Saved by the Cell

Publicity is the very soul of justice.

— Jeremy Bentham

Journalists have voiced near-universal praise for Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old who filmed the murder of George Floyd with her cell. 

Her footage all but convicted Floyd's killer.

She deserves our praise. 

Her cell made the law work.

Eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham thought the law's purpose is "to govern;" that is, to keep us safe. 

But to govern, the law must be enforced—and enforcement is everyone's responsibility. 

The law, he said, "governs through the governed."

Because it depends on the governed, the law is highly fallible—because we are. The corrective, Bentham said, is publicity. 

Publicity, he said, "keeps the judges on trial."

"It is through publicity alone that justice becomes the mother of security. Without publicity, all other checks are fruitless."

Without publicity, the law is toothless; but with it, the law can prevail, as it did yesterday.

HAT TIP: Thanks go to historian Jon Meacham for inspiring this post.

Kidnapped!

The inventor of the PDF, Chuck Geschke, who died last week at 81, was kidnapped at gunpoint from his workplace 30 years ago.

On a Tuesday morning in May 1992, in the parking lot of Adobe's headquarters in Mountain View, California, Mouhannad Albukhari and Jack Sayeh beckoned Geschke to their car. 

The two Syrian terrorists snatched Geschke at gunpoint, blindfolded him with duct tape, and drove him first to a local motel, then to a bungalow "safehouse" sixty miles away.

Over the following four days, Albukhari and Sayeh repeatedly phoned the executive's home demanding $650,000 (the amount Geschke thought his wife could raise).

The FBI told Geschke's family to pay the ransom. So on Friday night, Geschke's daughter put the money in a bag and drove 75 miles to the seaside town of Marina, where she dropped the bag on a dead-end road. Mouhannad Albukhari was hiding in wait just a few feet away, unaware the FBI had set up a dragnet. Nine hours later, after a roundabout helicopter chase, FBI agents nabbed him.

"After a gentlemanly discussion," an agent told the Associated Press, "he agreed to do the right thing and to take us to where Mr. Geschke was being held by Mr. Sayeh."

Geschke was freed and the two kidnappers arrested and convicted for life.

Geschke said at the sentencing, “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that these two individuals planned to murder me."

NOTE: A gripping, moment-by-moment account of Gescke's ordeal can be found in this four-part newspaper series from 2009:

Part 1: A dramatic kidnapping revisited
Part 2: Two days of terror, uncertainty
Part 3: Chuck’s dramatic rescue
Part 4: Aftermath of a kidnapping

Woke Me When It's Over

A sixth grader's father has caused a tempest in uptown Manhattan by mailing an angry letter to the 650 parents whose kids are enrolled in Brearley, an elite private girls school that costs $54,000 a year to attend. 

Recipients of the letter include Chelsea Clinton, Tina Fey, Drew Barrymore and Steve Martin.

"Our family recently made the decision not to reenroll our daughter at Brearley," wrote Andrew Gutman. 

"We no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development."

Gutman went on to say the school "has completely lost its way."

"The administration and trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob," he wrote.

The mob Gutman had in mind: the advocates of woke.

Last week I attended my first woke training course. 

I'm embarrassed to say I almost fell asleep.

The silliest portion of the training, by far, came when the presenter shamed herself for describing things as "crazy," pledging never again to use a word offensive to psychotics. 

Her self-mortification generated a couple dozen red-heart emojis and prompted one participant to pledge never again to describe things as "lame," a word offensive to cripples.

As far as the training went, he took the word right out of my mouth.

Woke's roots lie in French "post-structuralist" philosophy, which claimed that truth and righteousness are the solely property of the marginalized.

Many great philosophers contributed to post-structuralist thought.

But sadly, in the hands of hacks, their contribution to Western thought has devolved from insight to idiocy.

Woke training is inane.

Worse, it's a form of rhetoric philosophers call "moral grandstanding."

"Moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion," says philosopher Brandon Warmke. 

"Moral grandstanders have egotistical motives: they may want to signal that they have superhuman insight into a topic, paint themselves as a victim, or show that they care more than others."

Rather than mending society, moral grandstanders' soapboxing is divisive.

