Today's history nugget

Somerset County thus would gain the ill-fated distinction of having committed two sets of brothers to the gallows. There were three sets of brothers executed in public hangings in Pennsylvania prior to 1834...

From 1834 to 1906, five pairs of brothers were executed privately or within county jails. The Nicelys and the Roddys were among this group.

From my recent reading

Al Lawrence was astonished. 'I was bowled right over for two reasons., he recalled. 'The first thing that hits me is that Chuck isn't surprised if he walks into a room and sees an angel in there. And then he isn't surprised when the angel he sees has dark skin. So I said to myself, Wow! I mean, I am black but have never envisaged seeing a black angel. In my mind angels are always white. But There's Chuck who's telling me he's seen a black angel'

The Wild, Wild West really wasn't so wild

The reason the gunfight in Tombstone had drawn such attention was because such things rarely occurred. Drunks shot each other and lawmen chased down badmen, but marshals just never walked down the streets and shot it out with unconvicted and unindicted suspects.

Casey Tefertiller, Wyatt Earp

Compared to Chicago or Baltimore, we should start calling it the Mild Mild West.

But then what would the hoplophobes use as a talking point?

From the annals of faulty forecasting

[Dwight] Macdonald went on to attack Wolfe's mannerist style, skewer his penchant for 'elaboration rather than development' and speculate that 'Wolfe will not be read with pleasure, or at all, years from now, and perhaps not even next year.'
March Weingarten, The Gang that Wouldn't Write Straight

That was in the NYRB in 1965

He was wrong. Big time.

Wolfe does not win literary prizes and is despised by many of the biggest names in the literary pantheon. (Check out "My Three Stooges" in Hooking Up). But Wolfe has this going for him: if the mark of greatness is having something to say about "where we are and where we are going", he trumps everybody on the list. Does anyone in Denver look up from her Sunday paper and say "this sounds just like a John Updike novel"? How many people turn on the cable news programs and think "Is Philip Roth scripting this"? Yet from Tawana Brawley to the Duke Lacrosse case, Tom Wolfe scouted the territory before anyone else.

More proof the MSM is in the tank for Hillary

Follow the money is just so 20th century.....

.... at least when the money flows to Team Clinton

This deserves to be a bigger story.

Panama Papers Reveal Clinton’s Kremlin Connection

John and Tony Podesta aren’t fooling anyone

The revelations of the so-called Panama Papers that are roiling the world’s political and financial elites this week include important facts about Team Clinton. This unprecedented trove of documents purloined from a shady Panama law firm that arranged tax havens, and perhaps money laundering, for the globe’s super-rich includes juicy insights into how Russia’s elite hides its ill-gotten wealth.

Almost lost among the many revelations is the fact that Russia’s biggest bank uses The Podesta Group as its lobbyist in Washington, DC. Though hardly a household name, this firm is well known inside the Beltway, not least because its CEO is Tony Podesta, one of the best-connected Democratic machers in the country. He founded the firm in 1998 with his brother John, formerly chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, then counselor to President Barack Obama, Mr. Podesta is the very definition of a Democratic insider. Outsiders engage the Podestas and their well-connected lobbying firm to improve their image and get access to Democratic bigwigs.
...

John and Tony Podesta aren’t fooling anyone with this ruse. They are lobbyists for Vladimir Putin’s personal bank of choice, an arm of his Kremlin and its intelligence services. Since the brothers Podesta are presumably destined for very high-level White House jobs next January if the Democrats triumph in November at the polls, their relationship with Sberbank is something they—and Hillary Clinton—need to explain to the public.

RTWT and follow the author on twitter.

Those who forget history . . .

Those who followed thought they understood Europe and Germany's future place in it better than Bismarck. But they understood nothing. They busily engaged in disconnected and aggressive policies that led much of the rest of Europe to perceive Germany as a threat, drove Republican France and Tsarist Russia into an alliance that eventually attracted the British, and tied the German state to the irresponsible and decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire. In effect, while Germany was steadily becoming more powerful in its economic and military strength, its flawed strategic policies were creating an anti-German alliance system of even greater strength.

