Outliving this Day and Coming Safe Home

I was not able to watch or listen to the commemorative speeches and commentary yesterday. Some workmen cut our fiber optic link to the world rendering the office incommunicado (except for cellphones, and I have a dumb one). Had to read about it in the old fashioned way. Among the commentaries read, I found the one by John McWhorter to be the most incisive and relevant to our present situation. For those unfamiliar, Mr. McWhorter is a linguist by profession who has taught at Stanford, Columbia, and has been a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He writes articles for a number of publications, including The New Republic  and The Wall Street Journal (yes, my friends, you can mention those two publication in the same sentence). Here are some excerpts:

“On the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, we will hear a good deal about how life in this country for black Americans has not changed as much as Martin Luther King Jr. might have wished. We will hear little to nothing about the role that certain strains of black progressive ideology have played in delaying the realization of King’s dream.”

“[I]in the decades since the March on Washington, black America has been taken on a detour by too many self-described progressive black thinkers and leaders, whose quixotic psycho-social experiment they disguise as a continuation of the civil-rights movement. With segregation illegal and public racism considered a moral outrage, we black Americans are now told that we will not truly overcome until Americans don’t even harbor private racist sentiment, until race plays not even a subtle role in America’s social fabric.

“In other words, our current battle is no longer against segregation or bigotry but “racism” of the kind that can be revealed only by psychological experiments and statistical studies.

“This battle is as futile as seeking a world without germs. “We have come to the nation’s capital to cash a check,” King said. But the preacher was talking about being freed from “the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination”—not asking whether Americans are aware of skin color or are more likely to associate black faces with negative words in an experiment.”

“Too many blacks seem to have internalized just that: The essence of contemporary blackness in America is eternal indignation. Notice, for example, the fire-breathing hostility that against-the-grain black writers attract from other blacks. As I know from personal experience, these writers are accused of tempting whites into some kind of antiblack backlash.

“Instead, in recent years, the black middle class has flourished. Housing segregation for blacks is the lowest it has been since the 1920s. And a black president has been elected twice. Yet the fury persists, since what actually rankles these critics is the threat to what they feel is their very identity: underdogs with a bone to pick.

“This is not where the March on Washington was pointing us. . . .”

For McWhorter’s entire article, please see this link.

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I don’t know whether it’s my libertarian nature or what, but I have always preferred cats to dogs as pets. Or is that “animal companions” to the politically correct. Our cats prefer “your highness” or a similar appellation.

Don’t get my wrong, I don’t dislike dogs, as a matter of fact, I am rather fond of some – other people’s, that is. Cats can be standoffish, they can be unpredictable, but that I part of their charm. Cats can take care of themselves for the most part; dogs cannot. I suppose having a cat is like having a teenager, while having a dog is like having a toddler. Yes, they can sometimes be perplexing and inattentive to your wishes, but you can go out at night, or even stay away for a day or two without hiring a babysitter. Can’t do that with a dog.

I also don’t buy that cats are women’s pets while dogs are real men’s pets. I’ve known many a guy, other than me, who loved cats, and a number of women who didn’t. Choice of pets, at least between canines and felines, is not sex specific.

For more on this latter controversy, please see Peter Mandel’s article in today’s WSJ here.

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Fifty years ago, August 25, 1963 on Sunday afternoon, the President of France stood in the Place du Montparnasse to award a belated medal to World War II veterans who participated in the liberation of that city nineteen years prior. As Charles de Gaulle pinned the medal on one veteran’s chest, a hired assassin perched in a window above the square and fired. The bullet barely missed the President’s head as he leaned over to give the ceremonial kiss on the cheeks of the old soldier. As the assassin attempted to reload for a second shot, a French police detective burst into the room and shot first, killing the would be culprit. No one notices the missed shot. There was no press coverage. De Gaulle, unlike President John F. Kennedy later that year, survived that fateful year. He died at home in retirement at age 80 in 1970.

