"NY TIMES" STILL IMPRESSES

I’ve gone over the 2nd and 3rd Parts of the Goodnough-Davey series of sex-offenders and the policy and science of sex-offenses (Part 1 was discussed in an earlier Post, “NY Times Impresses” yesterday). (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/us/05civil.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

The series is a fine piece of reporting. But one point has to be made before we begin, and it is not the fault of the authors. Reflecting the (hardly accidental) vagueness that exists in this sex-offense stuff, the article mostly uses the term "sex offender" to cover a range of crimes and convicts that is vastly larger than what most of us see on TV news. The term "sex offender" as it is currently deployed in the media and in law and in public discourse covers a range of actions from a stranger-adult abducting, raping, and even killing a child (of the same or opposite sex) through the 'date-rape' type of case and on down through peeing (or technically: being seen to pee) in a public place (which might be behind a tree in a park in the night-time). Readers in matters related to sex-offenses have to continually ensure that they are not automatically equating the term "sex offender" with child-rapist/murderer or serial rapist, nor that they are allowing themselves to imagine a particularly vivid TV-news segment everytime they encounter the term "sex offense". The vast majority of persons classified by the very recent term "sex offender" are at the mid-lower levels of the range that defines the class.

Part 3 is the more significant for me. Part 2 recounts in detail the failure of a for-profit enterprise in – but of course – The Great State of Florida – where some market-driven company was contracted to come in and run the sex-offender civil confinement facility. Such facilities, we recall, are the key to the Supreme Court’s looking-glass fiction that if you lock people up as soon as they’re out of prison in order to get them therapy, then even if there’s no therapy to give, it’s not ‘punishment’ and it’s Constitutionally sweet. Ach ja!

As always in this sex-offense thing, we see the consequences of government’s removing the rules and opening everything up, having already whipped up a popular frenzy that panders to some folks’ lesser and more primitive instincts and subdues their ability to raise questions and think things through. (And does that sound like something connected to the Iraq war run-up?)

The courts’ substantive removal of such legal gate-keeping as Rules of Evidence, the guarantee that out of ‘respect’ and ‘sensitivity’ no claim would be questioned in court or in the media, the selective reporting of such claims as if they were facts and the automatic enrobing of claimants as ‘victims’ without any effort to verify their claims … all of this has been discussed at length in earlier Posts (see any Post with “Sex” in the title).

A “cottage industry” (and kudos to the authors for using the term) of “professionals” grew up around the now tax-fattened purses opened by state and national government to ‘do the science’ that must always accompany and smooth the path of the latest juggernaut. The relevant Advocacy spun its gambit as having been prompted by brilliantly and courageously discovered new-knowledge that had somehow escaped the notice of all the dumb, sleazy, secretive (and man-dominated) generations of humanity’s past umpty-thousand years,; now “professionals” would get to define their market-share by coming up with the “knowledge” about the awfulness of the whole thing and all of those ‘things’ now called “sex offenders”.

Of course, it had to be the correct “knowledge”. If you – say – did a very careful professional study of all the already-accepted studies that had been lying around quietly for years, and simply reported that you had noticed that those studies did not support the “knowledge” about the awfulness of it all, then you could find yourself in the dangerous position of having the national legislature itself pass a Resolution denouncing you. Much like scientists of an earlier era who had the bad luck to notice that Hitler’s Aryan race theory seemed to be a bit off or that Stalin’s theories about almost everything seemed to lack a basis in provable fact. Reichstag, Praesidium, Congress … they all get to seem the same after a while, I guess. At least when it comes to the pursuit of genuine knowledge. And of Truth.

Anyhoo, once the ‘civil confinement’ stuff came up (and it was seen as ‘cutting edge’ rather than as an ominous mimicry of totalitarian praxis), a whole new business opportunity opened up: private sector companies that would come in and ‘run’ these civil confinement facilities, creating jobs for pork-friendly communities while saving the host-state the expense of hiring more costly (and unionized) state employees. This was a refinement (so to speak) of the lucrative private-prison industries gambit that had sprung up a decade before.

