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The shooting of James King – political murder disguised as a justifiable response to a personal insult – inflamed the city of San Francisco immediately. King, shot in the chest but still clinging to life was taken to his house. Meanwhile, an enormous mob gathered at the police station, and the police realized almost at once that the accused James Casey could not be kept secure. He was removed under guard to the county jail. The indignant mob was not appeased, not even when the mayor of San Francisco attempted to address the crowd, pleading for them to disperse and assuring them that the law would run its proper course and justice would be done. The crowd jeered, “What about Richardson? Where is the law in Cora’s case?” The mayor hastily retreated, as the square – already guarded by armed marshals, soon filled with armed soldiers. The angry mob dispersed, still frustrated and furious. No doubt everyone in authority in the city breathed a sigh of relief, confident that this matter would blow over. After all, they controlled the political apparatus of the city, at least one newspaper, as well as the adjudicators and enforcers of the law … little comprehending that this shooting represented the last, the very last straw.

Several days later, a small advertisement appeared on the front pages of several morning papers: “The members of the Vigilance Committee in good standing will please meet at number 105 ½ Sacramento Street, this day, Thursday, fifteenth instant, at nine o’clock A.M. By order of the Committee of Thirteen.”

The effect on the general public was electrifying. Crowds descended on the building at the designated address – a three-story hall which had been built for the short-lived local chapter of the Know-Nothings. The Vigilance Committee of five years before, which seemed to have been an age ago, so quickly had the city grown, had been brutally efficient in sorting out the criminal gang called the “Hounds.” And now, many members of the original committee – who had whipped and housebroken the Hounds – were taking up responsibility again. The image of a ‘vigilante’ most usually implies a disorganized mob; lawless, mindlessly violent, easily steered but ultimately uncontrollable.

This Vigilance Committee was something much, much worse than that.

They were organized, they were in earnest, they would not compromise … and they would not back down.
And they proved to be very, very efficient. Immediate support for the Committee was overwhelming. A dozen members of the original committee reconstituted themselves, chose a leader and an executive committee, and began enlisting members. The line to enroll in the Committee was day-long: eventually there would be 6,000 – all of them vetted and vouched for, sworn to secrecy. Two thousand of the first-enrolled were assigned to military-styled companies of a hundred. The organization had to move operations to another building – swiftly fortified and eventually called Fort Gunnybags.

Almost immediately, the established political machine – which termed itself without irony as the “Law and Order Party” – demanded that the Governor of California call out the militia against this citizens’ insurrection. The Governor came hustling from Sacramento and requested an interview with the head of the Vigilance Committee, one William Tell Coleman. Coleman was polite, but firm; insisting that the Committee proposed no insurrection against civil authority – they merely wished to see that established laws were enforced. The Governor was mollified; he would not call out the state militia – but he was not yet aware that the Committee intended to take Charles Cora and James Casey into custody, give them a fair trial and administer such punishment as would be dictated by the verdict.

Which operation was carried out, with military precision and efficiency, on the following day, which was a Sunday morning. Of course, rumors and speculation ran wild, all over town that something was about to happen at the county jail building where Casey was being held. It couldn’t be denied that the Law and Order party might have been spoiling for a fight. Spectators gathered on the rooftops, at the windows of buildings around the square, and on every eminence which offered a view. Their patience was rewarded: a column of marching men – in civilian clothes, but carrying rifles with fixed bayonets appeared at the end of a street which emptied into the square – then another column, from another converging street. Then a third column, joined by a fourth: they marched into the square and took their places in regular ranks four-deep all around the square. An observer, a Southerner remarked to a friend, “When you see those damned psalm-singing Yankees turn out of their churches, shoulder their guns and march away of a Sunday, you may know that hell is going to crack shortly.”

But there was more. The silent ranks of men stood, waiting … waiting for a command which came presently. From out of a side street came a body of sixty men – drawing a field gun by means of a long rope. The cannon was wheeled into the middle of the square, aimed at the front door of the jail. Slowly and deliberately, it was charged with powder and shot, while another man lit a slow-burning match and stood at attention. And there they all waited silently … until a Vigilante on horseback rode into the square, and up to the door of the jail. He leaned down, rapped on the door with the butt of his riding whip and passed a note to someone within the jail … Silence descended on the square, on the men standing at attention by the cannon, on those in ranks around the edge of the square, and watching from rooftop and window. An eerie silence, broken only by the sound of carriage wheels.

(To be continued, yet again. It’s an exciting story, isn’t it? And I’m not making anything up.)

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When gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in 1848, it seemed as if most of the world rushed in to California – which, until then had been a sparsely-settled outpost of Mexico, dreaming the decades away. The climate was enchantingly mild, Mediterranean – warm enough for groves of olive trees and citrus to thrive, and the old missions crumbled away as if nothing had or would ever change. The old, proud Californio families with names like Verdugo, Vasquez, Pico and Vallejo kept vast cattle herds and lived in extensive but rather Spartan-plain estates. There were a few handfuls of American settlers who had come overland, or by sea; they tended to what little trade there was, and an energetic and slightly shady Swiss entrepreneur named Johann Sutter had a vast agricultural and establishment centered around a fortified holding in present-day Sacramento. It was on his property, and in the course of building a saw-mill that gold was discovered. And change came upon the enchanted land – and the place called Yerba Buena turned almost overnight from a hamlet of eight hundred souls on the shore of San Francisco Bay into a ramshackle metropolis of 25,000 and more in the space of two years.

The responsible citizens had once before resorted to a Committee of Vigilance, in response to a riot instigated by a criminal element known as the ‘Hounds’ in 1851. The Hounds were housebroken, following a judicious culling of the most notorious ring-leaders – either hung or exiled, but it was only a temporary solution. Five years, a couple of devastating fires, and who-knows-how-many thousand hopeful Argonauts later, the situation in San Francisco had degenerated to a point beyond the toleration of responsible and civic-minded citizens … again.

And this time, it was more than just a situation of sober citizens faced with obstreperous criminals – by 1856 it was a collective of sober citizens arrayed against a corrupt, criminal-allied, and crony-capitalist big-city machine. Several decades after the event, popular historian Stewart E. White wrote, “The elections of those days would have been a joke had they not been so tragically significant… the polls were guarded by bullies who did not hesitate at command to manhandle any decent citizen indicated by the local leaders. Such men were openly hired for the purposes of intimidation. Votes could be bought in the open market. ‘Floaters’ were shamelessly imported into districts that might prove doubtful; and, if things looked close, the election inspectors and the judges could be relied on to make things come out all right in the final count…” White also noted, “With the proper officials in charge of the executive end of the government and with a trained crew of lawyers making their own rules as they went along, almost any crime of violence, corruption, theft, or the higher grades of finance could be committed with absolute impunity…” White contributed a lot of the corruption to an influx of what he called low-grade Southerners, who were apt to use what he called ‘pseudo-chivalry’ in response to personal or political criticism, ‘battering down opposition by the simple expedient of claiming that he had been insulted.’

In the midst of all this, there were business reversals; a local and trusted financial and express firm failed. Its assets were taken over in what was suspected to be shady means which benefitted – of course – certain businessmen closely associated with the local machine. A crusading newspaper editor, James King of William and his Daily Evening Bulletin riveted and titillated the reading public as thoroughly as he angered those whom he targeted. King criticized various pillars of the city, in editorials and in straight news stories. He pulled no punches; he named names, explained methods and connections. About the same time a gambler, Charles Cora, shot and killed a well-known and well-liked US Marshal named William Richardson who was unarmed at the time. This was an unprovoked, cold-blooded shooting. Conviction seemed almost certain, although Cora was a good friend – a very good friend of both the local sheriff and the keeper of the jail, where he waited trial in considerable luxury and comfort. No expense was spared in Cora’s defense – and when the case came to trial, the jury couldn’t come to a decision and Cora was released. The law-abiding element in town seethed.

Several months later, King wrote another sizzling editorial – this one concerning an appointee to the position in the federal customs house. The appointee was the choice of one James P. Casey – a member of the board of county supervisors, and also a member in good standing of the political establishment. This, no doubt accounted for the curious circumstance of being elected to the board despite the fact that he didn’t live in the district, had not been on the ticket, nor been a candidate … and no one could be found who voted for him. Doubtless, Casey was already in King’s sights – for besides disparaging the customs-house appointee, King also noted that Casey had previously been an inmate in Sing-Sing. Casey accounted himself affronted, and paid a visit to the Daily Evening Bulletin offices to demand an apology – which was not forthcoming. After some hours drinking and fuming, Casey left the bar and waited just across the street for King to pass on his way home. At about 5 PM, King left the newspaper office, and as he passed by on his way home, Casey shot him. King fell, mortally wounded – while Casey’s friends hustled him off to safety in a nearby police station lock-up.
(to be continued – cross-posted at The Daily Brief, and at my book-blog)

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Some private security firms around Chicago are looking to beef up their ranks with Iraq and Afghanistan war vets ahead of two world summits that are expected to bring multitudes of protesters to the city this spring.