Except for the first and last sentences, the preceding paragraph, of course, is pure fiction – the denouement of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal 1971 book and later dramatized in the movies by director Fred Zinnemann. There were in fact no fewer than five attempts on Charles de Gaulle’s life while he was President. Most were connected to the Algerian war and de Gaulle’s acquiescence to independence for that former colony (which legally had been made an integral part of France, like a U. S. State).. The most notorious attempt was that of an August 1962 conspiracy by the OAS and led by air force Colonel Bastien-Thiry that almost succeeded. As a result, Bastien-Thiry had the dubious distinction of being the last person to receive the death penalty in France.

Assassinations of heads of state are nothing new. Julius Caesar famously met his fate on the Ides of March in 44 B.C., but he was far from in the first. In the modern era, six heads of state (including President McKinley) were murdered during the twenty years before World War I. There have been at least a dozen attempts on U.S. Presidents in our history; four were successful. World wide, successful or otherwise, there have been too many attempts in recent memory to recount here.

Do assassinations of head of state or powerful politicians change history? Much depends on whether Thomas Carlyle’s “Great Man” or Lev Tolstoy’s “Mass Movement” theory of history is the better one. No doubt Caesar’s murder led to a civil war and establishment of the Empire, which was really a long term military dictatorship. But that seemed to be the way Rome was going with Caesar alive anyway. Lincoln was seeking a conciliatory Reconstruction rather than a punitive one. Could he have withstood the radicals in Congress? Would that have made any difference for subsequent events?

There is little doubt that Franz Ferdinand’s death at the hand of a Serbian terrorist precipitated World War I. Nevertheless, a similar crisis could have had similar results. The great powers of Europe had been on a collision course for some time.

The 1961 assassination of Rafael Trujillo certainly ended that dictator’s regime, and the Dominican Republic seems to have been much better for it. The 1963 assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam does not seem to have changed much, he was on the way out anyway. Of course John F. Kennedy’s death had some far reaching effects. It gave his successor Lyndon Johnson a catalyst to pass sweeping civil rights legislation. That was coming under JFK anyway, though it would probably not have been as comprehensive. Would Kennedy have supported a Great Society, though? What about the Vietnam war? There seems to be evidence that JFK wanted no part of full scale intervention, as Johnson did?

The recent elimination of Osama Bin Laden was immensely cathartic for many Americans, but it didn’t change much going forward. Bin Laden had been reduced to impotency by the time it occurred.

Back to France. It is unlikely that a successful assassination of Charles De Gaulle would have changed much. Algeria’s independence was a foregone conclusion. The French were weary of colonial wars by the early 1960s, having been humiliated in Vietnam and still recovering from the effects of World War II. The only real support for Algeria remaining part of France was with the minor pieds noir population there – descendants of French settlers – and some fringe military officers that had formed the OAS. At the time, Algeria was no economic benefit to France; in fact it was a drag. Besides, by the time the most organized conspiracy, that of Bastien-Thiry, was launched, Algeria had already been granted independence and most pieds-noir had evacuated. Furthermore, de Gaulle had already made his mark on France, and the rest of his Presidency was essentially that of a caretaker. Or that of an old man sniping at the U.S. and Britain for imagined slights.

Forsyth relates the 1962 OAS attempt to kill de Gaulle more or less factually at the beginning of his novel. He was a reporter for Reuters in Paris at the time and covered the story first hand. It was the inspiration for his fictional plot. Oh, and for what it’s worth, Frederick Forsyth’s birthday is August 25.

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Excessive government regulation has a demonstrable negative impact on entrepreneurship in today’s economy. For the past 50 years or so, with a brief hiatus in the 1980s, Congress’s reaction to every supposed problem was to pass a law creating a new bureaucracy and enabling it to promulgate a plethora of new regulations to micro-manage all aspects of running a business.

Thomas G. Stemberg, founder of Staples, Inc. back in the 1980s, writes about the roadblocks start-up businesses face in the present.

Chief among those roadblocks, Stemberg says, is the blizzard of bureaucratic red tape that buries businesses and stifles job creation. He cites the additional 16 million hours that vending-machine and chain-restaurant business owners must spend complying with new food regulations each year. And somewhere there is a licensing requirement for magicians to do a rabbit disappearing act, which mandates an annual fee, surprise inspections, and a rabbit disaster plan. All told, American business faces 46,758 pages of rules to live by in the Federal Register.

