I am really beginning to enjoy the books of Kevin Wignall. They are intelligent thrillers, each a standalone, that have an above average vocabulary. Where else could one discover the word "shambolic." Good word.
The protagonist is an interesting character. Lucas, an ex-assassin (although it's never made quite clear), he has been hired to protect, Ella, on vacation in Italy, the daughter of a wealthy man who made his money in rather heinous ways. At the start of the book, Ella's father, mother, and brother have all been assassinated. As the book moves from perspective to perspective, we follow Lucas, doing his best to protect his charge. (One nice touch: Lucas is an inveterate reader, never going anywhere without a book. When was the last time you saw a movie hero carrying a book around with him on missions.) Fascinating as Ella begins to go off the rails with a most satisfactory ending.
The movie is vastly different with a different premise. One thing that has always bothered me about these kinds of stories both in print and film. The protagonists never, ever, have money problems. Needs a flight to athens, no problem, first class ticket, no problem. Yet there never seem to have a job or source of income. Nor do they ever have to pee or get their periods, or have diarrhea from eating strange food. Got to be a lucky group of people.
Saturday, December 08, 2018
Review: Poison Artist by Jonathan Moore
Yikes!. How to review this book and avoid spoilers, and while I generally have no problem with spoilers, in this case letting you know that the light at the end of the tunnel is indeed a train might ruin the splat.
Caleb's girlfriend, Bridget, has left him after throwing an ashtray at his head. We are not sure precisely what the infraction might have been (nor do we ever find out for certain although the hints are there,) but while drowning his sorrows in the bar he sees a stunning woman, an instant infatuation. Caleb is doing research on the physical manifestations of pain, e.g. hormones released, etc. Chemicals. "Guy gets hurt, his endocrine system responds. Adrenaline, endorphins. Damaged cells dump out different histamines. There’s paracrine signaling going on—that’s cell-to-cell communication—with compounds like prostaglandin and thromboxane. Bunch of other stuff. Pain leaves markers, and I’m following them. To quantify it."
He's also an expert in bizarre toxins. “Batrachotoxin." ...."The median lethal dose is ninety micrograms—a couple grains of salt,” Caleb said. “And all you’d have to do is touch it.” People start turning up loaded with this toxin.
I shall say no more other than to recommend this book if you have an interest in the bizarre mechanisms of the mind. Whether the events here represent anything approaching reality is a bit frightening.
Caleb's girlfriend, Bridget, has left him after throwing an ashtray at his head. We are not sure precisely what the infraction might have been (nor do we ever find out for certain although the hints are there,) but while drowning his sorrows in the bar he sees a stunning woman, an instant infatuation. Caleb is doing research on the physical manifestations of pain, e.g. hormones released, etc. Chemicals. "Guy gets hurt, his endocrine system responds. Adrenaline, endorphins. Damaged cells dump out different histamines. There’s paracrine signaling going on—that’s cell-to-cell communication—with compounds like prostaglandin and thromboxane. Bunch of other stuff. Pain leaves markers, and I’m following them. To quantify it."
He's also an expert in bizarre toxins. “Batrachotoxin." ...."The median lethal dose is ninety micrograms—a couple grains of salt,” Caleb said. “And all you’d have to do is touch it.” People start turning up loaded with this toxin.
I shall say no more other than to recommend this book if you have an interest in the bizarre mechanisms of the mind. Whether the events here represent anything approaching reality is a bit frightening.
Monday, December 03, 2018
Bingham, the Johnson Veto, and Privileges and Immunities (cont.)
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson. Part of his rationale for the veto was that the Congress lacked the authority to confer national citizenship. He also used the words “privileges and immunities” in a new context. In 1866, Johnson had already vetoed the expansion of the Freedman Act that had come out of the Senate, sponsored by Charles Sumner’s Select Committee on Slavery and Lyman Trumbull (a veto that was over-ridden). Johnson’s rationale was that it expanded the power of the federal government at the expense of the states, and he was anxious to return the southern states back into the union as expeditiously as possible and with as little inconvenience to their former status.
The 38th and 39th Congress had other ideas, arguing that the southern states had rebelled, taken themselves out of the Union and therefore would have to reapply under conditions set by the Republican Congress. Ironically, Johnson, by suggesting that a constitutional amendment would be needed to do what the Congress wanted in the Freedman Act and Civil Rights Act, may have forced them to do just that in the 14th Amendment.
The south had always assumed that should their rebellion fail, it wouldn’t matter that much because, as Garrett Epps pointed out in his book Democracy Reborn, a prominent southern paper had written “Universal assent appears to be given to the proposition that if the States lately rebellious be restored to rights of representation according to the federal basis, or to the basis of numbers enlarged by the enumeration of all the blacks in the next census, the political power of the country will pass into the hands of the South, aided, as it will be, by Northern alliances. The South claims that this will be the fact, and the North does not dispute it.” So fears of a southern reversal of everything that had been gained by the war were not unfounded.
Johnson’s sustained attempt to defeat the Amendment both deepened and helped shape public understanding of the proposed text and its impact on the autonomy of the States. It was President Johnson, for example, who first declared that congressional efforts to protect the “privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States” required a constitutional amendment. When Congress submitted a proposed amendment that adopted the President’s own phrases Johnson responded by challenging the very legitimacy of the Republican Congress and making opposition to the Amendment the focus of the Democratic platform in the fall elections. The Democrats were soundly defeated gave the 39th Congress a complete Republican majority. That gave them the authority they needed to propose the Amendment and nationalize the Bill of Rights.
Johnson’s suggestion that Congress lacked constitutional authority to confer the status of national citizenship would ultimately lead to the addition of the citizenship clause of the Amendment. But even more importantly, Johnson introduced the language of the rights of national citizenship to the legislative and public debate. Johnson announced in one of his speeches of 1866, that Congress had sought to confer the “privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States,” a category of rights altogether different from the state conferred rights protected under the Comity Clause. (Article IV of the Constitution that had been interpreted to mean only that states had to honor the privileges conferred on state citizens across state lines.) Johnson’s reference regarding the rights of national citizenship would soon become a part of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Bingham himself mocked the opposition for claiming they were "not opposed to the bill of rights," but only opposed to their federal enforcement. If states had no authority to violate the Bill of Rights, "how can the right of a State be impaired by giving to the people of the United States by constitutional amendment the power by congressional enactment to enforce this provision of their Constitution?” Such enforcement was essential, argued Bingham, in light of Chief Justice Marshall's Supreme Court's ruling in Baron v. Baltimore which had decided that the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government and authority and not the states. Actions in the south that clearly were intended to remove protections from freedmen necessitated federal enforcement and application to the states, especially of due process and the privileges and immunities of citizenship.
Sources: Lash, Kurt T. "The Constitutional Referendum of 1866: Andrew Johnson and the Original Meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause." SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2125363.
Epps, Garrett. Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post Civil War America. New York: Henry Holt, 2013. Kindle.
The 38th and 39th Congress had other ideas, arguing that the southern states had rebelled, taken themselves out of the Union and therefore would have to reapply under conditions set by the Republican Congress. Ironically, Johnson, by suggesting that a constitutional amendment would be needed to do what the Congress wanted in the Freedman Act and Civil Rights Act, may have forced them to do just that in the 14th Amendment.
The south had always assumed that should their rebellion fail, it wouldn’t matter that much because, as Garrett Epps pointed out in his book Democracy Reborn, a prominent southern paper had written “Universal assent appears to be given to the proposition that if the States lately rebellious be restored to rights of representation according to the federal basis, or to the basis of numbers enlarged by the enumeration of all the blacks in the next census, the political power of the country will pass into the hands of the South, aided, as it will be, by Northern alliances. The South claims that this will be the fact, and the North does not dispute it.” So fears of a southern reversal of everything that had been gained by the war were not unfounded.
Johnson’s sustained attempt to defeat the Amendment both deepened and helped shape public understanding of the proposed text and its impact on the autonomy of the States. It was President Johnson, for example, who first declared that congressional efforts to protect the “privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States” required a constitutional amendment. When Congress submitted a proposed amendment that adopted the President’s own phrases Johnson responded by challenging the very legitimacy of the Republican Congress and making opposition to the Amendment the focus of the Democratic platform in the fall elections. The Democrats were soundly defeated gave the 39th Congress a complete Republican majority. That gave them the authority they needed to propose the Amendment and nationalize the Bill of Rights.
Johnson’s suggestion that Congress lacked constitutional authority to confer the status of national citizenship would ultimately lead to the addition of the citizenship clause of the Amendment. But even more importantly, Johnson introduced the language of the rights of national citizenship to the legislative and public debate. Johnson announced in one of his speeches of 1866, that Congress had sought to confer the “privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States,” a category of rights altogether different from the state conferred rights protected under the Comity Clause. (Article IV of the Constitution that had been interpreted to mean only that states had to honor the privileges conferred on state citizens across state lines.) Johnson’s reference regarding the rights of national citizenship would soon become a part of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Bingham himself mocked the opposition for claiming they were "not opposed to the bill of rights," but only opposed to their federal enforcement. If states had no authority to violate the Bill of Rights, "how can the right of a State be impaired by giving to the people of the United States by constitutional amendment the power by congressional enactment to enforce this provision of their Constitution?” Such enforcement was essential, argued Bingham, in light of Chief Justice Marshall's Supreme Court's ruling in Baron v. Baltimore which had decided that the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government and authority and not the states. Actions in the south that clearly were intended to remove protections from freedmen necessitated federal enforcement and application to the states, especially of due process and the privileges and immunities of citizenship.
Sources: Lash, Kurt T. "The Constitutional Referendum of 1866: Andrew Johnson and the Original Meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause." SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2125363.
Epps, Garrett. Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post Civil War America. New York: Henry Holt, 2013. Kindle.
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Kavanaugh and Impeachment
We hear a lot from assorted political folks about how to interpret the Constitution. One popular among conservatives is called "originalism." Generally, it's defined as assuming that we should interpret the Constitution as if it had a stable content, that we need to look at the original intent of the authors, and if times change, then the steps in Article Five should be used to change it. Original intent has become less popular among originalists who now adhere more to the belief that we should focus on the original meaning, i.e., what reasonable people would have understood the meaning of a phrase to be. This syllogism is closer to textualism and Antonin Scalia is the justice most associated with the philosophy.
I got to thinking about originalism and impeachment and high crimes and misdemeanors. There is lots of loose thinking about impeachment these days. A recent paper by Gene Healy, Indispensable Remedy, helped focus some of these ideas.
The first impeachment of a federal official was in 1803, that of Judge John Pickering formerly of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, then of the US District Court for New Hampshire. He was beginning to show signs of mental impairment soon thereafter and he was impeached by the House for coming to court drunk and raving and ranting and "unlawful rulings." The Federalists raged that Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party were trying to eliminate jurists with a federalist mindset. Pickering was convicted and removed from office. He died a year later.
The Federalists' fears were warranted when President Jefferson pushed the House to impeach Justice Samuel Chase (not to be confused with Salmon Chase the later Chief Justice) whose federalist rants from the bench ran clearly against Jefferson's political leanings. Jefferson also feared that the judiciary, thanks to Marshall's establishment of judicial review in 1803, gave the judiciary far too much power. Chase has vehemently protested Jefferson's repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801 which had eliminated lower court federal judges, many of whom were Federalists. Chase was charged with political bias and defended by Aaroin a trial presided over by vice-president Aaron Burr in a trial before the Senate. The Senate, even though dominated by Jefferson's allies, refused to convict (For more details, a good summary is here. ) His acquittal some have seen as solidifying support for an independent judiciary not subject to political whim.
The Kavanaugh hearings and his partisan rant before the Senate on Thursday reminded me of these two cases and their import. Now, I disagree with Kavanaugh's judicial philosophy, at least as far as it can be determined as an examination of the decisions of Merrick Garland and Kavanaugh provide little dissimilarities and the term "conservative" as a pejorative label strikes me as overly simplistic. His loud, rude, and biased attack on his Senate adversaries was impolite if not stupid. Yet, based on what I heard, calls for impeachment seemed inadvisable. If the trial of Samuel Chase show us nothing else, it demands that we maintain at least the appearance of an independent judiciary. Should Kavanaugh show up drunk on the bench, however, all bets are off.
I got to thinking about originalism and impeachment and high crimes and misdemeanors. There is lots of loose thinking about impeachment these days. A recent paper by Gene Healy, Indispensable Remedy, helped focus some of these ideas.
The first impeachment of a federal official was in 1803, that of Judge John Pickering formerly of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, then of the US District Court for New Hampshire. He was beginning to show signs of mental impairment soon thereafter and he was impeached by the House for coming to court drunk and raving and ranting and "unlawful rulings." The Federalists raged that Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party were trying to eliminate jurists with a federalist mindset. Pickering was convicted and removed from office. He died a year later.
The Federalists' fears were warranted when President Jefferson pushed the House to impeach Justice Samuel Chase (not to be confused with Salmon Chase the later Chief Justice) whose federalist rants from the bench ran clearly against Jefferson's political leanings. Jefferson also feared that the judiciary, thanks to Marshall's establishment of judicial review in 1803, gave the judiciary far too much power. Chase has vehemently protested Jefferson's repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801 which had eliminated lower court federal judges, many of whom were Federalists. Chase was charged with political bias and defended by Aaroin a trial presided over by vice-president Aaron Burr in a trial before the Senate. The Senate, even though dominated by Jefferson's allies, refused to convict (For more details, a good summary is here. ) His acquittal some have seen as solidifying support for an independent judiciary not subject to political whim.