The article states that the security firms are interested in hiring veterans because they are likely to show “better restraint” if the protests turn violent. Interesting.

And I really hope any protests don’t turn violent.

Update: Thanks to Carl Prine’s Line of Departure for highlighting the above article/ad and mentioning this blog-within-a-blog. Second City Cop has a post on the topic and lots on the upcoming summit, too. Just keep scrolling.

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That is the sarcastic answer to an ancient question lately revised in the matter of the Penn State University athletic department having enabled a coach to serially molest young boys for decades – the question being, ‘How you separate the men from the boys at ____?’ Understandably, a large portion of the public is upset to furious about this, and those who are Penn grads and/or college football fans, and/or Joe Paterno fans are particularly distressed and/or seriously disillusioned.

The very saddest outcome from this appalling state of matters is something that I had meditated upon five years ago, when it was the matter of the Capitol Hill pages and a one Representative Mark Foley, who was forced to resign once his apparent inability to keep his hands, metaphorically speaking, off the junior staff became public knowledge outside Washington.

I noted that the long-term and most damaging after-effect was how this kind of predation – after the immediate damage is done – screws up any chance of a teenager having a good mentorly relationship with an older person not their parental unit. Any cross-generational friendship will be looked at with grave suspicion – and that is so not a good thing.

We came to the point several years ago – after the various scandals in the Catholic Church – of having to consider the possibility of an apparently friendly overture from an older man to a teenage boy or child as potentially the first move of a chicken-hawk. This just has to poison the pool just that much more, adding one more smidgeon of crappiness to a teenager’s lot in life, or to that of a child from a dysfunctional home. Being a teenager is an awkward age, for a variety of reasons; being physically nearly an adult but emotionally nearer to being a child, craving respect and responsibility, but not really getting much of a chance for earning either, the utter pointlessness of much that is taught in a public school setting . . . and then add to the fact that the average tweener or teen is stuck with their peers, by custom and institutional practice for much of each day.

Picture it, if your own memory of middle or high school is not painfully vivid in your memory: stuck with inane conversations, pointless rivalries, even more pointless academic curricula, bitter feuds, bullying and mind-games. Feeling ill and over-grown, flushed with too many hormones, and no outlet – and even if you are one of the lucky ones who do get along with your parents – they are, after all, your parents.

For a lot of teenagers, a friendship with an adult not their parent is a lifeline, and an anchor to sanity, a connection to a real world outside the confines of high school and their peer-group, a reassurance that they can connect with the real world. I have always had a conviction that teenagers – in order to get through the worst of it – need more than anything else, the companionship and example of adult friends who have common interests and enthusiasms. It tends to take the younger generation out of an insular round of strictly teen-approved interests, encourages them to connect and to get away from that sour view expressed in my own youth of “not trusting anyone over thirty.”

One of our joint enthusiasms, when my daughter was in middle school and we lived then in Ogden, Utah, was a regular meeting of the Salt Lake City Chapter of the Dr. Who Fan Club. Thirty or forty Whovians met socially once a month at a certain member’s house to watch an episode of Dr. Who on video and chat about their mutual liking for the series. (I rather liked the Whovians by the way; they were much more cerebral and grounded than the Trekfans. One felt that they had fairly successful and interesting lives, and their appreciation for The Doctor was merely an amiable eccentricity, not an overwhelming obsession.) Anyway, it gratified me as a parent to notice my daughter’s social assurance, and that of some of the other younger Whovians. At fourteen, she was much the youngest; I think the next youngest was sixteen, and the ages of the other members ranged well up into the seventies. But everyone always had a wonderful time at meetings, interacting as equals and friends, and I thought it was marvelous for the youngest fans, in that they were tacitly reassured that there was an escape over the walls of the teenage ghetto, and a wide world full of interesting friends on the other side. And at the very least, I am sure they came away from the meetings of the Whovians with the assurance that they would not be trapped in the teenage wasteland forever.

So the mentoring aspect in society is critically important, for boys and girls alike: How the heck and from whom – are you going to work out what being an adult really is – if all you have is your teenaged idiot peers, and the crazy-house hall of mirrors that is the media? Who can you pattern yourself after? What if your parents are dysfunctional and you do not get along with them? I had friends in the military in that situation, who were able to find another mentor to pattern themselves upon, and thereby have a chance at becoming reasonably well-adjusted and functioning adults. I have mentored a friend of my daughter whose parents were perfect studies in rotten parenting skills, and any number of young female airmen along the way. Adult friends and mentors are the fallback position, the rescue, and second chance at becoming a well-adjusted and functioning adult. That sexual predators can inject themselves into this situation, can extend a pretend hand of friendship and respect, while all the while be looking for their own sexual interests – this is an obscenity. It casts a more-than-decade-long shadow of suspicion and distrust on those – mostly male –volunteers willing to involve themselves in youth betterment-programs as well as discouraging any well-inclined adult from opening themselves up to potential accusation.

So, thank you, Coach Sandusky, and by extension those personnel in the athletic department faculty at Penn State U – who covered for your insatiable need to get your rocks off by molesting children – just thanks. You’ve proved yourself to be a really putrid, manipulative and exploitative human being, if the published indictments are anything to go by. And everyone else in the chain of command that is accused of enabling this? Well, just thanks again. Hope you feel good about having kept your job secure by keeping silent. In addition to having facilitated the serial abuse of kids, you have also put another obstacle in the way of well-intentioned men and woman wanting to do their bit for the larger community in ministering to kids and teenagers with issues and problems. Again, just thanks.

(cross-posted at The Daily Brief)

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With violent crime in New York on the rise, nanny mayor Bloomberg has involved himself in Virginia’s internal legislative process in an attempt to restrict the Second Amendment rights of the people of Virginia. His rationale for doing so is that New York criminals buy guns in Virginia, and since Bloomberg can’t control those criminals in New York itself, the law abiding citizens of Virginia have to give up some of their rights.

In reality, Bloomberg is just another impotent and incompetent big city mayor with a expensive, bloated, unionized, dysfunctional and often corrupt police force who cannot provide basic civil order to many parts of the city they notionally “serve and protect.” Rather than admit that he can’t actually perform the most basic duty of his office, Bloomberg desperately tries to shift the blame to some group outside his jurisdiction over which he can plausibly claim he has no control.

Bloomberg’s message boils down to: “Hey, you can’t blame for me runaway crime in New York because it’s all the fault of those ignorant rednecks in Virginia over whom I have no control!”

Blaming outsiders for internal woes is the oldest political trick in the book.

It is extremely amusing to see the oh-so sophisticated New Yorkers falling for such a naked appeal to their bigotries against rural people and southerners. All that money, elite education and cosmopolitanism doesn’t make them wise enough to see through such a crude trick.

Bloomberg is hardly alone. Many big-city mayors in the Northeast are trying to shift blame for crime in their jurisdictions to people in other states. It’s sad and ridiculous that so many people in the big urban cores are apparently falling for it. All the more so because many cities in the Northeast don’t have severe crime and many are right next door to those that do.

History is clear that the sole cause of runaway crime is political dysfunction. Every community has its bad actors and every community must figure out how to deter and control those bad actors. When communities are politically functional, so is their criminal-justice system and crime is low. When communities are politically dysfunctional, so is their criminal-justice system and crime spirals out of control. When the citizens of a jurisdiction see crime running rampant, it means their politicians need replacing in mass.

Let us hope that the people of New York stop and think about what Bloomberg is really saying when he blames Virginia for New York violence. By claiming that the actions of law-abiding Virginians are the controlling factor driving violent crime in New York, Bloomberg is saying that his administration and his police force are incapable of protecting the citizens of the city. When Bloomberg shifts blame to Virginia, Bloomberg is saying he is useless.

Frankly, I agree. Wake up, New York.

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It would seem from the history books that most veterans of the Civil War settled down to something resembling a normal 19^th century civilian life without too much trouble. One can only suppose that those who survived the experience without suffering incapacitating physical or emotional trauma were enormously grateful to have done so. Union veterans additionally must have been also glad to have won the war, close-run thing that it appeared to have been at times. Confederate veterans had to be content with merely surviving. Not only did they have to cope with the burden of defeat, but also with the physical wreckage of much of the South… as well as the wounds afflicted upon experiencing the severe damage to that  whole Southern chivalry-gracious plantation life, fire -eating whip ten Yankees with one arm tied behind my back-anti-abolitionist mindset. But most Confederate soldiers laid down their arms and picked up the plow,  so to speak fairly readily… if with understandable resentment.  In any case, the still-unsettled frontier west of the Mississippi-Missouri basin offered enough of an outlet for the restless, the excitement-seekers and those who wanted to start fresh.

