'Nother Solent

"Collar the lot."

In this post regarding the recently defeated proposal to allow detention without charge of terrorist suspects for 90 days, I said that if we didn't need those powers in 1940 we don't need them now. Partrick Crozier writes:

We did need (well, certainly use) internment in 1940. Enemy aliens were interned. When asked whether to include Jews and opponents of the Nazi regime, Churchill replied: "Collar the lot".

We also used it against the IRA in the 1940s and again during the Border Campaign of the 1950s and early 1960s. It was also used in Malaya and Kenya and for all I know half a dozen places in the Middle East.

If a terrorist enemy can find refuge amongst the native population or a significant part of that native population then internment is an essential (though not by itself sufficient) component in eventual victory.

I would be delighted if you or your readers could find a compelling counter-example but I suspect they will be searching in vain.

The general question of whether internment has or has not worked in our various wars is too big for me to discuss on a Saturday morning. I will stick to World War II.

I distinguish between the World War II internment and current proposals for the suspension or dilution of habeus corpus in several ways.

(1) There was a war on in 1940. Hitler was in the process of conquering Europe and had the serious intention of conquering us. I am a supporter of the War on Terror, but it isn't the same.

(2) Those interned in 1940 were foreigners, enemy foreigners to boot, not British citizens. Glenn Reynolds is always going on about how much more likely the US is to start falling down the slippery slope when it dilutes the rights of citizens, and he's right. This is not to say that non-citizens are intrinsically less valuable human beings; it is a matter of the implied contract between government and citizens.

(3) Apart from Churchill's bad-tempered outburst the British government never denied that most of those interned in 1940 were innocent. Contemporary propaganda was at pains to stress this point (I can't remember it exactly, but I think that the scene towards the end of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp where the nice German, Theo, is interviewed by what we would now call an immigration officer who says something like "these measures are for your protection as well as ours" is an example of the arguments used. Not that Churchill liked the film!)

(4) Did WWII internment actually do any good? Many of the accounts written nowadays are infected by a politically correct desire to make the British (or US) governments look bad in any circumstances, and take no account of the real dangers Britain faced or of the fact that the British authorities, being neither telepathic nor clairvoyant, could not know which dangers were real and which not. However, as I'm sure you know, the British policy of general internment of enemy aliens was eventually dropped, partly as a result of the torpedoing of the Arandora Star taking internees to Canada. The fact that the British government did not pursue the policy implies that they concluded that on balance it was not assisting the war effort. The German espionage network in Britain was never very successful anyway, but the accounts I have read do not suggest that it was much disrupted by internment.

Can anyone supply the author and title

of a history book for kids we have heard about? It was written quite recently by a father who became concerned that his children knew plenty of historical factoids but but had no sense of what happened after what. So this book is strongly chronological. As an extra bonus at the back of the book there are the lyrics of all those patriotic songs that everyone is supposed to know but doesn't any more.

Talking of blegs, Michael Jennings has enquired what "modern studies" is, although not in those exact words. To my gloomy prediction of "Little in-passing anecdotes about slavery and witch-burning" he adds, "I am sure the beastliness of the Industrial Revolution will be in there somewhere, too."

UPDATE: Tim Worstall (who is tons better looking than Paul Krugman) names the book.

Adloyada blogged about the huge demonstration in Morocco against al-Qaeda.

There's an even more extraordinary back story, which is that the protests themselves have come out of a wider awakening of yearnings for freedom, democracy and human rights which commentators argue was started off by the Casablanca bombings of 2003.

And those were bombings which were primarily targeted at the small remaining Jewish community of Morocco. Now imagine a demonstration by English trade unionists for the synagogue that got torched and the Jewish cemetries that got desecrated like that. Imagine a demonstration in Argentina for the justice that still eludes the victims of the Islamist bombing that killed so many when the Buenos Aires Jewish Centre was bombed. But this was a demonstration just a few days ago by Muslims in an Arab country.

UPDATE: Read the comments discussion about when and if countries should attempt to integrate Islamist political parties into the body politic, too. And read the post above about narratives. Avoid the one about mannequins.

