RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’m sure that Cliven Bundy [1] probably could have cut a deal with the Bureau of Land Management and should have. Of course, it’s never wise to let a federal court order hang over your head. And certainly we cannot have a world of Cliven Bundys if a legal system is to function.

In a practical sense, I also know that if I were to burn brush on a no-burn day, or toss an empty pesticide container in the garbage bin, or shoot a coyote too near the road, I would incur the wrath of the government in a way someone does not who dumps a stripped stolen auto (two weeks ago) in my vineyard, or solvents, oil, and glass (a few months ago), or rips out copper wire from the pump for the third time (last year). Living in a Winnebago with a porta-potty and exposed Romex in violation of zoning statutes for many is not quite breaking the law where I live; having a mailbox five inches too high for some others certainly is.

So Mr. Bundy must realize that in about 1990 we decided to focus on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding citizen and to ignore the felony of the lawbreaker. The former gave law enforcement respect; the latter ignored their authority. The first made or at least did not cost enforcers money; arresting the second began a money-losing odyssey of incarceration, trials, lawyers, appeals, and all the rest.

Mr. Bundy knows that the bullies of the BLM would much rather send a SWAT team after him than after 50 illegal aliens being smuggled by a gun-toting cartel across the southwestern desert. How strange, then, at this late postmodern date, for someone like Bundy on his horse still to be playing the law-breaking maverick Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) in (the David Miller, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Abbey effort) Lonely Are the Brave.

But the interest in Mr. Bundy’s case is not about legal strategies in revolving fiscal disagreements with the federal government.

Instead, we all have followed Mr. Bundy for three reasons.

One, he called attention to the frightening fact that the federal government owns 83% of the land in Nevada. Note that “federal” and “government” are the key words and yet are abstractions. Rather, a few thousands unelected employees — in the BLM, EPA, Defense Department, and other alphabet soup agencies — can pretty much do what they want on the land they control. And note, this is not quite the case in Silicon Valley or Manhattan or Laguna Beach. The danger can be summed up by a scene I see about once a month on a Fresno freeway: a decrepit truck stopped by the California Highway Patrol for having inadequate tarps on a trailer of green clippings, just as a new city garbage truck speeds by, with wet garbage flying over the median. Who will police the police?

TO THE RECENT spate of 50th-anniversary reflections on key political and cultural milestones — the 1963 March on Washington, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show — here’s one to add: The presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, the most influential also-ran in modern American politics.

Goldwater was nicknamed “Mr. Conservative,” but now even liberals adore him. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. penned an essay a few years back effusive in its praise for Goldwater, whom he described as an exemplar of civility, decency, and integrity. Goldwater was “neither mean-spirited nor racist,” wrote Kennedy; he challenged the liberals of his time through “sensible argument and honest conviction.” A 2006 documentary produced by CC Goldwater, Barry’s liberal’s granddaughter, is strewn with such liberal tributes; Hillary Clinton, James Carville, and Walter Cronkite are among those who attest to the man’s statesmanship and charm.

How things have changed.

In 1964, Goldwater appalled the political establishment. Though the blunt-spoken Arizonan’s bestseller, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” had made him a hero on the right even before his White House run, liberal commentators seemed shocked to discover that his conservatism was for real. When he declared, in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in San Francisco, that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” they were aghast.

What followed was one of the most ruthless campaigns of invective in US political history. Goldwater and his conservative supporters were repeatedly likened to Nazis, madmen, and warmongers. Jackie Robinson said he knew “how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” Lyndon Johnson’s notorious “daisy” commercial showed a little girl picking flower petals, until she is overwhelmed by the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. A month before the election, the cover of Fact magazine blared: “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater is Unfit to be President!”

Kosovo shares one social problem with Saudi Arabia. That is the infiltration of radical Islam. The story of victimized moderate Muslim clerics and intellectuals, removed from their congregations, dismissed from their teaching positions, and physically attacked, remains to be told.

I would like to be a brother or friend to a female president, but to a president that has reached her position as Wadjda got her bicycle — because she deserved it.

Saudi Arabia, a male-dominated country, is changing slowly. One example of its cautious new openness is the 2012 movie Wadjda, Saudi Arabia’s first feature film, by its first female director, Haifaa Al-Mansour.

