ShrinkWrapped

"My Brain Made Me Do It"

It is always rewarding, and sometimes remarkably difficult, to have a very smart patient in Psychoanalysis.  Some patients have a talent for introspection and reflection; others use their intellectual abilities to set up all sorts of impediments to the treatment with an unconscious goal of defeating the Analyst and insuring that they do not change.  Complex and sophisticated rationalizations comprise some of the most intractable defenses.  From time to time a more simple defense appears, which by virtue of its simplicity, allows the patient to refute all interpretative efforts and deny responsibility for their difficulties.  Among such simplistic rationalizations is the cry, of a particular behavior, "my brain made me do it."  Among other things, this defense has the virtue of being (apparently) supported by modern neuroscience and the legal profession, which takes every opportunity to find ways to mitigate the responsibility for misbehavior of their clients.

This morning, NPR discussed the results of MRI scans of the brains of criminals and how such scans may be changing our conception of guilt and innocence in the courtroom:

A Psychopath's Brain In The Courtroom

Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There's an intensity in their stare, as if they're trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue.

Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity.

"The scores range from zero to 40," Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. "The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile."

"Brian" is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. Last July, Dugan pleaded guilty to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation.

I don't think I am spoiling the story to mention that Psychopaths show different patterns on fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) of their brains than normal people do:

For ethical reasons, Kiehl could not allow me to watch an inmate's brain being scanned, so he asked his researchers to demonstrate.

After a few minutes of preparation, researcher Kevin Bache settles into the brain scanner, where he can look up and see a screen. On the screen flashes three types of pictures. One kind depicts a moral violation: He sees several hooded Klansmen setting a cross on fire. Another type is emotional but morally ambiguous: a car that is on fire but you don't know why. Another type of photo is neutral: for example, students standing around a Bunsen burner.

The subjects rate whether the picture is a moral violation on a scale of 1 to 5. Kiehl says most psychopaths do not differ from normal subjects in the way they rate the photos: Both psychopaths and the average person rank the KKK with a burning cross as a moral violation. But there's a key difference: Psychopaths' brains behave differently from that of a nonpsychopathic person. When a normal person sees a morally objectionable photo, his limbic system lights up. This is what Kiehl calls the "emotional circuit," involving the orbital cortex above the eyes and the amygdala deep in the brain. But Kiehl says when psychopaths like Dugan see the KKK picture, their emotional circuit does not engage in the same way.

Kiehl's response then encapsulates an argument that has already begun to be made in the Ivory Towers of Harvard and Yale Law Schools:

"We have a lot of data that shows psychopaths do tend to process this information differently," Kiehl says. "And Brian looked like he was processing it like the other individuals we've studied with psychopathy."

Kiehl says the emotional circuit may be what stops a person from breaking into that house or killing that girl. But in psychopaths like Dugan, the brakes don't work. Kiehl says psychopaths are a little like people with very low IQs who are not fully responsible for their actions. The courts treat people with low IQs differently. For example, they can't get the death penalty.

"What if I told you that a psychopath has an emotional IQ that's like a 5-year-old?" Kiehl asks. "Well, if that was the case, we'd make the same argument for individuals with low emotional IQ — that maybe they're not as deserving of punishment, not as deserving of culpability, etc."

And that's exactly what Dugan's lawyers argued at trial last November. Attorney Steven Greenberg said that Dugan was not criminally insane. He knew right from wrong. But he was incapable of making the right choices.

"Someone shouldn't be executed for a condition that they were born with, because it's not their fault," Greenberg says. "The crime is their fault, and he wasn't saying it wasn't his fault, and he wasn't saying, give [me] a free pass. But he was saying, don't kill me because it's not my fault that I was born this way."

[I won't even bother pointing out that brain structure does not predict behavior in any individual case.  There are people who have "psychopathic brain scans" who have never been involved in criminal behavior.  There are a multitude of criminals who have "normal" brain scans.  In reality, low IQ is highly correlated with criminality, though most people with low IQ's are not criminals.  Of course, many of the same behavioral scientists who insist that Psychopathy is hard wired and therefor mitigates or excuses criminal behavior will also argue there is no such thing as a meaningful neurological substrate for IQ.]

This is an argument that is without end.  If you believe in free will and responsibility then we must all accept responsibility for our actions.  The only reasonable exception should be the McNaughton Defense, where the perpetrator literally does not appreciate the difference between right and wrong.  Lenny, in Mice and Men, would have to be judged innocent under this standard.

If all behavior is not just psychically determined but structurally determined, then no one is responsible for anything.  The BP executives could no more avoid taking short cuts in the Gulf and their Regulators could no more avoid neglecting their duties than poor "Brian" could avoid raping and killing that 10 year old child. That way lies nihilism.  At the same time, while smart lawyers work out ways to free people like Brian from the consequences of their actions, they are also setting the table for a form of institutionalized neurologically based totalitarianism.  Once we have dispensed with free will and responsibility, then those who have "incorrect" or "dangerous" brain structures can only be locked up or otherwise removed from the body politic.  We do not know how to "fix" such brain structures (and such fixes are a long way off, perhaps an infinite distance off, considering the implications of complexity involved) and once we accept that no one can ever help doing what their brain “makes” them do, then the only way to protect a functioning society is to remove those whose brains are inimical to the demands of those who by virtue of their "correct" brain structures have no choice but to rule over the rest of us who are not so lucky.

