Book Review: 'No Ordinary Men,' by Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern

The pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his lawyer brother-in-law worked together to resist the Nazis and help Jews escape Germany.

By 

ALEXANDER KAZAM

Dec. 18, 2013 6:42 p.m. ET

http://online.wsj.com

Though the Nazis never won an outright majority in the parliament of the decaying Weimar Republic, they received nearly 44% of the vote in the critical election of March 1933—a mandate that enabled Adolf Hitler's anointment as supreme leader. To some, however, the evil character of the Nazi regime was visible from the start. Among them were the young Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, the subjects of Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern's "No Ordinary Men." In this concise, engaging account, Ms. Sifton, an eminent book editor, and Mr. Stern, a distinguished historian of Germany, trace Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi's evolution from partaking in small acts of opposition to playing leading roles in the anti-Hitler resistance.

Bonhoeffer, a pastor, fought Nazi efforts to meld Protestant churches into a single "Reich Church." Dohnanyi, a lawyer in the military intelligence service, used his position to document Nazi crimes and save Jews while joining several plots to kill Hitler. Their paths of resistance intertwined when Dohnanyi recruited Bonhoeffer to the anti-Hitler conspiracy.

Born in 1906, Bonhoeffer received a strong moral and intellectual upbringing from his father, Karl, an eminent Berlin psychiatrist, and his devout mother, Paula. The family had a notable independent streak; Paula chose to home-school their eight children in their early years. ("Germans," she observed, "have their backbones broken twice in life: first in the schools, secondly in the military.") One morning in 1922, Dietrich was in school when he heard "a strange crackling" from the street. It was the assassination of Germany's Jewish foreign minister, Walter Rathenau, a crime the Bonhoeffers recognized as an omen. "Only think of the trouble we shall have later with these people," Bonhoeffer's brother Klaus wrote.

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No Ordinary Men

By Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern
(New York Review Books, 157 pages, $19.95)

Dohnanyi, the son of a famous Hungarian composer, was childhood friends with the Bonhoeffers and later married one of Dietrich's sisters. While Hans began a brilliant career as a lawyer in the German civil service, Dietrich gained renown as a young theologian. Influenced by the Swiss master Karl Barth, who rejected the historicism of much academic theology and emphasized the transcendence of God across time and culture, Bonhoeffer sought to develop an account of how the Christian church could exercise leadership in an increasingly chaotic society. He finished his dissertation at 25, studied with the theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr during a year abroad in America, and began lecturing at the University of Berlin in 1931.

Two years later, Hitler barred "non-Aryans" from holding positions in the civil service, the academy or the clergy. While most church leaders dithered, the 27-year-old Dietrich published an important essay, "The Church and the Jewish Question," that subtly challenged the legitimacy of Nazi rule and argued that the church must not only help "those who have fallen beneath the wheel" but "at times halt the wheel itself."

Over the next few years, Ms. Sifton and Mr. Stern write, "virtually everything he did"—co-founding a league of anti-Nazi churches, developing relationships with Jewish and Catholic communities abroad—"set him against the Nazifying church authorities." By 1936 he was banned from lecturing at the University of Berlin. He retreated to the country estate of Finkenwalde, where he continued to mentor young pastors in secret and wrote a pointed tract called "The Cost of Discipleship." Two years later Finkenwalde was shut down on Heinrich Himmler's orders.

Meanwhile, Dohnanyi had become chief assistant to the minister of justice, a post that gave him invaluable cover and access to top-secret documents. As early as 1934, he began compiling records of Nazi atrocities, storing them in a safe at an army base outside Berlin. The events of Kristallnacht on Nov. 9, 1938—a spree of riots that destroyed more than 200 synagogues and led to the arrest of more than 30,000 Jews—only increased his determination to remain at the center of the resistance.

Dohnanyi came into contact with a circle of anti-Hitler army officers, and in 1939 he became a deputy in the Abwehr (military counterintelligence), a redoubt of anti-Nazi sentiment. Hans soon brought on board Bonhoeffer, who was to use his foreign contacts to gather intelligence for the resistance. Together they coordinated a daring rescue operation—brilliantly conceived by Dohnanyi—that allowed more than a dozen Jewish refugees to escape to Switzerland using false papers. Bonhoeffer called on Swiss friends, including Karl Barth, to help secure their passage.

It wasn't long, however, before the Gestapo had the pair in its sights, as more and more evidence linked them to the rescue operation and multiple failed attempts on Hitler's life. After they were arrested in early April 1943, their resistance took another form: withstanding isolation and harsh interrogations and refusing to name names. Both men found sustenance in their Bibles. And their families provided indispensable support, sending letters and packages with hidden messages that helped them coordinate their responses to questioning. Unbowed to the last, they were finally hanged in April 1945.

Among the books and films this story has inspired, Ms. Sifton and Mr. Stern's narrative stands out for its elegance, brevity and measured tone: exciting but not sensational, moving but not sentimental, erudite but not academic. It is also enriched by the authors' connections to some of its central figures and events. Ms. Sifton is the daughter of Reinhold Niebuhr, and Mr. Stern fled Nazi Germany as a child in the 1930s.

Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi are sometimes celebrated as "martyrs." But in Ms. Sifton and Mr. Stern's telling, the two men never allowed themselves to speak of their sacrifices that way. In Dohnanyi's more modest formulation, they had simply taken "the path a decent person inevitably takes." And yet, as the authors soberingly conclude, "so few traveled that path—anywhere."