Senators Angus King (I, Maine) and Roy Blunt (R, Missouri) have introduced legislation that would create a Regulatory Improvement Commission that would recommend cuts in the (federal, anyway) regulatory regime, that would require up or down votes in Congress on regulations identified as useless, oppressive, or just plain silly. This plan emulates the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) that successfully closed 121 military bases since 1988. The success mainly resulted from giving the members of Congress political cover for base closings in their district or state. That seems to be the trick to cutting pork. King and Blunt perceive it could work the same with arcane regulations that stifle entrepreneurs.

Can it pass? I guess we’ll see. For Stemberg’s essay, please see this link.

Speaking of bureaucracy, the ever increasing cost of medical services is a demonstrable result. One physician and his patient, however, found a way to do an end run, thus saving 85% off a bill for an uncomplicated hernia operation. Dr. Jeffrey A. Singer of Phoenix, Arizona scheduled a patient for surgery in a local hospital. The patient is 60-ish self-employed entrepreneur that has an indemnity type heath insurance policy with no provider or preferred hospital requirements. For the required surgery, the policy benefits would pay a total of $2,500 for the surgeon and anesthesiologist and $2,500 for the various hospital charges. After discovering that the hospital’s fees would be around $23,000, presumably based upon the now infamous “Chargemaster” described by Steven Brill in detail earlier this year (Time magazine, March 5, 2013), the patient balked at the surgery. Dr. Singer, after learning of the nature of the patient’s insurance, realized that because it was an indemnity policy – like car insurance – it did not bind him to any particular preferred provider or hospital arrangement. The physician was able to help his patient shop around for a hospital that would negotiate the fees. They found one that quoted a reasonable up front cash price. He had the surgery, paying a turn-key price of a little more that $3,000.

I know from personal experience this can work. A number of years ago, when I was self-employed in a fledgling business, I injured myself and had to go to the emergency room (under my own power) for treatment. When presented with the bill, which I believed was outrageous, I offered roughly one-third of the total in immediate cash. They accepted with alacrity.

What is wrong with the health care payment system we have allowed to grow uncontrollably is that it really is not insurance. As Dr. Singer points out, it is a pre-paid health plan. Insurance companies negotiate with hospital and provider networks for the fees. The “Chargemaster” or whatever the list price schedule used might be called, is only the anchor point from which the actual fees paid by the insurer are negotiated. The only patients who pay full list price are the under- or un-insured that don’t know they can negotiate the fees.

The hospital fees are so outrageously high because (1) the providers set a high list price so they can end up with a better deal (Negotiation 101), (2) the providers must factor in their costs incurred in submitted claims (even the smallest clinic, hospital, or ASC must have one of more full time employees that do nothing that process claims), (3) insurance companies also have the claims processing expenses, and (4) most important, the patient has no incentive to be a frugal consumer of health care services because it is “free” or has low out-of-pocket cost (of which many patients still complain) at the point of service. When the payer is a third party, the patient has no incentive to be a wise consumer.

The solution to this state of affairs was supposed to be the Affordable Health Act, or “Obamacare” if you please. It does nothing to address the situation described above. Not only will the administrative costs remain, but they will grow because of the added regulatory compliance costs and bureaucracy necessary to administer it. Even the meanest intelligence could have predicted that a 2000+ page statute that mandates the promulgation of who know how many thousands of new regulations would have a massive price. Actually, I’m sure the super-smart Ivy League educated policy makers and the insurance industry lobbyists knew that. They just figured that a good number of those dollars would end up in their pockets.

What’s next? An “Affordable (meaning free) Food Act”? A good model for that would be Soylent Green.

To read Dr. Singer’s article see this  this link.

If interested in a continuing discussion of the heath care finance morass, see John Goodman’s health blog at this link.

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Rick Perry and Eric Holder on the same page?