The Kavanaugh hearings and his partisan rant before the Senate on Thursday reminded me of these two cases and their import. Now, I disagree with Kavanaugh's judicial philosophy, at least as far as it can be determined as an examination of the decisions of Merrick Garland and Kavanaugh provide little dissimilarities and the term "conservative" as a pejorative label strikes me as overly simplistic. His loud, rude, and biased attack on his Senate adversaries was impolite if not stupid. Yet, based on what I heard, calls for impeachment seemed inadvisable. If the trial of Samuel Chase show us nothing else, it demands that we maintain at least the appearance of an independent judiciary. Should Kavanaugh show up drunk on the bench, however, all bets are off.
Sunday, November 18, 2018
Review: Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification by David Waldstreicher
Even though the Constitution never explicitly mentions slavery, it's legacy is throughout. Of the 84 clauses, "six are directly concerned with slaves and their owners. Five others had implications for slavery that were considered and debated. . . " I'm not sure we'll ever escape our heritage of bondage. Even the interpretations of the opinions rendered in Heller and McDonald were grounded firmly in the history of slavery. The minority, which argued for a "militia" interpretation noted that James Madison had been urged not to ignore the right of states to form militias (several states had already enacted constitutional rights to bear arms "for the common defense,") because southern states in particular were terrified of a slave rebellion and wanted to have armed militias to respond. The majority looked to the amendments after the Civil War which applied the Bill of Rights to the states and especially the importance of providing weapons to unarmed slaves to protect themselves from rampaging white Ku-Klux-Klan-like entities.
The three-fifths rule is the most notorious of the Constitution’s nod to enshrining slavery but Waldstreicher argues that many of the property protections written into the Constitution had the effect of protecting that “peculiar institution,” as well. And since all money bills had to originate in the House, the 3/5ths clause gave southern slave holders even more power since they then controlled the purse-strings. Not only that, but it prohibited Congress from making any laws prohibiting trade in slaves for 20 years after ratification. Given their control of the House, they could be pretty sure of few impediments down the road. Rules related to property further protected slave-owners since while ostensibly protecting trade by making property laws federal rather than state, fugitive slave laws were enshrined. (As an aside, the reason why the District of Columbia became the Capitol of the United States rather than Philadelphia, was because Quakers had passed laws freeing slaves whose masters took up residence in Philadelphia and the Founders most of whom owned slaves, did not want to risk losing their property.)
The conventional wisdom is that the Founders ignored the issue of slavery assuming it might disappear gradually, yet Waldreich suggests instead that they were obsessed with the issue. They were attempting to craft a stronger federal government yet had to deal with the parochial rights of the slave states. They preserved the “peculiar institution” while making a stronger federal system. That stronger federal presence, coupled with expanding power of the northern anti-slave states, mixed with some unfortunate Supreme Court decisions like Dred Scott (although it was declaring the Missouri Compromise that really inflamed things) and Prigg v Pennsylvania which overrode states which were trying to prevent local officials from having to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Prigg was another nail in the federal bulwark.
Slavery was so intertwined with the economy that its abolishment could only be done on the national level. Wealth was defined less by land than by the number of slaves one owned since they were needed to work the land. Any farm state would be at a serious economic disadvantage by unilaterally abolishing slavery. In the north where industrialization was taking hold, this was less of a factor. The southern states, heavily represented at the Constitutional Convention were determined to enshrine slave rights in the new national government.
Article IV, Section 2, Clause 2 reads:
A person charged in any state with treason, felony or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state, shall, on demand of the executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime.
No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.
Waldstreicher argues these clauses in particular were inserted to please southern slave owners as they prevented slaves from seeking freedom by fleeing to free states. The southern states used the power of the federal government to enforce their property rights (ironic in view of the Nullification Crisis of 1832.) Under Prigg the federal government was left with enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act when states such as Pennsylvania passed laws excluding local magistrates from having to do the enforcement, laws which, of course, enraged the slave states. As Calhoun wrote in a letter, “the new personal liberties laws rendered slave property utterly insecure" and was a "flagrant violation of the spirit of the U.S. Constitution."
Walstreicher argues that the Constitution’s imprecision with regard to slavery (I don’t think t was imprecise at all, it was clearly pro-slavery) led to both sides being able to claim the Constitution was or was not in favor of slavery. Given that most of the founders owned slaves and considered them property, I don’t think Justice Taney really had much choice in deciding Dred Scott in the way he did.
The assumption that southern population would grow faster than that of the north proved illusory as most immigration went to the anti-slave, industrial north thus rendering the infamous three-fifths clause moot and soon the southern states were desperately trying to add slave states to the union to retain some measure of power.
Quote: Many historians insist that the use of the word “slavery” to refer to taxes or restrictions of liberty simply came to seem hypocritical in light of racial slavery. It certainly did eventually, but this emphasis neglects the more basic, original link of British rights to property, the fact that slaves were property, and that both slavery and property were intrinsic to what colonies were all about: agricultural production and trade. . . The Americans had emancipated themselves, but in doing so had raised, not resolved, the question of slavery. On both ides of the Atlantic, people waited to see what exactly Americans meant when they said they would never be slaves.
I also recommend Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power by Garry Wills
The three-fifths rule is the most notorious of the Constitution’s nod to enshrining slavery but Waldstreicher argues that many of the property protections written into the Constitution had the effect of protecting that “peculiar institution,” as well. And since all money bills had to originate in the House, the 3/5ths clause gave southern slave holders even more power since they then controlled the purse-strings. Not only that, but it prohibited Congress from making any laws prohibiting trade in slaves for 20 years after ratification. Given their control of the House, they could be pretty sure of few impediments down the road. Rules related to property further protected slave-owners since while ostensibly protecting trade by making property laws federal rather than state, fugitive slave laws were enshrined. (As an aside, the reason why the District of Columbia became the Capitol of the United States rather than Philadelphia, was because Quakers had passed laws freeing slaves whose masters took up residence in Philadelphia and the Founders most of whom owned slaves, did not want to risk losing their property.)
The conventional wisdom is that the Founders ignored the issue of slavery assuming it might disappear gradually, yet Waldreich suggests instead that they were obsessed with the issue. They were attempting to craft a stronger federal government yet had to deal with the parochial rights of the slave states. They preserved the “peculiar institution” while making a stronger federal system. That stronger federal presence, coupled with expanding power of the northern anti-slave states, mixed with some unfortunate Supreme Court decisions like Dred Scott (although it was declaring the Missouri Compromise that really inflamed things) and Prigg v Pennsylvania which overrode states which were trying to prevent local officials from having to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Prigg was another nail in the federal bulwark.
Slavery was so intertwined with the economy that its abolishment could only be done on the national level. Wealth was defined less by land than by the number of slaves one owned since they were needed to work the land. Any farm state would be at a serious economic disadvantage by unilaterally abolishing slavery. In the north where industrialization was taking hold, this was less of a factor. The southern states, heavily represented at the Constitutional Convention were determined to enshrine slave rights in the new national government.
Article IV, Section 2, Clause 2 reads:
A person charged in any state with treason, felony or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state, shall, on demand of the executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime.
No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.
Waldstreicher argues these clauses in particular were inserted to please southern slave owners as they prevented slaves from seeking freedom by fleeing to free states. The southern states used the power of the federal government to enforce their property rights (ironic in view of the Nullification Crisis of 1832.) Under Prigg the federal government was left with enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act when states such as Pennsylvania passed laws excluding local magistrates from having to do the enforcement, laws which, of course, enraged the slave states. As Calhoun wrote in a letter, “the new personal liberties laws rendered slave property utterly insecure" and was a "flagrant violation of the spirit of the U.S. Constitution."
Walstreicher argues that the Constitution’s imprecision with regard to slavery (I don’t think t was imprecise at all, it was clearly pro-slavery) led to both sides being able to claim the Constitution was or was not in favor of slavery. Given that most of the founders owned slaves and considered them property, I don’t think Justice Taney really had much choice in deciding Dred Scott in the way he did.
The assumption that southern population would grow faster than that of the north proved illusory as most immigration went to the anti-slave, industrial north thus rendering the infamous three-fifths clause moot and soon the southern states were desperately trying to add slave states to the union to retain some measure of power.
Quote: Many historians insist that the use of the word “slavery” to refer to taxes or restrictions of liberty simply came to seem hypocritical in light of racial slavery. It certainly did eventually, but this emphasis neglects the more basic, original link of British rights to property, the fact that slaves were property, and that both slavery and property were intrinsic to what colonies were all about: agricultural production and trade. . . The Americans had emancipated themselves, but in doing so had raised, not resolved, the question of slavery. On both ides of the Atlantic, people waited to see what exactly Americans meant when they said they would never be slaves.
I also recommend Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power by Garry Wills
Wednesday, November 07, 2018
Birthright Citizenship
I suppose Trump has done us at least one favor and that's to make us more aware of the Constitution, not that he's ever read it or at least understood it. His shoot-from-the-hip attitude reflects what Rogers Stone noted about "people involved in immediate decision making are very dependent on the universe of ideas around them. They reach for ideas thinking they're going to be useful for them." In other words, original thought is rare among politicians.
Trey Popp, in his profile about Rogers Stone and the Birthright controversy*, also quotes John Maynard Keynes: "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."
Stone, now a self-described far left liberal, educated at Harvard and now teaching at Penn, started out in college a supporter of Goldwater but who was repelled by his experience with Republican back-room legislators where he worked as a clerk and page in Springfield, Illinois. They would indulge in drinking and scurrilous racial epithets and teach how to play dirty tricks on their political opponents. "That's when I began to freak out."
He became intrigued by the debate over the nature of government: Locke v civic republicanism, and he started exploring how "citizenship had been characterized in federal statutes." Instead of finding an uplifting vision of citizenship, he discovered that "American law had long been shot through with second-class citizenship, denying personal liberties and opportunities for political participation to most of the adult population based on race, ethnicity, gender, and even religion."
" 'Against liberal and democratic republican views describing citizenship as a human creation that ought to rest on the consent of all involved,' they assigned (or withheld) political rights on the basis of inalterable characteristics like race, gender, and the religion into which people were born."
Stone began to see consent as the key Lockean sine qua non of a political society and that the existing community should also give its consent. That duality creates an inate tension reflected in the Dred Scott decision in which Taney argued blacks could never be citizens because they did not have the consent of those states who were party to the Constitution. The 14th Amendment was designed to rectify that deficiency.
The phrase causing current disputation is "subject to the jurisdiction of." It was impossible to know what the authors of that section thought of an unauthorized immigrant since immigration was not even regulated until 1875, a decade after ratification of the 14th. The record was clear however with regard to two other groups: Native Americans (for tribe sovereignty and treaty reasons) and the children of foreign diplomats from whom citizenship was withheld. (That issue for Native Americans was rectified in 1924 with the Snyder Act.) During debates some legislators feared that citizenship would be conveyed to races they didn't like, including "Chinese, Mongols, and Gypsies."
The question presented so viciously by Trump but thoughtfully by Stone is what about those whose presence "contravenes American law." Is confirmation of citizenship on those here without permission incompatible with democratic institutions? Note that United States v Wong Kim Ark, the decision in 1898 that overturned a law preventing Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens applied to people who had consent to be here.
Ironically, Stone believes that we need higher levels of immigration and that the children of undocumented aliens deserve "access to citizenship." But, and a big but, Stone argues that Congress needs to be the arbiter of who qualifies for that citizenship be it birthright or otherwise. (Trump's suggestion he could do it with executive order is just another example of his ignorance.)
Unfortunately, to Stone's dismay, his ideas put forth with his coauthor Schuck in 1985, Citizenship Without Consent, were adopted in 1993 by California Republican Elton Gallegly who introduced a bill and amendment in Congress that would restrict "birthright citizenship to the children of mothers (but not the fathers) with citizen or legal-resident status." Similar bills have been introduced in every session since. It would seem to me that their failure each time would indicate some form of consent for the current situation.
Smith is not happy. As with most things, unintended consequences often mar otherwise good intentions. "The [Stone's] argument was used more persistently and prominently by nativist political forces than I ever anticipated. And that has been a shadow over my work in life."
In the end, Stone says, “What you want,” he says, “is to have as democratic a process of defining people-hood as possible, and to push within that democratic politics to make the choices as inclusive and egalitarian as possible, so that that definition of who we the people are may expand over time—but expand in a way that is sustainable because people have agreed to it, and it hasn’t been imposed on them.” The word "imposed" in this context bothers me not a little. A structure that has been in place and interpreted in a particular way for more than one hundred years would hardly constituted an imposition but much more an acceptance.
Smith would seem to be of similar mind. "In a 2008 article in Penn’s Journal of Constitutional Law, Smith made a case that Congress had effectively expressed the electorate’s will regarding birthright citizenship; the repeated and conclusive failure of 15 (now 25) years’ worth of restrictionist bills amounted to a clear expression that Americans, through their elected representatives, have consented to reading the Fourteenth Amendment as guaranteeing birthright citizenship to children of all aliens born on American soil."** Here, here.
*Popp, Trey. "Who is America?" The Pennsylvania Gazette Nov/Dec 2018, pp 33-41. http://thepenngazette.com/who-is-america/#comment-7721
**https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/jcl/vol11/iss5/6/
Trey Popp, in his profile about Rogers Stone and the Birthright controversy*, also quotes John Maynard Keynes: "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."