My country, the Balkan republic of Kosovo, more than 90% Muslim, is likewise male-controlled and also appears to be changing.

That impression, however, is created by Kosovo having a woman president, Atifete Jahjaga, and is false.

President Atifete Jahjaga does not belong in the same category as Wadjda, the female protagonist of the Saudi film. We need a Wadjda for our country – both a female with the spirit of the cinema character, and a movie like it. We need many Wadjdas.

From Dickens we get ‘butterfingers,’ from Lewis Carroll ‘chortle.’ Shakespeare’s word for a half-smile—’smilet’—never caught on.

In 1754, the English dilettante Horace Walpole wrote a letter to his friend Horace Mann in which he mentioned that he had recently found some curious information about heraldry in an old Venetian book. Dangling a talisman over the page, he had been drawn to the detail in question. He described this as a happy accident, “almost of that kind which I call Serendipity” and proceeded to explain to Mann what he meant by this expressive word. His inspiration was a fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip,” the heroes of which were forever making chance discoveries.

The word “serendipity” did not catch on immediately. It became well-known only in the second half of the 20th century, thanks in no small part to its adoption by Walter Cannon, a Harvard physiologist, and the Columbia sociologist Robert K. Merton (who may have also coined the term “self-fulfilling prophecy”). Today “serendipity”
is one of those mellifluous dainties beloved of poetic souls and posturing journalists, and although Horace Walpole made other bequests to posterity—the Gothic novel “The Castle of Otranto” (1764) and the villa like a slice of wedding cake that he built west of London at Strawberry Hill—the delicious “serendipity” may just be his most cherished achievement.

Coinages of this kind are the subject of Paul Dickson’s “Authorisms.” Mr. Dickson is a prolific writer on words, and his latest book focuses on some of the words that have sprung from the imagination of particular writers. It is a work of reference and gentle entertainment rather than a seamless narrative; most of the entries are less than half a page long. Mr. Dickson omits Cannon and Merton from his discussion of “serendipity” and is on parlous ground when he describes the word as “wonderfully onomatopoeic”—there is little in the sound of it to suggest happy accident. But he has plenty of pleasing things to say about a host of words and phrases, from “a man got to do what he got to do” (attributed to a character in “The Grapes of Wrath”) to the noun “zombification” (apparently coined by NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu ).

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Dickson’s most-cited source is Shakespeare —”one fell swoop,” “to the manner born,” “salad days.” Also on the leaderboard, though a long way behind, are Charles Dickens (“butterfingers,” “scrooge”) and Lewis Carroll (“chortle,” “galumphing”). But determining who actually invented a word is notoriously tricky, and Mr. Dickson occasionally goes astray—though he has the gumption to issue the caveat that some of the coinages he identifies may have been “second strikes.”

He says that Shakespeare coined “eyesore,” yet more than half a century before he used the word in “The Taming of the Shrew” it appeared in a book by the lawyer John Rastell. He also presents Shakespeare as the first user of the rare and attractive noun “smilet” to denote half a smile, though it had previously been employed by the poet Abraham Fraunce, whose writings Shakespeare knew. He writes of Christopher Booker coining “neophiliac” for his 1969 volume about recent changes in English life, but sociologists had been using it since the 1940s. And Theodore Levitt didn’t coin “globalization” in a piece for the Harvard Business Review in 1983; 10 years earlier Fouad Ajami, a foreign-policy expert, was using it in what is now its current sense, and he may not have been the first to do so.

Christians the world over celebrated the resurrection of their savior on Sunday with worship services and family gatherings. Thirty-eight-year-old Sonia Garro shares the faith too, but she spent the holiday in a Cuban dungeon as a prisoner of conscience, just as she has for the past two years.

Ms. Garro is a member of the Christian dissident group Ladies in White, started in Havana in 2003 by sisters, wives and mothers of political prisoners to peacefully protest the unjust incarceration of their loved ones. It has since expanded to other parts of the country and added many recruits. The group’s growing popularity has worried the Castros, and they have responded with increasing brutality.