A society based on “Neurological Determinism” will truly be mindless.

Remember This in November

One of our esteemed Congressmen at work: [HT: Sally Zelikovsky at Bookworm's Place]

The disdain and arrogance are dripping off his smug visage.

It doesn't matter where you stand on the particular topic, immigration in this case; the sad fact is that our so-called Representatives see themselves as our ruling class.

To quote Bookworm, this video has now been seen by 305 people.  It should be seen by millions.  Come November it is just this kind of person we need to get rid of.

Being "Special" vs Being "Good Enough": Addendum

Whenever it appears that things cannot get any worse, just remember, they always can:

Thirty Valedictorians? Seriously?

ecently, I wrote here about a report in the New York Times on the latest egalitarian trend in schools across America: breaking up best friends. Students, it seems, are no longer allowed to develop any special relationships, but instead are expected to be friends with everybody. Now, on its front page this Sunday, the Times reports on yet another frightening egalitarian trend in American education: everybody gets to be a valedictorian.

Well, not everybody. Stratford High School in Houston, Texas, only had 30, about 6.5 percent of the graduating class. In Colorado, eight high schools in the St. Vrain Valley district crowned 94 valedictorians, an average of nearly 12 per school. Jericho High School on Long Island was downright exclusive, naming just seven valedictorians (no one gave a valedictory address; the seven performed a skit together in which speaking time was evenly divided so no one would be perceived as the star). The dean of admission at Harvard, William Fitzsimmons, told the Times he had heard of schools with more than 100 valedictorians.

We (Western Civilization) are not done yet, but we are working on it.

Being "Special" vs Being "Good Enough"

The "self esteem" movement in our schools represents something of a "bait and switch" for our youngsters and some of our social pathologies stem from their resulting confusion.  Recently, John McWhorter wrote an approving review of Stuart Buck's Acting White (which I have not read).  As McWhorter puts its, Buck brings together a great deal of relevant data:

Guilt Trip

In 2000, in a book called Losing the Race, I argued that much of the reason for the gap between the grades and test scores of black students and white students was that black teens often equated doing well in school with “acting white.” I knew that a book which did not focus on racism’s role in this problem would attract bitter criticism. I was hardly surprised to be called a “sell-out” and “not really black” because I grew up middle class and thus had no understanding of black culture. But one of the few criticisms that I had not anticipated was that the “acting white” slam did not even exist.

...

Stuart Buck at last brings together all of the relevant evidence and puts paid to two myths. The first is that the “acting white” charge is a fiction or just pointless marginal static. The other slain myth, equally important, is that black kids reject school as alien out of some sort of ingrained stupidity; the fear of this conclusion lies at the root of the studious dismissal of the issue by so many black thinkers concerned about black children. Buck conclusively argues that the phenomenon is a recent and understandable outgrowth of a particular facet of black people’s unusual social history in America—and that facet is neither slavery nor Jim Crow.

As Buck notes, anecdotal accounts from blacks attacked for thinking they are “white” now constitute a crushing volume of testimony in countless newspaper articles over decades (as well as in the hundreds of unsolicited attestations I have received since Losing the Race). As Buck acknowledges, the plural of anecdote is not data, and yet we can be assured that certain parties would consider much less than this volume of testimonies of racist “slights” as invaluable evidence that America remains a deeply racist country.

I will not repeat in detail the argument, which is in essence that desegregation has placed many black children into schools with white power structures and that this lead to the wide spread belief that any black child who works hard and does well is trying to succeed under terms dictated by that power structure.  To this way of thinking black children in segregated schools could succeed because they were surrounded by other black children trying to succeed rather than white children who had too many advantages for the black children to overcome.

Steve Sailer adds his won distinct perspective on the data and suggests that the explanation is, at best, incomplete, and misses some salient detail:

Acting White—Or Acting Smart? Stuart Buck's New Book Can't Explain Education Gap

Are blacks held back by fear of "acting white"?

No doubt this is often true. Yet the benefits that whites bestow upon blacks for acting reassuringly white (for example, the White House itself) are so lavish that it’s hardly certain what the net effect is. As Buck admits, when unsuccessful blacks denounce successful blacks for "acting white," there’s an obvious whiff of sour grapes about the proceedings:

"Indeed, in one of the earliest scholarly accounts of ‘acting white,’ one of the poorer black students was remarkably frank about how he viewed the more accomplished black students in his class: ‘There're just a few of these Uncle Toms at school, these are the goody-goody guys. Maybe I say this, though, because they're doing a little bit better than I am. And maybe I'm a little bit ashamed of myself because I'm not doing as good as they are in school, and I'm jealous. Maybe that's why I think of them as Uncle Toms.’"

One peculiarity of this popular "acting white" theory: there is significantly stronger evidence that a lack of intellectual ambition holds back otherwise capable Hispanics (especially Mexican-Americans) than that it debilitates African-Americans. But that never seems to come up in public discussion—probably because, as I’ve argued before, Anglos just find blacks much more interesting than Latinos.