First as tragedy, then as farce

Sir Edward Grey, Britain's Foreign Secretary in the years before WWI:

The German Emperor is ageing me; he is like a battleship with steam up and screws going, but with no rudder, and he will run into something some day and cause a catastrophe.

Rejoice! He is Risen!

Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them.

And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.

And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.

And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:

And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?

He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee,

Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.

And they remembered his words,

And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.

It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.

And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.

Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.

Luke 24: 1-12

“Wood and nails and colored eggs”

First Posted 22 March 2005

This passage from Martin Bell's remarkable little book The Way of the Wolf: The Gospel in New Images seems especially timely this Easter season.

God raised Jesus from the dead to the end that we should be clear-once and for all-that there is nothing more important than being human. Our lives have eternal significance. And no one-absolutely no one-is expendable.

Colored Eggs

Some human beings are fortunate enough to be able to color eggs on Easter. If you have a pair of hands to hold the eggs, or if you are fortunate enough to be able to see the brilliant colors, then you are twice blessed.

This Easter some of us cannot hold the eggs, others of us cannot see the colors, many of us are unable to move at all-and so it will be necessary to color the eggs in our hearts.

This Easter there is a hydrocephalic child lying very still in a hospital bed nearby with a head the size of his pillow and vacant, unmoving eyes, and he will not be able to color Easter eggs, and he will not be able to color Easter eggs in his heart, and so God will have to color eggs for him.

And God will color eggs for him. You can bet your life and the life of the created universe on that.

At the cross of Calvary God reconsecrated and sanctified wood and nails and absurdity and helplessness to be continuing vehicles of his love. And then he simply raised Jesus from the dead. And they both went home and colored eggs.

Thought for the day

Discovery consists of looking at the same thing s everyone else and thinking something different.

Albert Szent-Gyorg, Nobel Laureate

Explaining Trump

Lot of truth here:

Trump and the Delayed Reckoning for the 2008 Financial Crisis

We might have had this reckoning earler, but the Tea Party let itself be captured by the RNC

Do we want to solve problems or elect Republicans?

For many of his supporters, Trump is a weapon Jacksonians can use to break the logjam of sclerotic, mediated democracy

The 2008 crisis also sucked the power from most the the GOPs best slogans.

From 2009

There is no doubt that a sizable minority of the population is opposed to bigger government. This minority is large enough to boost the ratings of talk radio. It drives readership for rightwing blogs and raises money for some candidates. But is it it enough to win election?

40% is an enormous share in radio ratings. It is also the bad end of a landslide election.

The usual mantra of "No socialism, Free Enterprise!" just seems inadequate in the face of the current economic realities.

Key fact number one. As Obama moves toward "socialism", he does so at the behest of the "capitalists". It is not as if he is sending paramilitary gangs to take over successful, profitable businesses. Obama, like Bush before him, is compelled to act because the capitalists screwed the pooch, crapped the bed, and then muttered "maybe my bad" when their recklessness sent the financial system off a cliff.

The broad public knows this, and that makes it hard to win them over with cheap slogans about socialist bogeymen.

And finally, failure theater does not work so well when there is an Army of Davids paying attention to what is going on.

From Duke Lacrosse to the Unsinkable Donald Trump

Last night ESPN aired a new episode in their 30 for 30 documentary series. “Fantastic Lies” was a searing look back at the Duke lacrosse case/hoax/scandal.

Overall, it was an outstanding piece of work. Admittedly, it skimmed over a great many points and left out others. That is inevitable when you have to cover a complex, year-long, story in 90 minutes of television.

For what it is worth, here are a few of the points about the case that deserve more attention.

Journalists were not just wrong about the case. They were arrogantly, viciously, proudly wrong.

Reporters and pundits did not just attack the members of the lacrosse team. They attacked anyone who tried to defend the team and its players. The documentary really should have included the brave stand made by the Duke women’s lacrosse team and the vitriol they received from the press for proclaiming their belief in the ‘innocence’ of the men lacrosse players.

The documentary lets the MSM off the hook. It lets the clowns and kommissars claim that failure was inevitable because the story was “a perfect storm.”

Failure was not inevitable. Some people were not caught up in the perfect storm. “Fantastic Lies” would have been much better if it had included the thoughts from someone like Stuart Taylor on the failure of the media.