"The real difficulty

which besets the philanthropist in his endeavour to exorcise the spirit of war is caused, not by the vices of this spirit, but by its virtues. In so far as it springs from vainglory or cupidity, it is comparatively easy to deal with. In so far as it is base, there is room for a bargain. It can be compounded with or bought off, as we have seen before now, with some kind of material currency. It will not stand out for very long against promises of prosperity and threats of dearth. But where, as at most crises, this spirit is not base, where its impulse is not less noble, but more noble than those which influence men day by day in the conduct of their worldy affairs, where the contrast which presents itself to their imagination is between duty on the one hand and gain on the other, between self-sacrifice and self-interest, between their country's need and their own ease, it is not possible to quench the fires by appeals proceeding from a lower plane. The philanthropist, if he is to succeed, must take still higher ground, and higher ground than this it is not a very simple matter to discover."

- F S Oliver, Ordeal by Battle, quoted by John Terraine in The Smoke and the Fire.

A Jacobite plot.

Today is Buy Joanne Jacobs' book day. I did. It's all part of a plot to drive up the Amazon rankings. I bought Tim Worstall's Blogged too, but not as part of a Timmite plot.

Ancient liberties.

Here is Nick Cohen writing on the un-Englishness of torture.

Sir Edward Coke, Bodin’s English contemporary, was adamant that “there is no warrant to torture in this land”. [Quoted elsewhere as "no law to warrant tortures in this land" - NS] He meant in the common law courts. It could be authorised by the monarch or the privy council, and practised under the royal prerogative by the Court of Star Chamber. James I had to sanction the torturing of Guy Fawkes personally. If his interrogators did put him on the rack, they would have done so in the Tower, which held the only rack in England.

I found this article via Google. The author is concerned to defend King James for reasons linked to the King James Bible. He makes the valid point that whatever the common law said, the "exceptions" authorised by Royal Prerogative or Star Chamber were not in fact that exceptional, and that Sir Edmund Coke himself authorised at least one of them.

Nonetheless "no law to warrant tortures in this land" is a tradition worth preserving and celebrating, and the celebration will help the preservation. But Cohen's article is honest. He also says,

If the Lords go against the government, all evidence from, say, Egypt will be inadmissible because the Egyptians may have used torture. The result will be a paradoxical inversion. The authorities will be able to deport a harmless Egyptian cabbie who came to Britain as an economic migrant, for breaking immigration rules. But they won’t be able to send back a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad as he “may” be tortured on return. If there is evidence from Egypt that he is plotting an attack on the Underground, they won’t be able to use that against him either because it “may” have been collected by torture. In other words, the greater the alleged threat a foreign suspect poses to the country, the harder it will be to deal with him.

It seems to me that the problem lies in the way that whole countries are either declared free of torture or declared to be torturing countries. Judges must do their job and judge individual cases.

On a similar theme, the MPs whose votes defeated government's proposal to grant itself the power to hold terrorist suspects without charge for 90 days are worthy of their predecessors.

Many observers, including plenty of bloggers who I generally agree with, say that the length and complexity of terrorism investigations that must cover several continents and deal with foreign languages and information held on computers are so great that ninety days is needed. To them I say

• Cliché it may be, but if we let the terrorists erode our liberties they will have won. I don't mean "have won spiritually" or anything wishy-washy like that, I mean that it is the conscious aim of terrorism to make the authorities repressive.
  
• If we could do without this in 1940 with Hitler at the door we can do without it now.
  
• 90 days? We can't afford to go that slowly. Parkinson's Law would apply here: if the police had ninety days to play with, ninety days they would take.
  
• I'd give it a week before such powers were used against supporters of the BNP, a month for the drug dealers and a year for hecklers at party conferences

Still, I recognise there are dangers. Brownie at Harry's Place describes one possible scenario well. If anything could have persuaded me, that would have.

Perhaps I can suggest a compromise? A great deal of my opposition to this proposed measure stemmed from the fact that it could and would be applied far beyond its original purpose. My husband suggested that if we must take extraordinary measures it would be better policy to revive the Act of Attainder. At least the accused was allowed to present evidence, provide witnesses, and speak before both Houses during the proceedings.

UPDATE 12 Nov: Patrick Crozier raised the issue of the internment of enemy aliens in 1940. Scroll up to see my response.

I see them here, I see them there, I see yankee war crimes everywhere.

Yankee war crimes in the Independent - read Scott Burgess on the White Phosphorus Scandal that rose into the sky like an illuminating flare, appropriately enough, and just as quickly sank. [Added later: I did not make quite clear enought that Scott's role in all this was to supply the gravity.]