Cuba’s military government wants us to believe that the Brothers Fidel and Raul Castro are “reforming.” To buy that line you have to pretend that Ms. Garro and her sisters in Christ don’t exist. Of course that’s often the impression one gets from Havana-based reporters working for foreign media outlets.

They’ve been invited into the country not to serve the truth but to serve the dictatorship. Fortunately, there are brave and independent Cuban journalists who continue to tell the Ladies’ story, despite scant resources.

In the late winter of 2012, Cubans were looking forward to a visit from Pope Benedict XVI and the Ladies were lobbying the Vatican for an audience. Their relentless pleading was embarrassing the dictatorship, which had been beating them in the streets on their way to Sunday Mass for almost a decade. It was also making the Church, which had already cut its own deal with the regime on the terms of the visit, look bad. On the weekend of March 17 Castro sent the Ladies a warning by locking up some 70 of their members.

Most of those detained, including leader Berta Soler, had been freed by the time the pontiff touched down in Cuba nine days later, but Ms. Garro was not. Benedict celebrated some Masses, did photo ops with the despots and left.

It was a clever strategy: The world saw the release of the many Ladies, which obscured the continued detention of the one. That one—poor, black and not well known internationally—serves, to this day, as a constant reminder of the wrath Castro will bring down on anyone in the barrios who gets out of line.

Not quite….in congress the majority of the Republican, and about 20 Democrat incumbents are on to this ruse and on to the fig leaf offered by amending a requirement that the government have environmental oversight. This is a big economy and energy issue and will play a large role in November 2014…..rsk

“The Koch brothers may get the media attention, but the billionaire getting the most political bang for his buck is Tom Steyer. The hedge-fund politico has pledged to raise $100 million to help Democrats keep the Senate, and on Friday he received a major return on his investment when the State Department again delayed its decision on the Keystone XL pipeline.

State’s excuse is that it wants to wait on the outcome of a legal challenge in Nebraska, but that’s no reason for the federal government not to declare itself. Earlier this year State’s latest environmental review found no net climate harm from the pipeline, which would take oil from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast. State found that the oil sands will be developed even if the Keystone XL isn’t built.

The real reason for the delay is Democratic politics. Mr. Steyer and the party’s liberal financiers are climate-change absolutists who have made killing Keystone a non-negotiable demand. But the White House doesn’t want to reject the pipeline before November because several Senate Democrats running for re-election claim to favor it. We say “claim” because Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu and others can’t even get Majority Leader Harry Reid to give them a vote on the floor.

So Senate Democrats get to have it both ways. They can benefit this year from the riches of Mr. Steyer, who pronounced himself well pleased by the delay. But they can also run in support of the XL pipeline and the thousands of new jobs it would create. Then President Obama can formally nix it next year.

Intellectuals fretting about income disparity are oddly silent regarding the decline of the two-parent family.

Mr. Maranto is a professor in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, where Mr. Crouch is a researcher.

“Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can’t change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn’t some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?

Yet in the current discussions about increased inequality, few researchers, fewer reporters, and no one in the executive branch of government directly addresses what seems to be the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States: the rise of single-parent families during the past half century.

The two-parent family has declined rapidly in recent decades. In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50% in 2006. This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%). Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.

Does it matter? Yes, it does. From economist Susan Mayer’s 1997 book “What Money Can’t Buy” to Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” in 2012, clear-eyed studies of the modern family affirm the conventional wisdom that two parents work better than one.

“Americans have always thought that growing up with only one parent is bad for children,” Ms. Mayer wrote. “The rapid spread of single-parent families over the past generation does not seem to have altered this consensus much.”

I was reading a recent copy of one of Britain’s popular newspapers, the Daily Express, when a particular item caught my eye.

The highly respected writer, Niall Ferguson, warned that, “President Obama’s policy of non-intervention, or, as he puts it, his being “resolved only to avoid being George W Bush,” resembles the incoherent foreign policies of British Liberals a century ago before the First World War.”

Ferguson was opining that despite the swirling tensions in the ever perilous Middle East and the current hostilities between Russia and the Ukraine, the real powder keg that could ignite a potential World War Three lies in the Far East as Japan and China fight over ownership of five uninhabited islands and three barren rocks.

Japan calls the territory the Senkaku Islands, and is using an ever increasing number of naval ships and warplanes to guard them while at the same time trying to involve the US.