Stone, now a self-described far left liberal, educated at Harvard and now teaching at Penn, started out in college a supporter of Goldwater but who was repelled by his experience with Republican back-room legislators where he worked as a clerk and page in Springfield, Illinois. They would indulge in drinking and scurrilous racial epithets and teach how to play dirty tricks on their political opponents. "That's when I began to freak out."
He became intrigued by the debate over the nature of government: Locke v civic republicanism, and he started exploring how "citizenship had been characterized in federal statutes." Instead of finding an uplifting vision of citizenship, he discovered that "American law had long been shot through with second-class citizenship, denying personal liberties and opportunities for political participation to most of the adult population based on race, ethnicity, gender, and even religion."
" 'Against liberal and democratic republican views describing citizenship as a human creation that ought to rest on the consent of all involved,' they assigned (or withheld) political rights on the basis of inalterable characteristics like race, gender, and the religion into which people were born."
Stone began to see consent as the key Lockean sine qua non of a political society and that the existing community should also give its consent. That duality creates an inate tension reflected in the Dred Scott decision in which Taney argued blacks could never be citizens because they did not have the consent of those states who were party to the Constitution. The 14th Amendment was designed to rectify that deficiency.
The phrase causing current disputation is "subject to the jurisdiction of." It was impossible to know what the authors of that section thought of an unauthorized immigrant since immigration was not even regulated until 1875, a decade after ratification of the 14th. The record was clear however with regard to two other groups: Native Americans (for tribe sovereignty and treaty reasons) and the children of foreign diplomats from whom citizenship was withheld. (That issue for Native Americans was rectified in 1924 with the Snyder Act.) During debates some legislators feared that citizenship would be conveyed to races they didn't like, including "Chinese, Mongols, and Gypsies."
The question presented so viciously by Trump but thoughtfully by Stone is what about those whose presence "contravenes American law." Is confirmation of citizenship on those here without permission incompatible with democratic institutions? Note that United States v Wong Kim Ark, the decision in 1898 that overturned a law preventing Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens applied to people who had consent to be here.
Ironically, Stone believes that we need higher levels of immigration and that the children of undocumented aliens deserve "access to citizenship." But, and a big but, Stone argues that Congress needs to be the arbiter of who qualifies for that citizenship be it birthright or otherwise. (Trump's suggestion he could do it with executive order is just another example of his ignorance.)
Unfortunately, to Stone's dismay, his ideas put forth with his coauthor Schuck in 1985, Citizenship Without Consent, were adopted in 1993 by California Republican Elton Gallegly who introduced a bill and amendment in Congress that would restrict "birthright citizenship to the children of mothers (but not the fathers) with citizen or legal-resident status." Similar bills have been introduced in every session since. It would seem to me that their failure each time would indicate some form of consent for the current situation.
Smith is not happy. As with most things, unintended consequences often mar otherwise good intentions. "The [Stone's] argument was used more persistently and prominently by nativist political forces than I ever anticipated. And that has been a shadow over my work in life."
In the end, Stone says, “What you want,” he says, “is to have as democratic a process of defining people-hood as possible, and to push within that democratic politics to make the choices as inclusive and egalitarian as possible, so that that definition of who we the people are may expand over time—but expand in a way that is sustainable because people have agreed to it, and it hasn’t been imposed on them.” The word "imposed" in this context bothers me not a little. A structure that has been in place and interpreted in a particular way for more than one hundred years would hardly constituted an imposition but much more an acceptance.
Smith would seem to be of similar mind. "In a 2008 article in Penn’s Journal of Constitutional Law, Smith made a case that Congress had effectively expressed the electorate’s will regarding birthright citizenship; the repeated and conclusive failure of 15 (now 25) years’ worth of restrictionist bills amounted to a clear expression that Americans, through their elected representatives, have consented to reading the Fourteenth Amendment as guaranteeing birthright citizenship to children of all aliens born on American soil."** Here, here.
*Popp, Trey. "Who is America?" The Pennsylvania Gazette Nov/Dec 2018, pp 33-41. http://thepenngazette.com/who-is-america/#comment-7721
**https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/jcl/vol11/iss5/6/
Sunday, November 04, 2018
Review: Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill
This book should have been titled "Be Careful What You Wish For; You May Get It," or perhaps "Unforeseen and Unintended Consequences."
He begins with a litany of problems facing the United States: income inequality, the highest poverty rate among the industrialized nations, a crumbling infrastructure, an attitude of American "exceptionalism"with a Congress that hasn't been able to pass a budget in decades, ("Like slacker schoolchildren unable to produce a book report on time, the country’s elected leaders have fallen back instead on an endless string of last-minute deadline extensions and piecemeal appropriations.") which is ruled by the more than twenty lobbyists for each Congressman. He then proceeds to zoom in on a variety of events and institutions he regards as the cause of these failures.
Just a couple of examples. He discusses the rise of meritocracy, the intent being to support and encourage those with brains and talent. What happened was those folks succeeded brilliantly, went to the best Ivy League schools (Brill is really big on mentioning where individuals graduated from and I was hard pressed to discover anyone he mentioned who had come from anywhere but an Ivy League school except perhaps Bernard Baruch in New York, a special case) but then created themselves into a protected class. Brill divides the world into two classes: the protected and the unprotected. The protected build walls around themselves and their money that make it virtually impossible for those not in the class to join it.
Another example is what he calls the "greening" of free speech. He cites Citizens United as a terrible decision because, in part, it emphasized the "personhood" of corporations. Yet, his informative history of free speech and corporations shows how critical that linkage is. Very much a progressive initiative, PACS were formed by unions first in 1943 as a way to support FDR's reelection. Through the 1950s and 1960s there was far more political money in union PACs than in business-oriented PACs. The New York Times case and the Virginia Pharmacy decision (ironically supported by Ralph Nader's Public Interest group as a way to make drug prices available on advertising and to create competition -- support they were to rue in when Citizens United came down)
A law review article by Martin Redish, a progressive Democrat, in 1982 * was an argument for why free speech should be applied to corporations. That view began to become more and more popular in legal circles culminating in Citizens United.
I happen to support that decision. What people often forget is that it was a case first, with a plaintiff who wanted to distribute a political movie and was told "no." During the oral arguments before the Supreme Court, which I listened to, I was absolutely horrified, as were most of the justices, by the response of the Deputy Solicitor General, who, when asked if the government could prevent the publication of a book that expressed political advocacy. That was a huge mistake.
Stewart's argument played into the hands of Ted Olson, counsel for Citizens United. By taking an extreme position that could be seen as akin to throwing someone in jail for writing a book, or book-banning, Stewart went way down the slippery slope, making it more likely that a majority on the Court (Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas) will want to say something about the Constitution, and not merely decide, as I've suggested, that the video-on-demand delivery of the anti-Clinton movie simply is not covered by the McCain-Feingold statute.**
While I occasionally disagreed with Brill's interpretations of several events, it's certainly a provocative book that does provide some interesting examples of positive solutions.
*https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/penn_law_review/vol130/iss3/2/
**https://www.americanbar.org/publications/preview_home/publiced_preview_QandACitizens/
He begins with a litany of problems facing the United States: income inequality, the highest poverty rate among the industrialized nations, a crumbling infrastructure, an attitude of American "exceptionalism"with a Congress that hasn't been able to pass a budget in decades, ("Like slacker schoolchildren unable to produce a book report on time, the country’s elected leaders have fallen back instead on an endless string of last-minute deadline extensions and piecemeal appropriations.") which is ruled by the more than twenty lobbyists for each Congressman. He then proceeds to zoom in on a variety of events and institutions he regards as the cause of these failures.
Just a couple of examples. He discusses the rise of meritocracy, the intent being to support and encourage those with brains and talent. What happened was those folks succeeded brilliantly, went to the best Ivy League schools (Brill is really big on mentioning where individuals graduated from and I was hard pressed to discover anyone he mentioned who had come from anywhere but an Ivy League school except perhaps Bernard Baruch in New York, a special case) but then created themselves into a protected class. Brill divides the world into two classes: the protected and the unprotected. The protected build walls around themselves and their money that make it virtually impossible for those not in the class to join it.
Another example is what he calls the "greening" of free speech. He cites Citizens United as a terrible decision because, in part, it emphasized the "personhood" of corporations. Yet, his informative history of free speech and corporations shows how critical that linkage is. Very much a progressive initiative, PACS were formed by unions first in 1943 as a way to support FDR's reelection. Through the 1950s and 1960s there was far more political money in union PACs than in business-oriented PACs. The New York Times case and the Virginia Pharmacy decision (ironically supported by Ralph Nader's Public Interest group as a way to make drug prices available on advertising and to create competition -- support they were to rue in when Citizens United came down)
A law review article by Martin Redish, a progressive Democrat, in 1982 * was an argument for why free speech should be applied to corporations. That view began to become more and more popular in legal circles culminating in Citizens United.
I happen to support that decision. What people often forget is that it was a case first, with a plaintiff who wanted to distribute a political movie and was told "no." During the oral arguments before the Supreme Court, which I listened to, I was absolutely horrified, as were most of the justices, by the response of the Deputy Solicitor General, who, when asked if the government could prevent the publication of a book that expressed political advocacy. That was a huge mistake.
Stewart's argument played into the hands of Ted Olson, counsel for Citizens United. By taking an extreme position that could be seen as akin to throwing someone in jail for writing a book, or book-banning, Stewart went way down the slippery slope, making it more likely that a majority on the Court (Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas) will want to say something about the Constitution, and not merely decide, as I've suggested, that the video-on-demand delivery of the anti-Clinton movie simply is not covered by the McCain-Feingold statute.**
While I occasionally disagreed with Brill's interpretations of several events, it's certainly a provocative book that does provide some interesting examples of positive solutions.
*https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/penn_law_review/vol130/iss3/2/
**https://www.americanbar.org/publications/preview_home/publiced_preview_QandACitizens/
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Corporations as Persons
Every time I mention that I think Citizen's United was rightly decided my liberal friends begin to gag and whine about how terrible it was and how awful it is that "corporations are persons." A new book by Kent Greenfield, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300211474/corporations-are-people-too, reminds us there are important reasons for corporations to be considered persons. For example, were corporations not to have the same rights of speech as persons, the New York Times would have lost the battle. The Times is a for-profit corporation yet the decision permitted it to publish classified information from Daniel Ellsberg. Ralph Nader's public interest group sued and won on behalf of pharmaceutical corporations to advertise. The issue was whether they had a right to commercial speech. The dissent in that case, was by the conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist; speech for corporations was considered to be a progressive cause.
Fast Forward several decades to Citizens United when that decision raised a firestorm of protest. Most people didn't know that the issue was protection of political speech at its best. The Court said the Federal Election Commission could not prevent the showing of a pay-per-view anti-Hillary movie within thirty days of the election. They went on to reiterate the importance of free speech for corporations as persons. That concept, enshrined by Justice Marshall in Dartmouth v Woodward (1819) is important because it not only protects the corporation and shareholders but requires responsibilities of them as well (a major point of Greenfield's book.) That guarantees them protection from unwarranted search and seizure by the government among other things. I know progressives would surely not want the government to willy-nilly search the files of a corporation like Planned Parenthood, for example. They also, as part of free speech, could spend money to support political positions, something progressives had fought for for unions.
Greenfield argues the Court made a mistake in the Hobby Lobby decision by not considering it a person. The Green's went wrong Greenfield believes is that the rights of the owners don't necessarily translate into the rights of the corporation as a person. The Greens has chosen to protect their personal assets by making Hobby Lobby a separate entity, person, if you will. "Corporate personhood expresses the idea that “for-profit corporations are entities that possess legal interests and a legal identity of their own—one separate and distinct from their shareholders. The corporate law brief argued that this separateness meant the Greens should not be able to attach their own religious beliefs to the corporation. The Greens chose to form a corporation in order to operate the business without running the risk of losing their personal assets."
Ironically, many of the groups now proposing a constitutionality amendment to deny corporation separateness and personhood, were it to be ratified would lose the right to talk about it.
"The argument that corporations should not have standing to assert any constitutional right is quite weak. The opposite of a constitutional right is a governmental power. If corporations have no rights, then governmental power in connection with corporations is at its maximum. That power can be abused, and corporate personhood is a necessary bulwark." The government tried to enforce censorship on the New York Times in 1971, but the court decided as a "person" it had protected speech.
"Today, Google and other media companies are fighting government demands to disgorge the contents of their servers. No one suggests that the government’s power should be unchecked because the media companies, as corporations, have no Fourth Amendment rights to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. If corporations were not able to claim the Fifth Amendment rights to be free of government takings, their assets and resources would always be at risk of expropriation. No one would invest in corporations, undermining the reason we have them in the first place."
Fast Forward several decades to Citizens United when that decision raised a firestorm of protest. Most people didn't know that the issue was protection of political speech at its best. The Court said the Federal Election Commission could not prevent the showing of a pay-per-view anti-Hillary movie within thirty days of the election. They went on to reiterate the importance of free speech for corporations as persons. That concept, enshrined by Justice Marshall in Dartmouth v Woodward (1819) is important because it not only protects the corporation and shareholders but requires responsibilities of them as well (a major point of Greenfield's book.) That guarantees them protection from unwarranted search and seizure by the government among other things. I know progressives would surely not want the government to willy-nilly search the files of a corporation like Planned Parenthood, for example. They also, as part of free speech, could spend money to support political positions, something progressives had fought for for unions.