Mr. Kazam, a former Tikvah Fellow at The Wall Street Journal, is a student at Yale Law School.

Hiding the Hacking

If your personal info is filched from the site, the government doesn’t have to tell you. 

By John Fund

http://www.nationalreview.com

December 23, 2013

Christmas shoppers were stunned to learn last Thursday that computer hackers had made off with the names and other personal info of some 40 million Target customers. Some of the pilfered information is reportedly being sold on the black market, prompting JP Morgan Chase to limit purchases and cash withdrawals on debit cards owned by recent Target shoppers.

But at least Target informed its customers of the security breach, as it is required by federal law to do. HealthCare.gov faces no such requirement; it need never notify customers that their personal information has been hacked or possibly compromised. The Department of Health and Human Services was specifically asked to include a notification requirement in the rules it designed for the health-care exchanges, but HHS declined.

The Federal Register tells the tale about what happened on March 27, 2012, at a meeting on the issue.

At that meeting, two commenters asked HHS to ensure the exchanges would promptly notify affected enrollees in the event of a data breach or unauthorized access to the exchange’s databases. One commenter suggested that a full investigation be launched each time such a breach occurred, with the goal of holding hackers legally and financially accountable for breaking into the website.

According to a report by the group Watchdog.org, HHS responded: “We do not plan to include the specific notification procedures in the final rule. Consistent with this approach, we do not include specific policies for investigation of data breaches in this final rule.” In other words, the government doesn’t have to tell you about a security breach unless it decides it wants to — despite the fact that private companies are required to publicly disclose any incidents. State laws also require many of the 14 state-run insurance exchanges to disclose such information, but no such law exists for the federally run exchange, which 36 states rely upon.

The Watchdog report notes that it’s through state laws that we’ve learned the most about security problems in the exchanges. In September, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that “an official at MNsure, the state’s new online health insurance exchange, acknowledged it had mishandled private data.” A Minnesota insurance broker received an e-mail containing a trove of confidential information on more than 2,400 people, including their Social Security numbers and business addresses. A staffer at MNsure had accidentally sent the e-mail to him. “The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was,” Jim Koester, the recipient of the data, told the Star Tribune. “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary.”

Last July, Dave Jones, California’s insurance commissioner and a Democrat, expressed his concerns about inadequate security processes on his state’s exchange, one of the better-run ones. If unscrupulous people get hold of Social Security numbers, health records, or other private information of consumers “we can have a real disaster on our hands,” Jones told the AP. He has declined further comment since then.

In Florida, GOP governor Rick Scott is troubled that privacy guidelines will be ignored in the rush to try to enroll his state’s 3.5 million uninsured residents. He wrote to Congress this fall expressing worry that the thousands of “navigators” hired by private groups posed a possible security threat, given that they undergo no federal background checks: “As the push for ‘navigators’ to sign up Floridians on the federal health insurance exchange becomes more frenzied, the need to safeguard the personal information Floridians submit to the ‘navigators,’ and its use in a ‘federal data hub,’ is taking on paramount importance.” The workers the federal government hired to conduct the 2010 census were fingerprinted and underwent background checks. Not so the Obamacare “navigators.”

It’s not as if the Obama administration wasn’t notified of security concerns about its website. MITRE Corporation, an HHS contractor, alerted the agency that 19 unaddressed security vulnerabilities plagued the website before its launch on October 1. Last week, Teresa Fryer, the chief information-security officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), told the House Oversight Committee that she recommended that HealthCare.gov not launch on October 1 because of serious security concerns. “My evaluation of this was a high risk,” shetold the committee in a private interview. Tony Trenkle, the project manager for the website, declined along with Fryer to sign the Authority to Operate (ATO) license needed to launch the site, which is why it had to be signed by Marilyn Tavenner, the political appointee in charge of CMS. Trenkle retired on November 13 and has declined to talk with reporters. But Fryer said her own concerns about security remain unaddressed because there have been “two high findings of risk” — the most serious warning level — in tests conducted in just the past few weeks. A CMS spokesman says both problems have been resolved.

Few cyber-security experts I spoke with for this article have much confidence that the government will quickly or competently reveal any security breaches on HealthCare.gov. On October 30, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified under oath before Congress that “no senior official reporting to me ever advised me that we should delay” the launch of the website. But Fryer told the House committee that she had personally briefed Sebelius’s top aides on her findings on September 20, ten days before the site launched. While it may be true that Fryer and Trinkle don’t report directly to Sebelius, they both declined to sign off on the ATO needed to launch the site. At best, Sebelius has demonstrated a complete inability to follow or manage the security crisis, though it’s her responsibility to do so.

According to Bruce Webster, a consultant who has advised companies for 40 years on IT issues, the administration’s policy appears to be “security through obscurity,” a largely discredited approach. He told me:

They do not want to talk about their security measures; they do not want to talk about their security breaches; they do not want to inform affected citizens of compromised personal information. Their attitude reminds me of Lily Tomlin’s character Ernestine as an AT&T operator back when AT&T had a monopoly: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Congresswoman Diane Black, a Tennessee Republican, is fed up with the obfuscation and evasion surrounding HealthCare.gov. She has introduced the “Federal Data Breach Notification Act,” which would require that the Federal Trade Commission notify anyone whose personal information has been jeopardized. “The federal government imposes these same rules on the private sector, yet they have gone out of their way to avoid imposing this basic diligence on their own Obamacare exchange,” she told me.

