Review: Jean-Marie Crocker memoir.

Why read this? I ran across Crocker's name from the Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam.  She struck me as an articulate, intelligent mother trying to understand and explain the tragedy of her son's death in Vietnam. I looked her up and discovered this memoir and decided to read it. It's available online at https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/vhp/0111/011174/pd0001.pdf

In it, readers are drawn into the inner spaces of a mid-century American family, struggling with the terrible implications of global strife. The tale serves as both a thorough biography of her eldest son, Denton “Mogie” Crocker Jr., and a melancholy meditation on the idealism and tragedy that dominated the Vietnam era. Crocker’s prose is dignified and calm, her memory relentless; together they make what could have been a straightforward history into a raw study of love and sorrow.

It opens by describing the context of post-war America, a time of seemingly great wealth, but yet one fraught with the existential fears of the Cold War. Mogie (b. 1947) is described as a child of exceptional intelligence and sensitive nature. Born in Saratoga Springs, New York, he grew up with a fascination for the heroic stories of the past, especially the Civil War, and was well aware of the tensions gathering in his own day. Mogie is portrayed by Crocker as a young guy who felt a deep, almost religious sense of his duty to the country, a conviction that often ran counter to the usual light-hearted attitude of the youth of the 1960s. That friction between the young man’s inner tenderness and his imagined martial commitment is the tragic heart of the book’s early chapters. He was a grade skipping, honors student of a boy, but he thought his actual vocation was to stand up for the principles he read about in his history books.

Things come to a head when Mogie, still a teen, wants to join the Army. Mogie’s parents were reluctant to start with and he had clear academic potential, but he felt talk was cheap and he needed to stand up for his ideas. He ran away from home but left a letter expressing his concern for the Vietnamese and the domino theory. Eventually he got his parents to sign the papers and joined up on his seventeenth birthday in June 1964. Crocker writes on the odd experience of watching her son become a soldier. His letters from basic training and airborne school at Fort Campbell are the writings of a youngster trying to become a man, documenting the difficulties of military life with a mix of pride and fatigue. He wrote home about the rigors of jump school and the discipline expected of a paratrooper, displaying a new maturity that both amazed and worried his mother. Mogie’s idealism began to collide with the hard realities of counter-insurgency warfare when he was deployed to Vietnam as part of the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles.

Using Mogie’s own letters, the narrative presents two points of view: the mother’s nervous waiting at home, and her son’s growing fatigue in his letters from the field. Mogie’s depictions of the heat, the leeches and the faceless adversary give a harsh, no-holds-barred perspective at the ground combat in 1965 and 1966. He was often disappointed by the nature of the fight, the difficulties in recognizing the enemy and the seeming apathy of some of the people they were assigned to protect. But even in the forest he was a scholar at heart, and he asked his mother to send him copies of books and magazines so he might hold on to the intellectual life he had left behind. He requested everything from classic books to current affairs journals, revealing an intellect that would not be confined by the trappings of war.

The emotional climax of the narrative comes in the spring of 1966. Mogie had seen his share of fighting, and had survived the grueling months of his first tour. But the severity of the fight was mounting. His intelligence and education had given him options to pursue safer assignments but he always stayed with his group in the field. Mogie was killed in battle on his nineteenth birthday, June 4, 1966, during a search-and-destroy mission in Kontum Province. Crocker’s account of hearing the news, the green vehicle and the two military men arriving at their home, is devastatingly clear and takes away all romanticism about war.

The rest of the narrative chronicles the long, agonizing aftermath, including the repatriation of his body and the funeral in Saratoga Springs, and the family’s struggle to make sense of a loss that seemed both inevitable and incomprehensible. Crocker writes of how loss was in every moment, from the silence at the dinner table to the painful chore of going through Mogie’s stuff. She also considers the greater social background of the day, as the nation became more and more divided over the very war that had taken her son. It is a memoir not merely of death, but of a mother's enduring love and the ability of memory to bridge the gap between the living and the dead.

Son of the Cold War is an outstanding accomplishment in the memoir genre. Jean-Marie Crocker does what many historians do not: she rescues an individual life from the cold statistics of a muddy war. She writes with a commendable discipline; she never succumbs to sentimentality, but trusts to the strength of primary materials and her own acute observations to give the measure of her anguish. The book’s greatest asset is its honesty. Crocker does not shy away from the complexity of Mogie’s character, his stubbornness, his occasional arrogance and his deep-seated insecurities. By making him a real human being, not a polished image, she has made his death feel like a personal loss to the reader.