Yankee war crimes in the Guardian - see this column by George Monbiot called "The media are minimising US and British war crimes in Iraq"

What struck me most about this article when I had stopped laughing long enough to read it was its reliance on cheap stunts. It starts with the line "We were told that the Iraqis don't count." Because by means of a wearisome pun on two possible meanings of the word "count", Monibot could give you the momentary impression that the Americans have said that the Iraqis are worth less as human beings .... yawn, you guessed right, Monibot does give you that impression.

He doesn't keep it up because he can't. With a certain reluctance he turns to his actual, quite different complaint in the next few lines. He writes:

"Before the invasion began, the head of US central command, General Thomas Franks, boasted that "we don't do body counts". His claim was repeated by Donald Rumsfeld in November 2003 ("We don't do body counts on other people") and the Pentagon last January ("The only thing we keep track of is casualties for US troops and civilians").

But then do you know what those warmongering Pentagon scum did? (Sensitive readers may prefer to look away at this point.)

They made a bar chart. Yes, a bar chart. In a report to Congress. It was labelled "average daily casualties - Iraqi and coalition. 1 Jan 04-16 Sep 05".

Sternly, Monibot says, "The claim that it kept no track of Iraqi deaths was false." First point: two of Monbiot's supposedly damning quotes (by Franks and Rumsfeld) date from before the beginning of the offending bar chart. (The first of them dates from before the war itself, and pretty clearly was talking about battle casualties among Saddam's army.) If someone claims not to be on a diet in 2003 it doesn't make her a liar if she then starts one in 2005.

Second point: who cares? So someone came out with a bit of bravado designed to lay the ghosts of Vietnam (a war in which "body counts" of enemy dead were widely condemned both for their dishonesty and because they can act as an incentive to massacre) and then the Pentagon changed its mind about its record keeping? Big deal.

Third point: if you look very, very carefully you will see that the unnamed Evil Pentagonian quoted third said, "The only thing we keep track of is casualties for US troops and civilians." And then if you look equally carefully further down the page you will see Mr Monbiot says,

The report does not explain what it means by casualty, or if its figures represent all casualties, only insurgents, or, as the foregoing paragraph appears to hint, only civilians killed by insurgents.

It's all very vague, but it looks to me as if the Evil Pentagonian and the Evil Bar Chart might have been talking about the same thing.

The next bit of the article is about Iraq Body Count and the Lancet study. Now, the internet isn't exactly short of discussion of the Lancet figures. For the record I think that they are way too high to be credible for that sort of war and that the source of error will turn out to be exaggeration by survey respondents for political reasons or in the hope of getting compensation.

Given that the phrase "two independent news agencies" impresses me very little when I consider possible pairs, my guess is that the Iraq Body Count estimate will also turn out to be too high. But I don't want to attack Monbiot here for believing differently. The point is that even on his own account, so far the article has had practically nothing to do with its stated subject of British and American war crimes. First he talked about, at worst, the US keeping records it had said it didn't keep. Then he talked about how to count numbers of deaths due to the war. He is of course aware that the Lancet and Iraq Body Count figures include things like higher incidence of disease, not to mention* the victims of the spectacular and unashamed war crimes committed by Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Finally he claimed that the US foolishly assumes all the people it blows up are insurgents.

The last two issues are important (the first isn't), but I can't help feeling sorry for all those Guardian readers who clicked the link hoping for some juicy US war crimes action and this is all they got. False advertising, I call it. Still, I suppose it sells papers.

*As indeed Mr Monbiot doesn't.

I greeted all the other self-antonyms

(or synantonyms) that I have posted on this blog as old friends whom I had not seen for a while. But the one Alex Bensky has provided is entirely new to me. He writes:

Well, some years ago, after I managed to pass the Missouri bar examination, I went to the state capital, Jefferson City, where I stood up with the others and solemnly promised to "demean myself in a manner befitting an attorney and member of the bar."

When I joined the line to pick up my certificate, it was all I could do to keep from pumping the hand of the state's chief justice and assuring him, "Your Honor, I have every intention of demeaning myself as a lawyer."

Why you should never, ever have a national curriculum.

I was directed to this story from Scotland by Freedom and Whisky.

A radical review of the curriculum could see history disappear as a separate subject to avoid "overloading" pupils in the early secondary years.

[Scottish Executive] Education Minister Peter Peacock favours teaching history as part of other subjects such as modern studies.