Steve Sailer goes on to sow that even greater than the failure of blacks to avail themselves of academic opportunities, Mexican Americans are even more likely to eschew "acting white."  He offers a deft explanation for the lack of Mexican-American achievement by noting the flow of successful Hispanics into the Middle Class and attributes much of the failure in educational aspiration to the birth and growth of the black power movement:

McWhorter writes:

"I even sense from the testimonials I have received that if one particular year could be pegged as the time in which ‘You think you’re white making those grades?’ ‘tipped’ as a community commonplace, it would be 1966—perhaps because this was the year that ‘black power’ ideology went mainstream in the black community."

The birth of the Black Pride movement around 1966 meant that the African-American Talented Tenth switched from emphasizing their cultural whiteness to emphasizing their cultural blackness: there was now good money to be made in acting black.

But this meant that the manners of the black masses were no longer upbraided by starchy black upper class role models, like Carlton Banks on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

For example, one of the main characters in Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full,is mild-mannered Roger White II, a black lawyer and Stravinsky devotee. He is known to his Morehouse college fraternity brothers, including the mayor of Atlanta, as Roger Too White. By the end of the book, even Roger Too White has figured out that the real money and power in modern Atlanta is in representin’.

White people will pay well to employ blacks who can act white—but as long as whites and blacks insist on assurances that the blacks are "authentic", racial tensions will continue. 

And the black-white educational performance gap is likely to continue even longer.

What is missing in these discussions is the impact of the movement for teaching "self esteem" by always offering effusive praise while never tolerating distinctions to be made that might hurt someone's feelings.  Note the time course mentioned in this wikipedia entry:

Self-esteem, grades and relationships

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s many Americans assumed as a matter of course that students' self-esteem acted as a critical factor in the grades that they earn in school, in their relationships with their peers, and in their later success in life. Given this assumption, some American groups created programs which aimed to increase the self-esteem of students. Until the 1990s little peer-reviewed and controlled research took place on this topic.

The concept of self-improvement has undergone dramatic change since 1911, when Ambrose Bierce mockingly defined self-esteem as "an erroneous appeasement." Good and bad character are now known as "personality differences". Rights have replaced responsibilities. The research on ego centrism and ethnocentrism that informed discussion of human growth and development in the mid-20th century is ignored; indeed, the terms themselves are considered politically incorrect. A revolution has taken place in the vocabulary of self. Words that imply responsibility or accountability — self-criticism, self-denial, self-discipline, self-control, self-effacement, self-mastery, self-reproach, and self-sacrifice — are no longer in fashion. The language most in favor is that which exalts the self — self-expression, self-assertion, self-indulgence, self-realization, self-approval, self-acceptance, self-love, and the ubiquitous self-esteem.^{[cite this quote]}

— Ruggiero, 2000

Peer-reviewed research undertaken since then has not validated previous assumptions. Recent research indicates that inflating students' self-esteem in and of itself has no positive effect on grades. One study has shown that inflating self-esteem by itself can actually decrease grades.

That the determinants of self esteem are primarily unconscious and that parents and teachers who expressly set out to enhance self esteem by curtailing criticism and offering an abundance of praise generally end up enabling the development of pathological self esteem (eg, most violent criminals have wonderful self esteem; they feel terrific about themselves and have little sense that what they are doing is problematic) is germane. 

When all children must be "special" none of them can be; further, if being "special"  is the base line (as in Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average)  who could possibly tolerate the shame of being merely "good enough"?

Our self esteem mantras have led a generation of children to either convince themselves, or pretend to believe, they are special and wonderful in all sorts of unique ways.  When cruel reality (failing a high school math test or noting that a school mate is obviously more gifted) intervenes, the child feels, quite reasonably, that they were lied to; the more limited their academic ability the greater the lie.  Bobby is better at school than Timmy and they both can't be academic stars, just as, despite all our efforts to avoid keeping score, children know when Alan is a far better athlete than Peter.  By insisting that all children are "stars" in the face of overt reality, children end up feeling that if they are not at the top of the class their value to others is limited; they then look for other places in which to establish their value.  In the most pathological settings, once academics have been surrendered, that value comes from instilling fear in others and being the toughest "gansta" in the school yard.

Not all children can be stars (although all should be to their families, as long as some decent approximation of reality is recognized) and by failing to educate our children to reality, we close off many alternatives that could be available to them.

In suburban New York, for example, there is a terrible dearth of plumbers, carpenters, and electricians.  These are high paying jobs that can be extremely rewarding yet because we have taught our children that such jobs are for those less educated (synonymous with smart) such jobs go begging as more and more children try to fit their square selves into the collegiate round holes that offer them nothing but unhappiness and debt.

Our self esteem culture has over-valued words and academic success and under-valued those who actually create and do things.  Unless we begin to redress this imbalance we will have a growing cohort of ignorant, poorly educated young people, unable to adequately compete in a globalized market place, unable to support themselves, unaware of their various ignorances, and unhappily coming to the recognition they have been sold a bill of goods.