Greenfield argues the Court made a mistake in the Hobby Lobby decision by not considering it a person. The Green's went wrong Greenfield believes is that the rights of the owners don't necessarily translate into the rights of the corporation as a person. The Greens has chosen to protect their personal assets by making Hobby Lobby a separate entity, person, if you will. "Corporate personhood expresses the idea that “for-profit corporations are entities that possess legal interests and a legal identity of their own—one separate and distinct from their shareholders. The corporate law brief argued that this separateness meant the Greens should not be able to attach their own religious beliefs to the corporation. The Greens chose to form a corporation in order to operate the business without running the risk of losing their personal assets."
Ironically, many of the groups now proposing a constitutionality amendment to deny corporation separateness and personhood, were it to be ratified would lose the right to talk about it.
"The argument that corporations should not have standing to assert any constitutional right is quite weak. The opposite of a constitutional right is a governmental power. If corporations have no rights, then governmental power in connection with corporations is at its maximum. That power can be abused, and corporate personhood is a necessary bulwark." The government tried to enforce censorship on the New York Times in 1971, but the court decided as a "person" it had protected speech.
"Today, Google and other media companies are fighting government demands to disgorge the contents of their servers. No one suggests that the government’s power should be unchecked because the media companies, as corporations, have no Fourth Amendment rights to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. If corporations were not able to claim the Fifth Amendment rights to be free of government takings, their assets and resources would always be at risk of expropriation. No one would invest in corporations, undermining the reason we have them in the first place."
Sunday, October 28, 2018
The Myth of Guns for Self-Defense
We were having one of our social gatherings recently and I was sitting with a bunch of male friends who got on the subject of the guns they own. (These folks were all in their eighties and nineties with imperfect eyesight I remind you.) They all indicated how much safer they felt having the guns handy. I just sat and listened making sure to never enter their houses without a blast on my air-horn.
I was reminded of two very public shootings where the target was surrounded by trained secret service and police officers, all carrying guns, and all trained to prevent any kind of attack on their principal. They all failed in spite of having vastly out-gunned the assailant. The two examples, Reagan, who had people armed to the teeth specifically trained to prevent his being shot, and Oswald, killed by Jack Ruby in front of numerous armed officers who had been warned to expect just such an action. For another example, on September 16, 2013, the Washington Navy Yard was protected by trained and armed security officers when a gunman killed 12 people. One of those killed was an armed officer. The gunman took his pistol and used it to shoot more.
The lesson is clearly that in spite of what the NRA would have you believe, if an intruder or anyone wants you dead, having a handgun handy is a waste of money and useless. It won't help. Bodyguards won't either. Better just not to piss anyone off.
On the other hand, there were 732 children, aged 0-11 killed, 3,232 teens killed, 606 murder suicides, and 2,015 unintentional shootings in 2017. Those numbers do not inspire confidence.
I deliberately left out the number of defensive use of guns as the surveys have been problematic (see #2 below) and they don't report the result of the use, i.e. did it work, what were the circumstances, etc. The first reference below indicates 2,030 uses but other studies report much higher, but all suffer from a lack of inspection as to what happened and what the result was. For example, we've all seen the story of the guy in the Florida parking lot who felt threatened by the man (black, of course) in front of him and so felt justified in shooting him. Not to mention Treyvon Martin. There are some legitimate cases like the pizza parlor guy who was attacked by the man with the bat, pulled a gun and killed his attacker. Of course if the attacker had had a gun, he'd be dead.
It would be nice to have some comprehensive research on gun violence as a public health issue, but ever since the Dickey amendment (R-AR) they have been de-funded and prohibited from doing any kind of research that might result in any kind of gun control, a broad preventive mandate, indeed. I don't know what the NRA and Dickey are afraid of, unless they know something we don't.
1. https://www.thetrace.org/rounds/gun-deaths-increase-2017/
2. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/04/defensive-gun-use-difficult-statistics-rare-events.html
I was reminded of two very public shootings where the target was surrounded by trained secret service and police officers, all carrying guns, and all trained to prevent any kind of attack on their principal. They all failed in spite of having vastly out-gunned the assailant. The two examples, Reagan, who had people armed to the teeth specifically trained to prevent his being shot, and Oswald, killed by Jack Ruby in front of numerous armed officers who had been warned to expect just such an action. For another example, on September 16, 2013, the Washington Navy Yard was protected by trained and armed security officers when a gunman killed 12 people. One of those killed was an armed officer. The gunman took his pistol and used it to shoot more.
The lesson is clearly that in spite of what the NRA would have you believe, if an intruder or anyone wants you dead, having a handgun handy is a waste of money and useless. It won't help. Bodyguards won't either. Better just not to piss anyone off.
On the other hand, there were 732 children, aged 0-11 killed, 3,232 teens killed, 606 murder suicides, and 2,015 unintentional shootings in 2017. Those numbers do not inspire confidence.
I deliberately left out the number of defensive use of guns as the surveys have been problematic (see #2 below) and they don't report the result of the use, i.e. did it work, what were the circumstances, etc. The first reference below indicates 2,030 uses but other studies report much higher, but all suffer from a lack of inspection as to what happened and what the result was. For example, we've all seen the story of the guy in the Florida parking lot who felt threatened by the man (black, of course) in front of him and so felt justified in shooting him. Not to mention Treyvon Martin. There are some legitimate cases like the pizza parlor guy who was attacked by the man with the bat, pulled a gun and killed his attacker. Of course if the attacker had had a gun, he'd be dead.
It would be nice to have some comprehensive research on gun violence as a public health issue, but ever since the Dickey amendment (R-AR) they have been de-funded and prohibited from doing any kind of research that might result in any kind of gun control, a broad preventive mandate, indeed. I don't know what the NRA and Dickey are afraid of, unless they know something we don't.
1. https://www.thetrace.org/rounds/gun-deaths-increase-2017/
2. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/04/defensive-gun-use-difficult-statistics-rare-events.html
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Removing Abortion as a Political Issue
I remember reading in Randall Balmer's book, Thy Kingdom Come,(https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/37675220?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1) of a meeting of Evangelicals in 1979, six years after Roe v. Wade, where they were looking for an issue that would help rally their congregations in support of Ronald Reagan. Not being able to use divorce as an issue despite the Bible having a great deal to say about it, they settled on abortion and proceeded to successfully drive a wedge between what became liberals and conservatives. They also creatively hijacked the language of the debate, claiming the moral high-ground by declaring themselves to be pro-life as if anyone in opposition would have to be pro-death. The limp response of liberals was to call themselves pro-choice, a nebulous phrase lacking in any moral quality at all. The result has been overwhelming success on the part of anti-abortion movement and its adoption by the GOP, to the point where even in those states where abortion laws are relatively loose, a clinic where they can be performed is virtually impossible to find.
Ironically, as a recent review of a documentary of the GOP and abortion indicates, the GOP had been the party of privacy and choice during the fifties and sixties, the Democratic Party being dominated by the Catholic Church. Ronald Reagan had even signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country in California, as did Nelson Rockefeller in New York."In 1972, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Republicans believed abortion to be a private matter between a woman and her doctor. The government, they said, should not be involved."
"As the historian of religion Randall Balmer explains in the film, evangelicals became politically active in the 1970s, when they were thwarted by the courts and the Internal Revenue Service in their efforts to obtain tax-exempt status for “segregation academies” like Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School and Bob Jones University that heeded what they believed to be a biblical mandate to keep the races separate. Around the same time, Paul Weyrich, a Republican strategist, recognized the potential political power evangelical voters would have if they were to vote as a bloc, and tried to pull them into the fold with issues he thought might appeal to their moralism, such as the proliferation of pornography, the Equal Rights Amendment, and even abortion—which, prior to Roe, they were largely sympathetic toward and considered a Catholic issue." (NYRB, Nov. 11, 2018, "How Republicans Became Anti-Choice")
Liberals remain clueless as to how to respond. May I suggest a drastic strategy. Support overturning Roe v Wade and call for a national referendum on whether it should be legal or not. It would eliminate a dominate rallying cry of the Right, remove a salient issue for many voters. Too many friends of mine, nominal Democrats, voted for the GOP and Trump in particular solely because of their stand on what they consider to be the only issue, a moral one. The immediate effect of overturning Roe v Wade as law of the land would be to return the battle to each state legislature but it would defuse it as a national campaign issue and perhaps we could return to some semblance of reasonable discussion of policy issue with less shouting (not to mention shooting.) Polls seem to indicate a majority of Americans support the right to legal abortion and a national referendum would supposedly reflect that further deflating the sails of the "values" voters. Even if no one could agree on the rules for such a referendum it would defuse the issue, or at least reduce pressure on the Democrats who could then argue, "well, we wanted to overturn Roe, too".
Ironically, as a recent review of a documentary of the GOP and abortion indicates, the GOP had been the party of privacy and choice during the fifties and sixties, the Democratic Party being dominated by the Catholic Church. Ronald Reagan had even signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country in California, as did Nelson Rockefeller in New York."In 1972, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Republicans believed abortion to be a private matter between a woman and her doctor. The government, they said, should not be involved."
"As the historian of religion Randall Balmer explains in the film, evangelicals became politically active in the 1970s, when they were thwarted by the courts and the Internal Revenue Service in their efforts to obtain tax-exempt status for “segregation academies” like Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School and Bob Jones University that heeded what they believed to be a biblical mandate to keep the races separate. Around the same time, Paul Weyrich, a Republican strategist, recognized the potential political power evangelical voters would have if they were to vote as a bloc, and tried to pull them into the fold with issues he thought might appeal to their moralism, such as the proliferation of pornography, the Equal Rights Amendment, and even abortion—which, prior to Roe, they were largely sympathetic toward and considered a Catholic issue." (NYRB, Nov. 11, 2018, "How Republicans Became Anti-Choice")
Liberals remain clueless as to how to respond. May I suggest a drastic strategy. Support overturning Roe v Wade and call for a national referendum on whether it should be legal or not. It would eliminate a dominate rallying cry of the Right, remove a salient issue for many voters. Too many friends of mine, nominal Democrats, voted for the GOP and Trump in particular solely because of their stand on what they consider to be the only issue, a moral one. The immediate effect of overturning Roe v Wade as law of the land would be to return the battle to each state legislature but it would defuse it as a national campaign issue and perhaps we could return to some semblance of reasonable discussion of policy issue with less shouting (not to mention shooting.) Polls seem to indicate a majority of Americans support the right to legal abortion and a national referendum would supposedly reflect that further deflating the sails of the "values" voters. Even if no one could agree on the rules for such a referendum it would defuse the issue, or at least reduce pressure on the Democrats who could then argue, "well, we wanted to overturn Roe, too".
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
His Master's Lusts
Sheila has been reading the new biography of Frederick Douglass by David Blight (she says it's excellent, by the way) and I started poking around in Douglass's autobiography. I was struck by the following paragraphs, which show the incredibly perverted way that white men justified and rationalized through legal methods their impregnation of slave women. He was separated from his mother as an infant.
"Called thus suddenly away, she left me without the slightest intimation of who my father was. The whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my purpose whilst the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father.
I know of such cases; and it is worthy of remark that such slaves invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with, than others. They are, in the first place, a constant offence to their mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom do any thing to please her; she is never better pleased than when she sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of showing to his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his black slaves. The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend."
Emphasis mine.
"Called thus suddenly away, she left me without the slightest intimation of who my father was. The whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my purpose whilst the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father.
I know of such cases; and it is worthy of remark that such slaves invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with, than others. They are, in the first place, a constant offence to their mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom do any thing to please her; she is never better pleased than when she sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of showing to his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his black slaves. The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend."
Emphasis mine.
Sunday, October 14, 2018
Review: To Die in Vienna by Kevin Wignall
I've been reading a lot of heavy stuff lately (reviews to follow eventually ) and some law review articles in preparation for a presentation on John Bingham and the 14th Amendment, so it's always nice to find something well-put together that doesn't insult the intelligence, but nicely engages. Kevin Wignall's To Die in Vienna is of the spy-like genre, a favorite of mine, and it fit the bill nicely.
Freddie is a surveillance expert who has been tasked with watching the activities of a Chinese national in Vienna. He has come to know Cheng's habits intimately, but one day he returns home early to find his apartment being trashed and he barely escapes with his life just managing to kill his attacker with a steam iron. His boss is clearly terrified then he is also killed and Freddie realizes it's time to hide. So he does in the place least likely to be suspected and in plain sight.
Things get complicated as they usually do, and Freddie's determined not to kill anyone, the reason for which is gradually determined. Freddie also happens to have numerous skills that he had preferred to leave unused and hidden.
Good story that moves forward nicely. I will read more Wignall.
Freddie is a surveillance expert who has been tasked with watching the activities of a Chinese national in Vienna. He has come to know Cheng's habits intimately, but one day he returns home early to find his apartment being trashed and he barely escapes with his life just managing to kill his attacker with a steam iron. His boss is clearly terrified then he is also killed and Freddie realizes it's time to hide. So he does in the place least likely to be suspected and in plain sight.
Things get complicated as they usually do, and Freddie's determined not to kill anyone, the reason for which is gradually determined. Freddie also happens to have numerous skills that he had preferred to leave unused and hidden.
Good story that moves forward nicely. I will read more Wignall.
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Ruminations on Madison v Alabama and Kavanaugh
Sheila and I were listening to the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of Madison v Alabama. At basic issue is whether a person who has lost his memory of a crime due to a medical condition, in this case vascular dementia, can be executed under the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.
During the arguments, a recurring theme was the importance of memory with the word “blackout” coming up. For example, Justice Kagan asked, “but the idea of a kind of fugue state or a blackout that's unaccompanied by anything else, does that count as the kind of mental disability that you're talking about?” The word “blackout” rang some bells. Stevenson’s response was, “We're not arguing that someone who is competent to stand trial, who nonetheless at trial maintains that they blacked out or don't remember would, therefore, be incompetent to be executed.”