More detail on this point can be found here:

Duke lacrosse: The AJR review

Duke lacrosse: Can the MSM look into the mirror?

Duke lacrosse: “Totalitarian Whiff”

A small point but a telling one:

“Fantastic Lies” whitewashes ESPN’s participation in the media mob that abetted Nifong.

When the documentary hid this fact it continued a long tradition of smokescreens and fig leafs. In that sense it is emblematic of the media cover-up that has gone on for ten years. The MSM cannot look in the mirror and admit its mistakes.

Which is why this happened:

None of the MSM outlets that messed up so horribly did anything to reform themselves. Nor did the Duke administration.

The Gang of 88 still rules the roost in Durham. The MSM still falls for hoaxes like the Rolling Stone story on UVa and “Hands up. Don’t shoot.”

When Evan Thomas of Newsweek tried to defend the magazine’s indefensible rush to judgment he came up with one of the most quoted lines of the whole saga.

“We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong."

And that is what ties this into the Trump phenomenon. Journalists and their lapdog media critics keep whining that millions of people ignore their rigorous fact-checking and debunking of Trump’s claims and promises. They say they are puzzled and I bet they are. If they really understood what was happening they would be terrified.

Millions of voters ignore the MSM attacks on Trump because they assume the MSM is filled with liars who prefer the Narrative (i.e. propaganda) to facts and truth. That is not entirely correct and it does not make Trump a good choice for president, but it does help explain why so many happily ignore the MSM.

If the old media has lost power, it is because they wielded it recklessly and unwisely.

One last point in Trump’s favor.

When the MSM ginned up their unthinking outrage mobs, professional conservatives and Republican politicians were slow to respond. Some happily ran with SJW pack. Most hid and hoped it would blow over.

When a Trump supporter says they like DJT because “he fights”, the background context is the craven cowardice of resercons like Tucker Carlson and gutless politicians too numerous to mention.

UPDATE: It is only fair to note that Tucker Carlson has come a long way. A long, long way and in the right direction.

Tucker Carlson:Quite the transformation

Feet of clay and heads of stone

America’s reporters in Vietnam became unwitting tools of Hanoi’s intelligence apparatus

Even worse, most of them were cool with that

This is a fascinating and important read:

PHAM XUAN AN: VIETNAM’S TOP SPY

Why Did U.S. Journalists Love Him?

The life and career of Pham Xuan An requires honest scholars to revisit the established narratives of the Vietnam War, the reporters who got famous there, and the internal CIA wars of the 1970s.

When An was revealed as a murderous communist spy, most of the reporters who had worked with him were ready to extol him as a fair and honest journalist.

I thought An deserved to be lauded by the communists as a hero of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. He had done his job well. But I didn’t see him as an American hero. So when an excerpt from Bass’s book appeared in The New Yorker in 2005 quoting journalists I knew as singing his praises, I wrote a letter to the editor, saying:

“It was one thing to have been against the Vietnam Warmany of us werebut quite another to express unconditional admiration for a man who spent a large part of his life pretending to be a journalist while helping to kill Americans.”

Related:

The irony of David Halberstam

Vietnam

The MSM is shrinking because it keeps celebrating people like Halberstam and Mike Wallace: idols revealed to be neither astute nor patriotic.

Grant provides a concise, brilliant illustration of how An played 3-D chess with his American friends at the Battle of Ap Bac (January 1963).

The short version: the esteemed “journalist” used his American connections to discover the timing and location of an ARVN offensive. He alerts his superiors in the Viet Cong. VC uses that foreknowledge to ambush and defeat ARVN offensive. “Journalist” explains to his American friends that battle proves that SVN forces are unable to match VC in morale and training, hence they are doomed to lose. American reporters use the battle to undermine American officials in Saigon who are optimistic about prospects for ARVN in future.

Fifty years later, J-schools and reporters still think those naïve American reporters should be role models.

Before William Colby became head of CIA, he clashed with the chief of counterintelligence, James Angleton, because the latter believed that Colby’s operations in Vietnam were insecure, riddled with spies, and susceptible to Communist disinformation. Turns out, he was right.