In addition, the memoir is a strong denunciation of the Cold War state of mind that required such sacrifices of its young people. Never overtly political, the contrast of Mogie’s youthful dreams with the tragic reality of his death speaks eloquently about the distance between geopolitical policy and the families that pay for it. The memoir asks readers to reflect on the human cost of decisions on foreign policy and the permanent scars they leave on the domestic front. In short, Jean-Marie Crocker has given her son a legacy as permanent as any monument. Son of the Cold War is a must read for anybody interested in the human aspects of the Vietnam War.” It is a story of a youngster who aspired to be a hero and a mother who refused to let the world forget who the boy really was. As she puts it, Mogie Crocker is no longer a name on a wall, but a genuine, breathing presence whose narrative continues to echo decades after his last mission. 

As she writes in her preface:  

Time and scholarship are revealing misconceptions and errors that can only altar the future.  As we continue to ponder the sacrifice of young men like our son, measured against the confessed flaws and misjudgments of our leaders, we may better understand the conflicts of reason and emotion that continue to surround Vietnam.

Mogie was born June 4, 1947. My birthday was June 3, 1947.  His parents wouldn't permit him to have a toy gun; neither would mine. Both sets of parents were academics. What explained the difference in his reaction to the conventional wisdom and governmental "brainwashing" and my skepticism? Was it my Quaker schooling?  I opted for conscientious objection; he felt obligated to join the army.  Why the difference?

His mother died in 2020 aged 97. 

 

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of AI

I've been trying to learn as much as I can about the assorted iterations of AI, and I happened to run across a  video by "El". As I'm always a bit skeptical, particularly where AI is concerned, I researched her background and it appears she is indeed a real person with strong credentials: a PhD in Computer Science working as a senior data scientist. She describes herself as a systems thinker and geopolitical analyst living in the UK with an emphasis on EU countries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbh8QteVM5g&t=934s 

El reported on several cases when organizations make one fundamental mistake: employing artificial intelligence to entirely replace human judgment, not augment it. AI is great at "what", terrible at "why."

The first case study is a huge Pizza Hut franchisee who sued its parent firm, Yum Brands, for $100 million. The franchise owner had a 90% on-time delivery rate, but wanted to get even better. He said a mandated AI delivery management system dubbed “Dragon Tail” basically ruined their business. The AI technology didn’t optimize logistics as designed, but instead provided delivery drivers with real-time insight into kitchen timing and tip levels, i.e. gave them perfect up-to-date information. That produced an unintended incentive dilemma. Independent Door Dash workers started manipulating the system, waiting to batch many deliveries together or cherry-picking just high-tip orders. The results were a disaster. Averages for pizza delivery time fell from 90% on-time delivery to only 50%. The franchise became a money loser, the business connection fell apart entirely and customers were unhappy.  The AI did exactly what it was intended to; the problem was in implementation that delivered unintended consequences.

Her second example is the Swedish finance business Klarna. The firm, in a cost-cutting move, terminated about 700 customer service jobs and replaced them with a chatbot powered by OpenAI. The chatbot did a good job of handling large numbers of ordinary encounters at first. But it floundered horribly in complex, emotional client scenarios – the kind that call for empathy, nuance and imaginative problem-solving. Klarna’s 2025 IPO was just months away and the business was obliged to make an expensive public reversal and re-hire human labor.

The real problem is not the technology.  What’s interesting is that the AI systems themselves didn’t actually malfunction or break. These challenges were the result of basic mistakes in business and system design. Firms hurried to implement AI without sufficient parallel testing, redundancy or understanding of how people behave in the real world. They expected automation would just do better, without any consideration for how people actually operate when given new tools and new information.

According to a 2026 Forrester survey, 55% of companies today regret having laid off workers to embrace AI.[1]  Gartner estimates that in the end 50% of the organizations who eliminate their support workers will have to bring them back.These are not isolated events. They are signs of a systemic problem with the way enterprises approach AI integration. Successful businesses go about it differently. So they have AI do the normal computations and repetitive duties while keeping humans in the loop for the localized judgment calls at the end. It is a tool that enhances human potential, not one that attempts to replace it wholesale.

El closes with a grim message. The reckless use of AI could not only hurt individual firm bottom lines but also provoke a significant public backlash. This could result in stringent rules that impede progress across the whole AI ecosystem. Similarly, high-profile AI failures could delay acceptance of helpful technologies before they’ve had a chance to prove their value.  AI should augment human understanding, not replace it. Those organizations who get this will prosper. Those that don't become cautionary tales themselves.As we go into a more automated future, the firms that will win are the ones who see AI as a powerful assistant, not an independent replacement for human judgment, creativity and empathy.