The value that he gives history can be assessed by the fact that sees no irony in making the study of the past a part of "modern studies." No piece of information must be allowed to reach the pupil without being filtered through the prism of modernity - which means, in practice, the prism of the views of the current Scottish educational establishment, a fairly narrow sect even within the Left. The article also says:

But it is believed that history would be taught "in passing" when elements of other subjects touched upon issues of historical interest.

"In passing", as one would speak of something embarrassing. History is like uranium to "progressive" educators: the last thing they want is for people to bring the separate pieces together. So long as the proles have no opportunity to perceive either that people of other times had quite different assumptions than those of today (a perception that inevitably suggests that current obsessions may be wrong or unimportant), or that they could be the equals or the superiors of moderns when it came to intelligence and virtue, so long as both these dangerous extremes are avoided a peppering of isolated historical grotesqueries serves the progressives very well. Little in-passing anecdotes about slavery and witch-burning briefly thrill the child while confirming the idea that nothing could possibly be learnt from people who said "thee" and "thou". It takes a deeper study to say anything coherent about, say, the role of Protestant or Enlightenment values in Scottish history, and that is why the Peacocks of this world would prefer no such study be made.

I blame Margaret Thatcher. She was enraged by excessively trendy schools churning out PC semi-literates who knew about whale song but not Waterloo. "I'm not having this," she said to her officials, "Get out there and make me a national curriculum." She imagined it as being written on one side of a piece of paper: reading, writing, 'rithmetic. A key point was always to include major kings-n-battles. Stories of spectacular historical ignorance on the part of schoolchildren were a major factor motivating supporters of the national curriculum.

Inevitably, this mildly repressive tool turned in her hand. Sure as eggs is eggs the national curriculum was taken over by the educational establishment, made monstrously detailed, and suffused with its values. Thatcher herself later admitted that the nationalisation of the curriculum was one of her biggest mistakes.

Time went on. Maggie went, the Conservatives went, Scotland was devolved. The idea of a national curriculum stayed.

And because of that if this proposal comes to pass it won't just affect a few of the most faddish Scottish schools. History will be shunted to the sidelines in schools all over Scotland.

UPDATE: Stop the presses! Mrs Thatcher not to blame after all! Andy of Don't Hold Your Breath writes:

I was interested to read your comments on teaching history in Scotland on your blog.

However, I think it's worth pointing out that the National Curriculum has nothing to do with Scotland. Scotland has always had an education system separate from England and Wales, and has no national curriculum. Thatcher's reforms only applied to England and Wales.

I hope that's of interest.

It is. But I take it there is some sort of Scottish national curriculum, or else how come the views of the Education Minister of the Scottish Executive carry any weight? The news story I quoted did not gave me the impression that Mr Peacock's "radical review of the curriculum" was purely advisory.

Sticking with the subject of education, having taken a look at his blog I am happy to say that Andy's views on truancy are sound:

In my experience (and I did go to school, so this is not some airy-fairy theoretical analysis based on consumer utility functions and labour supply curves), the pupils most likely to play truant were the same pupils who, when present, would be most likely to knife the teacher. A class full of truants is, when the truants are doing their truanting, a peaceful class. When the truants weren't there, we would discover that the teacher would often have interesting things to say. I am firmly in favour of truancy. It is a much under-rated educational innovation.

(A) Legislative Creep

. On the Adam Smith blog Tim Worstall warns that Blair hasn't even unwrapped his shiny new anti-terrorism powers yet and already he wants to use them to go after not terrorists but pimps and Yardies. Worstall writes:

Quite seriously the Prime Minister has proposed that the law should be changed so that every suspected pimp in the country can, at the instigation of the police, be locked up for three months without being charged or convicted of anything. Again, you may say this is just fine, exactly what they deserve. But what happens when there's another crime that the new law is applied to? Tax dodging? Dangerous driving (which after all kills far more than terrorism or drugs each year)?

He [Blair] told the Sunday Telegraph: "I don't think you can deal with crime in the way we used to deal with it."

"The way we used to deal with it" was successfully. Part of the reason for this success was that the generality of policemen, politicians and ordinary people gave their proud consent to the rule of law. Once that rule ceases to apply to anybody it ceases to apply to anybody.

Random thoughts

(on the Sowell model)

I like cheese.