If the House and Senate have any basic concern for the privacy rights of Americans, they will catapult her bill onto President Obama’s desk ASAP. It is horrible news that Target’s security vulnerabilities allowed hackers to filch the names and personal information of customers. But it will be even worse if the federal government can continue to keep people in the dark about its own security breaches, leaving many Americans with big, fat targets on their backs for identity thieves.

— John Fund is a national-affairs columnist for National Review Online.

Ideas From a Manger

By ROSS DOUTHAT

http://www.nytimes.com

December 21, 2013

Caravaggio, Nativity with Saint Lawrence and Saint Francis, 268 x 197, 1600 (San Lorenzo, Palermo, stolen in 1969)

PAUSE for a moment, in the last leg of your holiday shopping, to glance at one of the manger scenes you pass along the way. Cast your eyes across the shepherds and animals, the infant and the kings. Then try to see the scene this way: not just as a pious set-piece, but as a complete world picture — intimate, miniature and comprehensive.

Because that’s what the Christmas story really is — an entire worldview in a compact narrative, a depiction of how human beings relate to the universe and to one another. It’s about the vertical link between God and man — the angels, the star, the creator stooping to enter his creation. But it’s also about the horizontal relationships of society, because it locates transcendence in the ordinary, the commonplace, the low.

It’s easy in our own democratic era to forget how revolutionary the latter idea was. But the biblical narrative, the great critic Erich Auerbach wrote, depicted “something which neither the poets nor the historians of antiquity ever set out to portray: the birth of a spiritual movement in the depths of the common people, from within the everyday occurrences of contemporary life.”

And because that egalitarian idea is so powerful today, one useful — and seasonally appropriate — way to look at our divided culture’s competing worldviews is to see what each one takes from the crèche in Bethlehem.

Many Americans still take everything: They accept the New Testament as factual, believe God came in the flesh, and endorse the creeds that explain how and why that happened. And then alongside traditional Christians, there are observant Jews and Muslims who believe the same God revealed himself directly in some other historical and binding form.

But this biblical world picture is increasingly losing market share to what you might call the spiritual world picture, which keeps the theological outlines suggested by the manger scene — the divine is active in human affairs, every person is precious in God’s sight — but doesn’t sweat the details.

This is the world picture that red-staters get from Joel Osteen, blue-staters from Oprah, and everybody gets from our “God bless America” civic religion. It’s Christian-ish but syncretistic; adaptable, easygoing and egalitarian. It doesn’t care whether the angel really appeared to Mary: the important thing is that a spiritual version of that visitation could happen to anyone — including you.

Then, finally, there’s the secular world picture, relatively rare among the general public but dominant within the intelligentsia. This worldview keeps the horizontal message of the Christmas story but eliminates the vertical entirely. The stars and angels disappear: There is no God, no miracles, no incarnation. But the egalitarian message — the common person as the center of creation’s drama — remains intact, and with it the doctrines of liberty, fraternity and human rights.

As these world pictures jostle and compete, their strengths and weaknesses emerge. The biblical picture has the weight of tradition going for it, the glory of centuries of Western art, the richness of millenniums’ worth of theological speculation. But its specificity creates specific problems: how to remain loyal to biblical ethics in a commercial, sexually liberated society.

The spiritual picture lacks the biblical picture’s resources and rigor, but it makes up for them in flexibility. A doctrine challenged by science can be abandoned; a commandment that clashes with modern attitudes ignored; the problem of evil washed away in a New Age bath.

The secular picture, meanwhile, seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than either of its rivals, because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher. And the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism — tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss.

So there are two interesting religious questions that will probably face Americans for many Christmases to come. The first is whether biblical religion can regain some of the ground it has lost, or whether the spiritual worldview will continue to carry all before it.

The second is whether the intelligentsia’s fusion of scientific materialism and liberal egalitarianism — the crèche without the star, the shepherds’ importance without the angels’ blessing — will eventually crack up and give way to something new.

The cracks are visible, in philosophy and science alike. But the alternative is not. One can imagine possibilities: a deist revival or a pantheist turn, a new respect for biblical religion, a rebirth of the 20th century’s utopianism and will-to-power cruelty.

But for now, though a few intellectuals scan the heavens, they have yet to find their star.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/DouthatNYT.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 22, 2013, on page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Ideas From A Manger.

Badgers volleyball: Four-set loss ends national title dream

By DENNIS PUNZEL | Wisconsin State Journal

December 22, 2013

UW's Courtney Thomas tries to hit past Penn State's Ariel Scott, Katie Slay (16) and Deja McClendon on Saturday night at KeyArena in Seattle. (Elaine Thompson/AP)

SEATTLE — The University of Wisconsin volleyball team’s magical postseason ride came to an end Saturday night with a four-set loss to Penn State in the NCAA championship match.

The 12th-seeded Badgers were beaten for the third time this season by their Big Ten Conference rivals 25-19, 26-24, 20-25, 25-23 before a sellout crowd of 14,779 at KeyArena.