I note that recently Amazon suffered substantial down-time and major data loss from a requirement that their programmers use AI for 80% of their work. They learned the hard way that forcing AI tools on developers can backfire spectacularly. Over a chaotic three-month span, the e-commerce giant hit a wall with four massive AI-driven outages.  A brutal six-hour crash on March 5th triggered by Amazon's own AI coding tool  wiped out 6.3 million orders in North America alone. Apparently, the Agentic AI tool thought it could make the code better, deleted existing systems and implemented its own rewritten code.

In December 2025. Amazon’s AI tool, Kiro, went rogue and completely deleted a major AWS Cost Explorer environment, knocking out services in China for 13 hours. Shortly after, Amazon Q Developer joined the chaos, glitching delivery times and eating another 120,000 orders. This forced Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell—who had just mandated Kiro a month prior with a required 80% adoption goal—to hit the brakes. He’s now ordered a massive 90-day safety reset across 335 revenue-critical systems.

The problem was the agentic nature of the AI software. It was making decisions without any human review. While leadership bragged about deploying 21,000 AI agents to save $2 billion and boost developer velocity by 4.5x, 1,500 engineers had already protested the mandate, begging to use Claude Code instead. Now, Amazon is shifting to a hybrid playbook: AI writes, deterministic rules double-check, and humans sign off. It’s a reality check that aligns perfectly with Gartner’s prediction that 40% of agentic AI projects will tank by 2027 due to runaway costs and poor risk controls. [2]

Of course, Amazon blamed all the problems on "human error."  True, but not in the way they intended. The error was with the senior vice-president doofus who required implementation of Kiro, not the coders who argued against it. AI codes really, really fast and Agentic AI makes decisions based on data, but can't understand the "why" or the unintended consequences from unintended human reactions. Then again, McNamara had the same problem. 

[1]https://hrexecutive.com/the-ai-layoff-trap-why-half-will-be-quietly-rehired/

[2]https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-predicts-over-40-percent-of-agentic-ai-projects-will-be-canceled-by-end-of-2027

 

 

Guildford Four: IRA and British Justice

 In an earlier post [https://rarebits.blogspot.com/2026/04/review-oath-betrayed-torture-medical.html] I promised to discuss the Guildford Four.

In times of civil peace, the purity of the justice system isn't really put to the test. When society is under the intense, jagged pressure of a civil crisis, that's when its true strength is shown by how committed it is to human rights. This promise to stick together before anything else is made is a necessary constitutional anchor that keeps the state from drifting into the waters of reactionary vengeance when there are instant, overwhelming demands for security. The bombs in Guildford and Woolwich in 1974, which killed seven people and hurt nearly one hundred, were a terrible start to this kind of collapse. During the sudden void of terror, the basic need for truth was quickly replaced by a perceived need for order. This started a systemic descent in which the state's machinery started to value the look of competence over the substance of legality.

This change in the way the government thought led to a shift from research to confirmation bias, where the search for criminals was no longer objective and instead a convenient story was told. The Surrey Police didn't use proof to find their main suspects. Instead, they looked at how young people like Paddy Armstrong and Gerry Conlon were living in the dirty, drafty Kilburn squats, which made their lives seem easy to label as promiscuous and suspicious. In the mahogany-lined comfort of the Old Bailey, these people were recast as rebel troops, which meant that the government had to give up the strict rules of legal interrogation. Instead, the interviewing teams used a variety of intimidating methods that were not taped or seen. The suspects described a nightmare of physical and mental abuse, including officers urinating on their food, which is a shocking detail that shows how dehumanizing the police had to be in order to follow the scripts they had already written.

Leading the prosecution was Sir Michael Havers, and Mr. Justice Donaldson was in charge of the courts. They worked very hard to keep the Guildford Four from understanding the truth of the proof. The state tried to arrest the Maguire Seven even though there wasn't any forensic evidence. They used flawed nitroglycerin tests to say that Aunt Annie's quiet family home was actually her bomb kitchen. Sir Michael Havers worked very hard to persuade the jury that the trial of the Maguires had nothing to do with the Guildford case. He was successful in separating the two stories in people's minds. Even though the legal system was behaving like a cat with its paw on a mouse, this false sense of certainty was kept up. For example, Mr. Justice Donaldson suggested sentences with no chance of release for 35 years, effectively burying the innocent alive under the weight of a state-sponsored lie.