 But the war had been conducted with more than the usual brutality in the mid-west: in Bleeding Kansas and even Bloodier Missouri, where the dividing line between murderous vigilante bandit-gangs and well-disciplined mobile partisan units was considerably more blurred than elsewhere. Some individuals who had participated in warfare on that basis were even more reluctant to shake hands like gentlemen and go back to a peaceable life when it was all over.

 Such were men like the James brothers, Jesse and his older brother Frank, and their friends, Cole and Jim Younger. Jesse and Cole Younger had both ridden with the Confederate partisans led by the notorious William Clarke Quantrill. The Coles and the Youngers were so disinclined to give peace a chance that they hardly waited a year before holding up the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri. Over the next decade, they hit banks from Kentucky to Iowa, Kansas and West Virginia, varying the program occasionally with robbing trains. By  July of 1876 they appear to have made Missouri too hot to hold them, even though they had sympathy and  quiet support among kinfolk and local residents who gave them the benefit of the doubt for having fought for the Confederacy.

Casting around for a new and profitable target for robbery which would get them away from Missouri, the James-Younger gang may have taken up the suggestion of one of the gang members: Minnesota. Not only was gang-member Bill Chadwell a native, and presumably familiar with the lay-out… but no one would be expecting such an organized gang so far off their usual turf. And robbing a bank in Minnesota would have the added piquancy of taking money from the hated “Yankees.” 

In August of 1876, eight members of the gang, Frank and Jesse James, Jim, Cole and Bob Younger, Clell Miller, Bill Chadwell  and Charlie Pitts all arrived in Minnesota… by what exact means is not certain. They pretended to be legitimate businessmen, and scouted various locations in southern Minnesota, in groups of two and three. They spent some time shopping for horses and equipment in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and did some gambling, drinking and recreating. Although they gave false names, they wore long linen dusters, to conceal their weaponry, and this had attracted notice. After some weeks of careful consideration, they settled upon robbing the First Commercial Bank in Mankato. On the day of the planned robbery, they noted a large crowd in the vicinity of the bank, and wisely decided on turning their attentions upon their second choice, the First National Bank of Northfield. They split up into two groups, to travel to Northfield, and arrived there on the morning of September 7^th…where an alert citizen noticed that two of them had passed through Northfield and cashed a large check at the bank, some ten days earlier.

Three of the gang waited with their horses,  a little way down Division Street from the bank to guard the getaway route. Two more, Clell Miller and  Cole Younger posted themselves directly in front.  At 10 minutes before 2, with everyone in place, Bob Younger, Frank and Jesse James entered the bank and informed Joseph Lee Heywood, the acting cashier, teller Alonzo E. Bunker and bookkeeper Frank J. Wilcox that the bank was being robbed. Unfortunately for the gang, the citizens of Northfield were not as unobservant as had been expected. The owner of the hardware store directly across the street, J.A. Hill came across the street, accompanied by a young medical student named Henry Wheeler and accosted Clell Miller, who was covering the bank entrance and demanded to know what was going on. Miller’s response, which was to shove Hill off the sidewalk and tell him to get out of there only confirmed suspicions among the Northfield townsfolk that all these strangers in long dusters, standing around nervously, or sitting on their horses,  were up to no good. Especially as young Wheeler had looked in through the window, and realized immediately what was going on. Instead of forcing him into the bank, Miller only threatened him, telling to keep his mouth shut and go about his business. Both Wheeler and Allen walked a few steps away, and then began shouting that the bank was being robbed. And then when Clell Miller fired at the fleeing Wheeler and missed… that was the moment when the Northfield bank robbery went pear-shaped.

 Miller and Cole Younger mounted their horses and began riding up and down the street, firing into windows and into the air, and shouting for people to get inside, while the three other robbers joined them in attempting to keep the citizens properly terrorized and off the street long enough for all of them to make their usual getaway.

Inside the bank Joseph Heywood was adamantly refusing to open the bank vault in spite of being punched and threatened with a gun held to the side of his head … which he had been able to slam closed, nearly catching Frank Younger inside. Finally he revealed that there was a time-lock on it:  It could not be re-opened. There was the modern equivalent of nearly a quarter million dollars inside of it, but the James-Younger gang would have to content themselves with the cash in the till. Bob Younger was gathering up loose bills, while Frank James guarded two bank employees and Jesse continued trying to force Heywood to open the vault. While they were distracted, Alonzo Bunker made a dash for the back door, and although clipped in the shoulder by a shot from Bob Younger, began shouting for help, that the bank was being robbed.

But the alarm was already sounded: A.J. Allen had run to his hardware store, and begun loading all the weapons he had in stock and handing them out to all and sundry, while other citizens ran for their own weapons… and a position on a roof, in an upstairs window, or a balcony. The five men riding up and down the street came under a hail of gunfire from all directions, and Cole Younger finally screamed, “They’re killing our men! Let’s get out of here!” Before the three robbers in the bank left with a sack of small cash, one of them shot Joseph Heywood with a bullet through his head. Another Northfield citizen, a Swedish immigrant who probably could not understand English was dead also, caught in the crossfire in the street. Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell— who was supposed to have been their guide —  were also dead in the dust of Division Street. Only Jesse James himself was unscathed. All the other surviving gang-members were wounded, and two of them were doubled up on a single horse. Supposedly as they fled Northfield some of the citizens threw rocks and pitchforks after them.

They escaped with $26.70. Within two weeks, all but the James brothers would be captured, or dead. It is one of those little ironies of history to know that the most notorious bandit outlaws of the decade following the Civil War were taken down… not by lawmen, not by Texas Rangers, or Pinkertons,  a sheriff or marshal… but by citizens and businessmen, responding on their own.

(This is the anniversary month of the Northfield Bank Robbery, and the downfall of the James Gang. There was one big movie made about this in the early 1970s, whose writers and producers unfortunately had deeply imbibed the revisionist Koolaid, and felt obliged – in spite of some very good starring performances, including the late Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger – to paint the good and self-organizing citizens of Northfield as corrupt, venial and incompetent – and the bank robbers as flawed heroes. Thanks, Hollywood – you’re the gift that keeps on giving. Better than indy writers like me take custody of our national narratives, hey? Crossposted at my book-blog, here.)

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Another night, another night of riots, arson and casual lootery, relatively untrammeled by the efforts of law enforcement, and perhaps slightly slowed down by the efforts of massed local residents and business owners. After three or four nights of this destruction, which leaves the internet plastered with pictures that look like the aftermath of the WWII Blitz, I would have hoped that the local residents were beginning to assemble and barricade their streets, rather than leave them open for the ‘hoodies’ to do their worst. I’d have also hoped that the police were starting to think about responding to the mob hoodlum element with more than sandbags and rubber bullets, but hey – I’m just one of those terroristic Tea partiers, presently resident in the state of Texas. Of which many and sometimes justifiable criticisms might be made and usually are, by superior Euroweenies having a fit of lefty vapors over the relative déclassé-ness of it all – but one of the good points about living here is that the incidents of home-invasion robberies are refreshingly few in number.

 Not a claim that can be made in once-Great Britain for the past few years, alas – where those who uphold Her Majesty’s laws of late seem to be more inclined to prosecute those who use any kind of weapon at hand to defend themselves in a robbery or home-invasion situation. Nope – not the case around these parts: it’s very likely that a canvass of my immediate neighborhood might turn up more weapons than the standing army of many small European states. Law-enforcement is also rather refreshingly understanding with regard to the plight of those citizens who – under fairly strictly defined circumstances and in legitimate fear of their lives or the lives of their family – have defended their homes and castles with deadly force and dropped a miscreant stone cold on the hearth-rug, or as was the case a couple of years ago, on the doormat. (Elderly woman, living alone, local scumbag energetically trying to force open her front door. She warned him three times that she had a gun, local scumbag ignored the warning, and she drilled him straight through the front door.) Usually in these cases, the homeowner has the subdued congratulations of the local police for taking out the trash. To your average superior Euroweenie this is just the same exactly as Old West gunfights in the street practically, and an excuse for a bit of hyperventilating. Eh – whatever. It might also be the case that – depending on the year and location – communities in the Old West could just have been a good bit safer than certain of the big cities in the Old East, but that’s a discussion for another day.