After knocking off top-seeded and defending champion Texas in the national semifinals on Thursday, the Badgers couldn’t hold up against the Nittany Lions, who won their sixth national title under legendary coach Russ Rose.

It was the second championship match loss for the UW program. The Badgers also were second to Nebraska in 2000.

Early on, the Badgers looked to be on the brink of being blown out, but they battled back and nearly forced a fifth set.

“I think everybody out there saw a team that wasn’t just happy to be playing in this match,” UW coach Kelly Sheffield said. “There was a lot of emotion in the locker room. They play to win, they expected to win. Probably not a whole lot of people thought we had a chance to do that but our players did.

“We fell behind 0-2 and they showed a lot of heart to come back. Penn State is a great team.”

Ultimately, it was the power serve of Penn State’s All-American setter Micha Hancock, who was voted the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four, that made the difference.

Her serves helped the Nittany Lions to big streaks in the first two sets and she was serving as they finished off the match on a 5-0 run.

“Penn State has the biggest weapon

in college volleyball in Micha Hancock’s serve,” Sheffield said. “We battled like crazy to keep it off the floor.

“There was no offense at all when she was serving. She’s one of the few elite servers and a timeout doesn’t faze here. Lord knows we’ve been trying to save them for that. But she comes right back out and rips it. The amount of pressure she was putting on our team … that’s a tough deal.”

It was tough deal all around for the Badgers, whose inspirational and unexpected run to the final match ended in tears.

“I would never give up this experience for anything,” junior Ellen Chapman said. “It was an amazing ride. It’s just so weird to think how far we’ve come this year. The journey was the whole part.

“The bigger stage you’re on, the more it hurts to lose. Being one of the only two teams left in the country still playing, that’s what hurts so much, knowing how close we were.”

The loss was the last one for the Badgers’ only senior, Annemarie Hickey, who dislocated her right shoulder late in the fourth set.

But she tried to tough it out and made several big digs down the stretch. Unfortunately, for the Badgers, she also served a ball into the net late in that set, an error that put the serve in Hancock’s hands to finish out the match.

“This team just showed a lot of heart,” Sheffield said.

“I was trying to not let it affect me,” Hickey said. “My adrenaline was going and I was trying to do as much as I could to help my team.

“It hurt pretty bad. I could feel it come out of my shoulder. It was painful, but we were playing with such high intensity and we were winning the game. I didn’t want to come out and let my teammates down, so I just worked through it the best I could.”

The Nittany Lions looked like they were going to turn things into a rout early in the second set as they raced out to a 6-1 lead behind Hancock’s serving.

Penn State led 11-5 before the Badgers began a charge that had KeyArena sounding like the UW Field House West. The Badgers went on a 9-3 run to pull even at 14.

The lead batted back and forth before the Badgers took a 22-20 advantage. Penn State answered with three straight points to go up 23-22. A service error by Courtney Thomas let the Lions tie it up but a kill by Dominique Thompson gave UW a set point at 24-23.

But Deme Morales hit her serve into the net to give Penn State the tying point and All-American Ariel Scott followed with back-to-back kills to give the Nittany Lions the set.

Even though they were in a hole, Sheffield could see his team’s confidence growing.

“They believed they were going to go to Game 5,” he said. “You could see it in their eyes, they were locked in. I didn’t need a pep talk.”

Penn State again took command early in the third set, jumping out to a 5-1 lead. But once again the Badgers showed their spunk, responding with a 4-0 run to pull even at 5.

UW then took command midway through the set with a 6-0 run to take a 17-12 lead.

Penn State tried to keep things interesting, cutting the margin to three points on three occasions, but the Badgers fought them off, getting to set point 24-19 on a tip by Thompson and winning the set on a serve into the net by Penn State.

Thompson led the Badgers’ attack with 16 kills (.314) as freshman setter Lauren Carlini continually went to her for big points.

“She’s probably one of the most underrated middles in the country,” Carlini said of Thompson. “People look at her height more than anything and think, oh, she can’t be good. She lit it up tonight and made them pay.”

The Badgers got off to another slow start in the fourth set but recovered quickly to take a 10-7 lead. Penn State responded with a 6-1 run to grab a 13-11 lead and was up 15-13 at the official timeout.

UW then ran off four unanswered points, including kills by Carlini, Thompson and Chapman to go up 17-15.

The Badgers led 22-19 after Chapman’s serve hit the tape and rolled over to hit the floor on the Penn State side. After a kill by Penn State’s Nia Grant, Morales got a kill to make it 23-20.

But a serve into the net by Hickey proved costly as it gave the serve back in the hands of Hancock. She never let it go, recording two aces as the Nittany Lions put the match away with a 5-0 run. Deja McClendon scored the match point on a kill.

Carlini and Morales were named to the All Tournament team. They were joined by Penn State’s Scott, McClendon, Katie Slay and Hancock and Washington’s Krista Vansant.

Wisconsin 19 24 25 23

Penn State 25 26 20 25

WISCONSIN — (kills-aces-blocks) — Carlini 2-0-4, Thomas 1-1-5, Morey 0-0-0, Morales 15-0-2, Nelson 7-0-9, Thompson 16-0-5, Hickey 0-0-0, Kvas 0-0-0, Chapman 5-1-3. Totals: 46-2-14.