Last week the Attorney General announced that he was changing Justice Department policy in an effort to reduce the number of people sent to overcrowded federal prisons. These policy changes include charging alleged offenders in a manner so as not to invoke mandatory minimum sentence provision, primarily in drug cases, and release of elderly prisoners deemed not to be a threat any longer.

Holder is actually behind the curve. Perry, about as right as the Attorney General is left, ten years ago urged and obtained passage of a Texas statute that sentences persons convicted of possession of less than a gram of illegal drugs to probation, early release, and alternatives to prison for non-violent offenders.

This should not be much of a surprise. Texas conservatives have always had a libertarian streak, and Perry is no exception. Advocates of the failed “war on drugs” have cut across ideological lines for some time. One of the most important goals for the early 20^th Century Progressive Movement, which the American left of today regards as it ideological ancestor, was alcohol and recreational drug prohibition. Those earlier lefties succeeded, though the prohibition of alcoholic beverages was short-lived.

Some conservatives have howled about Holder’s proposals. To a large extent, that is a knee-jerk reaction. Many of the current AG’s polices are – justifiably – repugnant to the right, and the ad hominem reaction is understandable. Nevertheless, conservatives should stop and think twice about Holder’s initiatives.

The cross-ideological fear of drug-related crime is what enabled Congress, and most of the states, to pass draconian laws providing penalties for illegal drug dealing and even simple possession of certain controlled substances. There is little evidence that those penalties have stanched the drug trade. On the contrary, they have encouraged it by making it more lucrative for the most vicious of criminals who are smart enough to stay out of law enforcement harm’s way by enlisting and controlling low level “retailers” who tend to be the ones caught and sent to prison. Risk always makes an endeavor more lucrative, and the kind of person who will violate harsh laws in order to profit is inevitably psychopathic.

It’s not just the drug war. Since the 1960s, the fear of crime has encouraged politicians at every level, but especially those in Congress, to enact harsh criminal statutes to avoid being accused of being “soft on crime.” To a large extent this is an effect of the McLuhanesque global village media has created. The result is a federal criminal code of several thousand offenses, many of which the average citizen has no knowledge. It has also resulted in the criminalization of regulatory violations so obscure that few would even know they might violate the law by engaging in seemingly innocent activity.

This area is where Holder – and state and federal lawmakers – also need to push for reforms. Rather than put non-violent tax evaders, white-collar fraudsters, and polluters in prison, give them probation with a threat of prison conditioned on paying their taxes, making restitution, and cleaning up the mess made – at a hefty rate of interest and costs. And get rid of criminal, as well as civil, statutes that serve to punish or regulate purely state or local activities.

Drug offenders, as well as other non-violent criminals, should only go to prison for multiple successive offenses, and then only for long enough to get their attention. I personally would favor de-criminalizing all drug possession offenses, while maintaining harsh sentences for purveyors to minors. After all, it costs over $50,000 per year (as set forth in a U.S. Court pre-sentence report) to house, feed and otherwise care for a federal prison inmate. That money could be better spent elsewhere

Some intelligent reporting on this issue can be found in the current The Economist, pp.23-24 or this link.

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The George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin affair has generated considerable furor, much like other misplaced outrages about other juries’ not guilty verdicts. It is worth remembering some of the latter.

This post was prompted by the remembrance that this week in 1892, 121 years ago, businessman Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were found axed to death in their Fall River, Massachusetts home. Daughter Lizzie was arrested and indicted for their murder. The media of the time, consisting almost entirely of newspapers, hastened to convict her, but a jury found Lizzie Borden not guilty. The public was outraged by this “miscarriage” of justice, or so it was reported. Was the verdict wrong? Actually, in the Borden case the proper question is, did she do the deed? Only she knew for sure.

There was another famous, at least locally, acquittal in a ax murder case in 1980. During the hottest summer on record in Texas, Collin County housewife Betty Gore was hacked to death in her home. Betty’s husband Allen had been having an affair with neighbor Candy Montgomery that Betty apparently had discovered. During an altercation between the two women, Candy killed Betty with an ax, striking her numerous times. Candy Montgomery admitted she did it and pleaded self defense. The jury bought it, and found her not guilty.