After Colby became DCIA he fired Angleton and downplayed the importance of counterintelligence.

CIA proceeded to get conned by a long-series of double-agents and disinformation campaigns.

Related:

Spy Wars

This really is a big freaking deal

Are you really a ‘paranoid’ mole hunter if there really are moles?

We’d be better off if we were a little more Victorian

Reading Jacques Barzun’s works is a fantastic corrective to the Horror Victorianorum that haunts America’s pop culture and the minds of our intellectuals. Our image of the Victorian era and its people is still shaped by ‘rebels’ like Byron (who went into exile while denouncing the informal and formal strictures of England as ‘cant’). Its popular historiography is still founded on Lytton Strachey Eminent Victorians.

As Barzun points out in From Dawn to Decadence, what Byron called ‘cant’ was a powerful, religiously-inspired reforming impulse:

Its origins go back to Methodism, and in the early 19C its impulse to do good inspired the Evangelicals of the Church of England to agitate for such causes as the abolition of slavery.

Where Byron’s coterie could not be bothered to care about their own children, the Victorian do-gooders sacrificed in order to help the children of even the most despised. On the Salvation Army:

Huxley's denunciation of it for fanaticism and regimentation hindered it no more than did the disdain of professional men, who seemed to think that spirit seances and Theosophical jargon were worthier expressions of their feelings. It was not until George Bernard Shaw made the point in Major Barbara that the so-called elite began to appreciate what General Booth's movement had done for the uneducated, pauperized, and drink-sodden masses which Social Darwinism had complacently allowed to find their place under the heel of fitter men. Then it was seen that neither the fatalism of biological evolution nor the fatalism of 'scientific' socialism could withstand a vigorous assault by people who believed in the power of the human will and had the wits to combine religion, social work, army discipline, and rousing tunes

What did those people have that our age lacks? “Wits and will” makes a good start. And energy. Oh, and the courage to break from the crowd.

The Victorian period produced so many strongly marked characters, fearless in promoting original views and often eccentric in habit and deportment. Self-control at least develops a self. And the multiple achievements of the Victorian Age testify to the abundance of such men and women

Paul Johnson:

Willpower, industry and an internal drive in a particular direction: these raised the great men of the 19th century above their circumstances

The Birth of the Modern

We might be richer than the Victorians, but compared to them we are weak, lazy, conformist drones.

Even worse, for a half century we’ve be tearing down what they built up:

The American school system was at the height of its dedication and efficiency. The grammar schools has assimilated millions of motley immigrants; the free public high school was a daring venture that was the envy of industrialized nations; its curriculum was liberal (in modern speech elitist)-- Latin, the English poets, American and English history, a modern foreign language, mathematics and science every year-- and no marshmallow subjects

And to think, we did that without a federal Department of Education.

One of the very first times Abraham Lincoln appears in the public record is as the result of a speech he gave to Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois on January 27, 1838. What interests me here is not the speech but the venue. The first cabin at the place that would become Springfield was built on the Illinois frontier in 1820. In the 1840 census, the town had a population of 2,579. Yet the people of Springfield, the young men of Springfield, were already part of the Lyceum movement.

That spirit of self-improvement and adult education completely shames what passes for community organizing today.

The very model of a scholar

Jacques Barzun was the embodiment of the scholarly ideal. He reflected and defended a vision of the humanities that was destroyed by politics, physics-envy, and industrial-scale production of PH.D.s.

From Dawn to Decadence, like most of his works, is that rarest of books. It is a book every thinking person should read yet reading it is unalloyed joy.

It is sweeping in its scope and ambition. His vast scholarship and wise judgment is on display on every page. He does not shy away from confident pronouncements which are often delivered as gentle aphorisms:

It is logical that this century's taste for aberrations, which it sees as a norm previously obscured by prejudice…

Black humor was one of the favorite spicings substituted for energy...

Love of what is fine should not make one finicky.

Barzun embodied that last piece of advice. An intellectual historian of the first rank, he also was a reader of detective stories and wrote about them with the same verve and knowledge he brought to works on Freud, education, and music.