PENN STATE — (kills-aces-blocks) — Scott 21-0-0, Grant 4-0-4, Hancock 5-3-2, Slay 14-0-3, Courtney 5-0-5, McClendon 11-0-0, Pierce 0-0-0, Gonzalez 0-3-0, Prieto Cerame 2-0-0, Fuller 0-0-0. Totals: 62-6-9.

Hitting percentage — W .172, PS .206. Digs — W 73 (Hickey 26), PS 78 (Courtney, Gonzalez 20).

Assists — W 45 (Carlini 39), PS 56 (Hancock 48). Att.— 14,779.

Read more: http://host.madison.com/sports/college/badgers-volleyball-four-set-loss-ends-national-title-dream/article_5cffe020-0f11-59dc-a387-3ebe1c94a8ce.html#ixzz2oCgCJL00




Penn State's Megan Courtney (17) slams a shot past Wisconsin's Courtney Thomas (3) and Haleigh Nelson (13) in an NCAA college volleyball tournament championship final Saturday, Dec. 21, 2013, in Seattle. Penn State won in four games. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

PUT A RING ON IT

Lions capture sixth national championship

By Zack Neiner | Collegian Staff Writer

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/sports

December 22, 2013

Penn State players cut the net after they beat Wisconsin in an NCAA college volleyball tournament championship final Saturday, Dec. 21, 2013, in Seattle. Penn State won the championship in four games. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

For the fifth time in seven seasons, Penn State reigned as victors of the college volleyball world, defeating Wisconsin, (25-19, 26-24, 20-25, 25-23) on Saturday in Seattle.

It's the sixth championship in Nittany Lions' history and first since 2010 when the current seniors, including Deja McClendon, Katie Slay and Ariel Scott, were freshmen.

But it's the first for junior setter Micha Hancock.

As the confetti rained down on the players celebrating on KeyArena's court in a mosh of white, tears streamed down the face of Hancock. One year ago, she found herself injured in the semifinals, stranded from the bench to watch Oregon sweep the Lions.

On Saturday night, Rose said he went up to her in the fourth set and asked Hancock if she wanted to take the gamble and continue jump serving.

"And sometimes the players swear at the coaches," Rose added as Hancock found herself in one of the moments athletes say they live for.

Down 23-22, Hancock was behind the service line with the game in her hands, ready to jump serve.

"I didn't want it to go five sets," Hancock said after the game. 

Like she has done time and time again, the Edmond, Okla. native did not falter. Instead, Hancock helped rally three straight points for the Lions that ultimately capped off with a McClendon kill.

And after a 33-2 regular season and a journey through the postseason, the Lions could finally call themselves champions.

"A lot of people have said it's the best feeling in the world," Hancock said. "It really is."

Unlike No. 3 Washington, the team Penn State downed to reach the championship match, the No. 12 Badgers challenged Penn State consistently early on.

Just like Washington on Thursday night, Wisconsin came out with the hot hand offensively. At one time, the underdog seed had a .850 hitting percentage to propel to an early 8-6 lead in the first set.

That lead did not last as Penn State's offense came alive to have 18 kills in the first set. Just like the finish, the Lions had a 5-0 scoring run under Micha Hancock serving, who had two aces in a row.

Hancock remained a constant threat for Penn State pushing the Lions to a 20-15 lead that led to a 25-19 victory in the first set. Hancock finished with 48 assists and three aces, and terrorized the Badgers throughout.

"I just don't think that we could convert off of Micha's serves," Wisconsin outside hitter Deme Morales said. "They were just a couple of sporadic plays and we couldn't control them."

But Penn State couldn't carry that same success in the second set. While the Lions did survive the set, they almost let a 11-5 lead slip out of their hands as Wisconsin rallied to tie the game at 15.

The two teams went back and forth until an Ariel Scott killed put Penn State up, 2-0, going into intermission. Scott's kill was one of 21 kills for her on the night with a .291 attacking percentage.

But Wisconsin found something in that second set as the Badgers exploited the Lions' offense in game three. Neither team hit well, but Penn State hit worse.

The Lions hit .029 for the game with eight attacking errors compared to only nine kills. That combination ultimately led to Wisconsin to win its first game against Penn State this season in three meetings, 25-20.

Wisconsin appeared destined to have its Cinderella run continue in the fourth set after jumping out to a 10-7 lead. But Penn State battled, trying to break through the Badgers' tenacious defense.

"I just keep at it," Scott said. "Even if they're digging me, I don't get discouraged, and still ask for the ball."

Coming into Saturday's match, Wisconsin coach Kelly Sheffield stressed the importance of defense and while it took till the fourth set for them to really come alive, they did.

"They believed that we were going to go to game five," Sheffield said. "Even in the locker room, I'm in there and that team was locked in...They didn't need a pep talk."

The Badgers ended the match with 28 block assists and 73 digs. Despite holding Penn State to a .173 attacking percentage in the fourth set, the Lions still answered the Wisconsin's go-ahead leads.

That is until Hancock went behind the service line for one more time this season. And just like every time she stepped up to serve in front of a Rec Hall crowd, she ended with a boom.