Alas. The business plan for the private-prison industries was insufficient for the civil-confinement industry. The former merely had to keep convicts locked up; it didn’t need ‘science’ – all it needed was ‘law’ and it already had that. During the Twelve Years (abetted at every step by the Clinton administration) the goal of actually ‘correcting’ or ‘rehabilitating’ inmates in prisons was tossed out; warehouse the garbage and keep them off the streets – that was the plan. (That ‘plan’ - which was really more of a desire than a real plan – did not plan ahead to the post-confinement phase, when all these gentlemen would complete their sentences and come back to town … another curious similarity to the Iraq war script.)

The poor civil-confinement entrepreneur was handed a truly wormy apple by the Supreme and the lesser Courts: in order to justify the legal fiction that allowed this game in the first place, the confiner would have to come up with at least a reasonable simulacrum of ‘scientific knowledge’ upon which some now or future ‘therapy’ could be based, or at least hopefully asserted.

So to Part 3 where the authors gamely raise the issue of the lack of “scientific” and “professional” grounding, not only for the “civil commitment” gambit but for the whole “sex offense” category itself. They quote some “experts”, and here I have to note something tactical before we get to the content. The two “experts” are from differently-named organizations: the “Justice Research Institute” and “New England Forensic Associates”. The “Justice” entity does not easily show up in Google, but the name of the expert shows up, under another umbrella organization; the “New England” entity shows up, but that expert is also listed on the other expert’s entity. Both seem to be commercial or at least private enterprises, and not associated with any major institution of learning or medicine; both entities and both experts seem to have strong ties to law enforcement and criminal-justice education.

And the town in which the “Justice” entity’s actual organization is supposed to be located – “Accord, MA” – doesn’t exist … the zip code is assigned to a single PO Box number, the PO Box number given as the address of the “Justice” entity. All of which shows to go ya: there are many of these for-profit, free-lance outfits, with a surfeit of “Doctors”, “Directors” and so forth – sorta like think-tanks in Washington; these worthies have “treated” hundreds and thousands of sex-offenders and “forensically evaluated” even more hundreds and thousands; they are all very closely-connected to law enforcement and criminal justice type operations, where they have lectured, taught, advised, and otherwise greatly – if vaguely – surfed the Great Wave.

My thought is that the above oddnesses represent an effort to inflate the 'expert' network while simultaneously hiding its actual (small) size. 'Experts' who at first glance belong to different organizations are actually simply using different business cards that they had printed up; quoted as if they were two laregly separate professionals creates an 'echo' effect that lends to their comments a heavier weight. Offices that aren't actually accessible (perhaps even existent) prevent the curious from seeing just what shoe-box operations are really being run in this thing.

Two significant content-problems plague these heroes. First, sex-offensery (may I?) has “never been regarded as a legitimate and recognized topic for research by psychologists”. We are left to presume – these ‘experts’ no doubt hope – that this is due to the evil and secretive machinations of stodgy and male-dominated bureaucracies that for eons have with-held or suppressed the saving knowledge that would – through the well-remunerated services of these ‘experts’ – save many from much suffering and pain and ensure much ‘healing’ and ‘closure’. Actually, the mainstream science and research community seems to have realized a scientifically invalid monstrosity – this sex-offender ‘diagnosis’ – for the media-created, politically useful cultural artifact that it actually is, and backed away from getting itself mixed up in the whole thing. The American Psychiatric Association, if memory serves, said as much years ago.

This also helps to explain the second problem: “[S]ex offenders present major challenges as research subjects”. Yes, especially since most serious and competent researchers aren’t going to go near this hydra-headed, hydra-hearted Ponzi-scheme with a ten-foot pole, especially since if they have the (very probable) bad luck to find out that reality doesn’t agree with the sex-offense Script as it has become codified, then they and their institutions and colleagues could lose government funding and get a Resolution passed against them by Congress (which up until recently has had lots of time on its hands, since it had let the Unitarium run the country and the war). But that, of course, has left the ‘field’ wide open to the claims, assertions, ruminations and reminiscences of the for-profit, ad-hoc, criminal-justice roadies and freelance ‘experts’.

And while it is in no way suggested that all persons caught up in the toils of the sex-offensery are ‘innocent’, no rational being in his (always ‘his’) right mind would want to be forthcoming to ‘researchers’ who are clearly law-enforcement roadies or victim-oriented or Script/ideology-driven or simply amateurs. And let’s not forget that the chances have always been excellent that anything an already-convicted or a suspected offender says to a ‘researcher’ would very likely wind up as evidence when the research notes found their way to authorities.

