TOO MUCH POLICING IN BLACK NEIGHBORHOODS OR TOO LITTLE?: The Left argues that blacks are over-policed and over-incarcerated. But now the Washington Post shows that in some black neighborhoods, murders are common, but arrests are comparatively rare. Which is it, guys, too much policing or too little?
Author Archive: Gail Heriot
June 11, 2018
DON’T GET COCKY: In the midterms, even those who dislike Trump may not like the Democrats’ focus on impeachment and “resistance,” says John Fund.
THE COLLEGE FIX REPORTS ON LAST WEEK’S 50-47 CONFIRMATION OF KEN MARCUS AS ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF EDUCATION FOR CIVIL RIGHTS: In a saner world the Marcus nomination would have been uncontroversial, but … well … we may not be in the best of all possible worlds.
A conservative asked me recently why Trump bothered to nominate someone for this job at all. Why not just leave it vacant? I was a bit surprised at the question. But let me explain:
The Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights heads the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Education. OCR’s Fiscal Year 2017 budget was $108.5 million; it has 12 regional offices around the country and employs armies of lawyers and investigators. This is the office that gave us the transgender locker room guidance, the sexual assault on campus guidance that denies due process to accuseds, the disparate impact in school discipline guidance, and much more. Even many liberals understand that OCR’s actions during the Obama Administration were counterproductive.
Leaving the political positions there unfilled doesn’t mean that nothing will happen at OCR. It means that the policy preferences of civil service employees will reign supreme. When a left-of-center President is elected, this may not be a disaster for his supporters, since civil service employees tend to be left-of-center (and civil service employees in civil rights offices are often very left-of-center). When a right-of-center President is elected, leaving positions unfilled means the election has been effectively nullified in a hugely important area of the law.
OCR has very few political appointees in charge of a huge number of civil service employees. It’s hard enough to ensure that elections will have the consequences when all those positions are filled. It is impossible when the Senate sits on nominations for extended periods of time.
BTW: If you want to know why OCR has such a large budget, despite its tendency toward overreach the answer is this: During the Obama Administration, Congressional Republicans were alerted many times to OCR’s overreach. But, despite being in the majority and despite the urgings of many (including mine), they were too timid object to large increases in its budget.
OLD ENOUGH TO HAVE SEX, BUT NOT TO MARRY: My grandmother would not have understood this one at all.
June 9, 2018
IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A STORY ABOUT A MAN WHO CAME OUT OF NOWHERE TO CONQUER THE WORLD, HERE’S ONE: On this day in 1781, civil and mechanical engineer George Stephenson was born to illiterate parents in the north of England. Later known as the “Father of Railways,” Stephenson did not learn to read until he was 18 years old. And yet he went on to become a titan of the Industrial Revolution.
By 1810, Stephenson’s remarkable talent for designing engines had already been recognized by the wealthy coal-owning families of the Northeast (known as the Grand Allies). They put him in charge of all their machinery. But it took longer for recognition to come from the rest of Britain. This little story should illustrate:
On May 25, 1812, a ghastly mining explosion cost the lives of 92 men and boys. The problem was the oil lamp that the miners were using; its open flame could ignite the inflammable gases that collected in the mine. A reward was therefore offered for the first workable safety lamp.
The first attempt (offered by a Dr. Clany) was too heavy to be of use. So with great fanfare, mine owners called upon Britain’s leading scientist—Humphry Davy—to help. Davy enthusiastically agreed. “Do not despair, I think we can do something for you in a very short time,” he wrote to a mining company officer.
But unbeknownst to Davy, Stephenson (then employed by Grand Allies) was already working on the problem. Interestingly, the two men came up with very similar ideas, which led to some nasty accusations of copying.
In The Birth of the Modern (BTW a wonderful book), Paul Johnson told the story this way:
The likelihood is that both men discovered the principle independently. The lamps were the same, except that Stephenson used a perforated plate instead of Davy’s wire gauze. Stephenson quickly adopted the Davy gauze as superior, but kept to his glass chimney, which Davy’s lamp had scrapped. As a result, the Stephenson, or “Geordie Lamp,” was safer. There is no record of one going wrong. On 18 January 1825, on the other hand, a Davy lamp caused an explosion which cost the lives of 24 men and boys. By then, however, Davy had been universally credited with ending the problem. The state awarded him 2,000 pounds. The Tyne & Wear colliery owners presented him with a massive set of plate at the Queen’s Head, Newcastle, on 13 September 1817, “Jack” Lambton in the chair. The Royal Society awarded him the Rumford Medal. The Regent made him a baronet. Alexander I, anxious to get in on any “progressive” act, sent him a huge silver vase, with the gold of fire weeping over his extinguished torch. All Stephenson got was a purse of 100 guineas. … Stephenson’s backer, the Grand Alliance, was run by many grandees, and they were so annoyed by the honors paid to Davy that, two weeks after the Queen’s Head dinner, they gave Stephenson an even bigger one, at the Newcastle Assembly Rooms, presenting him with a silver tankard and £1,000 raised by public subscription. … But it was no use. Davy remained the inventor of the safety lamp in the public’s mind. He had won the publicity battle, and that, increasingly, was what mattered in the world.