Through the Looking Glass

David Foster is having Dark Thoughts:

Things are spinning out of control

Robert Avrech has a story about blatant anti-Semitism in Holland, the land of Anne Frank:

Anti-Semitism has gotten so ugly in The Netherlands that Jews walking along Amsterdam’s street are being harassed by young Muslims who yell insults or give Nazi salutes…A TV programme broadcast on Sunday by the Jewish Broadcasting Organisation showed rabbi Lody van de Kamp confronted by Moroccan youths giving the Hitler salute.

and

“Jews are deserting Antwerp,” headlines De Standaard. The Belgian newspaper predicts that in fifty years there will be no more Jews living in the city. Due to an increase of Anti-Semitism, many young Jews are leaving the city to study in London, New York or Israel, where “working with a skullcap (kippah) isn’t a problem”, and they never return.

The sharp increase in anti-Semitism is only one among many indicators of social disintegration and dysfunction throughout the Western world.

Phyllis Chesler is also worried:

The Flotillas of Summer, The Guns of August

The signs are ominous, disquieting. In Hannover, Germany, young Muslim children of Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iranian descent, ages ten to fifteen, throw rocks at a Jewish dance troupe, injuring one of the performers and ending the performance. The children use a megaphone to shout anti-Semitic slurs during the attack. In Amsterdam, Holland, a taxi sports this sign: Israel=Terror Country/State. The Dutch taxi also has a picture of an Israeli flag marked by an “x” and dripping blood.  Interestingly enough, Dutch law enforcement have begun to dress police officers as religious Jews or as “decoys” with which to catch anti-Semites in the act. In Washington State, in America, a nine-foot Chabad (remember Mumbai) menorah was knocked over; on its base was spray-painted: “Die Jew.”

Dinocrat quotes from a speech:

Through the looking glass

Stephen Schwartz went to a speech:

Rashad Hussain, America’s special envoy to the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC), the Saudi-based body formed in 1969 to “protect” Jerusalem from the Israelis, announced a new title this week for President Barack Obama. According to Hussain, Obama is America’s “Educator-in-Chief on Islam.”

Hussain so designated Obama in a keynote speech Wednesday, June 23, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The occasion was another “post-Cairo” conference, following on the event that welcomed Islamist ideologue Tariq Ramadan to Washington in April. Hussain also declared that Obama is “Educator-in-Chief” on the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which has produced diplomatic and political events around the capital for some years. Hussain affirmed with satisfaction that presidential iftar dinners, where the fast is broken after sundown, and which had formerly been limited to diplomats from Muslim countries, now welcomed American Muslims from throughout society.

In his remarks, Hussain also congratulated Obama for sending Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser, to last year’s annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, a notorious front for Saudi-financed Muslim radicalism. Worse, Hussain has now divulged that the U.S. will support the OIC in the latter’s United Nations effort to criminalize “defamation of religion” – widely perceived as a measure to suppress criticism of Muslim practices that violate human rights. “The OIC and the Obama administration will work together in the UN on the issue of defamation of religion”…

And Dinocrat concludes:

We’ve all gone through the looking glass.

(His comment was so apt that I have expropriated it for this post.)

John P. Opie thinks things are Totally Out Of Control...

How out of control is sheer government stupidity?

In California, welfare recipients were using their welfare money to gamble.

See this.

Key quote:
Democrats, who have been fighting to preserve the state's fraying social safety net in the face of a $19-billion budget gap, angrily rejected a Schwarzenegger proposal last month to eliminate the cash portion of welfare.
That was before anyone in Sacramento realized the money could be withdrawn by someone strolling from a poker game to a blackjack table.

...

Excuse my vernacular, but this system is fucked.

M_O_M is expecting the worst:

GDP Third Estimate

So here is the nightmare scenario for governments. We have a structural budget gap. If we raise taxes, we reduce PCE, which reduces GDP growth. But with trend growth so low, and PCE growth likely to moderate anyway, we really can't afford to reduce PCE by fiat because we'll produce a second contraction, which will certainly not help government revenues.

For voters, this is also a nightmare scenario, because we have nowhere to run in the current parties. What will work in this environment would be a mix of Republican/Democratic strategies. Right now that mix appears politically unobtainable. All taxation is not the same. In a situation in which growth is dependent upon bolstering investment, certain taxes should be cut and can be compensated for with raising other taxes. But we don' t have a party that is willing to do it.

Right now we are growing and can maintain growth, but only weak growth. As soon as current legislative initiatives start to be felt in the real economy, we'll slip into another contraction.

(My ongoing on-line problems are interfering with adding links, [and spell checking, so if you see any mispellings, send me an e-mail] but all of the following stories are readily available.)

At home, the Obama administration heaps one incompetence upon another.  Bureaucrats stop the building of berms meant to protect fragile shore areas from the leaking oil out of concern that it will harm the environment from which the sand is dredged.  The Obama administration attemtps to shut down all drilling in the gulf, decimating our oil industry and an already damaged economy, even though the consensus of their chosen experts did not support a shut down and, in fact, a  shut down would present a greater danger of additional spills/leaks than continuing to drill! 