On the other hand, China views the “nationalisation” of what it calls the Diaoyu Islands by the Japanese in 2012 as a serious provocation and will do whatever is necessary to assert its sovereignty.

The real danger is that if war were to break out between China and Japan, the US is bound by treaty to come to the aid of Japan. This would be another red line for Obama but following his experience with Syria, it is unclear how he would act, if indeed at all.

Brad Williams, a professor of Asian and International Studies at the City University of Hong Kong, made comparisons of the Sino-Japan tensions to those that led to the First World War; known as the Great War.

“Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzi Abe,” Professor Williams said, “probably sees China as a modern-day imperial Germany that is prone to aggressive behavior. That, of course, could trigger conflict despite the deep economic inter-dependence between the two countries.”

Indeed, Japan has stated that the tensions are similar to those between England and Germany before World War One – the war to end all wars.

At the end of Part One of this column, I asked: Was the law was on the government’s side and not on Cliven Bundy’s? What kind of law is it? And how is it being enforced throughout the country?
Few sitting politicians have remarked on the Bundy/BLM standoff. However, Christopher Agee, in his Western Journalism article of April 18th, “Obama Accused by Congressman of Illegal Action at Bundy Ranch,” reported:
Immediately after what many considered a victory against a tyrannical federal agency, a number of leftist voices – most notably, Sen. Harry Reid – indicated the action against this family will continue. In response, Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman sent a letter to Barack Obama, Department of the Interior Sec. Sally Jewell, and BLM Director Neil Kornze, laying out his position that any such action by the agency would violate the U.S. Constitution….

He cited the limited powers granted to the federal government, noting the bureau has no “right to assume preemptory police powers, that role being reserved to the States,” and explained “many federal laws require the federal government to seek assistance from local law enforcement whenever the use of force may become necessary.”
The letter included a section of the U.S. Code — 43 U.S.C. Section 1733, Subsection C — stating exactly that point. [Emphasis Stockman’s]
“When the Secretary determines that assistance is necessary in enforcing Federal laws and regulations relating to the public lands or their resources he shall offer a contract to appropriate local officials having law enforcement authority within their respective jurisdictions with the view of achieving maximum feasible reliance upon local law enforcement officials in enforcing such laws and regulations.”

The local law enforcement authority in this instance is the Sheriff of Clark County, Nevada, Douglas C. Gillespie, who, apparently intimidated by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) as the protesters were not, refused to intervene and demand that the illegal BLM vigilantes leave.
Gillespie, however, conspicuously took a back seat to BLM forces during the standoff.

All historical analogies are odious, some dead white man – probably a Frenchman – has said. Obviously, he meant that times change, the cast changes, the nuances change, the world moves on, and no geopolitical situation really replicates an earlier one. Some historiographers go even further; they say that for all these reasons there are not, indeed, any “lessons” from history, George Santayana notwithstanding. Still …

It’s good intellectual fun to make comparisons and sometimes we learn a little by playing a game in which we compare those former events with the contemporary happening. Of course, one problem is that our reconstruction of earlier events is often skewed if not downright wrong. For, obviously, if for no other reason, we view them in the context of the present. Again, still…

That’s the case now examining Vladimir Putin’s blatant aggression and attempted subversion of Ukraine as a sovereign state. It has become the cliché of clichés to see his program of violating internally accepted borders as the same route to war the totalitarian dictatorships took before World War II. But Putin is no Adolph Hitler, nor certainly no Josef Stalin. He has neither their talent for villainy and he heads an even more fragile economy, and indeed a political union coming apart at the seams. Yet his use of stratagems those 20th Century international outlaws used is all too obvious. One even is tempted to go along with the Polish official who said it was hard to believe Putin’s speechwriters hadn’t actually plagiarized an earlier Hitler model.

So that begs the question are we on the eve of a general war such as broke out in 1939?

The year 1938 was more than usually momentous for European history, and indeed for the whole world so Euro-oriented as it was in the last century. Among the many events were two dramatic crises that captured the headlines:

Trying to head off another catastrophe like The Great War from which the Europeans have never fully recovered because of the enormous loss of life, a deal was made at a conference in Munich between the Western allies and Hitler. War was temporarily averted.