But no matter. Stephenson’s immense talent went on to bigger and better things. He (and eventually his engineer son/partner, Robert Stephenson) built locomotives and railways across Britain. That includes the first public railway with steam locomotives–the Stockton and Darlington. He died a great man in the eyes of his countrymen. Hail the future!
June 8, 2018
“I LEAVE WITH THE KNOWLEDGE THAT I LIVED THE LIFE THAT I INTENDED”–CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: That’s really a remarkable sentiment–both because it’s true and because he knows it’s true. May we all be so fortunate.
KEN MARCUS CONFIRMED AS ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF EDUCATION FOR CIVIL RIGHTS: He didn’t get a single vote from a Democrat.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: The curious death of George Wythe, founding father and the nation’s first law professor.
A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING EUROPE: And his name is Karl Marx.
June 7, 2018
LIFE ON MARS!!: Or rather traces of complex organic molecules, which is reasonably interesting.
THE CDC REPORTS THAT SUICIDES ARE UP EVERYWHERE EXCEPT NEVADA (1999-2016): How much of that, if any, is because of the decreased stigma associated with RECORDING a death as suicide is unclear. There was a time that a suicide might have been reported as an “accident” even if the most probable cause was thought to be suicide. That stigma might have decreased somewhat between 1999 and 2016, which could affect the numbers. Of course, any decrease in stigma can have a double effect, increasing both the number of deaths reported as suicides and the number of actual suicides.
And, yes, there are lots of others things going on here too. Humans are complex creatures.
TIME MAGAZINE: ALLIED TROOPS STORM THE BEACHES AT NORMANDY, GET SHOT TO HELL, WOMEN SUFFER MOST: On the 74th anniversary of D-Day, a Time Magazine article entitled This Picture Tells a Tragic Story of What Happened to Women After D-Day reminds us that it’s all about women.
The headline is referring to the women who had their heads shaved (and sometimes much worse) during the épuration sauvage (or the wild purge). Over the course of the second half of 1944 and early 1945, women and men who were alleged to be collaborators were punished by gangs of vigilantes. For the women, this typically meant they were being accused, rightly or wrongly, of sleeping with the enemy.
The Time article (by Ann Mah) described it this way:
The victims were among the most vulnerable members of the community: Women. Accused of “horizontal collaboration” — sleeping with the enemy — they were targeted by vigilantes and publicly humiliated. Their heads were shaved, they were stripped half-naked, smeared with tar, paraded through towns and taunted, stoned, kicked, beaten, spat upon and sometimes even killed.
The épuration sauvage was as savage as it sounds. It has been estimated that 6000 individuals accused of collaboration were killed. Many of the perpetrators were resistance members or ex-collaborators who wished to hold themselves out as resistance members.
The Time article doesn’t mention it, but underlying the purge was a political struggle between communists and non-communists; the vigilantes were very disproportionately communists. It also fails to mention that the source it cited for the 6000 death toll also states that, of those, only about a third were women. Instead, the Time article claims (evidently incorrectly) that “the punished were almost always women.” It further states:
The suspicion and punishment of women after World War II is part of a cycle of repression and sexism that began long before D-Day and continues to be seen today, in the conversation around the #MeToo movement. It begins with a terrible event, then women get blamed, then aggressively attacked and finally the assault is forgotten.
What bothers me most is that Time ran the piece on June 6. Can’t we have a day to mourn the D-Day dead, who were overwhelmingly men, before we have to go back to the “World Ends Tonight, Women and Minorities to Suffer Most” routine? Isn’t the anniversary of D-Day the wrong time to argue that women are always “the most vulnerable members of the community”?
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: Born June 7, 1959.
June 6, 2018
HMMM … BRAZILIAN ANTHROPOLOGISTS SAY KILLING TWIN, DISABLED, OR TRANSGENDER CHILDREN (EVEN WHEN THEIR PARENTS OBJECT) OUGHT TO BE TOLERATED … so long as the perpetrators are from one of those … er … unassimilated indigenous tribes. And woe to anyone who attempts to inform tribal members that there may be alternatives to their traditional practices.