Expect to hear a lot about how the French riots are a result of their policy of laïcité or secularism - refusing to label a French citizen with any other category than "French". There will be many calls to get down to the work of giving everyone a religious or ethnic group tag so that an army of survey takers, equal opportunities trainers, race equality officers and lawyers specialising in discrimination cases can get to work - and get work.

The tranzis claim that they are deeply attached to laïcité. I doubt this is anything more than a bargaining ploy - all that stuff is too much wrapped up with embarrassing Gaullism and La Republique and those diagonal tricoloured sashes that French mayors wear to appeal to a modern European. They just say they like it in order to pretend they are giving up something of value in exchange for not having their cars burnt. Anything rather than give up something they really value, such as the European Social Model.

When exchanging beads for Manhattan one pretends to value the beads.

It's not jobs for the racism co-dependents that France needs, it's jobs for the fighting cocks - the young men on the dole who take on the role of warrior to give their lives meaning.

I am a

wikid woman.

Only one-third of Britons see benefit in continued EU membership

, says the Eurobarometer survey as reported by Fraser Nelson in The Business.

Unfortunately every time I try to call up the PDF of the Eurobarometer survey it gets stuck on "2 items remaining", so I can't read it. I'll have to go on the Business article and this post in EU Referendum (which is where I got the story). Richard North comments:

For the Tory leadership contest, the report has some considerable significance. Compared with the tentative steps suggested by the candidates to effect a selective withdrawal from the EU, the survey shows that public opinion is way ahead of what is on offer. Arguably, the two Davids are misreading public opinion and risk missing the boat.

Anything that brings the day we get out of the swamp closer is good news, including evidence that might convince politicians that getting out is good politics. However the survey does not, alas, give me the impression of either a Europe, or even a Britain, of suppressed free marketeers and liberal internationalists. Um, nooo. One of the paradoxes of debate about the EU is activists for withdrawal are usually far less prone to security-blanket nationalism than the general public.

Although The Business says:

The survey had much to support Blair’s theory that voters are ripe for liberalism. Of all various words tested, “monopoly” solicited the most hostile reaction (69%). Next came “protectionism” (49%) and then “globalisation” (46%). Concern for unemployment was he highest in its 30-year history. Some 47% of respondents said the EU should prioritise fighting unemployment. Blair wants the EU to liberalise to meet this goal.

I fear that the first and last sentences of the paragraph above are wishful thinking on the part of The Business. Hostility to the word "Monopoly" may signal hostility to corporatism, rent-seeking and big business in bed with the State to the sophisticated writers of business-oriented journals but to most people it signals hostility to capitalism; hostility to "globalisation" needs no further explanation; and I have a feeling that when they say the EU should prioritise fighting unemployment they are more likely to mean the introduction of a compulsory 35 hour week than its abolition.

Still, it was nice to see "protectionism" in the list of hostility-arousing words. I wish I knew the overlap between those respondents who didn't like protectionism and those who didn't like globalisation. If large, it means there are a lot of idiots out there who oppose globalisation in the same way that Defoe said the country fellows of his time opposed popery - without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse. If the overlap is low it tells me that there are some right-minded and some wrong-minded folk: a more optimistic scenario. However this next set of figures from Eurobarometer did not dispel my gloomy feeling that the ideology that will really capture the hearts of Europeans is one that will allow them to support both Naomi Klein and Jean-Marie Le Pen:

The 440-page Eurobarometer report offers several other insights on the EU, especially the growing hostility towards the United States, which a majority of 55% consider to be a “negative force” for peace. Only 25% consider it a “positive force”. Britain is found to be little different, with 47% seeing the US as a negative force, and only 23% disagreeing.

Seeing or not seeing the US as a "positive force for peace" is code for "Do you support the Iraq war?" While I am sorry to see so many of my countrymen would prefer tyrants to stay in power, I suspect this opposition does not, especially in Britain, translate into growing hostility to the United States per se.

(Tried to see the actual survey again. Nope. Still jams up.)

Never mind, never mind. Dank November it may be, but Spring is in the air when I read words such as these:

Particular dismay with the EU was found in Britain, where a majority – 42% to 40% – believe the UK has not benefited from its 30-year membership and only 36% of those questioned considered membership “a good thing”.

Of the 25 members, only 10 countries say they have a “positive image” of the EU. Again, Britain is at the bottom of this poll, with only 28% regarding Brussels in a positive light. Ireland records the highest satisfaction, with 68%.