To see what we’ve lost, here is Barzun on America, circa 1920:

The American school system was at the height of its dedication and efficiency. The grammar schools has assimilated millions of motley immigrants; the free public high school was a daring venture that was the envy of industrialized nations; its curriculum was liberal (in modern speech elitist)-- Latin, the English poets, American and English history, a modern foreign language, mathematics and science every year-- and no marshmallow subjects

And then the verdict on the damage done:

It was said earlier that the great 19C invention, the public school, had lost the power to make children literate. Methods useless for that purpose, absurd teacher training, the dislike of had work, the love of gadgetry, and the efforts to copy and to change the outer world ruined education throughout the West.

Sadly still true

Ideological words have a way of wearing thin and then, having lost their meanings, being used like switchblades against the enemy of the moment.

Walker Percy

This really is a big freaking deal

To paraphrase the soon-to-be Democratic nominee for President.

Anyhow-- this story is a couple of months old but it has not received the attention it deserves

CIA Fooled by Massive Cold War Double-Agent Failure

All recruits in East Germany, Cuba, and Russia fooled agency

The CIA was fooled by scores of double agents pretending to be working for the agency but secretly loyal to communist spy agencies during the Cold War and beyond, according to a former CIA analyst, operations officer, and historian.

The large-scale deception included nearly 100 fake CIA recruits in East Germany, Cuba, as well as the Soviet Union (and later Russia) who supplied false intelligence that was passed on to senior U.S. policymakers for decades.

“During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times,” writes Benjamin B. Fischer, CIA’s former chief historian.

Fischer’s article was published here.

It seems to me that a lot of journalistic history is in need of revising. All those books and articles that decried the “paranoia” of CIA’s counterintelligence branch under James Angleton now look suspect.

One of the counts against Angleton was that he turned away intelligence sources because he feared that they were double-agents dispatched by the Soviets to spread disinformation.

But it isn’t paranoia if they really were double-agents.

Most of the sources journalists used for those stories were CIA officers who later ‘vetted’ these double-agents, approved them, and fed their disinformation to government policy-makers.

So, a lot of “intelligence experts” look pretty silly now. (As usual Bill Clinton’s favorite girl journalist is a charter member of this group.)

Even worse, many in CIA tried to cover-up their mistakes and, in some cases, kept distributing the disinformation to avoid embarrassment for themselves and their agency.

These revelations make Tennent Bagley’s Spy Wars and Spymaster even more persuasive. (I reviewed Spy Wars here)

This is a matter of more than antiquarian or historical interest. As Gertz notes, the disparagement of counterintelligence at CIA (a legacy of William Colby and Stansfield Turner) continues to this day and can cost lives.

Critics have charged the agency with harboring an aversion to counterintelligence the practice of countering foreign spies and the vetting of the legitimacy of both agents and career officers. Beginning in the 1970s, many in the CIA criticized counter-spying, which often involved questioning the loyalties of intelligence personnel, as “sickthink.”

The agency’s ability to discern false agents turned deadly in 2009 when a Jordanian recruit pretending to work for CIA killed a group of seven CIA officers and contractors in a suicide bombing at a camp in Afghanistan.

Joby Warrick’s book on the deadly fiasco at Khost (FOB Chapman) is a great read and a first-rate piece of reporting.

Every day provides more evidence that McLuhan really was a genius

Moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity.

Marshall McLuhan

A little more Orwell

Seventy years later and the main stream press still has not learned

If tomorrow Stalin were to drop the committee of Liberation and recognise the London Government, the whole British intelligentsia would flock after him like a troop of parrots. Their attitude towards Russian foreign policy is not 'Is this policy right or wrong?' but 'This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?' And this attitude is defended, if at all, solely on grounds of power.

.....

First of all, a message to English left-wing journalists and intellectuals generally: 'Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don't imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist for the Soviet regime, or any other other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.
George Orwell, 'As I See It' Tribune 1 September 1944

The more things change....

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

To be a highbrow, with a footing in the snootier magazines, means delivering yourself over to horrible campaigns of wire-pulling and backstairs-crawling. In the highbrow world you 'get on', if you 'get on' at all, not so much by your literary ability as by being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of verminous little lions.

++++++++++++++++++

The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle class. The typical socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious- looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucus voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teatotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of nonconformity behind him, and above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.