During Kavanaugh’s nomination hearings, he insisted that while he “liked” beer, he never drank to excess and certainly never to the point of blacking out. He also never used the excuse of not being able to remember. I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was being really smart and avoiding the stigma of being labeled incompetent or mentally ill, a term the justices seemed to associate with the concept of blacking out. Then again memory loss or not being able to remember something is often attributed to malingering. Defendants at trial also use defenses of "I don't remember." It doesn't preclude the state from trying them, from convicting them, from sentencing them. It doesn't make them incompetent. It did seem a bit obscene to suggest that this man on death row, now blind, incontinent, and suffering from dementia could be attempting to fool them so he wouldn’t be executed.
What a shame that Kavanaugh wasn’t on the bench when this came up as he could have spoken from personal experience.
I must admit to being saddened and horrified by the entire discussion. Here the decision to take a life revolved on splitting hairs and dictionary definitions. The poor man has been on death row for more than thirty years, has all sorts of physical problems, and good old Alabama just can’t wait to execute the fellow. That strikes me as more than immoral.
During the arguments, a recurring theme was the importance of memory with the word “blackout” coming up. For example, Justice Kagan asked, “but the idea of a kind of fugue state or a blackout that's unaccompanied by anything else, does that count as the kind of mental disability that you're talking about?” The word “blackout” rang some bells. Stevenson’s response was, “We're not arguing that someone who is competent to stand trial, who nonetheless at trial maintains that they blacked out or don't remember would, therefore, be incompetent to be executed.”
During Kavanaugh’s nomination hearings, he insisted that while he “liked” beer, he never drank to excess and certainly never to the point of blacking out. He also never used the excuse of not being able to remember. I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was being really smart and avoiding the stigma of being labeled incompetent or mentally ill, a term the justices seemed to associate with the concept of blacking out. Then again memory loss or not being able to remember something is often attributed to malingering. Defendants at trial also use defenses of "I don't remember." It doesn't preclude the state from trying them, from convicting them, from sentencing them. It doesn't make them incompetent. It did seem a bit obscene to suggest that this man on death row, now blind, incontinent, and suffering from dementia could be attempting to fool them so he wouldn’t be executed.
What a shame that Kavanaugh wasn’t on the bench when this came up as he could have spoken from personal experience.
I must admit to being saddened and horrified by the entire discussion. Here the decision to take a life revolved on splitting hairs and dictionary definitions. The poor man has been on death row for more than thirty years, has all sorts of physical problems, and good old Alabama just can’t wait to execute the fellow. That strikes me as more than immoral.
Tuesday, October 09, 2018
From Tailspin by Steven Brill
Reading this for reading club. The first chapter makes for depressing reading. The book details how we got to this mess. Some quotes from the beginning, re the current state of the United States:
"Income inequality has snowballed. Adjusted for inflation, middle-class wages have been nearly frozen for the last four decades, and discretionary income has declined if escalating out-of-pocket health care costs and insurance premiums are counted. Yet earnings by the top one percent have nearly tripled. The recovery from the crash of 2008—which saw banks and bankers bailed out while millions lost their homes, savings, and jobs—was reserved almost exclusively for the top one percent. Their incomes in the three years following the crash went up by nearly a third, while the bottom 99 percent saw an up-tick of less than half of one percent. Only a democracy and an economy that has discarded its basic mission of holding the community together, or failed at it, would produce those results.
"The world’s richest country continues to have the highest poverty rate among the thirty-five nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), except for Mexico. (It is tied in second to last place with Israel, Chile, and Turkey.) Nearly one in five of America’s children live in households that their government classifies as “food-insecure,” meaning they are without “access to enough food for an active, healthy life.”
"Beyond that, few of the basic services seem to work as they should. America’s airports are an embarrassment, and a modern air traffic control system is twenty-five years behind schedule. The power grid, roads, and rails are crumbling, pushing the United States far down international rankings for infrastructure quality. Despite spending more on health care and K–12 education per capita than any other developed country, health care outcomes and student achievement also rank in the middle or worse internationally. The U.S. has the highest infant mortality rate and lowest life expectancy among its peer countries, and among the thirty-five OECD countries American children rank thirtieth in math proficiency and nineteenth in science."
"American politicians talk about “American exceptionalism” so habitually that it should have its own key on their speechwriters’ laptops. Is this the exceptionalism they have in mind? The operative word to describe the performance of our lawmakers in Washington, D.C., responsible for guiding what is supposed to be the world’s greatest democracy, is pathetic. Congress has not passed a comprehensive budget since 1994. Like slacker schoolchildren unable to produce a book report on time, the country’s elected leaders have fallen back instead on an endless string of last-minute deadline extensions and piecemeal appropriations. Legislation to deal with big, long-term challenges, like climate change, the mounting national debt, or job displacement, is a pipe dream. It is as if the great breakthroughs of the past, marked by bipartisan signing ceremonies in the White House—the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission, Social Security, interstate highways, the Food and Drug Administration, Medicare, civil rights legislation, the EPA—are part of some other country’s history. There are more than twenty registered lobbyists for every member of Congress. Most are deployed to block anything that would tax, regulate, or otherwise threaten a deep-pocketed client. Money has come to dominate everything so completely that those we send to Washington to represent us have been reduced to begging on the phone for campaign cash four or five hours a day and spending their evenings taking checks at fund-raisers organized by those swarming lobbyists."
"The result is a new, divided America. On one side are the protected few—the winners—who don’t need government for much and even have a stake in sabotaging the government’s responsibility to all of its citizens. For them, the new, broken America works fine, at least in the short term. On the other side are the unprotected many, who rely on government, as they always have, to protect and preserve their way of life and maybe even improve it. That divide is the essence of America’s tailspin. The protected overmatched, overran, and paralyzed the government."
Steven Brill's resume: Steven Brill (born August 22, 1950) is an American lawyer and journalist-entrepreneur who founded monthly magazine The American Lawyer and the cable channel Court TV, and is the author of the best selling, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall – and Those Fighting to Reverse It. (From Wikipaedia)
"Income inequality has snowballed. Adjusted for inflation, middle-class wages have been nearly frozen for the last four decades, and discretionary income has declined if escalating out-of-pocket health care costs and insurance premiums are counted. Yet earnings by the top one percent have nearly tripled. The recovery from the crash of 2008—which saw banks and bankers bailed out while millions lost their homes, savings, and jobs—was reserved almost exclusively for the top one percent. Their incomes in the three years following the crash went up by nearly a third, while the bottom 99 percent saw an up-tick of less than half of one percent. Only a democracy and an economy that has discarded its basic mission of holding the community together, or failed at it, would produce those results.
"The world’s richest country continues to have the highest poverty rate among the thirty-five nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), except for Mexico. (It is tied in second to last place with Israel, Chile, and Turkey.) Nearly one in five of America’s children live in households that their government classifies as “food-insecure,” meaning they are without “access to enough food for an active, healthy life.”
"Beyond that, few of the basic services seem to work as they should. America’s airports are an embarrassment, and a modern air traffic control system is twenty-five years behind schedule. The power grid, roads, and rails are crumbling, pushing the United States far down international rankings for infrastructure quality. Despite spending more on health care and K–12 education per capita than any other developed country, health care outcomes and student achievement also rank in the middle or worse internationally. The U.S. has the highest infant mortality rate and lowest life expectancy among its peer countries, and among the thirty-five OECD countries American children rank thirtieth in math proficiency and nineteenth in science."
"American politicians talk about “American exceptionalism” so habitually that it should have its own key on their speechwriters’ laptops. Is this the exceptionalism they have in mind? The operative word to describe the performance of our lawmakers in Washington, D.C., responsible for guiding what is supposed to be the world’s greatest democracy, is pathetic. Congress has not passed a comprehensive budget since 1994. Like slacker schoolchildren unable to produce a book report on time, the country’s elected leaders have fallen back instead on an endless string of last-minute deadline extensions and piecemeal appropriations. Legislation to deal with big, long-term challenges, like climate change, the mounting national debt, or job displacement, is a pipe dream. It is as if the great breakthroughs of the past, marked by bipartisan signing ceremonies in the White House—the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission, Social Security, interstate highways, the Food and Drug Administration, Medicare, civil rights legislation, the EPA—are part of some other country’s history. There are more than twenty registered lobbyists for every member of Congress. Most are deployed to block anything that would tax, regulate, or otherwise threaten a deep-pocketed client. Money has come to dominate everything so completely that those we send to Washington to represent us have been reduced to begging on the phone for campaign cash four or five hours a day and spending their evenings taking checks at fund-raisers organized by those swarming lobbyists."
"The result is a new, divided America. On one side are the protected few—the winners—who don’t need government for much and even have a stake in sabotaging the government’s responsibility to all of its citizens. For them, the new, broken America works fine, at least in the short term. On the other side are the unprotected many, who rely on government, as they always have, to protect and preserve their way of life and maybe even improve it. That divide is the essence of America’s tailspin. The protected overmatched, overran, and paralyzed the government."
Steven Brill's resume: Steven Brill (born August 22, 1950) is an American lawyer and journalist-entrepreneur who founded monthly magazine The American Lawyer and the cable channel Court TV, and is the author of the best selling, Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall – and Those Fighting to Reverse It. (From Wikipaedia)
Saturday, October 06, 2018
Review: Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn
Reading this book is sort of like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I didn't like the people (nor did they like each other.) Judging from other reviews, however, I am probably not giving the series (of which this is the first) a fair shake as the character of Patrick, here a child (who gets raped by his father, a warning for those of you a bit squeamish) matures in a variety of directions in later books. St. Aubyn has said the books are virtually autobiographical, a sad thing indeed, although from reviews I gather he overcomes conditions I would consider disastrous.
I bought this book based on several negative reviews in which the readers all excoriated the author for creating such a despicable character. Having loved Highsmith's Ripley series -- and how could anyone be more despicable than Ripley -- I couldn't wait.
This is a series of five novels, the most recent just published, that follow the lives of upper crust British society. And crust they are, but not in the hot-bread-lip-smacking-dripping-with-butter-crust we all love, rather the crust on a pile of manure after it's been baking in the sun for a while.
David, a very handsome man with a checkered past, married Eleanor for her money. He dominates and treats her miserably as he becomes part of the landed gentry. "The expression that men feel entitled to wear when they stare out of a cold English drawing room onto their own land had grown stubborn over five centuries and perfected itself in David’s face. It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place, but David left her in no doubt that they did. He was also descended from Charles II through a prostitute. ‘I’d keep quiet about that, if I were you,’ she had been told."
But most of the book is about David's childhood
I MUST quote this line from Paul's excellent review that captures the spirit much better than I ever could: " it was like eating a whole box of chocolate coated scorpions, crunch crunch, their little exoskeletons shattering on my palate and the poison flooding all my internal organs and me saying mmm-mmm, more please. " [http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/425509669]
The writing is exceptional.
I bought this book based on several negative reviews in which the readers all excoriated the author for creating such a despicable character. Having loved Highsmith's Ripley series -- and how could anyone be more despicable than Ripley -- I couldn't wait.
This is a series of five novels, the most recent just published, that follow the lives of upper crust British society. And crust they are, but not in the hot-bread-lip-smacking-dripping-with-butter-crust we all love, rather the crust on a pile of manure after it's been baking in the sun for a while.
David, a very handsome man with a checkered past, married Eleanor for her money. He dominates and treats her miserably as he becomes part of the landed gentry. "The expression that men feel entitled to wear when they stare out of a cold English drawing room onto their own land had grown stubborn over five centuries and perfected itself in David’s face. It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place, but David left her in no doubt that they did. He was also descended from Charles II through a prostitute. ‘I’d keep quiet about that, if I were you,’ she had been told."
But most of the book is about David's childhood
I MUST quote this line from Paul's excellent review that captures the spirit much better than I ever could: " it was like eating a whole box of chocolate coated scorpions, crunch crunch, their little exoskeletons shattering on my palate and the poison flooding all my internal organs and me saying mmm-mmm, more please. " [http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/425509669]
The writing is exceptional.
Saturday, September 29, 2018
Time for an Even Number
I am becoming more and more convinced that we would be better off with a 4-4 court. That everyone now looks to the court to make decisions of great monument (in spite of better a very small portion of the Court's decisions - 68% of decisions were unanimous in 2017) is indicative of the failure of Congress. We now essentially have a two-branch government instead of three and I don't think it's a good thing having one person (Anthony Kennedy or whomever) deciding what's best for the country on large cultural issues that seem to be the most problematic. If the decision is split evenly, the decisions of the Circuits stand, for the time being. Why is that a bad thing. So what if the law is slightly different in California than Texas. Do we really want one unelected person to make the decision for the entire country? I think what the Democrats should do if they win in November and take the House is to reduce the size of the Court to 8 or increase it to 10. The original Judiciary Act of 1789 set it at six. It was changed several times before becoming more or less permanent at nine in 1868 when the Court was packed to help Grant. Only a simple majority is required to change the size of the Court. I think it's time to revert to an even number. Then perhaps Congress can reclaim its role as legislator, a role it has abrogated to the Court.
ADDENDUM: I have done more research on this idea and am adding some caveats. If the Democrats were to reduce the size of the court by one following the seating of Kavanaugh, it would not reduce the size of the court immediately and the justices, since they have lifetime appointments would not be removed by seniority, but only by death, resignation, or impeachment (unlikely as it requires a 2/3rds majority vote in the Senate to convict. If they voted to add a seat making it 10 members, the president could, I assume simply ignore the extra seat by not nominating anyone. I have been unable to determine whether the president could veto their decision.
