Read the whole thing at NRO, about the not-particularly bright bureaucrats who arbitrarily stick names on the no-fly list. Excerpts:
But sorting out the criminals and malefactors from the law-abiding and peaceable is very difficult and demanding work, which is why we pay the ladies and gentlemen in our law-enforcement and intelligence agencies so much to do it. (Two hundred grand a year goes a long way in Philadelphia.) Conservatives are naturally inclined to indulge the police, but the fact is that the run of them are specimens of what you get when you take the same lazy unionized public-teat-suckling lumps over at the DMV and put guns on their hips and tell them that they are “at war” with the people they serve. Our intelligence guys aren’t in the main Blackford Oakes or James Bond: They’re drones compiling Excel reports until their pensions kick in.
And this:
On the matter of ordinary workaday murders of the South Chicago and North Philadelphia type, it cannot be repeated enough that the majority of the killers — 90 percent in New York City according to a New York Times review of the data — have prior criminal histories, often for violent crime, frequently involving weapons offenses. Chicago, among other cities, does basically nothing to prosecute crimes involving the illegal possession of guns. For all the clucking about straw-purchasers — phony buyers who help criminals avoid background checks when acquiring guns — the U.S. attorney’s office for blood-soaked Chicago won’t even bother with those cases as a matter of policy. Why? Too much work, not enough juice. Nobody’s career gets made by putting some South Side gangster’s mom in the pokey for making a straw purchase of a Glock for her beloved son.
The Democrats and their intellectually corrupt apologists at the New York Times and elsewhere are willing to strip Americans of their constitutional rights, to micturate from a great height upon the entire concept of due process, and to treat all of us like criminals — while doing precisely nothing to prevent school shootings, terrorism, or ordinary crime — because they don’t have the guts to tell their political clients in the schools, the mental-health bureaucracies, and the criminal-justice system that eventually they are going to have to do their goddamned jobs in exchange for the hundreds of billions of dollars we lavish upon them.
Conclusion:
It is time for Americans to grow up and to sober up. It may push your soy-latte buttons every time Bubba down in Muleshoe, Texas, buys a scary-looking black gun and declares war upon a row of defenseless Budweiser cans, but inconveniencing Bubba isn’t going to get the job done. Laziness, stupidity, corruption: The U.S. government exists for the sole purpose of protecting the rights of U.S. citizens, but somehow the fine minds at the New York Times conclude that the federal government should do more to burden the citizens to whom it owes every duty than, say, so-called refugees from Syria to whom the U.S. government has no duty whatsoever. Why? Because the alternative is expecting the employees of our federal, state, and local governments to do their duties, and that is just too much work.
We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning after when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.
... a point well demonstrated in the checkered career of one man:
Gaseous nitrogen combines with gaseous hydrogen in simple quantitative proportions to produce gaseous ammonia.
~ Fritz Haber (wiki) (attributed; a vast simplification of the Haber process for fixing nitrogen)
The field of scientific abstraction encompasses independent kingdoms of ideas and of experiments, and within these, rulers whose fame outlasts the centuries. But they are not the only kings in science. He also is a king who guides the spirit of his contemporaries by knowledge and creative work, by teaching and research in the field of applied science, and who conquers for science provinces which have only been raided by craftsmen.
~ Haber (memorial remarks on his mentor, Professor Georg Lunge, in January 1923)
The effects of the successful gas attack were horrible. I am not pleased with the idea of poisoning men. Of course the entire world will rage about it first and then imitate us. All the dead lie on their backs with clenched fists; the whole field is yellow.
~ Rudolph Binding (1867-1938) (on the first German gas attack, April 1915, in A Fatalist at War, 1915)
War and its horrors, and yet I sing and whistle...
~ Confederate General George E. Pickett (1825-1875) (letter to his wife, May 1864)
Today is the anniversary of the birth of German physical chemist Fritz Haber (wiki) (1868-1934), who received the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1918 for his role in inventing the Haber-Bosch process for "fixing" nitrogen on an industrial scale, thus permitting mass production of synthetic fertilizers and high explosives.* Born to a well-to-do Jewish family in Breslau, Prussia, Haber studied chemistry at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, eventually receiving a doctorate in 1891.