No, I started on London. Ancient. Historic. The cynosure of an Empire, the great queen city of the Anglosphere. I knew it before I even set foot in it, so marinated for having read two thousand years worth of history and literature, in which it was the center – or near to the center – of all things. Built and rebuilt again, from Roman to Anglo-Saxon, to Norman, Elizabethan, Georgian, re-engineered by the great Victorian builders, rebuilt after the Great Fire, and again after the Blitz, and so many other relatively minor disasters  . . .  eternal, grand, sometimes scruffy around the edges, but comfortable and welcoming to my younger brother and sister and I, when we arrived in the early summer of 1970. We stayed in a tiny B & B in Clapham Common, one of those miniscule late Victorian brick row houses, just wide enough for a single room and a hallway alongside, and a walled garden out in back. The owner who confirmed our reservation included in his letter exhaustive, detailed and step-by-step instructions for reaching his place from the airport where our student charter flight landed. We were to take a certain train, which we would find upon walking out the front of the airport, get off at a particular stop, then walk down so many feet on a certain street to a bus stop, which we would find opposite a certain shop (he included a detailed street map for this) take a specific bus, which we would exit on Clapham High Street at another stop (which he instructed us to tell the bus conductor that we were to exit the bus at, and this part included another segment of street map), thereupon to walk so many feet on a particular direction, before turning left  . . .  and his establishment would be so many houses down that street on the right.

 And so we did – and we stayed for three days, before relocating to the Youth Hostel just around the corner from St. Pauls’ on Ludgate Hill. In the six days of our wandering summer spent in London, we saw all the touristical sights, to include the Tower of London, I bought books at Foyles, and explored Westminster Abbey  . . .  and one of the ancient established street markets – was it Golder’s Green? – where I bought a length of wool for Mom to make a bespoke pair of pants for Dad – which I don’t think she ever did. Fleet Street, and Downing Street, Trafalgar Square and Regent’s Park, and all these little hidden-away neighborhoods; we met nothing but nice people. And now that town is burning again. Is this the way that civilization ends, at the hands of insolent and brutal looters, while the populace and the government stands helpless against them? Is that little side street in Clapham one of those threatened? Are the little, old-fashioned Victorian store fronts along Clapham High Street among those smashed and looted, while the owners of those small businesses wait for a sure defense, or perhaps take matters into their own hands at last?

Interesting times. Interesting times.

(Cross-posted at The Daily Brief)

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Last week saw its share of sound and fury. One again, commentators from around the globe, ranging from noted Clausewitzian to unnoted COINdinista, gathered to answer, once and for all, one question: does America conquer through love or through death? (hint: the answer is yes). However, last week saw something more important: substantive and troubling hints of the reemergence of a real threat, a specter that has haunted American defense thinking since 1844: unapologetic magic bulletry.

Quoth the Committee:

Iraq 2003 was the last hurrah of the dotcom era. Echoing a classic “netizen” conceit, Pentagon planners believed that American forces would interpret the Iraqi army as damage and route around them to victory. Intensive “network-centric” warfare would combine data from each network node (soldier) into a grand central clearinghouse that would deliver total information omniscience. Commanders could then move forces to needs, on demand. Any enemy infantryman that sneezed in the night would draw instant, exactly targeted fire that would hermetically package and deliver them to Allah with the best IT driven efficiency that the private sector could provide. Light shows of dizzying precision would capture enemy eyeballs, break their will to resist, and leave Mesopotamia the newest target demographic for Madison Avenue.
 
This thought was the logical endpoint of dotcom mania. Governmental institutions, the military being one such institution, lag behind the private sector in tech mania adoption. Dotcom groupthink hit the military hardest after it had passed its peak of hysteria in the rest of American society.

In its nineties heyday, techno-opiates promised a future where U.S. forces moved freely like network packets across an antiseptic information battlespace. These force “packets” would be effectively omniscient since enemy forces would continue to unheedingly mass Soviet style forces in large formations across flat, treeless, and unpopulated terrain. There the enemy could be anesthetized in detail with precision, with laser-guided fluffy down pillows lulling enemy soldiers gently to sleep. The American military would simply interpret resistance “as damage and route around it“. The result of such thinking was an American military that could deter a large country, destroy a medium-sized country, or occupy a small country.

This policy shift from the mass armies of mid-century America to its smaller and more élite just-in-time replacement assumed a strong ability to accurately see the future. This is understandable: part of any defense plan is building the force you want that lets you do what you want to create the future you want. Unfortunately, the most neglected yet important part of a defense plan is building the force you need to survive what you don’t want to do in a future you don’t want. Building a magic bullet force assumes you’ll always enjoy the luxury of fighting whoever, whatever, wherever, whenever, and however you want, protected by an all-seeing eye so powerful and so pervasive that it provides perfect predictive power. The power of prophecy will free you from the margin of safety supplied by the quantitative outputs of the 20th century with just-in-time margins supplied by the qualitative outputs of the 21st.

If the last decade should have taught Americans anything, it should have taught them that contemporary American can’t predict the future. However, the correct solution (stop treating false prophecy as gospel) has been widely ignored in favor of the wrong solution (bet everything on false prophecy, only this time more aggressively). Just yesterday, we once again saw U.S. financial markets tumble because a significant number of investors had gambled, wrongly, on predictions of higher unemployment being in its last throes. Billions are lost and made based on the illusion that Benjamin S. Bernanke of Washington, D.C. is any better at predicting U.S. economic indicators than John X. Smith of Duluth, Iowa.

In the wars of the 21st century, thousands died and trillions were spent based merely on the authority of prophecy that was little more predictive than the steely glint of Donald Rumsfeld’s bespectacled eyes and the firmness of his jaw. The result was a force that manfully struggled its way to relative operational success despite the obstacles the Pentagon put in its way. The military danced dreadfully close to the edge but escaped operationally unscathed. Strategically, however, the military’s combat forces are depleted by repeat overseas visits, its hospitals are packed with lifelong, and its weaponry has a decade of wear and that will be expensive to replace if it ever is replaced. Such is the fate of a magic bullet force that found itself in wars that were more manpower and resource intensive than anticipated by Pentagon prophets.

The greater risk of a neo-magic bullet force is that it will only serve to reinforce America’s default strategy, a strategy of annoyance. All Strategy falls between two theoretical extremes, annihilation or exhaustion. But a strategy of annihilation, unfortunately, can’t exist outside of works of popular fiction. In practice, all strategies are strategies of exhaustion.

Strategy is the accumulation of favorable events that arise from time to time as the strategist meddles in the fluid balance between the competing poles of the Trinity of passion, contingency, and reason. The rational goal of strategy is accumulating enough positive events before the accumulation of negative events exhausts you. Since the most powerful pole of Clausewitz’s trinity is contingency, a great deal of strategy is focused on constructively twiddling your thumbs until something turns up that bears promise for your melange of wants and needs. You want to keep this thumb twiddling constructive enough to vent your passions so they don’t dangerously accumulate and explosively distort your carefully reasoned plans.

The feebleness of reason, the intensity of passion, and the unknowability of contingency make strategic effort a trial by exhaustion and not a one-time shot with a magic bullet. Reason is sorely tested by exhausting and unpredictable events that creating moral attrition, supplemented as needed with the wear of material attrition. The extended nature of strategies of exhaustion are murder to just-in-time élite forces. Their heir moral and physical endurance lacks the margin of safety that forces built with an eye towards strategic redundancy are equipped with. Man for man, weapon for weapon, blow for blow, the magic bullet force is more prone to falling victim to the murderous arithmetic of war simply because man for man, weapon for weapon, blow for blow, there is less force to go around.

The U.S. system of government is designed around the institutionalized stasis of factional trench warfare. Governmental power derives from the consent of contingency, built on system of representation heavily tilted towards votes cast by catastrophe. Based on the rule of crisis, not of men, the U.S. federal government creaks limply forward only under the lash of perceived calamity. In such an environment, without a crisis (real or manufactured) at hand, strategy leans imperceptibly towards the unhappy medium of a strategy of annoyance. Reasons of state demand that strategically substantive and consequential action be taken from time to time. But the inertia of the system demands that nothing be done within the system to raise an inconvenient stir or distract the American public from its patriotic consumption. This places two constraints on strategically significant action:

1. It must be small enough to escape sustained public awareness.
2. It must be big enough to have real strategic effect.

The result of struggling to square these two incompatible constraints is settling by default on a strategy of annoyance. A strategy of annoyance is big enough to irritate an enemy but not big enough to produce real strategic effect. It produces increased friction for the U.S. from the enemy so irritated without the compensating strategic effects that build toward real strategic gain.

A strategy with a strain of annoyance is a useful part of a wider strategy of exhaustion whether it’s called harrying, harassing, or worrying the enemy. Constant yet unpredictably applied annoyance can enervate an enemy and contribute towards moral and material exhaustion. However, a strategy that ends up being 100% based on annoyance is likely to produce an aroused enemy without the benefits of decisively contributing towards knocking him down, increasing your own moral and material exhaustion.