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/sports/women_volleyball/article_6334912e-6aae-11e3-b5b1-0019bb30f31a.html

Related:

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/gallery/sports/article_fde8c73c-6ad9-11e3-a976-0019bb30f31a.html

Penn State volleyball: Nittany Lions wrap up sixth national title with win over Wisconsin

http://www.centredaily.com/sports/

December 22, 2013

Penn State's Micha Hancock (12) sets the ball for Katie Slay (16) as Wisconsin defenders get in position in an NCAA women's volleyball tournament championship final, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2013, in Seattle.ELAINE THOMPSON — AP Photo

Read more here: http://www.centredaily.com/2013/12/22/3953927/penn-state-volleyball-nittany.html#storylink=cpy

SEATTLE — It appeared the Penn State women’s volleyball team was on the brink of blowing a two-set lead.

But the right person stepped to the service line at the right time, and the Nittany Lions caught fire.

Micha Hancock delivered a pair of aces as the Nittany Lions ran off the final five points of the match — and another national title was theirs.

Behind a match-high 21 kills from Ariel Scott, and three key aces from tournament Most Outstanding Player Hancock, Penn State held on for a 25-19, 26-24, 20-25, 25-23 victory over Wisconsin on Saturday night at KeyArena for the program’s sixth national championship and fifth in the last seven seasons.

“It was a grind-out match,” said coach Russ Rose, who has been at the progam’s helm for 35 seasons, “which we knew we would have to do because of how well Wisconsin plays.”

The crown, wrapped up in the first all-Big Ten national title match, ties Stanford for the most in NCAA history as the Lions won their 24th consecutive match.

“I couldn’t be happier,” said Scott, who took 51 swings and hit .294. “There’s no better way to end my collegiate career.”

Penn State (33-2) also got 14 kills on .481 hitting from Katie Slay, 11 kills from Deja McClendon, five blocks and 20 digs from Megan Courtney, four stuffs from Nia Grant, 20 digs from Dominique Gonzalez, and 48 assists, 16 digs from Hancock.

“This is every colegaite volleyball player’s dream — to win a national championship,” Gonzalez said. “Being able to do that is pretty awesome.”

Wisconsin (28-9) was led by Dominique Thompson’s 16 kills and five blocks, and 5-foot-7 Deme Morales’ 15 kills on 51 swings, matching Scott for the match high. The Badgers also got seven kills and nine blocks from Haleigh Nelson, 26 digs from Annemarie Hickey and 39 assists from Lauren Carlini.

Penn State finished the match hitting .206, with 16 hitting errors over the final two sets and 27 total. The Lions also had a 62-46 kills advantage, a 78-73 edge in digs and a 6-2 lead in aces. Wisconsin hit .172 and won the blocking battle 14-9.

After knocking out the first two sets, Penn State lost its rhythm in the third set.

It took a little while, but the Nittany Lions began to find their game again in the fourth set, with passes starting to hit the mark again, and McClendon starting to find her hitting touch after a number of errors over the previous two sets. But the Nittany Lion play fell apart again, with three errors over five points, and a Badger ace, to put Wisconsin ahead 22-19 and the match appeared headed to a fifth set.

But Grant ripped a kill that brought Penn State back to life, and after the teams traded points Hancock was back at the service line at just the right time. She delivered the first ace ahead of a Slay kill on an overpass to knot it at 23-23. After a time out, Hancock ticked the net with another serve that flumoxed the Badgers just enough to give her another ace and match point, and seconds later an overpass floated above the net for McClendon to punch to the floor to wrap up another banner season for the Nittany Lions.

“I didn’t want to go to five (sets),” Hancock said her her mentality stepping to the line at that critical moment. “I don’t think anyone did.”

“It’s a great win,” Rose told ESPN2. “The kids played hard and we’ll have a little fun for a little bit now.”

The Nittany Lions pulled away in the opening set with a 6-2 run midway through, with back-to-back blocks by the combination of Slay and Hancock and two Slay kills highlighting the run. Penn State hit .350 and held a 19-9 advantage in kills in the frame.

Penn State carried the momentum well into the second set, rocketing to an 11-5 lead with more big swings from Scott. But Wisconsin rallied to knot the set at 14-14, and they stayed tight the rest of the frame. The Badgers had the lead at 23-22, and again had set point at 24-23, and both times Badgers put serves into the net. Scott closed out the set with two straight kills, giving her eight put-aways in the frame.

“We’ve got the hammer over there,” Hancock said. “I wanted to feed her.”

Both teams came out of the break between sets with some ragged play, with a combined 13 hitting errors by the timeout when the Baders led 15-12. Two Morales kills to go with a block on Scott over the final three points leading into the timeout gave Wisconsin the lead. The lead stayed between three and five the rest of the set to breathe life into Wisconsin, with a Paulina Prieto Cerame serve into the net locking up the frame.

Rose declined after the match to say where this win ranks among the program’s six titles.

“That’s like asking me about the birth of my children and where they rank,” Rose joked.