"Moral grandstanding contributes to political polarization, increases cynicism, and causes outrage exhaustion," Warmke says.

Moral grandstanders are also "free riders," Warmke claims. 

"They get the benefits of being heard without contributing to any valuable discourse."

Andrew Gutman's letter, although harsh, comes, I believe, as a predictable gut-reaction to moral grandstanding by Brearley.

"I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs," Gutman told The New York Post.

While worried about his daughter's "indoctrination," what actually set Gutman off was the school's insistence he attend woke training, which he called "simplistic and sophomoric" and likened to Mao-like rehabilitation.

Too bad he didn't realize he simply could have napped through the training. 

Please, woke me when it's over.

Beyond the Pale

Both dove-like roved forth beyond the pale.

— John Harington

I'm reading Revelations, the new biography of British painter Francis Bacon. 

The book opens by recounting how Bacon's parents, always the nomads, settled in Ireland in 1900, when the country was "still regarded as a colony," where they rented a manor in one of the horsey counties that surrounded Dublin, a region known as "the Pale."

The Pale—a 600-square-mile area referred to by the British king as his "four obedient shires"—was colonized in the 12th century. To mark his colony, the king drove wooden stakes, called "pales," into the ground. Eventually, the pales were replaced by a deep ditch and a hedgerow, but the name "the Pale" stuck.

If you lived inside the Pale in the 12th century, you lived under the protection of the crown, in a genteel environment safe from the savageries of the Irish. If you ventured beyond the Pale, well, good luck: you'd exited civilization.

Poet John Harington cemented the phrase beyond the pale in a 1657 work entitled The History of Polindor and Flostella. A character in the poem retreats to his manor for "quiet, calm and ease," but with a reckless girlfriend "roved forth beyond the pale," where he and his lover are immediately attacked by thugs.

Beyond the pale soon became synonymous with "outside acceptable behavior."

Two centuries later, Rudyard Kipling published "Beyond the Pale," a short story described by Kingsley Amis as "one of the most terrible in the language."

"Beyond the Pale" describes the forbidden affair between an Englishman and an Indian. Desperate to see his lover one night, the Englishman knocks at her window, only to see her thrust out two stumps where her hands had been. Shocked, the man doesn't notice an invisible assailant, who stabs him with "something sharp" in the groin.

The lovers pay heavily for roving beyond the pale. "A man should keep to his own caste, race and breed," the narrator advises.

While mores differ from those of the past, it's still easy to venture beyond the pale. Crooks, coaches, clerics, celebrities, journalists, CEOs, politicians and police officers do it every hour of every day.

Closer Than Ever

In the threatening situation of the world today, it would not be at all surprising if sections of the community who ask themselves nothing were visited by "visions." 

— Carl Jung

CNN reports that the Pentagon has acknowledged the existence of UFOs, after classified videos of flying saucers were leaked. The generals will report their findings to Congress in June.

Why this announcement isn't the lead of the day mystifies me. Perhaps, thanks to decades of lying, the federal government no longer has credibility.

Steven Spielberg in fact had Watergate in mind when in 1975 he pitched the script for a political thriller he eventually entitled "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Much different than the final cut of the film, Spielberg’s first draft followed Claude Lacombe, a Pentagon contractor who blows the whistle on a coverup. Lacombe's employer knows aliens visit Earth, but doesn't want the public to know.

Lacombe was based in part on Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the civilian advisor to Project Blue Book who developed the "scale" for alien encounters.

According to Hynek, a "close encounter of the first kind" was a UFO sighting; a "close encounter of the second kind" was the discovery of hard evidence; a "close encounter of the third kind" was contact.

Hynek—who served as Spielberg's technical advisor and enjoyed a cameo in the film—believed UFOs were real. He called them "M&Ms."

"I hold it entirely possible", Hynek said, "that a technology exists which encompasses both the physical and the psychic. There are stars that are millions of years older than the sun. There may be a civilization that is millions of years more advanced than man's. 

"I hypothesize an 'M&M' technology encompassing the mental and material realms. The psychic realms, so mysterious to us today, may be an ordinary part of an advanced technology."