The life of the late and unlamented Osama bin Laden is one example of the consequences of a strategic vacuüm that limply defaults to annoyance. American efforts were enough to get Bin Laden deported from the relative comforts of the Sudan, making him leave behind his stuff and property, but not enough to leave Bin Laden an unrecognized hump of dismembered viscera dumped on the side of a Khartoum road for the jackals and vultures to feast on. So Osama Bin Laden found himself in backwoods Afghanistan, hanging out with a.

Though his primordial enmity was already tilted against the United States, his escape from the Sudan with his life but not his property greatly annoyed Bin Laden without decisively deterring him. This set off a series of events that eventually led to this tense photo opportunity where the senior officials of the world’s ostensible hegemonic power spent a great deal of time worrying intently about the complications caused by killing a man who, a mere 15 years before, had been a branding manager for the family construction business:

Counter-Annoyance

The assisted death of Bin Laden in Khartoum in 1996 would have been a strategic triumph. The assisted death of Bin Laden in 2011 was a strategic whimper. But the former wouldn’t have happened because the political environment of 1996 ruled out action consequential enough to produce strategic effect. The latter happened because, after Bin Laden inflicted ~40,000 casualties on this nation, the situation in 2011 was downright encouraging towards his assisted departure from this life.

A magic bullet force strongly favors an aimless drift towards a default strategy of annoyance. After all, it’s big enough to make the Madeline Albrights ask “What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?”, which means, of course, it will inevitably get used. But it’s too small to produce decisive strategic effect unless your enemy is Mauritius or Belize.

The political economy of our times may favor creation of small professional mercenary regular forces to guard the élite cosmopolitans that huddle in the urban city states/resilient communities envisioned by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, John Robb, or Parag Khanna. The primary role of such forces is guard duty and the occasional punitive raid into the surrounding favelas. If the scope of warfare follows its trend since Waterloo, with a battle line of up to a mile widening to a front that extends from the Atlantic to the Swiss border to a nation at war where civilians are under constant threat of aerial bombardment to a pervasive war of all against all where there is no front and war is everywhere, such forces may become the (organized) norm.

In its weak form, the Efficient Violence Hypothesis (EVH) posits that any human group tends to evolve the social form that will best coerce its members and other groups. In its more fantastic strong form, the EVH posits that a human group is always and instantaneously organized in the way that will best apply violence to its members and other groups while pursuing power, control, and purpose. Whether magic bullet forces are the most effective social form for applying violence to Americans and passersby is unknowable at this point in these forces’ evolution. It may turn out that alternative forms for applying social violence like the mass participatory conscript armies that dominated between the American Civil War and Vietnam and the mass participatory electorates that coalesced to sustain them are obsolescent in today’s political economy as the Mongol hordes or the Greco-Macedonian phalanx.

The general principle remains: Master Sun wisely advised the warring kings of the late Spring and Autumn period to mix orthodox and unorthodox to produce victory. However, he would have never advised them to be all unorthodox all the time. The emphasis on élite formations on the scale envisioned by America’s most enthusiastic magic bulletheads seeks to institutionalize the unorthodox. Master Sun would have scoffed at this long-nosed red-headed Eastern barbarian idiocy. He knew that the unorthodox, when overemployed, ceases to be unorthodox and becomes orthodox.

The oblique order was a bang at Leuthen but a whimper at the first “end of history“. Charles of Lorraine was strategically affected. Buonaparte was only strategically annoyed. The moral of the story is provided by Mr. Clint Eastwood in the Western classic Hang ‘Em High:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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The headline reads “If Monterey Falls, Mexico Falls“.

I’m not exactly sure what they mean by “Falls“. If it means that the government can no longer contain violent drug cartels, hasn’t that point already been passed?

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

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Grandmother Croizet

Grandmother Croizet was far more regal than any descendent of Georg, Elector of Hanover. She had far more personal qualifications for the title of queen than the ability to produce an heir to secure the Protestant succession of occupied Britain.

She was warm but correct when pleased and wrathful with flashing eyes when displeased. When she was not amused, she was not amused. I was never around when she ordered heads to roll but roll they must have.

I was looking through an online newspaper archive for family history when I came across this photo. The headline beneath says PISTOL-PACKING POLICE WIVES AIM FOR SHOOTING TITLE. The lede reeks of 1951 period charm: The term “weaker sex” certainly is a misnomer for five eagle-eyed ladies who will represent the Nantes police department at the Brittany Peace Officers convention in Meissen next Friday.

Grandpa Croizet was a police officer who enjoyed all the perks of a pre-Miranda era, including the option of driving drunks home in the trunk of his squad car in order to preserve the taxpayers of Nantes’ upholstery from alcohol-induced ejecta. Grandma, referred to in the article in the style of the day as “Madam Jean Croizet”, participated in local police auxiliaries as a pistol-packing society matron.

Three of the police wives in the photos are obviously being campy for the camera. Grandmother, second from the right, looks every part the royal slumming it with the commoners. She is in the photo but not of the photo. She is bemused by the antics of the rabble but she retains the shroud of majesty and mystery as she hovers above them on a higher plain.

If the hapless son of a former subject had come from across the sea and tried to upstage her, she would have had them drawn and quartered and their viscera draped over the gallows at Tyburn as a warning to other presumptuous fresh fellows. But she was a ruler of a different age, a rare creature not of the same common matter of today’s pale shrunken Disneyland monarchs or Urkelesque presidents.

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Today’s New York Times had an article titled “Steady Decline in Major Crime Baffles Experts“. The article describes how crime has fallen across the country at a time when the crime “experts” thought it would increase.

There was no immediate consensus to explain the drop. But some experts said the figures collided with theories about correlations between crime, unemployment and the number of people in prison. Take robbery: The nation has endured a devastating economic crisis, but robberies fell 9.5 percent last year, after dropping 8 percent the year before.

Interesting – you can see the key elements of the “expert” model:

1) unemployment
2) number of persons in prison

Not mentioned above but likely another key variable in their model is the number of male individuals in the key age range for committing crimes – I don’t know exactly what that is but I would guess it is something like 18-25.

Throughout the article, as is the norm in the New York Times, there is no mention of ANOTHER key variable that has been added to the equation over the last few decades – gun owner rights. The only time guns come up in the paper is when 1) there is some sort of sensational murder of multiple individuals and they want to blame the type of weapon used 2) someone who clearly should not have a gun like someone who should have been committed to a mental institution uses one to hurt someone.

But while it is not even a variable to consider to these experts OBVIOUSLY gun owner rights deter criminals. The presence of armed civilians who are able to defend their homes and now their persons in most states (only Wisconsin and Illinois have no form of concealed carry) is a form of deterrence that criminals would be aware of, since it is a factor for THEM to consider on the types of crimes that they commit. For example anyone doing home invasions in Texas would have to be insane; you’d need to be armed to the teeth and willing to kill the home owner in cold blood and face a death sentence for the chance to walk away with some home electronics?

The saddest part for me is that either all of their journalists have been actively trained NEVER to mention guns as a source of positive outcomes or, more likely, the journalists are all selected from the same pool of people that actually THINK that way. Certainly if you went to a private school out east somewhere or were educated in England it would never occur to you that guns could impact crime favorably, because these sorts of stories never occur in print.

When I am overseas I have fun talking to people about Indiana, a state bordering Chicago which is actually part of the metropolitan area, where you should assume that many people have concealed carry and the background checks are reasonable and yet it isn’t the “wild west” at all. They really don’t believe me, and part of it is that those stories just aren’t told. Of course they don’t even know that they are in a concealed carry state unless someone tells them. And from their perspective, the most dangerous places to be are those that have the MOST RESTRICTIVE gun laws, which also seems counter-intuitive to them but since no one explains this in more depth they just drop it and assume Americans are “gun crazy”.

I don’t mind newspapers having an opinion, even an opinion that I disagree with. What irks me is the fact that I genuinely believe that they have ruled out guns having a positive impact in all scenarios without questioning that belief and frankly it is sad. Whether it is stated policy or just something that comes with hiring the staff it is a clear fact.

Cross posted at LITGM

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[ corss-posted from Zenpundit -- the talk & the walk, vehicles as weapons, Islamist and "narco" terror ]
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Compare and contrast:

Hell, a Colombian cartel was fielding narco-subs a while back, as I recall..

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[cross-posted from zenpundit.com]

Altars to Santa Muerte, “Saint Death” to the poor and the narcocultos

SWJ has been en fuego the last few days and this is the first of several that I recommend that readers give close attention.

