Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
… For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
God bless America.
I’ve been meaning for a while now to write about this very courageous woman (who is better known by the anglicized version of her name, Christine Granville)…the tragic events in Poland make this seem like an appropriate time to remember a Polish heroine.
Previously, I’ve posted about two women–Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan–who worked for the secret British WWII organization known as Special Operations Executive…whose mission it was to organize resistance and sabotage activities in occupied Europe. Krystyna Skarbek also worked for SOE during the latter part of her WWII career, during which time she was partnered with another SOE agent named Francis Cammaerts, who led resistance operations over an extensive area in southern France. I spent some time with Mr Cammaerts during a trip to France in 2001, and will be writing about him in a future post.
Skarbek was born near Warsaw in 1908: her father was a bank official and a member of the nobility, and her mother was Jewish. She became an avid horsewoman and skier, and also a beauty queen (#6 in the Miss Poland contest for 1930.) When WWII broke out, Krystyna was living in Ethiopia with her second husband, who was the Polish consul there. She immediately went to London and volunteered to work as a secret agent…I believe her first assignment was with the Secret Intelligence Service (spying) rather than with SOE (sabotage.) She first traveled to Hungary, from which she planned to ski into Poland…while in Budapest she met Andrew Kowarski, who was to become her great love. In early 1940, she went over the Tatra mountains to begin her first underground assignment, in which she organized a network of couriers to bring intelligence reports from Warsaw to Budapest. She also located her mother, who was doubly in danger because of her aristocratic connection as well as her Jewish background, and warned her to leave the country…but her mother refused and was later arrested and never heard from again.
Great Britain is currently in the throes of hysteria over pedophiles, as they seem to see them under every bed. This is a subject I have written about before.
An incredibly clever and sick individual has tried to use this to his advantage. A man obsessed with a coworker tried to frame her husband for child pr0n. He did this by repeatedly breaking into the victim’s house while the family was asleep, copying the family computer on a portable hard drive, and then going back to his own home to prepare and insert the doctored evidence.
What doctored evidence is that? It seems that he also broke in to the family’s house while they were away so he could take photos of the place. He probably Photoshopped some pics of kids being abused into the images of the home.
Months later he broke in again to steal the family’s hard drive from their computer, which he mailed to the police. Lucky thing suspicion fell upon the perp, and that he wasn’t half so clever in covering his own tracks. When the police investigated the criminal, they easily found all the evidence needed for the scheme to be revealed.
There are many elements of this story that I find shocking in the extreme.
An interesting essay by Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychologist who has worked extensively in prisons. Via psychiatrist Dr Sanity, who adds thoughts of her own.
My sense is that the self-esteem movement started benignly enough, with the sensible idea that it is usually better to focus on praising people for things they do right rather than on condemning them for their inadequacies. But it soon fell into the hands of various airheads, many of them professors in “education” schools, who too frequently have been hostile to the whole notion of individual achievement and individual accountability.
Via Ace comes a totally bewildering news story from Great Britain. The official government policy concerning burglary has just been changed. Burglars are not to be jailed unless they cause harm to persons or property.
No matter how much they steal, no matter if it is irreplaceable family heirlooms, the criminal walks. They get “community punishment”, which I suppose is the same as “community service” is here in the United States.
And we know that the felons will show up to fulfill their obligation to society because they are such stand up guys. Hardly like criminals at all. Right?
My favorite part…
“The recommendations to let burglars walk free come as, for the first time in several years, burglaries are increasing.”
So refusing to lock the burglars up where they can’t ply their vile trade will cause the number of break-ins to decline?
I keep rereading the news report, and I just can’t believe it. It slides off of my comprehension like claws on glass.
Is this some sort of April Fools joke done early?
In the spirit of full disclosure, there was a similar problem in the United States dating from the late 1980’s through the 1990’s. Space in our prisons was at a premium, the crowding so severe that courts were ordering a certain percentage to be released early to thin out the press.
Eventually the money was found and more prisons were built. And, please note, the felons got at least some jail time.
(Cross posted in a similar form over at Hell in a Handbasket.)