The ‘experts’ intimate to us unwashed that the problems are due to the Sex-Offender (as a type) being “secretive”. It is not unreasonable to imagine that any criminal would want to keep quiet about divulging fresh evidence against himself to authorities, and it is granted that the intricate internal dynamics of the human psyche in matters of sex often result in a certain reticence. It is also not unreasonable to note that such a ‘mysterious’ subject would also serve as an ever-ready cover for the lack of any serious (and ‘correct’) results of such ‘research’ as might be conducted.

But the authors – and they really are full of surprises, given the media’s performance in this whole thing to date – reveal on their own that another reason for the paucity of research is that “there are far fewer convicted sex offenders that most other kinds of criminals”. Now this gives one pause. Yes, the Advocacy has pre-positioned an explanation for this eventuality: there are – we must believe – 5 or 10 or ‘X’ times as many cases of ‘molestation’ and ‘abuse’ as are reported to the authorities, but everything related to sex is so ‘secretive’ and ‘mysterious’ that nothing can be proved but this itself only proves that we need more laws and more millions of bucks and more of everything, and for a long time.

But there are plenty of Americans still above-ground who remember the missile-gap and the bomber-gap before that; many more who recall the Gulf of Tonkin and the consequences that went on long after it was admitted to be an artifact; many many more who recall national security estimates of Iraq and its WMD. If We are to People this country nowadays then – at the very least – assertions of vast numbers of anything, even rabbits, must be looked at carefully. Had that been done just five years ago, what might have been prevented for which We and the world must now pay?

Another possible explanation for the paucity of sex-offender research subjects is that there just aren’t that many of them. That even after all the restraints upon untruth had been compromised and the definition of a sex-offense had been expanded to include everything but ‘bad thoughts’ and all the consequences for untruth had been removed and all the media had put everyone on alert … even with all that, there simply aren’t that many sex-offenders – at least, compared to what we have been led to believe: slavering hordes, working individually or in cells, either mindless, sex-addled golems or mysterious and powerful super-perps working alone or in concert, but also your local store-keeper, your local priest, your uncle and your dad, and as always, the ice cream guy. Just about, it is clear, every type of monster in every grade-D 1950s sci-fi or monster flik.

And thus we come, courtesy of this valuable series of reports, to this exquisite and so predictable bureaucratic gambit: since there is so little reliable research, why then few of the civilly-confined can be released. That they were confined on the basis of almost no scientific ‘knowledge’ is irrelevant; that they cannot be released without such scientific ‘knowledge’ is self-evident. Yah. No wonder Bush and Cheney figured We would fall for anything.

The ‘science’ of “risk assessment” is brought back, but not too deeply. None of these ‘experts’ wants to risk revealing the Justice Department’s own sex-offender unit’s report (a matter of public record) that sex-offenders have a lower recidivism rate than almost any other type of convict.

Dr. Eric Janus is quoted; he is the author of a book discussed on this site in the second half of the Post “Prosec Nation”. A law school professor, he tries to square the circle by admitting that we know almost nothing about sex-offenses and -offenders, but that feminism has contributed hugely to what little knowledge we do have, and that if we were just to put more money into research we’d know a lot more someday.

This begins to sound like a Pentagon general currently describing the Iraq war. It refuses to speak the huge and profound question it raises: if we know so little now, then on what reliable and justifiable grounds have we for years now frightened the citizenry, punctured the legal and constitutional walls precisely designed to protect the Republic from excessive intrusion by the police power of the government, un-Truthed our society, and created a new scape-goat class of ‘dangerous other’ upon whom all manner of venom and civic-disablements have been heaped? What – it may be asked – in hell have We gone and done? On what grounds? Or is that too ‘masculine’ a question? Too ‘insensitive’ an approach?

Janus is to be thanked for pointing out that we should be putting our money into ‘research’ and not into ‘punitive’ measures, and that’s nice enough. But it still begs the sturdy 1940's question: is this trip necessary? Is there actually a sufficiently large and identifiable reality that poses a large enough threat that We should so lasciviously endanger the vessel of this Republic to explore and conquer it? If a commanding officer loses an aircraft carrier and its entire crew of five thousand by trying to save ‘just one’ person adrift on the horizon, is that a desirable outcome? Hard questions. Not really telegenic for TV news or for soundbites. But then again, neither were the questions that – if properly deliberated and answered – would have prevented the mistakes of the Iraq misadventure.