After the Balcombe Street siege in 1975, it was at its worst when contradictory facts were hidden. Members of the real IRA Active Service Unit were caught and told unique and detailed stories that only the real bombs could have known. But the government decided to change and hide these admissions to protect the original convictions. Later, Lord Imbert, who was a top officer in the Bomb Squad at the time, would say that the men were rude as an excuse for not interviewing them further, which is a ridiculous reason for a terrible breach of investigative duty. In a last-ditch effort to protect the system itself, the appeal courts came up with ridiculous new scripts to explain why innocent people should stay in jail. There was a world where a person's conviction determined the version of the truth that could exist. This was the normative power of the real at its most cynical. Because they relied on the fake and the forced, investigative agencies lost their skills. This structural decay was shown by the fact that 32 officers were involved in the fake arrest sheets. Not until years later, when two earlier drafts of statements were found with changes made by hand, did the shocking level of lying that had kept the building up become clear.

The judicial debates about the war on terror after 9/11 are likened to this tragedy from the past. Some people, like Alan Dershowitz, want to control interrogational torture with a warrant system. On the other hand, Judge Richard Posner says that only the most rigid would say it shouldn't be used if the stakes were high enough. The ticking time bomb situation is used to support this line of thinking. This is a made-up idea that requires a level of knowledge that isn't common in national security. Someone who is torturing someone is sure that they have the right person and that person has the code. This is similar to what the Surrey Police said in 1974. Both are based on the false idea of knowledge, which doesn't work in a world where known unknowns rule. This is the decommitment effect: when a lesser evil is made legal, it sets up a slippery slope where agencies will be less careful and abuse will spread to cases with weak proof. If the law allows the wrongdoing, it doesn't protect the state; it removes the moral authority that gives it power in the first place.

To fix a damaged legal image, there needs to be openness, which the British government continues to fight very hard against. The May Inquiry was supposed to be a Public Inquiry, but it was mostly kept hidden, which meant that neither the Guildford Four nor their lawyers could fully participate. Today, the inquiry's records are still locked up. The Home Office recently decided to keep the files locked up for an extra 75 to 100 years, citing concerns about national security and the privacy of sources. These excuses are becoming more and more like a current shield for wrongdoing in the past, meant to protect the dead's reputations instead of telling the living the truth. The people who were hurt and their families have to pay the price because they are gagged and can't really take part in new inquests. The state has top lawyers representing it at a huge cost to the taxpayers, but the families can't get legal help, so their status as interested parties doesn't really mean anything.

For Paddy Armstrong and Gerry Conlon, the nightmare didn't end when their convictions were thrown out. The horror continued into their afterlife, leaving them mentally shattered in a way that no apology could fully fix. Even though there was clear proof of fake scripts and lying, no officer was ever held responsible for the plot. This means that the full truth may never be known. The lesson of the 1970s is a scary precursor to what happened at Abu Ghraib: courts do not protect the state from terror when they use open and legal means to defend the use of physical force and made-up stories. Instead, they destroy justice itself, casting a shadow that lasts long after the jail gates have been opened.

 Sources:

Armstrong, Paddy, and Mary-Elaine Tynan. Life After Life. Gill Books, 2017.

 

Berman, Eli. "Torture in Counterterrorism: Agency Incentives and Slippery Slopes." ScienceDirect, 2010.

 

Forcese, Craig. "Torture and the New Normal: Modern Legal Thinking on an Ancient Scourge." Ottawa Law Review, vol. 37, no. 1, 2005, pp. 149-161.

 

Greenberg, Karen J., and Joshua L. Dratel, editors. The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

 

Kee, Robert. Trial and Error: The Maguires, the Guildford Pub Bombings and British Justice. Hamish Hamilton, 1986 / Kindle Edition, 2021.

 

Levinson, Sanford, editor. Torture: A Collection. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Logan, Alastair, OBE. "Guildford Four: How the Innocent Were Framed and the Truth Buried." The Justice Gap, 2020.

 

Schoeller-Burke, Tara. "The Wrongful Imprisonment of the Guildford Four: Who Bears the Blame?" Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Law Research Papers, vol. 5, no. 31, 2015, SSRN, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2647781.

 

Stare Decisis: Salvation or Downfall

Since the Dobbs decision, we’ve been forced back into a massive national debate over some really old court rulings. It’s gotten to the point where people are questioning the basic foundation of how our courts work and how we keep society stable. I’m talking about stare decisis—the legal principle of standing by past decisions. For the longest time, most people just took precedent for granted as a settled, slightly boring part of the legal system. Now, it’s a total political lightning rod.