The Congress introduces bills that will do the exact opposite of what they claim.  The healthcare bill will increase costs and cause millions to lose their preferred plans.  The Disclose Act will inhibit political speech by groups that threaten the interests of (mostly) Democratic law makers, while facilitating the political speech of unions and other Democratic interest groups.  Yet it is being sold to us as a bill to decrease the influence of money on our politics; what a joke.

We have a nominee for Supreme Court who admires an Israeli Judge who has no respect for precedent or reason; whatever is "progressive" is rationalized as allowable.  The goal is to have the Judiciary replace the Legislature in determinign our laws; if the Legislature refuses to pass "progressive" laws, then our Judges will instead.

The list is seemingley endless.  If one were of a suspicious mindset, one might wonder if this is the Cloward-Piven strategy writ large, but that would be paranoid, and as one who generally believes that we should never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance, such a conclusion is surely unwarranted.

The only way to make sense of what is happening, as the world appears to be descending into increasing chaos and strife, is to remember that in a Post-Modern world, words are malleable and reality is a construct:

War is now Peace.

Jihad is now an internal struggle for purity and Islam is a religion of peace.

Terrorists are motivated by the usual stressors of everyday life and not by religious conviciton, with the notable exceptions of those who are movitated by Christianity or Judaism, now understood to be inherently violent religions.

Friends are now enemies and enemies are now friends.

The enrvironment must be protected at all costs so we need to force oil drilling into more marginal and treacherous locations.

I think I'm begining to understand.

Under the Radar

If Peace is ever to come to the Middle East it will not be ushered in with a great deal of fanfare.  There will be no Peace Treaties signed on the White House lawn and parades in Middle Eastern capitals.  The hatred of Israel and Jews that has been so carefully nurtured in the Arab world is unlikely to diminish in any such dramatic fashion, and as long as a Jewish state remains anathema to a substantial population of Arabs, Peace will remain a Utopian dream.  However, steps toward Peace may arrive in more obscure ways and places.

The Palestinians have been among the most abused and mis-used of peoples.  They have been denied citizenship and active participation in their resident countries throughout the Middle East (with the notable exception of Israel, which grants full legal rights and protections to its Palestinian minority, something unique in the Middle East.)  They have been expelled and actively discriminated against in such divers countries as Iraq and Kuwait and their own leaders keep them captive, preventing emigration and working assiduously to maintain them as a displaced people. 

Lebanon has had particularly bad experiences with their Palestinian "guests."  In 1982, after creating a terrorist mini-state within a state in Lebanon, the PLO provoked Israel's invasion, which ultimately led to the PLO's banishment to Tunisia:

What did the PLO do in Lebanon?

In 1969, in Cairo, the prime minister of Lebanon reached an agreement with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) that effectively endorsed PLO freedom of action in Lebanon to recruit, arm, train, and employ fighters against Israel. This was the beginning of a disaster for the people of Lebanon.

...

Throughout the 1970s, PLO terrorists mounted intermittent cross-border attacks against civilian and military targets in Israel. There were also interational terrorist spectaculars, e.g., the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, perpetrated by groups based in Lebanon. In turn, the Israelis struck back at targets and groups across the border in Lebanon.

By 1975, relations between assorted Lebanese groups and the Palestinians had degenerated into open warfare. Lebanese militia groups armed themselves for self-protection from the PLO terrorists. Soon various Lebanese groups were fighting one another as old feuds revived and new atrocities demanded revenge. This fighting would continue in one form or another until 1990.

In 1976, the Lebanese Christian leadership invited the Syrian Army in for assistance in fighting the PLO. An Arab peace-keeping force (usually called the "Arab Deterrent Forces") was subsequently deployed by the Arab League, incorporating into its ranks the Syrian forces. Intermittent cease-fires were followed by new rounds of fighting. The civilian population of all faiths suffered greatly.

By 1978, Israel had had enough of the constant attacks by terrorists based in Lebanon and launched a counterattack in the form of a limited invasion of Lebanon, the Litani River Operation.

In early June of 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon with a massive force, called Operation Peace for the Galilee, driving all the way to Beirut and putting the PLO and residents, as well as the Lebanese civilian population of that city, under siege. Israel justified its action by citing the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London and a build-up of PLO armaments in South Lebanon in addition to the constant attacks on Galilee settlements across the border.

In August 1982, US Ambassador Philip Habib negotiated the withdrawal of Yaser Arafat and his PLO forces from Lebanon. They relocated their headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia.

Once free of the PLO the Lebanese still had problems with their remaining Palestinian "refugees", now numbering ~400,000:

2007 Lebanon conflict

The 2007 Lebanon conflict began when fighting broke out between Fatah al-Islam, an Islamist militant organization, and the Lebanese Armed Forces(LAF) on May 20, 2007 in Nahr al-Bared, an UNRWA Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli. It was the most severe internal fighting since Lebanon's 1975–90 civil war. The conflict evolved mostly around the Siege of Nahr el-Bared, but minor clashes also occurred in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon and several terrorist bombings took place in and around Lebanon's capital Beirut. Fighting continued into early September and the LAF declared victory on September 7.