ADDENDUM: I have done more research on this idea and am adding some caveats. If the Democrats were to reduce the size of the court by one following the seating of Kavanaugh, it would not reduce the size of the court immediately and the justices, since they have lifetime appointments would not be removed by seniority, but only by death, resignation, or impeachment (unlikely as it requires a 2/3rds majority vote in the Senate to convict. If they voted to add a seat making it 10 members, the president could, I assume simply ignore the extra seat by not nominating anyone. I have been unable to determine whether the president could veto their decision.
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Review: Behemoth: A Making of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua Freeman
What's really fascinating about this book is how the great factories of the Soviet system relied upon and emulated the factory system created in the west. They had one enormous advantage, however, in that each had a more dedicated workforce, i.e., one supposedly more friendly to the economic system, not to mention a sophisticated system of spies to weed out malcontents. The unions were devoted to the system as well if not arms of the government. Soviet masters even went so far as to copy and employ the designs of Ford's assembly lines, Stalin and his minions believing that industrialization was a tool of class warfare. Were Soviet factories during the thirties any different than their western counterparts in terms of organization and hierarchies. Not much suggests Freeman, except for Soviet use of forced labor and periodic purges of upper management. Both systems bred hierarchical management and conflict-ridden.
The great textile mills of the northeastern U.S. had some environmental advantages over their counter-parts elsewhere. They were mostly powered by water and often entire towns sprang up around the mills with garden lined streets and housing for the workers.*
To some extent it was the rise of unions in the west that spelled doom for the behemoth factory. Owners were anxious to defuse the power of unions and so decentralized the manufacturing process to a point where now only 8% of U.S. labor is employed in a factory of which Trump speaks so nostalgically and erroneously. By the early fifties the age of industrial gigantism was over in the U.S. but continued apace in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with the rise of industrial communities like Stalinstadt (now Eisenhuttenstadt - a town I would like to visit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuQpRna3suc) and Nowa Huta in Poland as late as the late seventies.
Freeman suggests that the days of the gigantic factory may be over even as he examines the huge factories of Foxconn in China that produce so much of Apple and other computer manufacturers' products. At its peak Foxconn employed an amazing 300,000 workers (though hardly sweatshops as they have nice facilities, dormitories, swimming pools, and cafeterias,) but the trend is now for robots to take over such jobs. Robots don't need sleep, nor food, nor amenities of any kind and happily work steadily 24/7.
* See Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City by Tamara Hareven for a detailed examination of one textile manufacturing city-factory.
The great textile mills of the northeastern U.S. had some environmental advantages over their counter-parts elsewhere. They were mostly powered by water and often entire towns sprang up around the mills with garden lined streets and housing for the workers.*
To some extent it was the rise of unions in the west that spelled doom for the behemoth factory. Owners were anxious to defuse the power of unions and so decentralized the manufacturing process to a point where now only 8% of U.S. labor is employed in a factory of which Trump speaks so nostalgically and erroneously. By the early fifties the age of industrial gigantism was over in the U.S. but continued apace in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with the rise of industrial communities like Stalinstadt (now Eisenhuttenstadt - a town I would like to visit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuQpRna3suc) and Nowa Huta in Poland as late as the late seventies.
Freeman suggests that the days of the gigantic factory may be over even as he examines the huge factories of Foxconn in China that produce so much of Apple and other computer manufacturers' products. At its peak Foxconn employed an amazing 300,000 workers (though hardly sweatshops as they have nice facilities, dormitories, swimming pools, and cafeterias,) but the trend is now for robots to take over such jobs. Robots don't need sleep, nor food, nor amenities of any kind and happily work steadily 24/7.
* See Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City by Tamara Hareven for a detailed examination of one textile manufacturing city-factory.
Sunday, September 23, 2018
Frankling Graham Continues the Familial Tradition of Defining the Wolf in Sheep's Clothing Idiom
"A wolf in sheep's clothing is an idiom of Biblical origin used to describe those playing a role contrary to their real character with whom contact is dangerous, particularly false teachers." (Wikipedia)
Billy Graham often eulogized Richard Nixon, a president who was so in love with power it subsumed him. Graham himself worshiped at the feet of power, attaching himself to the powerful. He failed to see how it began to corrupt him and his message. That descent continues apace as his son Franklin oleaginously effusively praises Trump, a man he claims God has put in the presidency. (Can one assume God did the same with Obama and James Buchanan?) This is an unedited transcript of a recording made of Trump during the 1016 campaign (you can listen to it in full here :
Donald J. Trump: You know and ...
Unknown: She used to be great. She’s still very beautiful.
Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.
Unknown: Whoa.
Trump: I did try and fuck her. She was married.
Unknown: That’s huge news.
Trump: No, no, Nancy. No, this was [unintelligible] — and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping.She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture —
I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.
Billy Bush: Sheesh, your girl’s hot as shit. In the purple.
Trump: Whoa! Whoa!
Bush: Yes! The Donald has scored. Whoa, my man!
[Crosstalk]
Trump: Look at you, you are a pussy.
Now, I'm no prude, but I find that kind of conversation extremely offensive. Franklin Graham seems to think it's OK for his president to speak thus. Had Obama said anything close to that and he would have been pilloried. And for Graham to suggest he see God's work in Trump's White House is just plain blasphemy. The only thing I can think of is that Graham has sold his soul to the devil and truly become the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing.
Billy Graham often eulogized Richard Nixon, a president who was so in love with power it subsumed him. Graham himself worshiped at the feet of power, attaching himself to the powerful. He failed to see how it began to corrupt him and his message. That descent continues apace as his son Franklin oleaginously effusively praises Trump, a man he claims God has put in the presidency. (Can one assume God did the same with Obama and James Buchanan?) This is an unedited transcript of a recording made of Trump during the 1016 campaign (you can listen to it in full here :
Donald J. Trump: You know and ...
Unknown: She used to be great. She’s still very beautiful.
Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.
Unknown: Whoa.
Trump: I did try and fuck her. She was married.
Unknown: That’s huge news.
Trump: No, no, Nancy. No, this was [unintelligible] — and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping.She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture —
I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.
Billy Bush: Sheesh, your girl’s hot as shit. In the purple.
Trump: Whoa! Whoa!
Bush: Yes! The Donald has scored. Whoa, my man!
[Crosstalk]
Trump: Look at you, you are a pussy.
Now, I'm no prude, but I find that kind of conversation extremely offensive. Franklin Graham seems to think it's OK for his president to speak thus. Had Obama said anything close to that and he would have been pilloried. And for Graham to suggest he see God's work in Trump's White House is just plain blasphemy. The only thing I can think of is that Graham has sold his soul to the devil and truly become the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing.
Friday, September 21, 2018
John Bingham and Why He's Important
In the now-famous 1830s chronicle of a visit to America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that in America every political issue is ultimately a legal issue in the courts. The political issues left unresolved at the end of the Civil War were addressed legally by the passage of the fourteenth amendment. Justice Brennan suggested that more cases were litigated under the Fourteenth Amendment than under any other provision of the United States Constitution. James E. Bond has likened the Amendment to a “Second Constitution.” (Actually the third if you include the failed Articles of Confederation.)
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any
State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due
process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.
I happened to be reading about John Bingham’s fight for black rights and the 14th amendment after the Civil War. John Bingham was a congressman from Ohio; an abolitionist who believed that Article IV section 2 of the Constitution should be interpreted and amended to give Congress the right to enforce the Bill of Rights on the states. Until the 14th amendment as later interpreted using the due process clause of the 5th amendment, the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government. What Bingham thought is of no little passing interest as it is essential in determining the “original intent” of the authors of the amendment.
Bingham was born in Mercer, Pennsylvania in a two story house on the courthouse town square that still exists today. His father was a carpenter and bricklayer who was passionately interested in politics. He was a member of the anti-Mason party, whose membership included an important abolitionist, Thaddeus Stevens, Speaker of the Pennsylvania House. Stevens became important in the creation of the fourteenth amendment. John and his father became members of the Whig Party, known for its opposition to war with Mexico, annexation of territory (and especially the extension of slavery into new territory), and slavery itself. After the death of his mother, John went to Cadiz, Ohio to live with his uncle, a judge and prominent Whig. The Cadiz area, while not being exclusively abolitionist, was considered predominantly of that mindset. John attended Franklin College, whose President of the Board and a teacher was Reverend Walker, a man devoted to abolitionism. The Reverend Titus Basfield, a former slave, was a member of Bingham’s class at Franklin. Basfield and Bingham were friends and corresponded for many years.
Bingham became a lawyer and consorted with many politicians. He startled the Whig convention of 1848 which supported Zachary Taylor with the radical position of “No more slave states, no more slave territories, the maintenance of freedom where freedom is and the protection of American industry.” His statement was ruled out of order, but represented a strong strain of idealism and brought him national recognition. He was involved in rewriting the Ohio Constitution in 1855 and that presciently used the words “privileges” and “immunities” in connection with “equal protection.”
Bingham was elected to Congress in 1854 where he immediately showed his anti-slavery colors. In 1857 he opposed not only the admission of Kansas as a slave state, but also the imposition of slavery upon the territory. In another speech, he vindicated the anti slavery views of Salmon Chase—that freedom was national and slavery only local—while also
claiming for slaves the right to act in self-defense. “It is too late to make it felony to utter the self-evident truth that life and liberty belong of right to every man by virtue of the same creative energy which breathed into him the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” Bingham did not limit rights to white people. To the contrary, he based his legal and constitutional arguments upon the view that blacks had equal rights with whites.
As Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee following the takeover of the House by the Republicans, Bingham was already noting the use of the word “persons,” in the Constitution to support black rights. He fought against the admission of Oregon as a “free” state in 1859 on the grounds that it excluded blacks from its borders and denied them the ability to use
the courts of the new state to vindicate their rights. He also adopted the free labor arguments against slavery. (See more at Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War by Eric Foner)
With regard to the use of the word “person” in the Fifth Amendment, Bingham noted that “[i]t makes no distinction either on account of complexion or birth—it serves these rights to all persons within its exclusive jurisdiction.” In reversing the argument of slave holders for the protection of property Bingham continued: This is equality. It protects not only life and liberty, but also property, the property of labor. It contemplates that no man shall be wrongfully
deprived of the fruit of his toil any more than of his life. . . . “ He said he would oppose admission of Kansas as a slave state even of all the white citizens of the territory wanted it. Persons could not be property in his mind under any circumstances.
When Virginia Representative William Smith, future confederate general, wanted to prevent anyone from becoming Speaker who had endorsed Hinton Helper’s anti-slavery book, The Impending Crisis of the South, which argued that slavery was holding back the economic future of the South, Bingham quoted from Jefferson and Washington’s Last Will and Testament, not to mention the Virginia Resolution of 1774, to ridicule Smith’s proposal making it look like Smith was denying his own heritage.
“I asked the gentleman to remember that the bold word ‘abolish’ is there. Abolition, if you please, is incorporated in that memorial declaration, for his father and mine went through . . . the revolution.”
Further, Bingham stated, defiantly it would seem: “I adopt the words as mine: when any form of government becomes destructive of the rights of life or liberty, it is the duty of people to
abolish it.”
Contrary to most federal generals and Lincoln himself who, like many southerners feared a slave insurrection, Bingham applauded the idea supporting their right to use force to gain their freedom. “He denounced southern laws that would make it a crime to “whisper” to a slave that “there is a God that . . . sometimes condescends to clothe with superhuman power that good right arm of an outraged man when he strikes for the liberty of himself, his wife, and children.”
When it was suggested that the Fourteenth Amendment might result in a majority of blacks taking over the governments of South Carolina and Mississippi as they were in the majority, Bingham sarcastically noted that’s precisely what whites had done to blacks and continued to support their suffrage, guaranteed under the 14th amendment.
The religious influence behind the guarantees of the 14th amendment was important. The story of Paul in Acts 23:25 where Paul is about to be scourged and beaten by Roman soldiers until they realize he was a Roman citizen, was a well-known story. American citizenship should equally protect its citizens against abuses by states. Bingham, in campaigning for its ratification said in 1867, ““We propose to put it into the power of every man, woman, child, black or white, rich or poor, when his rights are invaded, to raise his hand toward the flag, and say, I AM AN AMERICAN CITIZEN.” That was a direct attack on states rights.
Before the 14th Amendment it was settled law that the Bill of Rights applied only to Federal territories, not states. But states like Pennsylvania and later Ohio, had strong Bills of Rights for their citizens and which had incorporated sections of the Declaration of Independence, especially the section where all “men are created equal.” Indeed, the Ohio provision went further and indicated that “every free republican government” was founded upon the authority of these free and equal people and was “organized for the great purpose of protecting their rights and liberties.”
In Barron ex rel. Tiernan v. Mayor of Baltimore (1833), the Supreme Court ruled that the Bill of Rights applied only to the Federal Government. Chief Justice Marshall recalled that the founding generation added the first eight Amendments to the Constitution in response to Anti-Federalist concerns regarding the extent of federal—not state—power, and held that if “the framers of these amendments [had] intended them to be limitations on the powers of the state governments, “they would have declared this purpose in plain and intelligible language.” Finding no such language in the Bill, Chief Justice Marshall held that it did not in any way restrict state authority.