Most of us are familiar with O. J. Simpson’s 1995 trial on murder charges for murdering his estranged wife Nicole and her boyfriend Ron Goldman. Most observers believed the evidence of guilt was overwhelming, even though no one witnessed the crimes. A jury nevertheless found Simpson not guilty. Did he do it? Later a civil jury found he was responsible — under a much lower standard of proof.

Similarly, the media observers were convinced of her guilt when Casey Anthony was tried for the 2008 murder of her 2 year old child Caylee in 2011. Much to the public outrage – mainly, I suppose, because of the death of child barely out of infancy and a ne’er do well mother – Casey Anthony was declared not guilty by her jury. Again, only she knows for sure.

As for George Zimmerman, we know for sure he killed Martin by shooting him with a gun. The reasonable doubt question was whether he was justified under Florida law. The only persons who could answer that were the six jurors. They did. Were they correct? So much of that depends on one’s point of view, and is empirically unanswerable.

There are doubtless a myriad of other cases like these that did not draw widespread attention.

Did justice fail in such cases? For whom did it fail?

So far as whether “justice” failed on the facts, if you were not on the jury and listened to all of the evidence that was present, you are in not position to say the verdict was wrong.

Considering for whom it might have failed, consider this. Signs read “Justice for _______.” Fill in the blank: Andrew and Abby, Betty, Nicole and Ron, Caylee, Trayvon, countless unnamed others. But how can we achieve such justice? They are dead; gone; no more than a bleeding, then decaying piece of earth. If there is a life to come after physical death, perhaps they will receive justice, or mercy, whichever is appropriate. It nevertheless is beyond the power of anyone living. If physical life is all there is, as some believe, then those victims (and I use that term as merely descriptive and without judging their blame of lack thereof) are completely out of luck. Some of them might have been out of luck in this world, anyway. Perhaps some progs believe in a collective consciousness and justice for the victim is justice for those similarly situated. That concept is more fantastic than that of an afterlife, which cannot be empirically proven one way or the other. Those who say they feel your pain really don’t. See if they yelp when you get stuck in the butt with a sharp stick. The bell isn’t tolling for you until it does.

Law is really not about justice.  Law is really about ordered liberty (Justice Benjamin Cardozo’s phrase, not mine), though some semblance of justice is quite often the by-product.This is more often the case true in a body politic that makes laws on an objective basis with the standard being individual freedom for all its members as the standard of reference.Where the rights to life, liberty, and property clash, ambiguity often arises. The law provides a means, although imperfect, of sorting out the ambiguities. The goal is to keep the lid on and protect reasonable expectations, which may not necessarily be just to many minds.

Justice is a subjective concept. Those close to or who identify with the victims believe they were deprived of justice. The (alleged) perpetrators may believe they were deprived of justice because they had to undergo the ordeal of a trial. The trial itself was all the justice either would receive, and, for many of them or their surrogates, that was not enough or too much for them.

To those who decry the lack of justice, take comfort. As Hamlet reminded Polonius: “use every man after his desert, and who should escape whipping?”

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“You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. . . . It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four.

KOMO the CBS radio and TV outlet in Seattle reports that an internal memo at Seattle City Hall is causing quite a stir.

According to the City of Seattle, the terms “citizen,” or “brown bag” are potentially offensive and other words should be used. It suggests government workers no longer use the terms.

“Luckily, we’ve got options,” Elliott Bronstein of the Office for Civil Rights wrote in the memo. “For ‘citizens,’ how about ‘residents?’” Bronstein wrote.

What if you’re not a citizen or a resident?

And while city leaders publicize “brown bag” lunch meetings as a way to designate a bring-your-own lunch time event, the term has a sordid history. Huh?

“It used to be a way people could judge skin color,” Bronstein said in a phone interview.

Anyone ever heard that?

Does the public find it offensive? Most people agree it’s not.

Do they agree that Bronstein is an idiot?

But the City of Seattle isn’t alone. Washington State lawmakers have voted to remove “gender” specific words in official records.