As Michael Totten pointed out at the time, the Palestinians were, once again, the worst victims of their Arab brethren, (who, it should never be forgotten, strut about loudly proclaiming their interest in freeing their Palestinian brethren, while in reality using them as pawns for their true desire, the destruction of the Jewish state.)

Al Qaeda in Lebanon - CONTINUOUSLY UPDATED

Fatah al-Islam terrorists in the Palestinian Nahr al-Bared refugee camp (which is an urban ghetto in Tripoli, not a tent city) are, reportedly, mostly not Palestinian. No one has suffered more from Lebanon’s worst fighting since the civil war ended than the Palestinian civilians of Nahr al-Bared. After decades as second-class non-citizens living in dejection and squalor, they are now human shields in a battle between foreign terrorists and the host country.

Lebanon’s freshest and most vicious of enemies have, if reports are correct, arrived from battlefields in Iraq via Syria. Their relationship with the Syrian state and Al Qaeda is murky and hard to sort out, but they do seem to have connections of some kind to both.

An Nahar reports that mosques there now are dual-use. They are places in which to pray. They are also armed camps. They are also, possibly, terrorist targets. Suicide bombers reportedly detonated themselves at the Thawra mosque. Perhaps someone ignited himself a little too early. Maybe the keepers of that mosque were hostile to Fatah al-Islam. I do not know.

All of this is preamble.  It may just be that there are glimmers of hope and, if not a light at the end of the tunnel toward Peace, perhaps a hint of the entrance to the tunnel:

Parliament discusses granting basic rights to Palestinians

BEIRUT: Lebanese lawmakers submitted Wednesday a second draft law to grant Palestinian refugees their civil rights amid rising domestic debate over the scope of those rights and their nature.

Both proposals called for amendments to labor, social security and foreign property ownership laws to guarantee equality in rights between Lebanese and Palestinian refugees with the exception of the right to Lebanese nationality.

But the March 14 Secretariat General insisted Wednesday on the adoption of humanitarian rights that improve the refugees’ living conditions rather than “civil rights from a political and administrative perspective.”

Over 400,000 Palestinian refugees living in camps all across the Lebanese territories are denied basic civil rights, including ownership of property, access to employment and social security services. Christian parties fear their naturalization would alter the country’s confessional power sharing balance.

“Lebanon is a country with an Arab identity and a member and founder committed to the Arab League’s charter and Palestinian refugees are Arab citizens,” the proposal said in its section highlighting the relevant reasons in support of the law proposal.

The draft law grants Palestinian refugees civil and social rights equal to those to Lebanese citizens but rejects their naturalization by denying them the right to Lebanese nationality, to vote and run for municipal and parliamentary elections and work in public state positions.

There is more about the discussion here and here.  Not unexpectedly, many Lebanese, with their complicated inter-ethnic/religious/tribal relations are fearful of adding a large block of Palestinian citizens into the un-melted pot of Lebanese society.  However, it may turn out that discussions concerning granting minimal rights to Palestinian "refugees", now kept stateless for over 60 years, can someday lead to their integration into the fabric of their resident countries and a consequent diminution of the pressure their existence places upon the polity of every state in the neighborhood.

Perhaps someday we will be able to look back and recognize that the granting of rights to displaced Palestinians, kept stateless for 4 generations and counting, will have marked the beginning of the end of the Israeli-Palestinian War. 

Any alternative resolution includes the death of large numbers of human beings, an outcome that should trouble all well meaning and Peace loving observers and participants:

There Will Be War

The Next Lebanon War

On-Line Problems

My on-line connection has been balky today and promises to be problematic for the near future.  As a result blogging will be spotty in the next little bit until I can devise a work around. 

White House and MSM Economic Illiteracy

When I saw the headline this morning, Obama Says Health Law Shouldn’t Be Excuse to Raise Rates in the New York Times, I knew it would demonstrate the economic illiteracy of the President and the reporters.  I was hoping that someone who is good with numbers would Fisk the article.  M_O_M obliged:

The NY Times Is Lucky The Spider Bit Me

Because if the spider hadn't bitten me, I'd have enough energy to really eviscerate this paper that should adopt the motto "All The Pez That's Fit To Print". Just look at this idiocy.

The White House is concerned that health insurers will blame the new law for increases in premiums that are intended to maximize profits rather than covering claims. The administration is also closely watching investigations by a number of states into the actuarial soundness of double-digit rate increases.

They gargle on with this nonsense, which surely came straight from the White House:

The new law requires the health secretary to work with states to establish a process for annual reviews of “unreasonable increases in premiums.” Administration officials said Monday that they were still writing regulations to define “unreasonable increases.”

So the article then proceeds to discuss state crackdowns on insurance increases:

In Massachusetts, the administration of Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, used long-untapped power to deny 9 of 10 rate increases requested by the state’s insurers, provoking a lawsuit from the industry. A court in Maine recently upheld a smaller rate increase for that state’s largest insurer — 10.9 percent instead of 18.1 percent — that had been ordered by the insurance superintendent.