The real tension today isn't just a debate over whether a specific case like Roe v. Wade or Miranda v. Arizona was right or wrong when it was decided. Instead, the question has become much more fundamental: is following precedent a mandatory constitutional requirement built into the very DNA of our government, or is it just a convenient policy that judges can toss aside whenever the political winds shift? Should cases like Plessy, Dred Scott, Griswold, or Brown be considered permanent law?

Honestly, how someone answers that question usually depends entirely on what they are trying to achieve politically in the moment. But the answer we ultimately land on will determine whether our legal system remains a reliable anchor or just becomes entirely unpredictable.

Discussions about this are endless and go back decades without any real resolution. I pulled a couple of contrasting views to get a flavor of the debate: Michael Paulsen vs. Richard Fallon. Which one you find convincing usually depends entirely on your political views.

Paulsen basically thinks that because the Constitution doesn’t explicitly use the words stare decisis, the whole concept is just a sub-constitutional judicial policy. To him, it’s not a fundamental pillar of law, just a secondary tool. His logic is deceptively simple: if the Constitution is the supreme law, and a past court made a mistake interpreting it, then following that mistake actually violates a judge's oath. Paulsen goes a step further, suggesting that since this is just a policy, Congress has the power under the Necessary and Proper Clause to pass a law abolishing it. He’s pretty open about his strategic motives here. He isn't just looking for a theoretical debate; he wants to dismantle abortion rights. He’s suggested that Congress could pass a law telling the Supreme Court to ignore precedent specifically in abortion cases. It’s a selective repeal strategy that treats the law like a light switch the legislature can flip whenever they don't like how judges are reading the map.

But when you start calling a foundational principle like precedent a mere policy, you open a massive can of worms regarding what "judicial power" actually means. Professor Richard Fallon’s rebuttal is a great defense of the constitutional status quo. Fallon argues that Article III’s grant of judicial power isn't just an empty vessel for whatever the current majority wants to do. He says the authority to rely on precedent is inherently baked into that power. He points back to the very beginning of the republic to show this wasn't some later invention. Even Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 78, argued that to avoid arbitrary court decisions, it is absolutely indispensable that judges be bound down by strict rules and precedents. Hamilton’s point was that without these rules, a judge is just a politician in a robe. Fallon builds on this by noting that judicial power also includes the power to make judgments final. If Congress can't pass a law to reopen a final judgment between two parties—which is a settled rule in our system—then they definitely shouldn't be able to reach into a judge’s chambers and dictate how they think.

The irony of Paulsen’s Necessary and Proper Clause argument is pretty wild when you look at the strategy. Fallon points out a glaring logical trap: if Congress really has the power to tell the Court to give less weight to precedent, wouldn't they also have the power to tell them to give it absolute weight? Imagine if Congress passed a law saying the Court could never overrule a past decision, even if it was obviously a disaster. That would be just as much of an unconstitutional power grab as Paulsen’s proposal. It would completely interfere with the core function of the judiciary to say what the law is, a principle established all the way back in Marbury v. Madison. By trying to pluck out the thread of stare decisis, Paulsen isn't just changing a policy; he’s trying to redefine the very nature of the judicial branch. While Congress can change things like standing requirements—who gets to bring a lawsuit—they cannot tell the Court how to interpret the core meaning of the Constitution itself.

It’s always fascinating to see how political goals dictate whether a commentator suddenly loves or hates the idea of following old rules. This is where the strategic masks usually slip. When a previous decision is something you hate, you call it a mere policy judgment that isn't an "inexorable command." You see this with some originalists who view stare decisis as a hurdle keeping them from getting back to the "true" 1787 meaning of the text. But when the decision is something you want to keep, suddenly that exact same doctrine is a fundamental pillar of law and the ballast keeping the ship from capsizing. We saw this play out in the Casey decision, where the Court admitted that while some Justices might personally dislike a prior ruling, the costs of overruling it were simply too high for the rule of law to bear. The truth is, stare decisis is often used as a shield when you’re winning and dismissed as a nuisance when you’re losing. But if we treat it as something we can switch off for "special" cases like abortion, we run into what Fallon calls the interwoven strands problem. Constitutional doctrines aren't isolated islands; they are a fabric. If you pull the thread on abortion rights, you’re also pulling on substantive due process, which is the same thread holding up the idea that the Bill of Rights applies to the states, or that the federal government must provide equal protection.

This brings us to a really uncomfortable truth about legal legitimacy. Why do we actually follow these rules in the first place? If you ask an originalist, they’ll say it’s because we all consented to the written Constitution back in 1787. But Fallon points out the obvious flaw most people ignore: none of us were alive then. We haven't actually given our active consent to be governed by people who have been dead for two centuries. Instead, the legitimacy of our entire system rests on something much more fluid and, frankly, fragile: widespread acceptance and reasonable justice. We follow the law because we accept the system as it works today. Stare decisis is the glue for this acceptance. It creates a sense of continuity that allows us to go about our lives without wondering if the entire legal order will be reinvented every Tuesday morning. It keeps the law from becoming a series of disconnected, arbitrary lurches from one political extreme to another.

If we were to follow Paulsen’s path and enter a world where precedent no longer matters, we wouldn't just be debating one or two controversial cases. We would be inviting total legal chaos. Fallon is very clear about the "so what?" of this debate. If every single legal question was suddenly up for grabs because precedent is just a "policy," the burden on the Court and the country would be overwhelming. We’d have to re-litigate whether the Bill of Rights even applies to the states. We’d have to question whether the "one-person, one-vote" rule is valid or if it was just a mistake by a past Court. We’d even have to wonder if the regulatory agencies running our economy are allowed under the separation of powers. No country could survive having to rethink its foundational principles in every single case. We would be trading a stable, if imperfect, legal system for a never-ending cycle of constitutional crises where nothing is ever truly settled.

Even the idea of a selective repeal—just getting rid of stare decisis for abortion cases—is blatantly unconstitutional because it’s a direct attempt to force a specific outcome. It isn't a neutral effort to get the law right; it’s a command to the Court to ignore the rules that support one side while leaving the other side’s arsenal intact. Once you recognize that stare decisis has constitutional weight, any attempt by Congress to selectively dismantle it is just raw political power over the law. Congress has plenty of ways to express disagreement with the Court—they can pass resolutions, file amicus briefs, or pass new legislation to trigger a challenge—but they cannot direct the Court to completely ignore constitutional considerations.

To see what a current justice might think about this, Amy Coney Barrett’s writing explores this principle-versus-policy debate within the context of the Supreme Court’s constitutional rulings. She argues that the Court’s weak presumption against overruling its own past decisions isn't a flaw, but a necessary tool for managing disagreements among justices who have fundamentally different visions of the Constitution. By placing a heavy burden of proof on anyone who wants to overturn a case, the doctrine ensures that a new majority can't just impose its will through votes alone—they have to provide a compelling, reasoned defense for unsettling the law. Furthermore, Barrett highlights that stability is maintained by other systemic features, like vertical stare decisis (lower courts following higher courts) and the certiorari process, which keep "superprecedents" and well-settled laws from being constantly challenged. Ultimately, her view of the law is both realistic and practical. It allows for constitutional thought to evolve while protecting the basic continuity of the American legal system.

There were several references to Justice Brandeis' dissent in Burnet v Coronado (1932) in which he proposed a ringing endorsement of adhering to precedent:

"...Stare decisis is usually the wise policy, because, in most matters, it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right. This is commonly true even where the error is a matter of serious concern, provided correction can be had by legislation. But in cases involving the Federal Constitution, where correction through legislative action is practically impossible, this Court has repeatedly overruled its earlier decisions. The Court bows to the lessons of experience and the force of better reasoning, recognizing that the process of trial and error, so fruitful in the physical sciences, is appropriate also in the judicial function."

"The rule of stare decisis, though one tending to consistency and uniformity of decision, is not inflexible. Whether it shall be followed or departed from is a question entirely within the discretion of the court, which is again called upon to consider a question once decided."

In the end, we are left with a sobering thought that every strategist and citizen needs to reckon with. Our entire constitutional order doesn't rest on a solid, unchanging rock of absolute truth. Instead, as Fallon so eloquently puts it, it rests on the potentially shifting sands of acceptance and reasonable justice. Stare decisis isn't a perfect doctrine, and it isn't an absolute rule that can never be broken. Even its strongest defenders acknowledge that some decisions are so misguided they have to go. But it is the best tool we have to prevent the law from becoming nothing more than a reflection of whoever happens to be in power at the moment. As much as we might wish for a more permanent foundation, the reality is that the law only works as long as we all agree to stand by what has been decided. Without that commitment to continuity, the fabric of our legal system doesn't just fray—it completely and irrevocably unravels.  

Sources:

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S1-7-2-2/ALDE_00013237/%5B%27article%27,%20%272%27,%20%27branch%27,%20%27powers%27%5D.  This is an annotated explanation of Article III.  Section 1.