We are at the point now where We are repeating mistakes before We have even forgotten the history. Indeed, the mistake was that We created no history of questioning in the first place. This is a peculiarly American type of doom. Weirdly American. We need not surrender to it.

“NEW YORK TIMES” IMPRESSES – EXTRY!

Not to beat a dead horse, but there’s a straw in the wind. Monica Davey and Abby Goodnough authored an article in the March 4 “Times” (www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/us/04civil.html.) entitled “Doubts Rise as States Hold Sex Offenders After Prison Terms”.

They report that “about 2,700 pedophiles, rapists, and other sexual offenders are already being held indefinitely … under so called civil commitment programs in 19 states”. The thought arises: if you aren’t a pedophile or a rapist, just what ELSE can you do that would get you committed to a locked state-run mental facility for years over and above – and after – your prison term?

The article goes on to note that the constitutionality of the ‘civil commitment’ has been upheld; the Supreme Court embraces the pious fiction that the purpose isn’t to punish but to provide treatment. That effective treatment has not been developed; that the accurate understanding of the dynamics of sexual activity and the causes, then, of some of those activities or proclivities has not reached even a modest state of ripeness; that it may be quite a long time before any treatment is developed and eons before a treatment is developed specific to each type of sexual acting-out … the Court and the courts have turned off their hearing-aids and closed the briefing packets. Our enlightened modernity has apparently improved – among so many other things – upon Emerson: not consistency but also rationality is the hobgoblin of little minds.

It may be the intimation of the impossible complexity of ‘treating’ crimes that kept the Framers from wading into that swampy abyss in the first place: try the act, prosecute if guilty, imprison for punishment, and at the end of that have done with it. What more can a human government do? What more can mature citizens expect? There was surely enough ‘medicine’ around in their day so that if they felt like making a stab, they could have required the perpetrators of certain criminal acts to – say – be subjected to leeches or laudanum. But no.

We, however, have advanced so very far beyond the Framers and their under-civilized world. Their presumptions about the punishment of the crimes of citizens are as quaint as their presumptions about the workings of democracy and checks-and-balances and the powers and responsibilities of Congress and all that stuff in the creaky and inefficient old Constitution. We live in a world of ‘real men’ now, although some of them are – of course and with all due respect – women. Ah, brave new world to have such people in it!

All those States, and now The Great State of New York, are going in for civil commitment of certain sex-offenders (although the criteria seem, as aforenoted, rather hazy); we might imagine ‘of all possible sex offenders’. California has just dropped 388mil into a 1500-inmate facility, and the Justice Department – the steely but sensitive Alfredo “Quaint Al” Gonzales presiding – is, in sympathetic support of those Great States, setting up its own houses-of-healing for Federal inmates who are ‘eligible’. Amenities will be minimum and security will be maximum.

Various political functionaries, State and Federal, are quoted that they might share their illuminations: “There has to be a process in place that prevents someone from rejoining society if they’re still dangerous”, asserts one New York State legislator. That the Framers obviously thought otherwise, or why they thought otherwise, seems not to have entered his mind. Such is our modern American reality.

Impressively, the authors state baldly that “even with the enthusiasm among politicians, an examination by “The New York Times” of the existing programs found that they have failed in a number of areas”.

They then proceed to tick off a couple-six failures: the offenders selected for commitment are not always the most violent; the treatment regimens are expensive and largely unproven; the cost of the programs (initial facilities and then per capita per year for each ‘patient’ is going through the roof (4 times the cost of ‘regular’ prison); there is no monitoring and sex between offenders and staff – or among the offenders themselves – has been reported; successful treatment does not seem to be a factor in determining who gets released; few States seem to know what to do with the double-whammied men (of course, men) that they eventually do decide to release but have few options for residence or employment.

Now if you went to a State pol and asked for immediate multi-billion dollar funding for a new kind of vehicle that has never quite worked properly and the dynamics of whose propulsion you haven’t actually figured out yet … you might not get a positive reply. Unless you promised to build it in the pol’s district, or make the pol’s wife a member of your board – but that rarely happens. But that’s not how things work in the looking-glass world of sex-offenses, where everybody gets to be the Red Queen and believing impossible things before, during, and after breakfast is what they do for a living.