See, this is just out and out misrepresentation. A google would have shown the hapless Sack and Stolberg that the Massachusetts situation is rather obviously political. The court in MA told the insurers to wait for the departmental grievance process to work, even though the MA law explicitly says insurers can't set rates. Everyone knows that the insurance companies will be granted major increases after the elections are over, because, lalala, they are losing money:

Read the whole thing; I'll take an impaired, snake bitten M_O_M any time over the New York Times.

This afternoon I had a discussion with Oldest Son who insisted that putting private insurers out of business was an unintended consequence of the healthcare bill.  He didn't think the Administration or Congress was smart enough to have planned this.  I disagreed; I think bankrupting insurance companies and forcing them out of business as a way to achieve government run healthcare was clearly intentional, albeit covert.  In the end, incompetence and/or malice are leading to the same place. 

A New Meme Takes Shape

For quite a while now, Hugh Hewitt has wondered if OIIOHH:

Obama is in over his head

There is a vast, coast-to-coast recognition of "oiiohh" -- Obama is in over his head. I have offered the T-shirt to my radio audience, and they are moving quite briskly. The "messiah" has become a punch line.

What could he do to turn it around, I asked John Podhoretz, editor of the newly energized and sparkling Commentary magazine. "Things his ideology will never allow him to do," John replied, and we went on to talk about extending the Bush tax cuts and standing resolutely beside Israel in the face of serial provocations.

AJ Strata, as reasonable a Conservative as exists in the blogosphere, who has been vociferous in taking to task those on the Right who would push us too far, has lost all patience with our President:

Our Government Has Lied To Us

I know I will get slammed for the comparison, but some times the acts fit the crime. The Obama administration’s PR campaign is mirroring the PR campaign instituted by the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. I am saying mirroring, not identical. We have yet to hit the point where political opponents are more than roughed up by labor union goons. There are no concentration camps out there. But some core methods are eerily similar.

AJ's post delineates a number of issues on which the Obama administration has been behaving in ways that do not comport with their expressed concerns; in other words they have either lied about the various crises we face or do not understand what they are doing.  His cri du couer is remarkable in its anger and frustration.

Yesterday Glenn Reynolds linked to a number of posts recently that raise concerns about what our government is doing.  Jay Tea wrote about seemingly the inexplicable behavior of the Obama administration concerning the oil spill, especially their lack of urgency:

The Scent Of Fear

1) The disaster isn't as bad as we all think it is, and the Obama administration knows that.

If that was true, then their "never let a crisis go to waste" response is understandable. Heinous, but understandable. This is an opportunity for them to push their agenda, and push it hard.

2) The disaster is as bad as we think, but the Obama administration doesn't realize it.

This would be entirely in character with this administration. They are the Peter Principle writ large: they have been promoted past their level of competency. They simply can't grasp that this disaster is a game-changer, so they are simply playing the game that they have played all their lives. Not because that's what they think is best, but because that's all they know how to do. "When your only tool is a hammer, all your problems start looking like nails."

3) The disaster is at least as bad as we think, if not worse, and the Obama administration knows it.

If that is the case, then the only explanation that makes any sense is that they believe that the whole thing is a lost cause, that it is pretty much an unstoppable catastrophe, and they're figuring that since we're all pretty much fucked, they might as well get theirs before it all goes to hell.

4) The disaster isn't as bad as we think it is, but the Obama administration doesn't realize it.

Steve Sailer notes that the primary causative elements leading to the mortgage meltdown have still not been addressed.  His post comes complete with government data that the government has completely ignored. In another post, he points out that Canada has a more sound immigration policy than the United States but it cannot be discussed in polite company.  In both cases, reality is ignored in favor of a Politically Correct fantasy structure.

Allahpundit highlights an example of White House incompetence and insouciance while Ed Morrissey points to an even more egregious example.

Yet another data point on a not inclusive list is the insubordination of General McCrystal:

More on McCrystal

General McCrystal will be fired, as he almost certainly should be. That really isn't the problem facing the Obama administration and the country. The problem is that we appear to be losing the war, and now you have an internal distraction the enemy had nothing to do with.

The President made Afghanistan his war when he decided to go with General McCrystal's counterinsurgency strategy and began surging additional troops. I don't want to hear how the President of the United States had no choice regarding Afghanistan and was backed into the corner - because to suggest that is true is to basically say Barack Obama is not qualified to be the leader of the free world. The President has lost his General. Has he lost the General McCrystal counterinsurgency strategy too? Is losing the war not so far behind?

Galrahn rarely makes political comments on his blog.  When he does it suggests a level of frustration and worry that is alarming.  His conclusion is thus more troubling than hearing similar sentiments from a Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity:

I just wish there was one thing so far during the Obama administration to date I could point to and suggest there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but the lack of direction and focus that is displayed in every emerging challenge this administration has faced to date suggests that a pattern of panic, confusion, chaos, and indecision regarding what to do will become the next phase of the Afghanistan war.

The nascent meme concerning Barack Obama is that he is incompetent, crippled by his ideology, and unable to adapt to changing conditions.  As such we are likely to have a terrible vacuum at the center of our government for the next two years, at minimum.  Our adversaries, if they are smart, will take advantage of this unique opportunity to advance their interests while America is rudderless.  Our enemies, if they are stupid, will over reach and evoke a counter-reaction which will have terrible consequences for the world. 