Unable to find a comfortable working relationship with his father in the latter's Breslau chemical plant, Haber accepted successive academic positions in the universities of Jena and Karlsruhe and developed his nitrogen-fixing process at the latter between 1894 and 1911, while also working on electrochemistry, combustion reactions, and the separation of gold from seawater. When World War I broke out, Haber's process was key to Germany's ability to produce both fertilizer and high-explosives despite her inability to import nitrates because of the British blockade. Moreover, as a militant German imperialist who strongly supported the war effort, Haber played a major role in the development of chemical warfare by the Germans in World War I and was primarily responsible - as an army officer - for the weaponization of chlorine gas and its first devastating deployment against Canadian troops in the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915.**
He was also active in developing gas masks, studying the physiological effects of poison gas, and is still recognized by many as "the father of chemical warfare.*** Between the wars, Haber continued secret work for Germany on poison gas weapons, but with the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, his Jewish ancestry told against him (despite an earlier conversion to Lutheranism), and he removed himself to Switzerland, where he died in 1934, a strange, enigmatic man... In his The Void of War, 1918, English writer Reginald Farrer (1880-1920) noted,
"Even in theory, the gas mask is a dreadful thing. It stands for one's first flash of insight into man's measureless malignity against man."
* N.B. Although atmospheric nitrogen is plentiful, it is relatively inert and difficult to coax into forming compounds. The Haber-Bosch process converts atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia by a reaction with hydrogen using a metal catalyst and high temperatures and pressures. The ammonia is used in turn for manufacturing synthetic fertilizers or to produce the nitric acid needed for explosives. Thus, the Haber-Bosch process is one of the most important - and beneficial - industrial procedures ever devised.
** A detailed account of Haber's role in the first deployment of poison gas at 2nd Ypres is provided by Diana Preston in her recent book, A Higher Form of Killing, which treats "the six weeks in World War I that forever changed the nature of warfare." (Preston also treats the sinking of the Lusitania and the first Zeppelin bombing raids on London, all in April/May 1915.)
*** Haber's first wife, who was strongly opposed to his work on chemical weapons, committed suicide within two weeks of their first use at 2nd Ypres. His award of the Nobel prize was bitterly opposed by the Allied nations.
What an extraordinarily mixed legacy - more here on the benefits to the world of the ability to fertilize crops with artificially produced ammonia. SciShow has an excellent brief video on Haber's inventions, good and bad:
Unsurprisingly, after a few minutes of this the French soldiers fled their trenches in terror. Harold Peat, a Canadian private in reserve in the eastern part of the salient, witnessed the first moments of this new horror in war:
In the far distance we saw a cloud rise as though from the earth. It was a greeny-red color, and increased in volume as it rolled forward. It was like a mist rising, and yet it hugged the ground, rose five or six feet, and penetrated to every crevice and dip in the ground. We could not tell what it was. Suddenly from out the mist we men in reserves saw movement. Coming towards us, running as though Hell as it really was had been let loose behind them, were the black troops from Northern Africa. Poor devils, I do not blame them. It was enough to make any man run.
Another Canadian soldier in the front line, Reginald Grant, painted a similar picture:
The line trembled from one end to the other, as the Algerian troops immediately on our left, jumped out of their trenches, falling as they ran. The whole thing seemed absolutely incomprehensible until I got a whiff of the gas. They ran like men possessed, gasping, choking, blinded and dropping with suffocation. They could hardly be blamed... The buttons on our uniforms were tinged yellow and green from the gas, so virulent was the poison.
Gassed, a relatively little-known painting by famed American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), better known for his exquisite portraiture. Now in the Imperial War Museum, London, it makes a harrowing impression full size:
Based on Ed's Quotation of the Day, only available via email. Leave your email address in the comments if you'd like to be added to his list.
ICYMI, Friday's links are here, and include the end of prohibition in the US, the world's most expensive cars, an emergency enema kit (the defibrillator of the 18th century) and more dubious medical treatments, DIY candles, and concrete ships.