One inmate was selected for this quasi-permanent confinement because he took “indecent liberties” with two 13-year-old boys in an electronic shop where he worked. Now I hold no brief for hanky-panky with minors, but “indecent liberties” – which obviously did not rise to the level of anything like what is seen on TV news – should constitute no basis for life imprisonment. Especially not in light of the liberties being taken – issuing in fatal or maiming result – with boys only 4 or 5 years older who are sent to the eastern front. And in Florida, where the looking glass clearly works better than the voting machines, one prosecutor wants to send a person with a previous sex-offense conviction to this sempiternal purgatory … for drunk-driving; the ‘stain’ of the prior sex-offense apparently having – to the prosecutor’s mind – an almost Kathlik effect on this wretch’s very essence. There appears to be a theology to this madness, and arising in precincts not heretofore widely esteemed for their illuminations in the realm of the spiritual.

The report goes on that even the advocates of sex-abuse victims are saying that the huge monies being spent – and that will now have to be spent to maintain this system of healing-gulags – would be better deployed in other ways. While this may not indicate a looming rationality and respect for Constitutional realities (the Supreme Court suffering, presumably, from a fit of absence of mind), it more ominously indicates a looming lack of funds among States that are currently hard-pressed to keep recruits and taxes flowing to the Unitarium for its Long War, and they will probably remain in that difficult circumstance for a Long time.

Psychiatric opinion as to the etiology, dynamics, differential diagnosis, therapy, and criterion of therapeutic success is sufficiently divided as to lead one to imagine that casting lots would be as effective a determinant of ‘eligibility’ and far less expensive. It is freely admitted here that the examining of animal entrails or other such haruspicial procedures are too barbaric for these enlightened times.

Yet, the article states with seriously impressive clarity, “supporters of the laws offer no apologies for their shortcomings”. Which reminds us once again of the similarities between the dynamics of the sex-offense mania and the dynamics of the Iraq war, whose Instigator-in-Chief offers no apologies whatsoever and whose Vice-Instigator insists that all is going well indeed. Despite the fact that numerous Deputy-Under-Associate-Instigators now claim that it was a glorious and pure Idea that was hashed up by the aforementioned Chief(s) in the matter of execution ‘on the ground’.

The article, faithful to the current state of the situation, dwells a bit on the complexities of 'risk prediction', how experts try to determine which sex-offenders now approaching release (or the gulags of 'civil commitment') are to be classified. Once again, one is tempted to think of casting lots or consulting an astrologer - if that doesn't violate the Church-State doctrine. Of course, the healthy doctrine of Church-State separation, although hardly well-grounded in the documents of those times, is hell and gone from the far madder doctrine of separation of State and Beyond. To want to hold the State back from putting its immense power behind any one religious vision and organization is one thing; to try to divorce the State from the Ultimate Dimension of Being ... well now that just doesn't sound like a good thing at all. And if there is no Beyond in the life of the State - or rather in the lives of its functionaries - then what is to keep the State within its proper bounds? And if there is no Beyond in the life of its citizens - of The People in the case of this Republic - then what is to keep them from filling that vast void with ... the State, a worse-than-pagan collapse into Flatness?

But the problem isn't with how to predict risk; it's that we have allowed matters to get to the risk-prediction stage at all. Why didn't the Framers? Why hasn't Western Justice, in all the magnificent thought that has gone into its crafting over two millennia, at least toyed with risk-prediction? Computers are modern; thought most surely is not, and was at least as accessible - if not more - to the ancients as to ourselves.

I would propose that the ancients, the Medievals, the Early Moderns, and the Framers did not discuss 'risk prediction' because they knew enough not to touch it with a ten-foot pole. There's no way - short of the haruspix - that one can do it with sufficient clarity, precision, and certainty to justify enrobing the prediction with the awesome and ever-dangerous police power of the State. 'Risk prediction' is a parlor game, or a source for emotionally involving speculation on daytime TV shows, or an academic research problem; it is not a basis for massive social policy, especially requiring huge outlays of increasingly scarce money and huge expansions of the police power of the government.