In the McDonald’s decision that applied the 2nd amendment gun rights to the states through substantive due process of the 14th amendment, Justice Thomas wrote a very interesting concurrence arguing the Privileges or Immunities Clause rather than substantive due process should have been used to apply the amendment to the states. That’s very interesting and very powerful.
Justice Thomas argued for a more cogent application of fundamental rights. As he said in his McDonald concurrence, “I cannot accept a theory of constitutional interpretation that rests on such tenuous footing. This Court’s substantive due process framework fails to account for both the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and the history that led to its adoption, filling that gap with a jurisprudence devoid of a guiding principle. I believe the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment offers a superior alternative, and that a return to that meaning would allow this Court to enforce the rights the Fourteenth Amendment is designed to protect with greater clarity and predictability than the substantive due process framework has so far managed.”
One aspect of the difference between using the due process clause and the Privileges or Immunities Clause is that due process part refers to persons, i.e. it would apply to everyone, whereas the Privileges or Immunities Clause refers to citizens. So had the Court used Thomas’s reasoning one could argue that non-citizens did not have the same gun rights as citizens. As it stands now, every person has full gun rights regardless of citizenship.
There was a famous debate between two law professors, Fairman and Crosskey. Most law school professors sided with Fairman who did not believe the 14th Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights to the states. Generally, they did not read Crosskey or wrote him off as simply wrong. When Raoul Berger wrote his Government by Judiciary in the early sixties he was immediately adopted by the conservative press and crowd anxious to roll back the decisions of the Warren Court. They thought the easiest way to do that was to roll back incorporation arguing that historically the framers of the 14th amendment never intending it to be such. Berger rather demolished Bingham.
Michael Kent Curtis went back and looked up discussions of the two main proponents of incorporation and discovered that had talked and written about it extensively. “Of coure the historical evidence against incorporation could be strong, even of much of the evidence marshalled for it was mistaken. Ordinarily, those who advocate a massive rollack of Supreme Court precedent based on history should bear the burden of proof.” [Michael Kent Curtis] An exchange of views with Berger resulted related to the “nine-lived-cat.” Others, including Edwin Meese and Alexander Bickel decried the application of the First Amendment to the states.
(to be continued) Cont. at https://rarebits.blogspot.com/2018/12/biongham-johnson-veto-and-privileges.html
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any
State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due
process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.
I happened to be reading about John Bingham’s fight for black rights and the 14th amendment after the Civil War. John Bingham was a congressman from Ohio; an abolitionist who believed that Article IV section 2 of the Constitution should be interpreted and amended to give Congress the right to enforce the Bill of Rights on the states. Until the 14th amendment as later interpreted using the due process clause of the 5th amendment, the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government. What Bingham thought is of no little passing interest as it is essential in determining the “original intent” of the authors of the amendment.
Bingham was born in Mercer, Pennsylvania in a two story house on the courthouse town square that still exists today. His father was a carpenter and bricklayer who was passionately interested in politics. He was a member of the anti-Mason party, whose membership included an important abolitionist, Thaddeus Stevens, Speaker of the Pennsylvania House. Stevens became important in the creation of the fourteenth amendment. John and his father became members of the Whig Party, known for its opposition to war with Mexico, annexation of territory (and especially the extension of slavery into new territory), and slavery itself. After the death of his mother, John went to Cadiz, Ohio to live with his uncle, a judge and prominent Whig. The Cadiz area, while not being exclusively abolitionist, was considered predominantly of that mindset. John attended Franklin College, whose President of the Board and a teacher was Reverend Walker, a man devoted to abolitionism. The Reverend Titus Basfield, a former slave, was a member of Bingham’s class at Franklin. Basfield and Bingham were friends and corresponded for many years.
Bingham became a lawyer and consorted with many politicians. He startled the Whig convention of 1848 which supported Zachary Taylor with the radical position of “No more slave states, no more slave territories, the maintenance of freedom where freedom is and the protection of American industry.” His statement was ruled out of order, but represented a strong strain of idealism and brought him national recognition. He was involved in rewriting the Ohio Constitution in 1855 and that presciently used the words “privileges” and “immunities” in connection with “equal protection.”
Bingham was elected to Congress in 1854 where he immediately showed his anti-slavery colors. In 1857 he opposed not only the admission of Kansas as a slave state, but also the imposition of slavery upon the territory. In another speech, he vindicated the anti slavery views of Salmon Chase—that freedom was national and slavery only local—while also
claiming for slaves the right to act in self-defense. “It is too late to make it felony to utter the self-evident truth that life and liberty belong of right to every man by virtue of the same creative energy which breathed into him the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” Bingham did not limit rights to white people. To the contrary, he based his legal and constitutional arguments upon the view that blacks had equal rights with whites.
As Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee following the takeover of the House by the Republicans, Bingham was already noting the use of the word “persons,” in the Constitution to support black rights. He fought against the admission of Oregon as a “free” state in 1859 on the grounds that it excluded blacks from its borders and denied them the ability to use
the courts of the new state to vindicate their rights. He also adopted the free labor arguments against slavery. (See more at Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War by Eric Foner)
With regard to the use of the word “person” in the Fifth Amendment, Bingham noted that “[i]t makes no distinction either on account of complexion or birth—it serves these rights to all persons within its exclusive jurisdiction.” In reversing the argument of slave holders for the protection of property Bingham continued: This is equality. It protects not only life and liberty, but also property, the property of labor. It contemplates that no man shall be wrongfully
deprived of the fruit of his toil any more than of his life. . . . “ He said he would oppose admission of Kansas as a slave state even of all the white citizens of the territory wanted it. Persons could not be property in his mind under any circumstances.
When Virginia Representative William Smith, future confederate general, wanted to prevent anyone from becoming Speaker who had endorsed Hinton Helper’s anti-slavery book, The Impending Crisis of the South, which argued that slavery was holding back the economic future of the South, Bingham quoted from Jefferson and Washington’s Last Will and Testament, not to mention the Virginia Resolution of 1774, to ridicule Smith’s proposal making it look like Smith was denying his own heritage.
“I asked the gentleman to remember that the bold word ‘abolish’ is there. Abolition, if you please, is incorporated in that memorial declaration, for his father and mine went through . . . the revolution.”
Further, Bingham stated, defiantly it would seem: “I adopt the words as mine: when any form of government becomes destructive of the rights of life or liberty, it is the duty of people to
abolish it.”
Contrary to most federal generals and Lincoln himself who, like many southerners feared a slave insurrection, Bingham applauded the idea supporting their right to use force to gain their freedom. “He denounced southern laws that would make it a crime to “whisper” to a slave that “there is a God that . . . sometimes condescends to clothe with superhuman power that good right arm of an outraged man when he strikes for the liberty of himself, his wife, and children.”
When it was suggested that the Fourteenth Amendment might result in a majority of blacks taking over the governments of South Carolina and Mississippi as they were in the majority, Bingham sarcastically noted that’s precisely what whites had done to blacks and continued to support their suffrage, guaranteed under the 14th amendment.
The religious influence behind the guarantees of the 14th amendment was important. The story of Paul in Acts 23:25 where Paul is about to be scourged and beaten by Roman soldiers until they realize he was a Roman citizen, was a well-known story. American citizenship should equally protect its citizens against abuses by states. Bingham, in campaigning for its ratification said in 1867, ““We propose to put it into the power of every man, woman, child, black or white, rich or poor, when his rights are invaded, to raise his hand toward the flag, and say, I AM AN AMERICAN CITIZEN.” That was a direct attack on states rights.
Before the 14th Amendment it was settled law that the Bill of Rights applied only to Federal territories, not states. But states like Pennsylvania and later Ohio, had strong Bills of Rights for their citizens and which had incorporated sections of the Declaration of Independence, especially the section where all “men are created equal.” Indeed, the Ohio provision went further and indicated that “every free republican government” was founded upon the authority of these free and equal people and was “organized for the great purpose of protecting their rights and liberties.”
In Barron ex rel. Tiernan v. Mayor of Baltimore (1833), the Supreme Court ruled that the Bill of Rights applied only to the Federal Government. Chief Justice Marshall recalled that the founding generation added the first eight Amendments to the Constitution in response to Anti-Federalist concerns regarding the extent of federal—not state—power, and held that if “the framers of these amendments [had] intended them to be limitations on the powers of the state governments, “they would have declared this purpose in plain and intelligible language.” Finding no such language in the Bill, Chief Justice Marshall held that it did not in any way restrict state authority.
In the McDonald’s decision that applied the 2nd amendment gun rights to the states through substantive due process of the 14th amendment, Justice Thomas wrote a very interesting concurrence arguing the Privileges or Immunities Clause rather than substantive due process should have been used to apply the amendment to the states. That’s very interesting and very powerful.
Justice Thomas argued for a more cogent application of fundamental rights. As he said in his McDonald concurrence, “I cannot accept a theory of constitutional interpretation that rests on such tenuous footing. This Court’s substantive due process framework fails to account for both the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and the history that led to its adoption, filling that gap with a jurisprudence devoid of a guiding principle. I believe the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment offers a superior alternative, and that a return to that meaning would allow this Court to enforce the rights the Fourteenth Amendment is designed to protect with greater clarity and predictability than the substantive due process framework has so far managed.”
One aspect of the difference between using the due process clause and the Privileges or Immunities Clause is that due process part refers to persons, i.e. it would apply to everyone, whereas the Privileges or Immunities Clause refers to citizens. So had the Court used Thomas’s reasoning one could argue that non-citizens did not have the same gun rights as citizens. As it stands now, every person has full gun rights regardless of citizenship.
There was a famous debate between two law professors, Fairman and Crosskey. Most law school professors sided with Fairman who did not believe the 14th Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights to the states. Generally, they did not read Crosskey or wrote him off as simply wrong. When Raoul Berger wrote his Government by Judiciary in the early sixties he was immediately adopted by the conservative press and crowd anxious to roll back the decisions of the Warren Court. They thought the easiest way to do that was to roll back incorporation arguing that historically the framers of the 14th amendment never intending it to be such. Berger rather demolished Bingham.
Michael Kent Curtis went back and looked up discussions of the two main proponents of incorporation and discovered that had talked and written about it extensively. “Of coure the historical evidence against incorporation could be strong, even of much of the evidence marshalled for it was mistaken. Ordinarily, those who advocate a massive rollack of Supreme Court precedent based on history should bear the burden of proof.” [Michael Kent Curtis] An exchange of views with Berger resulted related to the “nine-lived-cat.” Others, including Edwin Meese and Alexander Bickel decried the application of the First Amendment to the states.
(to be continued) Cont. at https://rarebits.blogspot.com/2018/12/biongham-johnson-veto-and-privileges.html
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Review: Dying Light by Stuart MacBride
DS McRae has been sent to work with DI Steele of the “fuck-up” squad after a raid gone wrong in which a constable was badly wounded. Everyone is looking at him askance. Jackie, his WPC squeeze is mad at him for not standing up to Steele who never seems to recognize his time off.
Steele, who never goes by the book and thinks nothing of destroying evidence if it doesn’t seem to match her prior conception of guilt or innocence.
Written with a sardonic and often sarcastic wit, this series has become a favorite and I have bought them all. Not to be read by the squeamish.
On to the next one.
Steele, who never goes by the book and thinks nothing of destroying evidence if it doesn’t seem to match her prior conception of guilt or innocence.
Written with a sardonic and often sarcastic wit, this series has become a favorite and I have bought them all. Not to be read by the squeamish.
On to the next one.
Review: The Verdict by Nick Stone
Audiobook
Terry Flynt is a clerk in a large law firm. He's assigned to case that's more than startling. A man who grew up with and with whom he had a terrible falling out has been charged with murder and the evidence of his guilt is startlingly overwhelming. His boss assigns him telling Terry this case will help him win promotion and a scholarship to law school.
The boozing investigator assigned by the firm tells Terry otherwise, hinting the case is so unwinnable Terry was assigned so they could give him the boot at its conclusion. Terry continues to investigate on his own, but as potential witnesses and colleagues die he realizes something is truly off.
The ending was a bit rushed and off, good story and enjoyable listen. The courtroom scenes were particularly interesting.
Terry Flynt is a clerk in a large law firm. He's assigned to case that's more than startling. A man who grew up with and with whom he had a terrible falling out has been charged with murder and the evidence of his guilt is startlingly overwhelming. His boss assigns him telling Terry this case will help him win promotion and a scholarship to law school.
The boozing investigator assigned by the firm tells Terry otherwise, hinting the case is so unwinnable Terry was assigned so they could give him the boot at its conclusion. Terry continues to investigate on his own, but as potential witnesses and colleagues die he realizes something is truly off.
The ending was a bit rushed and off, good story and enjoyable listen. The courtroom scenes were particularly interesting.
Wednesday, September 05, 2018
Review: Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier by Tom Kizzia
Tom Kizzia ran across the Pilgrim family when he and his wife (who was to die quite early, unfortunately) in McCarthy, Alaska, a town that time and the mining industry had abandoned and forgotten. It's remoteness, gorgeous scenery, and culture of self-reliance are perhaps what attracted both families.
Kizzia worked for a newspaper. He and his wife were transplants from the east, she working for the Sierra Club. They built a cabin close to McCarthy and so Kizzia was more or less accepted as a kindred spirit by Pilgrim who assumed Kizzia would write favorably of the preacher's battle with the Park Service.
Pilgrim had obtained land and being a "man-of-God" with a wife and fourteen children (a sign itself of insanity) decided he could do whatever he wanted, including bulldozing a road to his property through the National Park. The Park Service was not happy.