The Kamayurá are among a handful of indigenous peoples in Brazil known to engage in infanticide and the selective killing of older children. Those targeted include the disabled, the children of single mothers, and twins—whom some tribes, including the Kamayurá, see as bad omens. [A Kamayurá man] told me of a 12-year-old boy from his father’s generation whom the tribe buried alive because he “wanted to be a woman.”
Suruwaha are another such group. According to the article, a few years ago, a couple there to study the Suruwaha language took a 5-year-old Suruwaha child who had hypothyroidism (an easily treated condition) to the state capital for medical attention. The child’s parents had committed suicide rather than kill their child, and the tribe’s efforts to kill her by burying her alive had failed. When the couple brought the now-treated girl back to her tribe, nobody wanted her, so the couple adopted her themselves. Meanwhile, the public prosecutor had banished them from the Suruwaha territory. The anthropologist’s report that undergirded the prosecutor’s injunction argued that they were wrongdoers because they had let the Suruwahas know that there are alternatives to their traditional practices. Apparently, if you are unlucky enough to have been born to the Suruwahas, you must be kept in the dark.
As of April, the Brazilian legislature was trying to do something about this issue. The Brazilian Association of Anthropology was opposing the proposal, arguing that “the most repressive and lethal actions ever perpetrated against the indigenous peoples of the Americas … were unfailingly justified through appeals to noble causes, humanitarian values and universal principles.”
Call me a cultural bigot if you will, but I am so glad to have been born in a community where the city council members figured they’d get in trouble if they starting insisting that I be killed.
THE LAST MUNCHKIN IS GONE: Jerry Maren, the last surviving munchkin from the Wizard of Oz, dies.
“CHRISTMAS IS A BLOW TO OUR MUSLIMHOOD”: Turkey is increasingly unsafe for its tiny Christian minority.
CAN MATT ROSENDALE DEFEAT INCUMBENT JON TESTER?: Montana State Auditor Matt Rosendale has won the GOP primary for U.S. Senate. This will be a race to watch. Trump won Montana by 20 points. Meanwhile, Tester has been a thorn in Trump’s side.
June 5, 2018
MORE ON DC’s WOKEST RESTAURANT: Ed Driscoll posted on the wokest restaurant in Washington earlier this afternoon. It’s called Busboys & Poets. As Ed wrote, among its many “woke” innovations is its practice of handing out “Race Cards” to patrons, with questions like “How often do you discuss race with your family and friends?”
What caught my eye about the Washington City Paper article was a statement by a “core organizer of Black Lives Matter DC,” who is decidedly unenthusiastic about the restaurant. It’s not woke enough for her. And here’s the reason why:
“The Core Organizers of Black Lives Matter DC will no longer accept speaking engagements, participate on panels, or otherwise patronize any Busboys & Poets or Mulebone restaurant based on our past experiences,” she wrote. “Andy Shallal has used Busboys & Poets to commoditize racial history by having panels with local radical activists while making money from food and drink sales of attendees but not paying them, profiting on the history of Black DC while contributing to ‘revitalization’ that is fueling displacement, and posturing as a radical while being a capitalist.”
To put it a bit more succinctly: You’re doing it wrong. You were supposed to pay us.
NOT A PIECE OF CAKE: I am of two minds about Masterpiece Cakeshop. On the one hand, I’m sure it’s not comforting for the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop to think that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission might have won if its members had only disguised their contempt for people of faith a bit better. On the other hand, as my colleague Maimon Schwarzschild has written in “Do Religious Exemptions Save?,” the alternative—a Constitutionally-mandated duty to accommodate religion—may not work so well either.
In the end, there is no substitute for living in a country where people (and hence legislators) want to accommodate the sincerely held religious and moral views of others and don’t want to dragoon them into actions to which they have such objections unless it’s really necessary.
BIRTH OF THE MARSHALL PLAN: On June 5, 1947, Gen. George C. Marshall, then Secretary of State, gave a speech at Harvard University at which he called for what came to be called “the Marshall Plan.” Said he: “The truth of the matter is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character.”
It seems to have worked pretty well. One downside: Many later policymakers saw the Marshall Plan’s $13 billion lesson as throwing very large sums of money at a problem—no matter how different from postwar Europe—will solve that problem. No such luck.
IF YOU LIVED IN BOTSWANA, YOU COULD HAVE SEEN THE FIREBALL: Six-foot asteroid–small enough to disintegrate in the Earth’s atmosphere–was spotted hours before impact. Message to Outer Space: Please don’t send us any bigger ones.
June 4, 2018
DOES THE MASTERPIECE CAKESHOP DECISION STRENGTHEN THE CASE AGAINST THE TRAVEL BAN?: Ilya Somin argues that it does.