We can't predict risk. We can't predict re-offense risk. And why just of sex-offenders? What's so special about them? Can we predict whether a pol imprisoned for accepting bribes, for the treachery of using his public office to make money on shoddy equipment sent to the troops in the field, will 're-offend' when he gets out? Is he not-worse than someone who took 'indecent liberties' with 13 year-olds? What about a bank robber? Is there some reason why he is not as 'special' as a sex-offender? Why we are not trying to assess his risk to reoffend? What the hell is going on here?

It is not a risk-free society because it is not a risk-free existence, this human existence of ours. Something has become very very skewed in our society in the past few decades, and it has weakened Us as The People and as individuals and it has weakened and corrupted the structures and the very foundations of our Republic. We need to pay attention.

Clarence Thomas (he who is enamored of the torture on Fox's "24") is quoted for what he wrote for the Court in one civil-commitment case: "We have never held that the Constitution prevents a state from civilly detaining those for whom no treatment is available, but who nevertheless pose a danger to others". Well, two things. First, if you're going to hold someone, even if there's no treatment 'available' and double-especially if it's because there's no treatment possible or even invented, then say it - be a mensch and say what you're doing; don't pussyfoot around with this smarmy dreck about 'therapeutic possibilities' and all that. You wanna run a gulag - then say you're gonna run a gulag and see what The People have to say. Even more: make The People see exactly where it is that their passions are leading toward. That's the service that the Court can perform. It's called Truth. Of course, if Truth fares the same way in sex-offense matters that it does in torture matters, then we've got a much bigger set of problems on our hands than sex-offenses.

Second, what constitutes a unique and confinable 'danger' to others such that even after conviction and time served one must be monitored because of the 'danger' one represents? A sex-offense of some sort is but bank-robbery isn't? A sex-offense of some sort is but swindling thousands of employees out of their jobs and retirements isn't? A sex-offense of some sort is but a general or an admiral buying crap equipment from a company that will fail troops in the field isn't? A sex-offense of some sort is but a recruiter lying to 17 year-olds isn't? A sex-offense of some sort is but lying to the country and starting a pre-emptive war isn't? A sex-offense of some sort is but being responsible for acts of commission or omission that rise to the strict Constitutional definition of "treachery" isn't? Tom DeLay isn't going to be civilly confined? What is going on in this country? What has happened to us?

These civil confinees are called "detainees", and this should raise a bright warning flag: the similarity between the sex-offender methodology and the Iraq war methodology is pervasive. Why wouldn't Bush figure he could 'disappear' anybody he wanted after 9-11? He only had to see what was being done by Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public to 'sex offenders' in upstanding towns and cities all over this great land of Ours.

But then perhaps the answer is here, in a quotation from a mother "whose daughter's rape and murder in 1988 helped spur the first civil commitment law". She is of the firm opinion that "no sexual predator should walk free and that longer prison sentences should 'absolutely' be considered". The emotions of grieving relatives are very real; they are also rooted in complex human realties, individual and relational. They are deserving of careful, empathetic, and competent attention.

Whether, however, they constitute a valid basis for social policy and for the deployment of the massive police power of the modern government is another question altogether. And it is a question that seems not to have been considered at all. Should Lincoln have stopped the Civil War because some outraged mother lost a daughter? Should Lincoln have tried to assassinate Jefferson Davis because a bereaved mother of a Union solider felt it would help her find 'closure'? Should Lincoln have removed Grant because a bereaved mother who lost a son to a drunk man driving a carriage too fast felt that Grant's drunken galloping (and he did) was victimizing her all over again? Should Lincoln have removed Sherman because some mother felt very uncomfortable with the almost histrionic lability that the general suddenly displayed in the presence of young girls (and the general did)?

Once again, in becoming more 'sensitive' and 'responsive' the government seems to have found a way to engorge itself. Which is precisely what the Framers feared of any government, including the one they themselves were in the process of erecting. The victim's movement - so to speak - has become co-opted by the very vampire it sought to 'hire' to do its will. As the German barons were co-opted by the Austrian corporal. And the result is in no small part one of the roots of the Iraq war and the monstrous dangers facing Our Republic today.

None of which is to hold a brief for unwanted sexual congress of any sort at any time with any person of any age.

All in all this article is a ray of sunlight in a fear-stabbed darkness that should give all serious citizens cause for grave and sustained concern. May it be so. Fiat Veritas, ruat coelum.