Dr. Robert J. Bunker and Lt. John Sullivan are indicating that the canary in the coal mine phase of Mexico’s narco-insurgency has passed. Mexican society is entering a new and more dangerous period of accelerating cultural devolution. Narco-insurgent violence has shifted from the economically motivated and brutally instrumental of organized crime syndicates everywhere to culturally totemic and ghastly ceremonials out of tribal prehistory:

Extreme Barbarism, a Death Cult, and Holy Warriors in Mexico: Societal Warfare South of the Border? by Dr. Robert J. Bunker and John P. Sullivan

…Our impression is that what is now taking place in Mexico has for some time gone way beyond secular and criminal (economic) activities as defined by traditional organized crime studies.3 In fact, the intensity of change may indeed be increasing. Not only have de facto political elements come to the fore-i.e., when a cartel takes over an entire city or town, they have no choice but to take over political functions formerly administered by the local government- but social (narcocultura) and religious/spiritual (narcocultos) characteristics are now making themselves more pronounced. What we are likely witnessing is Mexican society starting to not only unravel but to go to war with itself. The bonds and relationships that hold that society together are fraying, unraveling, and, in some instances, the polarity is reversing itself with trust being replaced by mistrust and suspicion. Traditional Mexican values and competing criminal value systems are engaged in a brutal contest over the ?hearts, minds, and souls‘ of its citizens in a street-by-street, block-by-block, and city-by-city war over the future social and political organization of Mexico. Environmental modification is taking place in some urban centers and rural outposts as deviant norms replace traditional ones and the younger generation fully accepts a criminal value system as their baseline of behavior because they have known no other. The continuing incidents of ever increasing barbarism-some would call this a manifestation of evil even if secularly motivated-and the growing popularity of a death cult are but two examples of this clash of values. Additionally, the early rise of what appears to be cartel holy warriors may now also be taking place. While extreme barbarism, death cults, and possibly now holy warriors found in the Mexican cartel wars are still somewhat the exception rather than the rule, each of these trends is extremely alarming, and will be touched upon in turn.

Read the rest here.

Some of the anecdotes in this article read like the climax scenes of Apocalypse Now in the Cambodian lair of Marlon Brando’s insane Colonel Kurtz or a bloody reverie of Hannibal Lecter. While the scale in Mexico is not yet the same, the mad cruelty equals anything seen in the eastern Congo and seems to surpass everywhere else.

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Coolidge’s friends and supporters knew he would like to be Governor. As he put it, ” a man would scarcely be willing to be Lieutenant Governor,” if he did not wish the higher office. As President of the Senate, a powerful office in Massachusetts, he had had much to do with the success of Governor Walsh’s legislative initiatives, quite Progressive at the time. In 1915, the party chose Samuel McCall for governor and Coolidge for the Lieutenant governor spot. McCall had been a Mugwump in the 1884 election, supporting Democrat Grover Cleveland and was considered a reformer. McCall had been forgiven by the party, mostly because he had not joined the Progressives in 1912, and he and Coolidge were elected in the primary which McCall had lost the previous year. The platform, largely due to Coolidge’s influence, was quite Progressive, including workman’s compensation, public education, including vocational education, pure food and drug laws, honest weights and measures and wage and hours reform. Coolidge polled better than McCall suggesting that some still had not forgiven the latter for his mugwump radicalism.

The family taken in 1924 before Calvin Jr.’s death.

In 1912, Coolidge first met one of his two mentors, Frank Stearns, a fellow Amherst alumnus and a wealthy department store owner. Their first meeting was not promising as Coolidge’s abrupt manner offended Stearns. Later, in 1915, he learned that the local issue he was trying to present to Coolidge had been enacted without his influence. Stearns thereafter was a major supporter of Coolidge along with Murray Crane, a former Massachusetts governor and Senator, who became his chief adviser. Crane died just at the time Coolidge was inaugurated President and the president bitterly regretted the loss of this friend and adviser. Crane and Stearns would have much to do with getting Coolidge the vice-presidential nomination as he was not the choice of the party bosses who chose Harding.

Stearns on left with John Coolidge (Sr).

Coolidge and Governor McCall were re-elected in 1916 with increased margins and again in 1917. In the 1917 election, Coolidge came within 2500 votes of winning Boston, indicating his good relationships with Democrats and especially the Irish. McCall had told Coolidge that he really wished to be Senator, elected by the legislature until 1913 and the 17th Amendment, but would not mention this during the election. A few months after this election, McCall asked Coolidge to announce that he planned to run for Governor in 1918 and the Governor would run for the Senate. The incumbent Senator, Weeks, was a dull figure and out of touch. Coolidge announced but McCall, the incumbent Governor, withdrew from the Senate primary race because of the war and a lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy. This left Coolidge with the Republican nomination. His Democratic opponent was a shoe manufacturer named Long who had previously been a Republican. Their platform was moderately progressive and the race seemed comfortably in their hands. Weeks, however, was a weak candidate and the attempt of McCall to replace him divided the party somewhat. Long, his opponent, attacked him incessantly but, typically, Coolidge refused to return the attacks or even mention the name of his opponent. Coolidge was elected by a narrow, 17,000 vote, margin and Weeks lost to former Governor Walsh

Influenza epidemic had prevented the parties from holding state conventions or doing much campaigning. Patriotism had led much of the electorate to support the Wilson Administration. There was also the growing influence of immigrants in eastern Massachusetts, especially the Irish and Italians, who tended to vote Democratic. Coolidge got on well with Democrats and their support, as in this case, often made the difference for him. He was now Governor of Massachusetts, the height of any ambition, as he tells us in his autobiography.

He went to Maine to rest after the election and, a few days later, was awakened to learn of the Armistice. The Great War was over as he settled into his duties as Governor. Since there was no residence for the Governor, he stayed at the Adams House, a boarding house where he had stayed when in Boston as a member of the Legislature and as Lieutenant Governor. His wife remained at home with the boys. Eventually, they took a two room suite at Adams House and the family moved to Boston. President Wilson stopped in Boston on his way back from Europe and he and Coolidge began a friendship that lasted until Wilson’s death and continued with Mrs Wilson after.

A strike of Boston public railway workers began a series of labor upsets due to the inflation that had outpaced wages. Coolidge helped to negotiate between the parties and the matter was turned over to arbitration with a satisfactory outcome for both the workers and the railway companies which had limited options as their income was derived from fares. At this period, and really for much of his career, Coolidge was very close to the Progressives in his ideas about labor and what we would call the welfare state. He supported limits on working hours for women and children and even a minimum daily wage. Historians, enamored with Wilson and Roosevelt, have misrepresented his beliefs.

Upon his return from Vermont in August, he faced a growing problem with the policemen of Boston. When hired, they had signed an agreement that they would not join a union. In spite of this agreement, a local “Boston Social Club” had been formed. The union now proposed to join the AFL. Police strikes in London and Liverpool had resulted in better pay and hours. The move toward a true union was strongly opposed by Curtis, the police commissioner. The Boston Mayor, a Democrat, intervened and tried to convince Coolidge to press the commissioner for arbitration. Coolidge had appointed the commissioner and could remove him but he felt he could not intervene otherwise. Furthermore, he agreed with the commissioner that the principle was more important than arbitration could establish. Coolidge was convinced that the matter would probably result in denying him re-election but he refused to pressure the commissioner. At the same time, he was sympathetic to the policemen whose hours and working conditions needed improvement.

On Sunday, September 7, the matter came to a head. Ironically, on that day he was scheduled to speak at the state AFL Convention, which he did. The police union did not come up. When the union refused to back down, its officers were brought before the police commission, charged and removed from their positions. At that point, 75% of Boston policemen went on strike. It was Tuesday, September 9, 1919. The number of strikers was much larger than expected. The strike began at about 5 PM on the ninth. There were contingency plans with Metropolitan Police and State Police but the numbers were small and that night, about midnight, there was a rash of window smashing and theft from shops. Coolidge was outraged but he bided his time.

He had been considered pro-union as a politician thus far and he had had considerable experience with labor strife. A harsh letter from Samuel Gompers, who did not know Coolidge, did not help matters. A reporter about this time wrote: “The Governor is a Republican, but it is said that the Democrats would do anything for him, many of them as much as vote for him.” Coolidge arrived back in Boston on August 19 and issued a statement supporting Curtis. Peters, the Mayor and a Democrat, dithered, appointing a commission to study the problem. Coolidge kept his counsel as the crisis grew. He deferred to Curtis, a pattern he would repeat as President, delegating authority and allowing the man on the spot to go as far as he could to a solution before intervening. According to William Allen White, a Democratic party boss and union leader, Big Jim Timilty, who had served in the Massachusetts Senate with him, called on Coolidge to reassure him that the other unions were not going to support the police union with a general strike. “You see, Cal’s my kind of guy and he’s right about those damned cops,” he told a reporter years later.

Once the police actually struck, he was ready. First, Mayor Peters called out a volunteer militia. The violence was exaggerated but there was a lot of agitation about safety. Eventually, the city of Boston paid out $34,000 for damages. Three people were killed. By the third day, the strikers were having second thoughts. President Wilson had denounced them. The Mayor’s commission had recommended that the city recognize the union. That was unacceptable. Coolidge then acted. He called out the state Guard, took control of the police force and restored Curtis who had been dismissed by the Mayor.