Notes: Penn State entered the night with 23 straight-set wins this season. ... Rose had 1,124 wins heading into Saturday’s title match. Hawaii’s Dave Shoji paces all Division I coaches with 1,128. ... Penn State had won both regular-season meetings with the Badgers 3-0. ... The Nittany Lions went into the finals with a 25-0 record after winning the first two sets. ... The Nittany Lions were making their ninth appearance in the finals, losing the first three before winning the last six. ... Scott, Slay and McClendon were all supposed to receive their diplomas Saturday if they had been on campus.

http://www.centredaily.com/2013/12/22/3953927/penn-state-volleyball-nittany.html

Read more here: http://www.centredaily.com/2013/12/22/3953927/penn-state-volleyball-nittany.html#storylink=cpy

Today's Tune: Joey Ramone - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

Mental Health Laws Are Trouble For Democrats

By Ann Coulter

http://www.anncoulter.com/

December 18, 2013

Jared Loughner  (Phoenix), Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook), James Holmes (Aurora, Colorado), Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), Dylan Klebold (Columbine), Kipland Kinkel (Springfield, Oregon)

Instead of always taking incoming fire, how about Republicans start sending some back? It's great that they stopped HillaryCare, but if they had actually fixed health care by forcing health insurance plans to be sold in a competitive free market, there would have been no opportunity for shyster Democrats to foist Obamacare on us.

It's fantastic that we caught the Boston Marathon bombers, but why don't Republicans fix an immigration system that brings foreign terrorists and mass murderers to our country? Let the Democrats explain why we couldn't make room for a Danish surgeon because we needed another Chechnyan terrorist.

And it's terrific that Republicans have managed to block sweeping gun bans after every mass shooting over the past few years -- opposition to new gun restrictions has more than doubled since Newtown -- but how about they actually do something to stop the next mass murder?

All these shootings are united by one clear thread: They all were committed by visibly crazy people, known to be nuts but not institutionalized.

Mental illness was blindingly clear in the cases of Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), Maj. Nidal Hasan (Fort Hood), Jared Loughner (Arizona shopping mall), James Holmes (Colorado movie theater), and a dozen other mass shootings in the past few decades.

But in every instance, Democrats' response was: Let's ban high-capacity magazines! Let's limit private gun sales! Let's publish the names of everyone who owns a registered gun!

Mass shootings don't correlate with any of these things. They correlate with not locking up crazy people. We're not worried about school kids being systematically gunned down by angry husbands, gang members or antique gun collectors. We're worried about a psychotic showing up in a public place and shooting everyone in sight.

There's absolutely no point in making it more difficult to buy firearms at gun shows -- unless gun dealers have no trouble getting files on the mentally ill. Until we do that, we're wasting our time.

Fixating on guns after a crazy person commits mass murder is like draining the ocean to find a ring you dropped.

Liberals can take the position that crazy people living on the street and filling up our prisons and homeless shelters are a necessary evil that is a consequence of their idee fixe. But then, when one of their pet victims shoots up a movie theater, they don't get to blame it on guns.

In every one of these mass shootings, there was someone in a position to say before the attack, "Trust me, this person is a psycho." Try getting Jared Loughner or James Holmes through any mental illness hearing in which they're required to speak. (Though both might end up being offered their own shows on MSNBC.)

If someone was brought back from the 1950s to today, he'd tell us: "I couldn't help but notice that all the people who committed mass shootings were batsh*t crazy. Why were they not locked up or forced to take medication?"

We'd have to say, "Because some people -- we call them 'liberals' -- get a warm feeling of self-righteousness by defending the right of the deranged to crap in a shoebox, carefully label it and put it in a closet."

Democrats absolutely will not address the one thing that was screaming out from all of the mass shootings: a crazy person committing the crime. We can't medicate them and we can't lock them up because the ACLU has handcuffed society's ability to deal rationally with the mentally disturbed.

Not only will Democrats refuse to address the problem of the mentally ill on their own, but they will fight to the last ditch to protect any crazy person's right not to take his medication.

At some point in the 1980s, not being "judgmental" became the highest form of virtue -- although the left is plenty judgmental about things they don't like, such as white males, smokers, Christianity, Wal-Mart, Fox News, talk radio and NASCAR.

Liberals are so determined not to stigmatize anybody that their solution is always to make all of society suffer instead:

-- To avoid hurting Muslims' feelings, everyone has to strip to his underwear at the airport.

-- So no one feels excluded, we're not allowed to say "Merry Christmas!"

-- To avoid singling out gays, the government and media lied to Americans for a decade about the coming explosion of heterosexual AIDS. (We're still waiting.)

-- To stop people from noticing patterns, the media bend over backward to avoid telling us the race of dangerous criminals on the loose.

-- To prevent hurt feelings, everybody gets an "A."

And to avoid "stigmatizing" the mentally ill, society has to live with the occasional mass murder.

These anti-stigmatization rules don't even help the people they claim to be protecting. But defending ridiculous rules that ruin things for everyone else makes liberals feel heroic.

Rather than constantly playing defense on gun rights, why don't Republicans force Democrats into taking uncomfortable positions for once? Make them choose between ticking off the ACLU or ticking off soccer moms -- as well as all of sane America. (Don't kid yourself: The non-insane are still a potent voting bloc in this country.)

Republicans should say, "We owe it to the memory of these kids to unclog the regulations that prevent us from forcing psychotics to take their medication."

COPYRIGHT 2013 ANN COULTER 

The Age of Intolerance

The forces of “tolerance” are intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval. 

By Mark Steyn

http://www.nationalreview.com/

December 20, 2013

Last week, following the public apology of an English comedian and the arrest of a fellow British subject both for making somewhat feeble Mandela gags, I noted that supposedly free societies were increasingly perilous places for those who make an infelicitous remark. So let’s pick up where we left off:

Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:

“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”

For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently coercive about the enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be “tolerant” — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly supportive, according to taste. The forces of “tolerance” would become intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.