Aiken, Charles. Stare Decisis, Precedent, and the Constitution. The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Mar., 1956), pp. 87-92. http://www.jstor.org/stable/443254

Amy Coney Barrett, Precedent and Jurisprudential Disagreement, 91 Tex. L. Rev. 1711 (2013). https://texaslawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Barrett.pdf

Burnet v. Coronado Oil & Gas Co., 285 U.S. 393 (1932) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/285/393/

Fallon, Richard. Stare Decisis and the Constitution: An Essay on Constitutional Methodology. New York Law Review, 08. 2018 https://www.nyulawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/NYULawReview-76-2-Fallon.pdf

Paulsen,  Michael Stokes. Abrogating Stare Decisis by Statute: May Congress Remove the Precedential Effect of Roe and Casey?, 109 Yale L.J. 1535, 1538 n.8 (2000) http://www.jstor.org/stable/797601

N.B. As our current president does everything he can to mold the law to his own purposes, and the legislature has abandoned any semblance of participation in government,  it may be that judicial adherence to stare decisis may be the only saving grace to democracy.

Review: The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I

The Diesel Disruption: A Strategic Re-Evaluation of Industrial and Naval Revolution

This is an exceptionally interesting book that details Rudolf Diesel’s development of his eponymous engine and the mystery surrounding his death. Diesel was obsessed with the inefficiency of late-nineteenth-century coal-fired steam engines, which barely achieved 6% efficiency. His first successful prototype reached 22% efficiency—defined as the power achieved from a given amount of fuel—and could run on almost any type of oil, making it safer and far more portable than its steam counterparts.

Born in Paris in 1858 to Bavarian immigrants, Diesel’s intellectual foundations were forged in an environment of displacement. The Franco-Prussian War forced his family to flee to London, a formative experience that sharpened his awareness of how geopolitical conflict disrupts the socio-economic status quo. From a young age, Diesel exhibited an obsessive curiosity toward the inner mechanics of his childhood toys, an impulse that evolved into an engineering philosophy seeking to revolutionize the world. His quest was fundamentally humanitarian; he viewed the development of a cleaner, more efficient engine not merely as a technical milestone, but as a moral imperative to liberate workers from the grueling, coal-dust-choked labor inherent to steam technology. This philosophical commitment to efficiency over tradition would soon manifest as a disruptive technical reality that threatened the very foundations of the existing global order.

Diesel’s genius breakthrough lay in recognizing that air could be compressed to the point of initiating combustion. In his engine, fuel was injected at the end of the compression stroke and ignited solely by the high temperature generated by that compression. The fuel efficiency of his engine far surpassed all others at the time, and it could run on a variety of different oils, including peanut and vegetable oils. On a personal note, a cousin-in-law of mine actually collects waste vegetable oil from McDonald's to power his diesel VW. Because fuel for diesel engines is far less volatile and will not explode, it is much safer to store and use. However, the engine itself requires heavier, stronger components to withstand the intense internal compression. These qualities made it ideal for submarines. France was the first to recognize this potential and became an early adopter. Germany may have been late to the game, but it eventually purchased engines with triple the horsepower of the French models.

This capability represented a strategic masterstroke with profound implications for the merchant marine. By eliminating the need for massive teams of coal stokers and the extensive storage space required for solid fuel, the diesel engine fundamentally altered the economics of transoceanic travel. The technical realization of this disruption was evidenced by milestones such as the 1903 screw oil tanker Vandal, and the work of French licensee Frederic Dyckhoff, who adapted the engine into horizontal designs for canal boats. Most significantly, this shift in efficiency threatened to dismantle the British maritime empire’s coaling station strategy. For centuries, British power had been anchored in a global network of refueling depots; an engine that could navigate vast distances without frequent stops or coal reliance rendered this logistical pillar increasingly obsolete, signaling a transition from the age of steam to an era of autonomous power.

In 1904, after making his fortune, Diesel toured the United States. His observations, much like those of Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, were quite illuminating. He attributed America’s prosperity to its higher wages compared to Europe, but as an entrepreneur, he decried the labor unions that stripped power from management. He noted that the ubiquitous use of wood allowed for cheap construction but led to a deep-seated fear of fire, evidenced by the external iron fire escapes attached to every building. Traveling up the West Coast, he saw forest fires everywhere, but he was highly impressed by the quality of the American railroad tracks. The ties were spaced much closer together and the rail joints were tighter than those in Europe, resulting in a noticeably smoother ride.

ver, the very versatility that made Diesel’s engine a triumph of engineering also placed him in the crosshairs of the world’s most powerful economic monopolies. In the early twentieth century, the rise of the petroleum industry was inextricably linked to the dominance of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Diesel’s multi-fuel vision represented the ultimate threat to this monopoly: energy democratization. An engine capable of bypassing the petroleum supply chain invited a future of market decentralization that Rockefeller’s interests could not permit. As Diesel established a global network of licensees, including the Danish firm Burmeister and Wain, the Nobel family in Russia, and the American industrialist Adolphus Busch, he became a catalyst for monopoly displacement. Tensions escalated significantly when his 1908 agreement with Busch was explicitly promoted by the U.S. Navy, indicating that the strategic friction between disruptive technology and entrenched capital was moving from the boardroom to the halls of state power. This clash illustrated a recurring theme in industrial strategy: energy independence is the vital precursor to both economic and naval autonomy.