Freshman can now be “first-years,” journeymen are “journey-level,” and penmanship is simply “handwriting.”

For the entire history of modern English, at least until the hyper sensitized present, the word “man” was used to refer to all human beings, regardless of sex. The Oxford English Dictionary explains the etymology. Many languages have one word for humans regardless of sex, and others that are sex specific. Latin had/has “homo” not to be confused with the Greek root meaning “same” as in “homosexual” or “homogeneous”) and “vir” meaning a male human. German has “Mensch” for the general term, and “Mann” and “Frau” for the sex-specific word. I suppose we could use “human” as a sex-neutral term, but “freshhuman” “journeyhumans,”and “penhumanship” are all awkward. “First year” is alright, but “journey-level” would be as awkward as the other proposal. “Penmanship” connotes a quality judgment that “handwriting” does not.

To offend or not to offend, turns out to be a very sensitive question. And a ridiculous one at that.

Word usage tends to evolve nicely on its own. The state dictating what words should be used creates awkwardness and affectation.

So what is a person supposed to say instead of brown bag? According to the memo, people should try “lunch-and-learn” or “sack lunch.”

Perhaps Bronstein is the one who should be sacked.

A reader called my attention to the 7/24/2013 column by Walter Williams.

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/13/Profiling.htm

Imagine you are one of our prehistoric ancestors wandering through the ancient forest when suddenly you hear a faint noise ahead. Is that the wind rustling believes or a dead branch falling off a tree, or is it a dangerous predator, perhaps a bear or tiger? Your answer could mean life or death.

If you assume the noise is a predator, but turns out to be just the wind, you have made what is called a Type I Error; that is, believing a pattern is real when it is not, in other words, a false positive. If you assume that the noise is just the wind, but it turns out to be a hungry tiger, you have made a Type II Error; that is believing a pattern is not real when it is, a false negative.

In making the Type I Error, you might be inconvenienced to varying degrees. On the other hand, if you make the Type II Error, you’re the tiger’s lunch. Obviously, the practice which permits the greatest level of survival, is to make the Type I Error. Whether this means that those who tend to make the type to error are eliminated from the gene pool by a biological evolutionary process, or their contemporaries learn from experience and pass this on to successive generations, matters not. The point is that we learn to recognize patterns, and the absence of complete information, assume the worst. We tend toward false positives. This is the survival mechanism at work, and it is found both in human beings, who are after all a species in the animal kingdom, as well as lower animals.

Fast-forward to the year 2013 late at night in one of our major cities. You’re walking on a lonely street in an area known for muggings and other criminal attacks, in which all the reported suspects are young males. Up ahead you see two young men. They are both dressed in what might be called gangsta-chic and seem to be hanging around with no apparent purpose.

What do you do? The alternatives are to assume the two men may be up to no good and look for an alternate route to where you are going, or give them the benefit of the doubt continue on walking up to them, hoping to pass by without incident. If you commit a Type I Error, you may be needlessly delayed in reaching your destination. On the other hand, if you commit a Type II Error, you could lose your wallet, and suffer a beating or worse. The answer is obvious, unless you are a fool.

Slight change of scenario. You are a police officer, sworn to protect and serve all persons in your city. Do you approach the two men and inquire as to who they are and what their purpose at the time might be? If you do, and based on your experience, you don’t get quite the right answers you frisk them for weapons, and perhaps check them out for outstanding warrants? Or do you just ignore them? If you commit either type error, you’re not doing your job.

That scenario can be changed up to the other end of a continuum, by changing the time of day, the location, and the appearance of the two men. The two men are in broad daylight, waiting at a taxi stand or bus stop, dressed in conventional suits and ties, carrying brief cases. Without more – a lot more – viewing them with suspicion would obviously be irrational. But I venture to say that scenario rarely occurs today.

Police officers, much more than ordinary citizens, have the training and experience to sort out ambiguities in marginal situations. They learn from street experience which patterns or situations are likely to be trouble, which are less so, and which are most likely to be harmless. This is the same learning process that makes a grand master quickly recognize a pattern on the chess board, or ordinary Americans to instantly recognize a word written in English in the Roman alphabet. Arabs likewise instantly recognize words in Arabic that look like doodling or chicken scratches to anyone other than a fluent reader of that language.

