated me, but several authors. There are three major books on the subject, two of which I’ve read, and a movie I’ve seen that I don’t much like but that was highly praised. The two books I’ve read are titled Married to Tolstoy and Lev and Sonya, and the one I haven’t read is a tome by none other than William Schirer and is entitled Love and Hatred: The Tormented Marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy.

That last title is no exaggeration.

It’s hard to summarize what was going on there, but I’ll just say that the Tolstoy marriage was not only one of the most intense (in every sense of the word) on record, but it was also one of the most amply documented. Both parties kept voluminous no-holds-barred diaries which they regularly left for each other to read.

The Tolstoys had thirteen living children – only eight of whom survived childhood – and if memory serves me, Sonya had several more pregnancies that ended in miscarriages. Meanwhile, Tolstoy later in life developed a moral or religious aversion to sex even in marriage, although he continued to engage in sexual relations with his wife quite regularly. He even wrote a long short story on the subject (“The Kreutzer Sonata”), and Sonya wrote a rebuttal. Just to get a little flavor of that story of Leo Tolstoy’s, here’s a description:

The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage. The main character, Pozdnyshev, relates the events leading up to his killing of his wife: in his analysis, the root causes for the deed were the “animal excesses” and “swinish connection” governing the relation between the sexes.

As for Sonya’s reaction, here’s what happened:

It was fair to say Sofiya was humiliated and incensed when [The Kreutzer Sonata] was published and her marriage to The Great Man became suspect, subject to nationwide speculation. (And yet such was her devotion she made a special plea to the Czar to allow its publication after Orthodox Church objections banned it)…

For a long time, it had been thought Sofiya kept her dismay to her private diary. But…it turns out she wrote an entire novella of her own that has languished unpublished and untranslated in the depths of the archives of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow for more than a century.

…Just published for the first time in English in a translation by the scholar Michael R. Katz, it appears in a Yale University Press edition that includes not only Tolstoy’s original Kreutzer, not only Sofiya’s “answer novel,” not only a response document from Tolstoy’s son and from his daughter, but much more. The volume is called The Kreutzer Sonata Variations.

Here’s Sonya’s book, which I haven’t read, so I don’t know whether I would agree or disagree with the Slate author’s description:

Specifically, Sofiya pulls off a remarkable structural feat in mirroring Kreutzer’s wife-murder plot from the point of view of the murdered wife. And she does it with prose that (in English at least) comes across as graceful, emotionally intuitive, and heartbreaking.

Thematically, she counters her husband’s rage against sex and love with what is, cumulatively, a deeply affecting defense of love. A portrait of love from a woman’s point of view unlike any you can find (or I have found) in Tolstoy.

Meanwhile, in real life Sonya ran the large estate – with help, but it still required enormous work and energy – dealt with a bunch of eccentric Tolstoy-admiring hangers-on, fought her husband’s efforts to deprive their children of education and their inheritance, and copied out his manuscripts in longhand as a tireless secretary. I believe she copied out War and Peace something like eight or so times as it was being written and rewritten, deciphering Tolstoy’s handwriting and revisions, staying up long hours at night to do it. Over the years she is reported to have become more difficult and more emotionally distraught, and although it’s pretty easy to see why that may have happened, it couldn’t have been easy for Tolstoy either.

Commenter “Zaphod” mentions a famous incident: “Shouldn’t have shown his newlywed wife his diary.” You better believe it. Tolstoy was 34 when he married, almost twice the age of his 18-year-old fiancee, and he had lived a very dissolute life as opposed to her innocence at the time. Here’s how Wiki describes the incident, plus the literary reference in Anna Karenina:

On 17 September 1862 the couple became formally engaged after Tolstoy gave Sophia a written proposal of marriage, marrying a week later in Moscow. At the time of their marriage, Leo Tolstoy was well known as a novelist after the publication of The Cossacks. On the eve of their marriage, Tolstoy gave Sophia his diaries that detailed his sexual relations with female serfs. In Anna Karenina, 34-year-old Konstantin Levin, a semi-autobiographical character behaves similarly, asking his 19-year-old fiancée Kitty to read his diaries and learn of his past transgressions. The diary included the fact that Tolstoy had fathered a child by a woman who remained on the Yasnaya Polyana estate. In Anne Edwards’ Sonya: The Life of Countess Tolstoy, she describes Sophia as having a deep fear that Tolstoy would re-enter a relationship with the other woman.

Anne Edwards doesn’t just describe that fear; it features prominently in Sonya’s diaries over the years, and she could not avoid seeing the woman now and then on the estate where she still lived. Why did Tolstoy decide to have Sonya read his account? He wanted to unburden himself of a guilty conscience and decided full disclosure was necessary, but I believe he was putting his own needs way before those of his bride and ignoring how terribly it would affect her. The man who could write so eloquently about Kitty’s feelings wasn’t nearly as thoughtful about those of the real-life Sonya. At any rate, the decision to have her read the diary backfired, as did so many of the things they did to each other.

The 2009 movie about the last years of the Tolstoy marriage was called “The Last Station.” I saw it, but by then I was somewhat of an expert on the Tolstoy marriage, and although it starred Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren (two good actors) I found many things wrong with it, although perhaps I was being nitpicky. At any rate, the last chapter in their marriage – which did occur at a railway station, where Tolstoy died very shortly after leaving Sonya when he was 82 years old – is especially tragic.

For anyone interested – and not everyone will be, I’m pretty sure – I recommend any of this material. I also offer what I believe is the last picture ever taken of the couple together (just a few weeks before his “escape” and death), which I think expresses Sonya’s pain and desperate need to hold on, and Tolstoy’s resentment and resolute need to go:

In younger days, around the time they were married:

And if you’re interested in learning what drew these two together in the first place, Tolstoy explains in Anna Karenina in a scene that occurs between Levin and Kitty. I can’t remember where I read it (maybe in one of their diaries?), but I distinctly recall learning that this is based on something that actually happened:

A silence followed. [Kitty] was still drawing with the chalk on the table. Her eyes were shining with a soft light. Under the influence of her mood he felt in all his being a continually growing tension of happiness.

‘Ah! I’ve scribbled all over the table!’ she said, and, laying down the chalk, she made a movement as though to get up.

‘What! shall I be left alone—without her?’ he thought with horror, and he took the chalk. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, sitting down to the table. ‘I’ve long wanted to ask you one thing.’

He looked straight into her caressing, though frightened eyes.

‘Please, ask it.’

‘Here,’ he said; and he wrote the initial letters, w, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t. These letters meant, ‘When you told me it could never be, did that mean never or then?’ There seemed no likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; but he looked at her as though his life depended on her understanding the words. She glanced at him seriously, then leaned her puckered brow on her hands and began to read. Once or twice she stole a look at him, as though asking him, ‘Is it what I think?’

‘I understand,’ she said, flushing a little.

‘What is this word?’ he said pointing to the n that stood for never.

‘It means never,’ she said; ‘but that’s not true!’

He quickly rubbed out what he had written, gave her the chalk, and stood up. She wrote, t, i, c, n, a, d.

…He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant, ‘Then I could not answer differently.’

He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.

‘Only then?’

‘Yes,’ her smile answered.

‘And n … and now?’ he asked.

‘Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like—should like so much!’ She wrote the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, f, w, h. This meant, ‘If you could forget and forgive what happened.’

He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and, breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, ‘I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.’

She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.

[NOTE: Sonya was an excellent early amateur photographer – in her copious free time? – when photography required a lot of technical know-how and patience. Here’s a book of many of her photographs; it includes some diary excerpts.]

Another day with good intentions gone awry

Posted on January 15, 2022 by neoJanuary 15, 2022

I’ve been researching a bunch of seemingly pressing topics today, mostly having to do with the Biden administration’s current campaign against the right and in particular about the new sedition charges against eleven participants in January 6th.

It turns out I’ll need more time.

That happens now and then. Some of these topics practically require taking a mini-course in a certain area of law, and reading long indictments or other material. For example, here’s the document for the Oathkeeper Elmer Rhodes and it’s 48 pages long. But without taking a good look at it, I can’t tell exactly what he’s actually alleged to have done, and whether I think it fits the charge of seditious conspiracy.

Luckily, it’s really really really cold here today. Luckily? Well, I mean that I didn’t miss doing something outside on a day when I could have spent much time out there. I did try; I suited up with down jacket, scarf, hat, and very warm mittens. But although it was sunny it just wasn’t pleasant to be outside for more than a few minutes.

So after three minutes I came back, none the worse for wear. It’s nice and cozy inside.

Seditious conspiracy: the charges against the eleven Oathkeepers who participated in January 6th

Posted on January 15, 2022 by neoDecember 8, 2022

When I was in law school many many years ago, I studied Criminal Law my first year, as did virtually all law students at the time. As part of that course, there were three criminal doctrines I found disturbing – they probably weren’t the only troubling ones, but they were by far the most memorable. These three were felony murder, conspiracy, and the possibility of entrapment by government agents in connection with conspiracy. These doctrines seemed either overinclusive (felony murder), perilously vague and close to thoughtcrime (conspiracy), and difficult to defend against because they cut into the defendant’s presumption of innocence and arguably allowed the government to plant the idea and even the execution of the crime (entrapment).

This was my impression and the cause of my concern back then and it still is now, although back then I was a Democrat and now I’m not. At the time, many Democrats would have agreed with me, because – particularly with conspiracy charges – the left were often the targets. Nowadays, however, the left has taken charge of many legal agencies of the government, and seems eager to employ these tools to imprison people they consider the enemy. This is the case even if those people have done very little or even nothing to harm anyone. At the very least, even if they’re not convicted, the goal is to put them through such misery that it scares and dissuades anyone else.

Which brings us to “seditious conspiracy” – the charges against eleven Oathkeepers present in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That is a doubly vague and flexible charge that consists not of violent activities carried out, but of thoughts and speech and plans and preparations, containing two flexible terms (sedition and conspiracy). That makes it useful for employment against political enemies.

Here’s the definition of seditious conspiracy:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

So the whole thing hinges on two elements. The first is the idea that when two people plan something it’s worse than when one does. That is sometimes the case, but not necessarily. The second element is the definition of “conspire.” In common usage it simply means to make secret plans to commit a harmful or unlawful. act. How far do the plans have to go? How detailed, and what sort of actions need be taken, before the charge can stick? I don’t know enough about the details of those things, but there’s no question that no violence has to actually occur for the crime to have occurred.

So far the charge has rarely has been used against anyone in this country. But it’s being used against eleven of the January 6th defendants. Here’s some recent history about such charges:

Sedition has rarely been charged in the U.S., and carries a longer prison sentence than simple conspiracy. If convicted of seditious conspiracy, defendants face up to 20 years in prison.

Per the Associated Press, the last time U.S. prosecutors brought a seditious conspiracy case was in 2010, when nine members of the Hutaree militia in Michigan were charged with inciting an uprising against the government. They were acquitted on the sedition conspiracy charges at a 2012 trial. (Three pleaded guilty to weapons-related charges.)

I had no recollection of the Hutaree case, but it’s an interesting one that occurred during the Obama administration. The group seems to have been Christian survivalists, and the circumstances were these:

From March 28 to March 30, 2010, nine people thought to be Hutaree members were arrested in police raids in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana (in Hammond), for their alleged involvement in a plot to kill various police officers and possibly civilians using illegal explosives and/or firearms. An undercover [FBI] agent played a role in the investigation that led to indictments.

Only one undercover agent? And what was that role? Was it on the up and up, or did this person’s actions border on entrapment? With groups like this, infiltration and surveillance by agents and/or informants is often necessary to get the goods, and agents have to at least seem eager to participate within the group, in order to not arouse suspicion. But they must not become leaders. They can’t be instrumental in the planning or lead the group to actions it would not otherwise undertake. And yet we know that sometimes, perhaps even often, they either do just that or something perilously close to that.

Here’s more about the charges in the Hutaree case [emphasis mine]:

The United States Attorney’s Office stated that the Hutaree allegedly planned “to kill an unidentified member of local law enforcement and then attack the law enforcement officers who gather in Michigan for the funeral”. The press release further stated that nine had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Detroit on charges of seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosive materials, and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence. The indictment said that the Hutaree planned to attack unspecified law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession for an unspecified officer or officers they planned to kill on an unspecified occasion, using unspecified explosively formed penetrator improvised explosive devices…

Some articles suggested the Hutaree had not yet determined whom they would kill in law enforcement, or even that they wished to kill a law enforcement officer to begin a war with law enforcement, while not having any specific target. The FBI was aided in its investigation by members of another militia group.

This was the defense, in a nutshell:

Defense attorneys argued that statements made by Hutaree were constitutionally protected free speech and not plans for an attack.

They were acquitted by the judge, with a few pleading guilty to possessing illegal weapons.

Prior to that there was an actual conviction for the charge – in 1954, in connection with an attack that was carried out and which wounded five members of the House. That was the Capitol shooting by Puerto Rican separatists that I wrote about in this post and also in a post I wrote a few days after January 6th, comparing and contrasting it with that latter event. In the 1954 incident, there was no question that the perpetrators did not merely conspire to do something; the shooting actually took place.

The accused were found guilty, but they were pardoned by Jimmy Carter in 1979 and and returned home to Puerto Rico to a heroes’ welcome.

[NOTE: I plan to write more on the charges against the eleven January 6th defendants, but this post is already long enough, and so I’ll do it separately.]

Open thread 1/15/22

Posted on January 15, 2022 by neoJanuary 15, 2022

RIP Terry Teachout

Posted on January 14, 2022 by neoJanuary 14, 2022

Another person connected with the arts has died. This time it’s WSJ drama critic and playwright Terry Teachout, who died unexpectedly at the age of sixty-five. Teachout wasn’t just a drama critic and playwright, either; he was “an acclaimed author, a jazz connoisseur, [and] a dance scholar.” He wrote biographies of H.L. Mencken, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and George Balanchine:

Nate Chinen, who writes about jazz for NPR, says he was dazzled by Teachout’s breadth. “So many critics are specialists, and that’s where they get their authority,” he told NPR. “[Teachout] was able to write with authority, insight and perceptiveness about so many art styles, forms and disciplines. And he did so with a real clarity of opinion.”

“There was nobody around who also covered jazz, rock, pop, classical music, dance, ballet, film, books and any other medium that came along the way Terry did,” Washington Post music critic Tim Page added in an email to NPR. “His tastes tended conservative but he could often be convinced and nobody was more cheerful about changing his mind. Above all, he was the sort of friend with whom you could have an argument that remained always within the bounds of love.”

“His tastes tended conservative” – unusual in the circles in which he moved.

When I did a search of my blog for Teachout’s name I was surprised to discover that I’ve never written about him before. That doesn’t mean I never read anything he wrote, though; I did, although not all that often.

The piece of his I remember best was his review of the abominable 2012 “re-imagining” of the opera “Porgy and Bess.” I saw the production and detested it, and therefore I really appreciated his deft and witty panning of it (in contrast, I found that whenever I tried to write about that “Porgy and Bess” on this blog it turned into an incredibly lengthy and heated rant). Here’s how Teachout saw it:

It ought to be good news that “Porgy and Bess” is back on Broadway for the first time in 35 years. Sad to say, the new version, which is billed by express order of the Gershwin brothers’ estates as “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” is a sanitized, heavily cut rewrite that strips away the show’s essence so as to render it suitable for consumption by 21st-century prigs. If you’ve never seen or heard “Porgy,” you might well find this version blandly pleasing. Otherwise, you’ll be appalled.

I am very familiar with the opera “Porgy and Bess” – I know almost every word – and I was so appalled I spent some of my audience time there with my face in my hands, unable to look although definitely listening with dread.