The stakes of this autonomy were nowhere higher than in the naval arms race preceding the First World War. Kaiser Wilhelm II, driven by an ambition to challenge the maritime supremacy of the British Royal Navy, recognized the diesel engine as the linchpin of a modern U-boat fleet. The engine’s reliability and efficiency offered the stealth and range necessary to undermine a British blockade. Yet, Diesel’s relationship with the German military-industrial complex was fraught with friction. He steadfastly refused to cooperate exclusively with the Kaiser’s interests, leading to a series of bitter lawsuits that soured his standing within the German Empire. Diesel’s willingness to do business with foreign entities, specifically the British shipyard Vickers, positioned him as a strategic liability to his own country. Leaders such as Winston Churchill and First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher were quick to recognize this opportunity, seeing in Diesel’s technology the means to maintain British naval dominance through a transition to oil-and-diesel-powered fleets. In a world where naval supremacy was synonymous with national survival, Diesel’s refusal to be a pawn of state interests made him a figure of intense geopolitical intrigue on the eve of global conflict.

The climax of these converging pressures occurred on a misty night in September 1913 in the English Channel. Rudolf Diesel boarded the SS Dresden in Antwerp, ostensibly traveling to London for a business meeting with the British Admiralty. The circumstances of his disappearance were hauntingly precise: his cabin, number 106, was found empty with the bed unslept in, while his watch, hat, and neatly folded overcoat were discovered near the afterdeck railing. Ten days later, a Dutch vessel recovered a badly decomposed body from the sea. From this body, his son identified several personal items: a pill case, a wallet, an eyeglass case, a pocketknife, and an ID card. While contemporary journalism attributed the vanishing to suicide brought on by financial ruin, or perhaps an accidental fall, the motives for state-sponsored murder were overwhelming. Both Rockefeller’s agents and the Kaiser’s operatives had significant cause to silence a man whose technology threatened to upend their respective global ambitions.

Author Douglas Brunt has proposed a more speculative fourth theory: that Diesel faked his own death to escape his detractors and work in secret for the British Admiralty. Under the potential protection and patronage of Winston Churchill, Diesel may have sought to further his designs for the Royal Navy away from the prying eyes of German agents. Proponents of this theory point to the subsequent and remarkably rapid advancement of diesel-powered submarines at the Vickers shipyard in Montreal shortly after Diesel’s disappearance. Whether his end was an act of desperation, a calculated escape, or a cold-blooded execution, the mystery remains a perfect symbolic representation of the deception and high-stakes maneuvering that defined the eve of the Great War. It suggests a world where the brilliance of the inventor was recognized only so long as it served the rigid requirements of national power.

The legacy of Rudolf Diesel remains a profound paradox. While his name is a fundamental component of the global lexicon of transportation and power, the man himself is often obscured by the monumental shadow of his invention. Today, the diesel engine remains a cornerstone of global commerce on land and sea, a testament to his enduring pursuit of thermal efficiency and industrial progress. It is a reminder that in the cold calculus of geopolitical strategy, the technology often survives to conquer the world, even as the visionary who birthed it is discarded by the very powers that utilized his genius.

To illustrate the sheer scale of the revolution Diesel's invention created, look no further than a contest conducted in 1939. Five massive steam engines were pitted against the new E103 diesel locomotive, which consisted of an ABBA unit generating 5000 hp. Each set of engines was tasked with pulling the exact same amount of weight over a prescribed route filled with daunting geographic challenges. The results were astonishing: the diesel completed the route faster, required absolutely no stops for water or coal—whereas railroads running steam had to build their entire schedules around frequent refueling stops—suffered no mechanical issues, and required zero mid-trip maintenance, unlike steam locomotives which necessitated constant oiling. Furthermore, the diesel required only a two-man crew to operate, compared to the twenty men needed to run the steam locomotives. Ultimately, the economics proved undeniable: operating the diesel was 70% cheaper than running the steam locomotives.