It takes a lot of experience. An article in Scientific American a while back opined that it takes about 10,000 hours, or five years of 40 hour work weeks to develop an “expert mind.” Significantly, 10,000 hours is the number of hours of flight time it takes to be hired as a commercial airline pilot. Most non-police officers do not develop the street sense facility. They have to rely on their common sense and general information and experience. This means they will make numerous Type One Errors – and will avoid harm in most cases.

Thus, profiling occurs all the time, and it will continue to occur. Insofar as considering a person’s race as a factor, in some situations it make sense – common sense. In other situations, it may not. Once thing is certain: The fact that someone being profiled is of a certain skin color should never be a reason to not inquire further when other factors are present. Even though that might lead to an accusation of “racial” profiling, it would be stupidity in the extreme. But then, what is often called “political correctness” is synonym for stupidity.

Yesterday was the 60^th anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean War. That cease-fire established a demarcation line within a demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas. That line is still there; the DMZ is a no-man’s land across which occasional pot-shots have been traded for the past 60 years. Periodic threats emanate from the North Korean leadership, usually when they perceive such bellicosity could bring tribute from the West in the form of economic – the naive call it “humanitarian” – aid to prop up that regime. China for a number of less than virtuous reasons, continues to abet the North.

Shortly after the Soviet Union and its evil empire collapsed in 1989 – 1991, a colleague remarked to me that the only Marxists left in the world were on American college campuses. Not quite. He left out a large portion of the news media. Furthermore, he apparently did not consider the two surviving communist regimes that did not collapse, and still have not – Cuba and North Korea.

Cuba remains communist for a number of reasons. Fidel Castro was a competent leader who learned from history – the page of the Bolshevik play book that counseled to get rid of your opposition immediately and completely, preferably by killing them. Castro also quickly also became a client of the Soviet Union. After the Cuban missile crisis, however, Communist Cuba was never more than a mere irritant. It is presently a threat to no one.

North Korea similarly survived. Unlike Cuba, it is a potential threat. It appears to have several nuclear warheads or bombs, and a nascent delivery system. Its conventional forces could devastate or seriously damage the South Korean capital Seoul before an effective response could be mounted. There are also 35,000 plus U.S. troops there.

Eliminating the North Korean regime is possible, but China’s reaction is uncertain. Even though it has been evolving into a market economy, it is still an authoritarian regime, and its “capitalism” is more “cronyism” in the way it operates. A unified Korea, which would be led by the South, would be a serious economic threat to China. It is doubtful if the Chinese would stand idly by if that might occur.

I confess that my current knowledge of the Korean question is superficial, so our foreign relations leaders have to be trusted. It may be that the status quo, as irritating as it might be for our Western sensibilities, is the best course for now. This is in our national interest because the world needs more examples of why the capitalist market economy is superior. That example of the progress that South Korea has made since the armistice is impressive. I spent part of 1968 and most of 1969 in South Korea. It was then definitely a third-world country that still bore the scars of war in which the active fighting, at least, had ended a decade and a half previously. There were signs then of a robust economy still in gestation. No question that nation has grown in prosperity. The devastation wreaked by another war – especially of nuclear weapons, however low-grade – on its soil would be catastrophic for the people there as well as the rest of the world.

Except for Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 – 1990, and possibly the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991, the United States has not had an unequivocal military victory since World War II. Even the rump British Empire has done better than that. The Korean War was not in vain, however. President Obama, with whom I often disagree, pointed to the staggering resurgence of South Korea, and opined that holding the line in Korea, and at least making the continued existence of the South possible, was itself a victory. Whether a total military victory was possible in 1950 – 53 is now a moot point; the President is at least partially correct.

There are plenty of accounts of the Korean War available. To my mind, the most illuminating and readable are This Kind of War, by T. R. Fehrenbach (who actually fought in the front lines in the Korean War, though he never mentions that service), and The Coldest Winter, by David Halberstam.