Societal Regression: Irrationality and Prophylaxis

In the course of discussing Tom Friedman's column on Turkey, Yaacov Lozowick made a telling observation:

Turkish Delight

A friend recently sent me this link, to a strongly pro-Israel article on an American political website. It's a gratifying read (even if she's got a few of her numbers wrong), but that's not the point, since if you know where to go looking, you can always find people who are even more hawkishly pro-Israel than many Israelis. (Hint: most American outlets who don't define themselves as stridently liberal). The point of the story was the person who sent me the link, a moderate woman who doesn't deal much with politics, with whom I've had past discussions from the left. In recent times, however, the amount of blatantly irrational invective being directed at Israel is so outlandish, that she's seeking comfort from wherever she can find it, even from folks who are not her natural allies.

This irrationality is becoming one of the main stories of our time, and probably deserves closer scrutiny than I'm giving it.

I have written a great deal about the tendency toward Societal Regression that takes place during times of great stress.  Most of my posts have concerned various signs of such regression, starting with the American Psychoanalytic Panel on the subject from 2005, which I wrote about in Terror and Societal Regression.  Yaacov Lozowick touches on a slightly different aspect of such regression, the tendency toward the elevation of the irrational.

No one is surprised when the Arab World and their appeasers in Europe and on the Left attack Israel with anti-Semitic tropes and evince apparent belief in the most fabulous paranoid conspiracy theories.  The tendency toward irrationality when anti-Semitism is in play has a long historical pedigree.  There is also no surprise that at any given time a small but not insignificant portion of the American polity believe bizarre theories about their political opponents.  Such a tendency occurs on both the Left and the Right and their beliefs, even when given some currency by the opposing parties, rarely reach a threshold for concern.  A mature and healthy society easily tolerates the irrational and maintains a reasonable perspective.  However, when more mature and rational societies begin to slip down the path toward irrationality, the early danger signs can be missed.

Typically stable societies regress slowly at first, and then rapidly.  As noted by Antonin Scalia, quoted by Jennifer Rubin, neither Hitler nor Stalin started out with the goal of becoming monsters:

The Best Speech Those High School Grads May Ever Hear

Movement is not necessarily progress. More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly. Nobody — remember this — neither Hitler, nor Lenin, nor any despot you could name, ever came forward with a proposal that read, “Now, let’s create a really oppressive and evil society.” Hitler said, “Let’s take the means necessary to restore our national pride and civic order.” And Lenin said, “Let’s take the means necessary to assure a fair distribution of the goods of the world.”

What determines whether a democratic society succumbs to severe Societal Regression depends on many different factors, some inherent in the population  (Americans by and large have shown very good common sense over the years, even in the face of significant stressors such as 9/11) and some resident within the personality and person of the leadership.  A demagogic leader during a time of great stress, creates a high risk environment for dangerous Societal Regression.  One additional aspect that has protected us in the past is under assault:

In Praise of David Brooks

On Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour, David Brooks — while properly castigating Rep. Joe Barton for his politically inept defense of BP and his muddled attempt to draw an important principle from what is happening — said this:

He actually had a kernel of truth at the core of what he said, which is that we’re a nation of laws. We have laws to protect the unpopular, and to even protect people who do bad things. And we have a set of laws, when somebody does something bad, does something negligent, to force them to pay and compensate those who were damaged. And that’s all on the books. And what President Obama did when he very publicly and very brutally strong-armed BP into setting aside this $20 billion, is, he went around those laws. And some people think, “Oh, it’s no problem. It’s only BP.” Well, if you’re upset about — I mean, if, imagine if Dick Cheney did it to somebody he didn’t like and said, “Oh, we don’t happen to like you. We’re going to set $20 billion aside, and I will appoint the person who is going to decide what is going to happen to that $20 billion.”

...

David’s point is well put, and, when passions among the polity are running high, it was a responsible observation to make.

In A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More and William Roper have an exchange in which Roper says to More, “So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!”

More answers: “Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” Roper replies, “I’d cut down every law in England to do that!” And More answers this way:

Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

During this crisis, BP has acted horribly on almost every level; but the rule of law still matters, even — and maybe especially — in instances like this.

The rule of law is one of the great bulwarks of democracy protecting us from our worst instincts and our tendency to regress toward the irrational under stress.  We have as President a man who has never been truly tested by failure.  He has had a charmed political life, has an academic political philosophy that has never done particularly well in the past when tested against reality, and a sensitivity to slights that is troubling in a leader.  All politicians (as all human beings do) have a tendency to demonize their opponents.  Mature adults recognize that tendency and develop more mature modes of thinking that allow them to discount that tendency within themselves.  The jury is still out on Barack Obama's level of emotional and political maturity.  Thus far, in various settings, he has exhibited an unfortunate tendency to demonize his opposition, as if they were enemies rather than merely political opponents.  This tendency can easily lead to demagoguery.  As his grip on the levers of power is threatened, let us hope he can tolerate a diminution of his power with some grace.  The alternative promises additional and unnecessary upheaval during parlous times.