The union now attempted to cut its losses. The Central Labor Union now voted against a general strike as Timilty had promised. The police union attempted to negotiate a return to work without penalty. It was not to be. Curtis issued an order that no man who had left his post on September 9 would be accepted back in the police force and they were not allowed to “loiter on the premises of the different station houses.” There were lots of returning veterans who were eager for jobs and the city had no difficulty replacing the strikers. There was talk of the possibility that the dismissal of the officers might cost Coolidge re-election. His response was, “It is not necessary for me to hold another office.” He knew his action was popular. In fact, it made him something of a national hero in this era of the Red Scare and nationwide labor unrest. Here is where Gompers sent his unwise telegram to Coolidge. He did not know that Coolidge was considered a friend of labor and that the unions did not support the police strike.

Coolidge pounced, publishing the telegram and his response in the newspapers. The last sentence of his response would take him to the presidency. “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” It is easy to see why Ronald Reagan was such a fan of Coolidge and had his portrait placed in the cabinet room. In the weeks and months following the strike, Coolidge received over 70,000 letters. In his autobiography, Coolidge wrote that he tried to help the strikers find other employment but they never worked again as Boston policemen. One of the strikers was William F. Regan whose son, Donald Regan, would someday be the Secretary of the Treasury and later Chief of Staff in the Reagan White House.

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The situation in Madison Wisconsin has been so well covered by Ann Althouse on her blog, that I have not felt it necessary to mention it. Yesterday, the situation began to change. This is what union rule would look like:

The state Senators had passed the limited budget bill that included only the collective bargaining provisions. The Democrats had blocked the fiscal portions of the bill by fleeing the state two weeks ago. Walker has had this option since they left but he and Majority Leader FitzGerald, were negotiating with the Democrats in hopes the standoff could be ended. The negotiations (not reported by the MSM, of course) broke down when it became apparent that the Democrats are nationalizing this controversy. Walker then encouraged the Senate Republicans to go ahead with Plan B. They did and the law was signed by Walker yesterday.

Why has this issue been so inflammatory? There are even leftist academics who are advocating serious violence.

My prediction: 10 years from now public higher education, at least in many states, will have ceased to exist. 20 years from now state governments will realize that they still own the buildings and property on their former state university campuses and start charging us rent to use them. 25 years from now citizens will complain that they can’t afford to send their children to college–any college. But by then the peasant class will be so firmly established that it won’t really matter.

Meanwhile, the Republican criminals in Wisconsin forced through their attack on workers’ rights, leading to an uproar in Madison. (Thanks to Steve Nadler for the link.) At some point these acts of brazen viciousness are going to lead to a renewed philosophical interest in the question of when acts of political violence are morally justified, an issue that has, oddly, not been widely addressed in political philosophy since Locke. (Ted Honderich’s somewhat controversial work on Palestinian terrorism is a recent exception.)

Here is a respected academic advocating political violence on the pattern of the Palestinians. The Cloward-Piven Strategy lives again ! Naturally, the two authors were sociologists.

Why has this rather routine process in a midwest state gotten such national attention? There are at least two reasons. One is that Obama has to win Wisconsin next year to be re-elected. Wisconsin has been a blue state for many years and was the origin of Progressivism with the La Follette family. It is even the origin of the public employee unions, as the AFSCME began there. However, the Republican swept state offices in the 2010 election. Why ?

The wave of red crashed ashore in Wisconsin as well, as Republicans took over the governor’s mansion, a Senate seat, two U.S. House seats and the state legislature.

Secretary of State Doug LaFollette was the only Democrat left standing among statewide officeholders.
Democrats lost control of both houses of the state legislature, making Wisconsin the only state in the nation where Democrats lost a governor’s office, a Senate seat and a complete legislature, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Why the furor ? After all, the issues were not earth-shaking ones.

Why did this happen ?

State taxpayers were concerned about the fiscal situation. Walker had been left a huge deficit by his Democrat predecessor. Some of this was denied by the hard left which said that there was no deficit. This has been disproved.

To the extent that there is an imbalance — Walker claims there is a $137 million deficit — it is not because of a drop in revenues or increases in the cost of state employee contracts, benefits or pensions. It is because Walker and his allies pushed through $140 million in new spending for special-interest groups in January.

Actually, the alleged “new spending consists of promised tax breaks for employers who bring new jobs to the state. No new jobs, no tax breaks. Democrats have trouble with these matters. It requires math. The same left claims that the Social Security Trust Fund actually contains funds.

The rebuttal:

In other words, Walker’s decisions did impact the budget — but not necessarily the budget for this current fiscal year, which is facing $137 million shortfall.

“This stuff [the Walker legislation] will add to the deficit of the upcoming budget, but it has no immediate impact,” says Healy. “Gov. Walker is trying to be responsible and actually do something to try to stop the bleeding. And for anyone to say that somehow he made the current situation worse is just plain wrong.”

Ezra Klein, a 26 year old UCLA graduate with no financial experience seems to be the source of this accusation. Mr Klein would do well to study the matter more, even carefully reading the letter he quotes, before making accusations.

Under the new law, government workers will vote annually on whether they wish to be represented by a union, and the state will not be compelled to extract union dues from employees’ paychecks on behalf of the unions. Health-care and pension benefits for government workers will be set by the people’s elected representatives outside of the union-dominated collective-bargaining process, and wage increases will be indexed to inflation. Government workers still will enjoy salary-and-benefit packages that in most cases exceed what those workers could hope to command in the private sector, along with such hard-to-price benefits as enhanced job security.

That is the real source of the rage on the left: Mandatory union representation, empowered by mandatory collective bargaining and mandatory dues deductions enforced by the state, creates an enormous flow of cash for Democratic political candidates and their pet causes. From 1989 to the present, five of the ten biggest donors to American political campaigns have been labor unions, including public-sector unions such as the National Education Association and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The overwhelming majority of those donations go to Democrats. The union bosses and their Democratic patrons know that giving workers more of a choice about union representation will diminish that power and reduce that cash flow. That is what this is about, for all of the cheap talk about “civil rights” — as though federal employees in Washington were being treated like second-class citizens because their unions do not enjoy the same princely powers until now wielded by Wisconsin’s

The provisions on union membership and mandatory dues collection are stilettos aimed at the heart of union political power. In Indiana, governor Mitch Daniels decertified public employee unions by executive order when he took office two years ago.

On his first day Daniels reversed an executive order signed by a Democratic predecessor granting collective bargaining rights to state employees. Union membership plummeted overnight. “I think they were happy to have the extra thousand dollars that would have gone to dues,” Kitchell said. Decertifying the public-employees’ union has spared Indiana pressures that have crippled other state governments. Unhindered by union demands, the governor instituted a “pay for performance” scheme, rewarding state employees who met explicit goals with raises ranging from 4 percent to 10 percent. The salaries of underperforming employees stayed flat. No one was fired, but every time a job went vacant a supervisor had to justify hiring a replacement. The number of state employees has fallen from 35,000 to under 30,000, back where it was in 1982.

Here, I think, is the heart of the Democrat/union fury at Scott Walker. Unions, especially public employee unions, are heavy hitters in politics and support Democrats almost exclusively. The push for “card check” by the Obama administration during the last Congress was an example of payback for union support. Private industry unions have found themselves unable to win elections in attempts to organize workers at non-union plants. Therefore, they have tried to get “card check” passed while the Democrats held Congress. Card check is a term for non-secret ballot elections. The voter has to make his vote public and therefore subject to the sort of pressure seen above in the video.

incoming legislators would do well to heed the public’s desire for big government and big labor to step back and allow the free enterprise system and job creators to get our economy moving again.

It is important to note this was an American issue, rather than a partisan issue. In the Senate, eight candidates who supported card check lost while West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, who came out against the bill, won. And voters in four states, Arizona, Utah, South Dakota, and South Carolina, passed measures to head off any potential efforts to kill secret ballots in their states.

This is an issue related to that in Wisconsin. Unions need money and dues are the “mothers milk of politics” to quote Jesse Unruh, late political power in California. Why do they need money, aside for political power? You will not read this in the NY Times or LA Times but unions are in deep financial trouble.

‘We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama,” declared Andy Stern last month, and the president of the Service Employees International Union wasn’t exaggerating. The SEIU and AFL-CIO have been spending so much on politics that they’re going deeply into debt.

Alarm is coming even from inside the AFL-CIO — specifically, from Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, who sits on the AFL-CIO’s finance committee. Bloomberg News reports that he is circulating a report claiming the AFL-CIO engaged in “creative accounting” to conceal financial difficulties heading into last year’s Presidential election. As recently as 2000, the union consortium of 8.5 million members had a $45 million surplus. By June of last year it had $90.6 million in liabilities, or $2.3 million more than its $88.3 million in assets. “If we are not careful, insolvency may be right around the corner,” Mr. Buffenbarger warned.