Second joke from the archives: Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra kept this one in the act for a quarter-century. On stage, Dino used to have a bit of business where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Sinatra would respond, “I dunno. How do you make a fruit cordial?” And Dean would say, “Be nice to him.”

But no matter how nice you are, it’s never enough. Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, in his career-detonating interview with GQ, gave a rather thoughtful vernacular exegesis of the Bible’s line on sin, while carefully insisting that he and other Christians are obligated to love all sinners and leave it to the Almighty to adjudicate the competing charms of drunkards, fornicators, and homosexuals. Nevertheless, GLAAD — “the gatekeepers of politically correct gayness” as the (gay) novelist Bret Easton Ellis sneered — saw their opportunity and seized it. By taking out TV’s leading cable star, they would teach an important lesson pour encourager les autres— that espousing conventional Christian morality, even off-air, is incompatible with American celebrity.

Some of my comrades, who really should know better, wonder why, instead of insisting Robertson be defenestrated, GLAAD wouldn’t rather “start a conversation.” But, if you don’t need to, why bother? Most Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage; they don’t oppose the right of gays to advocate it. Yet thug groups like GLAAD increasingly oppose the right of Christians even to argue their corner. It’s quicker and more effective to silence them.

As Christian bakers ordered to provide wedding cakes for gay nuptials and many others well understand, America’s much-vaunted “freedom of religion” is dwindling down to something you can exercise behind closed doors in the privacy of your own abode or at a specialist venue for those of such tastes for an hour or so on Sunday morning, but when you enter the public square you have to leave your faith back home hanging in the closet. Yet even this reductive consolation is not permitted to Robertson: GLAAD spokesgay Wilson Cruz declared that “Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe.” Robertson was quoting the New Testament, but hey, what do those guys know? In today’s America, land of the Obamacare Pajama Boy, Jesus is basically Nightshirt Boy, a fey non-judgmental dweeb who’s cool with whatever. What GLAAD is attempting would be called, were it applied to any other identity group, “cultural appropriation.”

In the broader sense, it’s totalitarian. While American gays were stuffing and mounting the duck hunter in their trophy room, the Prince of Wales was celebrating Advent with Christian refugees from the Middle East, and noting that the land in which Christ and Christianity were born is now the region boasting “the lowest concentration of Christians in the world — just four percent of the population.” It will be three, and two, and one percent soon enough, for there is a totalitarian impulse in resurgent Islam — and not just in Araby. A few miles from Buckingham Palace, Muslims in London’s East End are now sufficiently confident to go around warning local shopkeepers to cease selling alcohol. In theory, you might still enjoy the right to sell beer in Tower Hamlets or be a practicing Christian in Iraq, but in reality not so much. The asphyxiating embrace of ideological conformity was famously captured by Nikolai Krylenko, the People’s Commissar for Justice, in a speech to the Soviet Congress of Chess Players in 1932, at which he attacked the very concept of “the neutrality of chess.” It was necessary for chess to be Sovietized like everything else. “We must organize shock brigades of chess players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess,” he declared.  

Six years later, the political winds having shifted, Krylenko was executed as an enemy of the people. But his spirit lives on among the Commissars of Gay Compliance at GLAAD. It is not enough to have gay marriage for gays. Everything must be gayed. There must be Five-Year Gay Plans for American bakeries, and the Christian church, and reality TV. There must be shock brigades of gay duck-hunters honking out the party line deep in the backwoods of the proletariat. Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily gay, can only be dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate so as to communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor heterosexuality is in contemporary America.

Look, I’m an effete foreigner who likes show tunes. My Broadway book was on a list of “Twelve Books Every Gay Man Should Read.” Andrew Sullivan said my beard was hot. Leonard Bernstein stuck his tongue in my mouth (long story). But I’m not interested in living in a world where we have to tiptoe around on ever thinner eggshells. If it’s a choice between having celebrity chefs who admit to having used the N-word in 1977 (or 1965, or 1948, or whenever the hell it was) and reality-show duck-hunters who quote Corinthians and Alec Baldwin bawling out some worthless paparazzo who’s doorstepping his family with a “homophobic” slur, or having all of them banished from public life and thousands upon millions more too cowed and craven to speak lest the same fate befall them, I’ll take the former any day.

Because the latter culture would be too boring for any self-respecting individual to want to live in, even more bloody boring than the current TV landscape where, aside from occasional eruptions of unerotic twerking by sexless skanks, every other show seems to involve snippy little Pajama Boys sitting around snarking at each other in the antiseptic eunuch pose that now passes for “ironic.” It’s “irony” as the last circle of Dante’s cultural drain; it’s why every show advertised as “edgy” and “transgressive” offers the same pitiful combination of attitude and impotence as a spayed cat humping.  

Such a pansified culture is going nowhere. I hasten to add I don’t mean “pansified” in the sense of penetrative sex with other men, but in the Sarah Silverman sense of “I mean ‘gay’ like ‘retarded.’” Miss Silverman can get away with that kind of talk because she’s a Pajama Boy–friendly ironist posing as a homophobic disablist. Unless, of course, she’s a homophobic disablist posing as a Pajama Boy–friendly ironist. Maybe we should ban her just to be on the safe side.

How do you make a fruit cordial?

Be nice to him. Or else.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn