Judging the Judges

For John, BLUF:  Judges are protected from criticism.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

From time to time, Professor George Anthes, Esq, rails against judges in the Massachusetts judicial system.  He is not wrong in many of his comments, for example where he talks about judges releasing DWI/OUI convictees with just time served or no time at all.  However, he might wish to pay attention to this case in Indiana, where a man went to jail for two years for on-line rants against a judge:

A group of free-speech advocates is rallying behind an Indiana inmate serving two years for his online rants against a judge who took away his child-custody rights during a divorce case.

They have UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh in the mix of free-speech advocates.

This case has been to the Appeals Court in Indiana, which reasoned that some of the defendents accusations were false and for others:

... their truthfulness were not necessarily relevant to prosecution because the harm, which in this case was striking fear in the victim, occurred “whether the publicized conduct is true or false,” according to Reason Magazine.

Yes, it is Fox News, but does that change anything?

Final thought.  I am against electing judges, but I am in favor of having their tenure reviewed by the voters from time to time.  Send them to the ballot every eight years.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Terrorism Relationships

For John, BLUF:  Al Qaeda groups fighting in Mali are in a relationship with the late Osama bin Laden's group.

Yes, this is a link to an older blog post at Gunpowder and Lead, but, it is not outdated.  It is a discussion of "Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Al Qaeda’s Senior Leadership".  It is a longish article, but parts can be safely skimmed.

Regards  —  Cliff

Systemic Problems Regarding Racism

For John, BLUF:  Government needs to be checked for fairness from time to time.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

Columnist Megan McArdle, writing in The Daily Beast tells us about "How Good Principles Can Make Bad Rules".  The subtitle is "How short-sighted FHA rules enforced housing segregation and inequality."  This is a history lesson, going back to the 1930s.  Here is the concluding paragraph:

The point is that racism is not just something that bad people do from bad motives.  It's a systemic issue—and if you ignore the systemic effects of your actions, you may end up perpetuating some terrible injustice.

This isn't just about red lining neighborhoods.  It can be about transportation.  Are we providing the transportation that allows low income people mobility?  Put another way, are we holding low income people in Boston, when they wish to move out into the countryside, by not providing the ability to conduct a reasonable commute from outside I-495 to a job in Boston?

Government is a powerful instrument and it needs to be asking itself if it is creating an unfair playing field by one method or other.

Or, to quote Bill Taupier this morning quoting Thomas Aquinas, "Does it fit the common good?"

Regards  —  Cliff

University President in Trouble

For John, BLUF:  Self-censorship is still desired by some in the name of being politically correct.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

Here is one of those terrible arguments where we hold the past to today's standards, and fail to understand the past in its own terms.  In this case a University President, James W. Wagner, PhD, of Emory University, noted that the decision of the Delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to count slaves as three fifths of a person allowed the Union to be formed:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Without the compromise there would have been no grand Union and perhaps slavery would have continued in the Southern States longer than it did.  But, one of Dr Wagner's Department's is mad at him.

The linked blog post thinks this is PC run wild.

The alternative view is that Dr Wagner had lost the Department of History and African American Studies already and this is just a public example of it.  He probably has an engineer's sensibilities about such issues and fails to understand the nuances of appeasing people.  Fortunately, engineers build our bridges.

Regards  —  Cliff

Being Punished For Doing Good

For John, BLUF:  Gun control run amok.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

I got this from The Instapundit, who got it from The Blaze, who got it from TV Station WFTX (Fox News) (Fort Myers).  It seems three teens were suspended for wrestling a gun away from another teen, who was threatening to shoot a fifth teen.

Has the gun control thing gone so far that teens without a gun, protecting teens from someone threatening with a gun are treated like they are bad guys?  Put another way, is there no sense of proportion?

There must be some hidden side to this story, being withheld to protect some innocent party.  Don't you think?

If it had happened up here, where the winter has gone on a little long, we could reference the first part of this Robert Service poem to explain things:

    There are strange things done in the midnight sun
        By the men who moil for gold;
    The Arctic trails have their secret tales
        That would make your blood run cold;
    The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
        But the queerest they ever did see
    Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
        I cremated Sam McGee.

But, no, this was Florida.  The cold and the dark are not an excuse for the Principal's actions.

Regards  —  Cliff

Getting Our Act Together

For John, BLUF:  It is often hard to get different Departments in an Administration to work together.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

Columnist David Ignatius, of The Washington Post, tackles the question of coordination in our foreign policy, under the title "Can we close the power gap?".  He frames it in terms of "sitting at the table"♠ at a National Security Council meeting.

Imagine that you’re sitting at the table as the National Security Council debates the deteriorating political and security situation in a North African country (take your pick).  The president asks how the United States can prevent conflict there without sending in the military.  Various Cabinet members and agency directors look awkwardly at each other — because nobody has a good answer.

Here lies one of the biggest unresolved problem for U.S. national-security planners today:  How can America shape events in an unstable world without putting “boots on the ground” or drones in the air? Does this stabilizing mission belong to the experts at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)?  Or to the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, which was created in 2011 to deal with such problems? Or to the facilitators and analysts at the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was created in 1984 to help resolve conflicts peacefully?  Or maybe to the covert-action planners at the CIA, who work secretly to advance U.S. interests in key countries?

I am not sure Mr Ignatius has any good answers.  He talks about "soft power" and "smart power", but he doesn't have an answer.  Perhaps the new team President Obama is assembling will be able to "close the power gap?

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Maybe "sitting at the table" is a term more used in our nation's capitol.  It is a way of distinguishing between those who are the "principals", and thus empowered to talk, and the "horse holders", who can pass papers to the "principals", but are not authorized to voice their own opinions.

Holocaust Extend Expanded

For John, BLUF:  German treatment of Jews during WWII was worse than thought.

The New York Times has an article on a recent book released by the US Holocaust Museum, based on detailed research into where Nazi Germany held Jews during World War II—"The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking".

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

At the level of the ordinary citizen who learns about the Holocaust what this changes is the idea that the Holocaust all happened in Poland.  Yes, the Death Camps were there, but this says there were a lot of small groupings of Jews, so the argument by Germans that they didn't know does not hold as much water as it used too.

On the other hand, one wonders if there might not have actually been more accidental Oskar Schindlers?

Well worth the read to get an updated and more balanced view of this terrible blot on Western Civilization and the idea of "scientific progress".

Regards  —  Cliff