All 10 new EU members are shown to be going cold on the euro, with a marked drop in those believing it would be good for their countries, the fugures falling to 38%, from 44% and interest in the single currency is now a minority issue, at 48%.

Britblog roundup! Also I gotta gotta gotta buy Tim's book and put myself in that wiki thing. Trouble is, no kidding, I hate doing things online that I don't know exactly how to do.

Here is an admirable post on the French riots

from Helen Szamuely at Albion's Seedlings. She bounces her ideas off a much-linked column by Francis Fukuyama that places some of the roots of Islamofascism in Western Europe. Among many other things she argues that because national European identities "cannot be articulated [at least not by European governments - NS] they cannot be offered to those at the margins of society."

I am more in agreement with Helen Szamuely's post than with that of her fellow Albion's Seedlings contributor Verity just below it, but read Verity's post too.

Verity also comments on this Samizdata post that quotes this post of mine from Friday in which I said, "One way in which consensus opinion changes is when scattered individuals become aware that many others share their opinions." (I hope you are taking notes, as there will be a test on who said what after class.)

I saw the post I made on Friday as being more a tentative sociological observation about the way the average tone of comments to the BBC changed (when what had been an editor-selected "letters to the editor" page became a forum) than an endorsement of the majority opinion on the forum. In fact I do endorse the majority opinion that the grievances of the rioters do not justify riots, but I didn't do it there. What led me to post that time was the possibility that the BBC might be educated about its audience - and its audience be educated about itself - by means of the change to a more open forum.

A legal penumbra.

The New York Times has every right to its opinion that Samuel A. Alito is not its choice for the US Supreme Court. However the reasons NYT writers Adam Liptak and Jonathan Glater give for this view come close to saying that Judge Alito is bad because he does not find for the right sort of people often enough:

Judge Alito dissented more than 60 times, often taking issue with decisions that sided with criminal defendants, prisoners and immigrants.

He frequently voted in favor of the government and corporations in these dissents. He generally deferred to what he called the good faith judgments of other participants in the justice system, including police officers, prosecutors, prison wardens, trial judges and juries.

This passage was among those highlighted by Bilious Young Fogey in a fisking of the NYT article called Law-Lite. As usual, one reason that I liked the post was that it said exactly what I had been thinking vaguely.

You will note that I said the reasons Liptak and Glater give "come close" to what I called a legally indefensible view, namely that judges should be swayed for or against a particular plaintiff or defendant because he, she or they belong to some category liked or disliked on political grounds. Some readers may think my vague "come close" is a smear. Anyone's defensible opinions, these readers may say, might "come close" to other indefensible opinions.

But I don't think it is a smear. I think I am unavoidably vague because the thing I am criticising is deliberately vague. I really don't like the way they say, "He frequently voted in favor of the government and corporations" or the mention of immigrants in the paragraph above. What's that all for, if not to trigger certain political neurons in the minds of NYT readers? If the New York Times thinks that Alito has violated his oath of office by letting prejudice against immigrants or a wish to curry favour with the government or corporations affect his decisions, then come out and say it. The NYT just hints it. Incidentally, one can tell that the Times itself thought this was an important factor by the tag line it uses to encourage online readers to go ahead and access the article.

Continuing the theme of legal exactitude, elsewhere in his post the Fogey commented:

"Deciding properly does not mean reversing the decision, and it certainly does not mean imposing the court's own decision. Once again, pretty basic and mainstream stuff, unless you happen to believe that unelected judges should usurp the functions of all other arms of government.

There were aspects that I did like to Liptak and Glater's article. For instance,

Judge Alito was appointed by the first President Bush. Academic studies of dissenting opinions generally predict that judges appointed by Republican presidents will dissent more often in cases in which both of the other judges on three-judge panels were appointed by Democratic presidents.

But Judge Alito does not follow that pattern: he dissented in 4 cases in which both of the other judges were appointed by Democrats and in 26 in which they were both appointed by Republicans.

This factoid does contain real information that helps the reader to place Alito ideologically.

A scholar to the end.

This Samizdata post by Findlay Dunachie on the subject of Trafalgar was the last he ever wrote. He knew that his life had only days to run when he wrote it. Read these words of farewell from Brian Micklethwait - and then, taking your time, peruse the "book reviews" category of Samizdata (Findlay Dunachie wrote most of them) and learn much.