Here may be the answer to the furious and violent reaction to Scott Walker. The dues provisions and annual election provision may cut union income by up to 90%, especially in a tight economy when that $1000 in dues money could come in very handy. After Mitch Daniels ended mandatory dues collection in Indiana, union dues income from public employees fell 95%. The recent furor and walkout by Democrats in Indiana concerns that new legislation would affect private unions and their dues. Daniels has suggested that the legislature delay this issue for now. The proposals would make Indiana a “right-to-work” state.

By the end of 2008, the SEIU also owed Bank of America nearly $88 million, including its headquarters loan and another $10 million for unspecified purposes. This is the same BofA that the union has spent the past months attacking as the face of Wall Street excess. The SEIU has protested outside of Bank of America offices and demanded the resignation of CEO Ken Lewis. We assume no one forced the SEIU to invest in real estate or borrow from a bank to finance it.

An SEIU spokeswoman says the union works on a four-year cycle, in which it goes “all out for the presidential election” and then rebuilds its finances. She adds the union has paid back more than $10 million of the $25 million it borrowed last year. But it’s nonetheless true that the SEIU’s liabilities have continued to climb each year from 2003 to 2008.

The dues and annual election provisions, if copied by other states in serious fiscal peril, could cut the union movement off at the knees. That is where the fury originates.

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I have had a house in Tucson for the past five or six years. It is in Gabriel Gifford’s Congressional district. I know the corner of Ina Road and Oracle Road where the shooting occurred. I know and like Tucson and Arizona. I would rather be living there than here because I have serious fears about California’s future while I think Arizona is now in pretty good hands. They had a housing bubble but they have more sensible people in that state government.

Gabriel Gifford’s district includes some of the most affluent areas of Tucson. To be re-elected, she had to be a “blue dog” Democrat. She has an appealing personal story. Her father is a sheriff of a neighboring county and her husband is an astronaut. I would not have voted for her because she had a very attractive opponent but there was very little of the animosity in that election that there was in other district races. Some of her constituents were unhappy about her healthcare vote. She had gotten the message and voted against Nancy Pelosi for minority leader of the Democrats, one of 17 Democrats to do so.

The press conference by the Pima County sheriff yesterday was disgraceful. I watched the whole thing. He went over and over his theories that harsh political discourse was somehow a cause of the shooting. He repeated the whole mantra three times by my count. Other than that, he provided very little information, for example, declining to give the suspect’s name when everyone with an internet connection knew what it was. I think he may have been reacting to personal distress as he probably knows Ms Gifford’s father and has known her for a long time. I also suspect he is a Democrat as Tucson is a rather left wing city being the site of the University of Arizona. The City Council has been very left wing and several members were defeated in the previous election as they had spent far too much money on frivolous projects, some of which had never been completed.

There is a lot of wild talk on left wing web sites, some of which is being rolled back as Daily Kos and the DNC scrub web sites of similar images and rhetoric as conservative sites and people they are attacking. A lot of it has been scrubbed but some people have found Google caches.

Like this DLC “targeting map.”

There has been a lot of talk about how “angry” Arizona people are. Well, maybe they have reason to be angry. The Obama administration has sued the state to try to stop an Arizona law that merely enforces a federal law that Obama seems disinterested in enforcing. Arizona is overrun with illegals immigrants, drug violence is 60 miles away in Mexico and auto insurance rates are sky high because of car theft. Someone I know had a LoJack system installed in his car. When he realized the car was stolen, the police activated the locator and the car was already 60 miles into Mexico.

Some of the angry rhetoric comes from a sense that the people have lost control of the government since Obama was elected. The health care bill was opposed in every poll of public opinion. The Republican minority was completely opposed. Yet, the bill was passed by procedural maneuvers never before used to pass legislation of this magnitude. As the people have learned more about the bill, they like it less. Nancy Pelosi told us they have to pass it so we can find out what is in it. Yes, the people of Arizona are angry. But it had nothing to do with yesterday’s shooting.

The young man is obviously a paranoid schizophrenic. His ramblings on a You Tube video contain the typical delusions of schizophrenics. He goes on about the government controlling minds through grammar. He appears to be obsessed with grammar and goes on about introducing a new currency for which he will be the Treasurer. These are the delusional ravings of a psychotic. There appears to be some level of disappointment that he is not associated with a political ideology, especially the tea party. There are already think pieces about “violence”, by which they mean talk radio and Fox News, just as Clinton did after the McVeigh bombing in Oklahoma.

By day’s end, the argument that the political right—fueled by anti-government, and anti-immigrant passions that run especially strong in Arizona—is culpable for the Tucson massacre, even if by indirect association, seemed to be validated by the top local law enforcement official investigating the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D).

This refers to that disgusting press conference by the Pima County sheriff. They even have a video of his rant.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, an elected Democrat, at a news conference Saturday evening.

Yup, I guessed right.

One veteran Democratic operative, who blames overheated rhetoric for the shooting, said President Barack Obama should carefully but forcefully do what his predecessor did.

Another Democratic strategist said the similarity is that Tucson and Oklahoma City both “take place in a climate of bitter and virulent rhetoric against the government and Democrats.”

Isn’t it odd that movies about the assassination of George Bush are not considered too extreme ?

I think Representative Gifford will recover as the gunshot wound track passed from her temple out her forehead, probably missing her brain. A family friend said she is now in induced coma, no doubt to minimize cerebral edema from the contusion to the brain from the shock wave. I don’t know if the Democratic party will recover from its disinterest in debate and its tendency to try to demonize its opponents instead of argue with them.

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Wikileaks randy revolutionary, Julian Assange, cannot be a traitor to the US, we are told, because he is an Australian citizen. This leaves him with a vulnerability in releasing documents that involve the Australian government.

Since it is highly unlikely that in the 250,000 cables there are none that involve the government of Australia there is no doubt a legal team examining Australian law for the proper way to proceed when Mr. Assange’s traveling roadshow comes to Canberra. So how many Australian related State Department cables have been released? So far as I can tell, exactly zero. That’s very nice for Mr. Assange but doesn’t do so much for Wikileaks’ reputation as an honest broker or any of Wikileaks’ non-Australian collaborators who do not get that little legal benefit.

Update: The Guardian newspaper, who has all the cables, has a CSV file which includes cable metadata from Canberra, the US’ embassy in Australia. It also has a nice cable source graphic. Australia is one of the few countries not listed as having any cables from there. This is passing strange.

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[Officer] Chalifoux said, “When I asked him to recite the alphabet from A to Z, he said, ‘I can’t do that.’ When I asked him why, he stated, ‘No one could do that. From A to Z? Come on. That’s crazy.’ ” From the Boston Herald

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It is a bit peculiar how the left seems to be fond of terrorists. Bill Ayres and his wife, of course, are prime examples but not the only ones. Some of them have adoring books written about them. Naturally, Sarah Jane Olsen had become a “community activist” in her new identity.

Now we have a new example disclosed today by Andrew Breitbart. Bradblog is a left wing blog that has become very successful while attacking such people as James O’Keefe of the ACORN tapes, and it has spun numerous conspiracy theories about the right and election fraud, etc. It turns out that one half of the blog, which has received over $1.3 million in donations from such sources as Teresa Heinz’s Tides Foundation, is a convicted murderer and terrorist. His name is Brett Kimberlin although he was once known as the “Speedway bomber” as he terrorized a town in Indiana. He was also a drug smuggler and dealer and he eventually ended up with a 50 year prison sentence. He was paroled after only 13 years but, when he refused to make any payments to the widow of one of his victims who had won a civil suit against him, he went back to prison for four more years.

Today he is a prominent figure on the left and his story of how he went to prison, a total fabrication, has made him even more of a hero. It’s pretty interesting reading.

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In a recent post, I discussed how art lovers were upset that billboards were blocking the view of famous landmarks in Venice, Italy. Complain all they might, the mayor of that canal-infested city points out that selling ad space is the only way to generate the funds needed to preserve the very treasures the critics want to see.

To point up the unreasonable nature of the complaints, I juxtaposed how people not involved in law enforcement were constantly insisting that the police expand their responsibilities. This is in spite of the fact that there simply isn’t enough in the budget to pay for equipment, training, or the manpower to do the new jobs.

This prompted Ric Locke to pen a comment ….

“Perhaps police should sell advertising space on their patrol cars, rather the way race drivers do.”

That has already been tried. If memory serves, the public didn’t like it because some local strip clubs (to my knowledge the only healthy and growing businesses in Toledo, Ohio) bought adverts on the cruisers.

There is no pleasing some people.