Kizzia did research into the background of the family as the battle between the Park Service (which I thought was being quite reasonable, although that the Pilgrim family was armed to the teeth and adopted a constant threatening posture which may have been part of the equation.) The family (Pilgrim insisted he should have 21 children, it being some kind of magical number with religious significance -- it's also the product of 3 and 7 but that never got my blood rushing) had migrated from New Mexico where they had begun to irritate the neighbors by being unneighborly, you know like cutting fences, and stealing stuff, that kind of thing.
Initially, the family's outwardly "pure" appearance and legend, appealed to the Alaskan community, always ready to take on the government, except when it means losing federal money. Cynics suspected Pilgrim had moved there to cash in on Alaskan oil benefit checks, about $2,000 per person, surely a procreative incentive. Congress, in its infinite wisdom, had written into the 1980 conservation law special exemptions for Alaskan frontier types, encouraging living off the land, mine creeks, and you know, shoot bears and moose.
Claiming that the Book of Ezekiel prohibited usury Pilgrim always refused to pay interest. Turns out he had all sorts of other religious rules that included sleeping with his eldest daughter and gradually other daughters, not to mention beating the shit out of his wife and children if they crossed him at all. The family knew no different as any interaction with those outside the family was punished physically.
It’s pretty much against man’s law to be a true Christian family, Papa said, because so many things in the Bible are illegal. The state uses the word “abuse,” but doesn’t Proverbs say that a father who spares the rod hates his child? If you brought some matter before the judgment of a state court instead of God’s eternal judgment, the choice to do so was already your defeat. The state would entice children to speak against their own parents and then send them off to jails and foster homes.
Things started to go to Hell for Papa when the children had too much interaction with another Christian family who moved into the area with children of similar age, that was what we might say more "conventional" and a lot less physical. Pilgrim's eldest daughters took off and the dreaded authorities got involved with prison being the outcome.
It's a fascinating story and reveals how easy it is for insular communities, be they family or larger units, to fall under the sway of individuals to their detriment.
See Tom Kizzia ran across the Pilgrim family when he and his wife (who was to die quite early, unfortunately) in McCarthy, Alaska, a town that time and the mining industry had abandoned and forgotten. It's remoteness, gorgeous scenery, and culture of self-reliance are perhaps what attracted both families.
Kizzia worked for a newspaper. He and his wife were transplants from the east, she working for the Sierra Club. They built a cabin close to McCarthy and so Kizzia was more or less accepted as a kindred spirit by Pilgrim who assumed Kizzia would write favorably of the preacher's battle with the Park Service.
Pilgrim had obtained land and being a "man-of-God" with a wife and fourteen children (a sign itself of insanity) decided he could do whatever he wanted, including bulldozing a road to his property through the National Park. The Park Service was not happy.
Kizzia did research into the background of the family as the battle between the Park Service (which I thought was being quite reasonable, although that the Pilgrim family was armed to the teeth and adopted a constant threatening posture which may have been part of the equation.) The family (Pilgrim insisted he should have 21 children, it being some kind of magical number with religious significance -- it's also the product of 3 and 7 but that never got my blood rushing) had migrated from New Mexico where they had begun to irritate the neighbors by being unneighborly, you know like cutting fences, and stealing stuff, that kind of thing.
Initially, the family's outwardly "pure" appearance and legend, appealed to the Alaskan community, always ready to take on the government, except when it means losing federal money. Cynics suspected Pilgrim had moved there to cash in on Alaskan oil benefit checks, about $2,000 per person, surely a procreative incentive. Congress, in its infinite wisdom, had written into the 1980 conservation law special exemptions for Alaskan frontier types, encouraging living off the land, mine creeks, and you know, shoot bears and moose.
Claiming that the Book of Ezekiel prohibited usury Pilgrim always refused to pay interest. Turns out he had all sorts of other religious rules that included sleeping with his eldest daughter and gradually other daughters, not to mention beating the shit out of his wife and children if they crossed him at all. The family knew no different as any interaction with those outside the family was punished physically.
It’s pretty much against man’s law to be a true Christian family, Papa said, because so many things in the Bible are illegal. The state uses the word “abuse,” but doesn’t Proverbs say that a father who spares the rod hates his child? If you brought some matter before the judgment of a state court instead of God’s eternal judgment, the choice to do so was already your defeat. The state would entice children to speak against their own parents and then send them off to jails and foster homes.
Things started to go to Hell for Papa when the children had too much interaction with another Christian family who moved into the area with children of similar age, that was what we might say more "conventional" and a lot less physical. Pilgrim's eldest daughters took off and the dreaded authorities got involved with prison being the outcome.
It's a fascinating story and reveals how easy it is for insular communities, be they family or larger units, to fall under the sway of individuals to their detriment.
See https://culteducation.com/information/8867-the-strange-story-of-papa-pilgrim.html for a detailed article on Papa Pilgrim's origin and twin brother.
Kizzia worked for a newspaper. He and his wife were transplants from the east, she working for the Sierra Club. They built a cabin close to McCarthy and so Kizzia was more or less accepted as a kindred spirit by Pilgrim who assumed Kizzia would write favorably of the preacher's battle with the Park Service.
Pilgrim had obtained land and being a "man-of-God" with a wife and fourteen children (a sign itself of insanity) decided he could do whatever he wanted, including bulldozing a road to his property through the National Park. The Park Service was not happy.
Kizzia did research into the background of the family as the battle between the Park Service (which I thought was being quite reasonable, although that the Pilgrim family was armed to the teeth and adopted a constant threatening posture which may have been part of the equation.) The family (Pilgrim insisted he should have 21 children, it being some kind of magical number with religious significance -- it's also the product of 3 and 7 but that never got my blood rushing) had migrated from New Mexico where they had begun to irritate the neighbors by being unneighborly, you know like cutting fences, and stealing stuff, that kind of thing.
Initially, the family's outwardly "pure" appearance and legend, appealed to the Alaskan community, always ready to take on the government, except when it means losing federal money. Cynics suspected Pilgrim had moved there to cash in on Alaskan oil benefit checks, about $2,000 per person, surely a procreative incentive. Congress, in its infinite wisdom, had written into the 1980 conservation law special exemptions for Alaskan frontier types, encouraging living off the land, mine creeks, and you know, shoot bears and moose.
Claiming that the Book of Ezekiel prohibited usury Pilgrim always refused to pay interest. Turns out he had all sorts of other religious rules that included sleeping with his eldest daughter and gradually other daughters, not to mention beating the shit out of his wife and children if they crossed him at all. The family knew no different as any interaction with those outside the family was punished physically.
It’s pretty much against man’s law to be a true Christian family, Papa said, because so many things in the Bible are illegal. The state uses the word “abuse,” but doesn’t Proverbs say that a father who spares the rod hates his child? If you brought some matter before the judgment of a state court instead of God’s eternal judgment, the choice to do so was already your defeat. The state would entice children to speak against their own parents and then send them off to jails and foster homes.
Things started to go to Hell for Papa when the children had too much interaction with another Christian family who moved into the area with children of similar age, that was what we might say more "conventional" and a lot less physical. Pilgrim's eldest daughters took off and the dreaded authorities got involved with prison being the outcome.
It's a fascinating story and reveals how easy it is for insular communities, be they family or larger units, to fall under the sway of individuals to their detriment.
See Tom Kizzia ran across the Pilgrim family when he and his wife (who was to die quite early, unfortunately) in McCarthy, Alaska, a town that time and the mining industry had abandoned and forgotten. It's remoteness, gorgeous scenery, and culture of self-reliance are perhaps what attracted both families.
Kizzia worked for a newspaper. He and his wife were transplants from the east, she working for the Sierra Club. They built a cabin close to McCarthy and so Kizzia was more or less accepted as a kindred spirit by Pilgrim who assumed Kizzia would write favorably of the preacher's battle with the Park Service.
Pilgrim had obtained land and being a "man-of-God" with a wife and fourteen children (a sign itself of insanity) decided he could do whatever he wanted, including bulldozing a road to his property through the National Park. The Park Service was not happy.
Kizzia did research into the background of the family as the battle between the Park Service (which I thought was being quite reasonable, although that the Pilgrim family was armed to the teeth and adopted a constant threatening posture which may have been part of the equation.) The family (Pilgrim insisted he should have 21 children, it being some kind of magical number with religious significance -- it's also the product of 3 and 7 but that never got my blood rushing) had migrated from New Mexico where they had begun to irritate the neighbors by being unneighborly, you know like cutting fences, and stealing stuff, that kind of thing.
Initially, the family's outwardly "pure" appearance and legend, appealed to the Alaskan community, always ready to take on the government, except when it means losing federal money. Cynics suspected Pilgrim had moved there to cash in on Alaskan oil benefit checks, about $2,000 per person, surely a procreative incentive. Congress, in its infinite wisdom, had written into the 1980 conservation law special exemptions for Alaskan frontier types, encouraging living off the land, mine creeks, and you know, shoot bears and moose.
Claiming that the Book of Ezekiel prohibited usury Pilgrim always refused to pay interest. Turns out he had all sorts of other religious rules that included sleeping with his eldest daughter and gradually other daughters, not to mention beating the shit out of his wife and children if they crossed him at all. The family knew no different as any interaction with those outside the family was punished physically.
It’s pretty much against man’s law to be a true Christian family, Papa said, because so many things in the Bible are illegal. The state uses the word “abuse,” but doesn’t Proverbs say that a father who spares the rod hates his child? If you brought some matter before the judgment of a state court instead of God’s eternal judgment, the choice to do so was already your defeat. The state would entice children to speak against their own parents and then send them off to jails and foster homes.
Things started to go to Hell for Papa when the children had too much interaction with another Christian family who moved into the area with children of similar age, that was what we might say more "conventional" and a lot less physical. Pilgrim's eldest daughters took off and the dreaded authorities got involved with prison being the outcome.
It's a fascinating story and reveals how easy it is for insular communities, be they family or larger units, to fall under the sway of individuals to their detriment.
See https://culteducation.com/information/8867-the-strange-story-of-papa-pilgrim.html for a detailed article on Papa Pilgrim's origin and twin brother.
The Dean Scream
The NPR show On the Media had a fascinating program in which Brooke interviewed Erica Seifert, author of The Politics of Authenticity. 2016 was supposedly the year of the “outsider”. History reveals that many candidates have run as outsiders, including Lincoln, Carter, and most remarkably Reagan while running for a second term. His deft ads portrayed him as someone never a part of Washington even as a sitting president. Cruz even as a sitting Senator and one who worked for a Republican president, argues he is an outsider because he’s against everything. (Eisenhower was perhaps the most legitimate outsider along with Ulysses S. Grant.)
The famous Howard Dean “scream” is featured in another one of the “On the Media” programs. Those of us old enough to remember the famous win in Iowa will remember the crash-and-burn of his campaign after the media played and replayed his supposed “scream” at the rally following his victory. The show brought in a media expert to explain why no one who was at the event remembered the scream, but everyone who watched on TV remembered nothing else. The producers were using a special microphone and it was intended to pick up only that voice of the speaker, eliminating the crowd noise. The audio technician was then supposed to mix in the crowd noise picked up from different microphones scattered throughout the auditorium to get a more accurate rendition of what happened. He didn’t do that, so the media was left with only Dean’s voice. The crowd noise was so loud that he had to yell and shout to be heard over it.
That famous scream was rebroadcast over and over, more than six hundred times accompanied by commentary that it would sink his campaign. Well, that’s just what happened. One theory as to why it was hammered on over and over was that Dean had said he would break up the large media conglomerates and they wanted him to lose, especially as an “outsider.” In fact, several media outlets said later that they wish that they had not done that that. It was overkill and totally unnecessary. But this is a case where a failure to do the technology correctly ruined a political campaign. No one blames the individual individual engineer for doing this deliberately, but failure to use the technology correctly destroyed Dean, whose campaign never recovered.
The famous Howard Dean “scream” is featured in another one of the “On the Media” programs. Those of us old enough to remember the famous win in Iowa will remember the crash-and-burn of his campaign after the media played and replayed his supposed “scream” at the rally following his victory. The show brought in a media expert to explain why no one who was at the event remembered the scream, but everyone who watched on TV remembered nothing else. The producers were using a special microphone and it was intended to pick up only that voice of the speaker, eliminating the crowd noise. The audio technician was then supposed to mix in the crowd noise picked up from different microphones scattered throughout the auditorium to get a more accurate rendition of what happened. He didn’t do that, so the media was left with only Dean’s voice. The crowd noise was so loud that he had to yell and shout to be heard over it.
That famous scream was rebroadcast over and over, more than six hundred times accompanied by commentary that it would sink his campaign. Well, that’s just what happened. One theory as to why it was hammered on over and over was that Dean had said he would break up the large media conglomerates and they wanted him to lose, especially as an “outsider.” In fact, several media outlets said later that they wish that they had not done that that. It was overkill and totally unnecessary. But this is a case where a failure to do the technology correctly ruined a political campaign. No one blames the individual individual engineer for doing this deliberately, but failure to use the technology correctly destroyed Dean, whose campaign never recovered.
Fast Food and Dihydrogen Monoxide
The Washington Post had a rather flimsy story related to the dangers of “fast food” which they obliquely define as “processed food” which, in my mind, goes way beyond the “fast food” label. They explicitly define it as food sold in places without waiters. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/15/researchers-have-found-an-alarming-new-side-effect-from-eating-fast-food/]
After reading it, it appears to me to be just another scare story built on a fabric of weak associations. Given all the dangers from chemicals, industrial food processing, factory farms, etc., one would expect the life expectancy to have decreased; and yet, in the 1950s one could expect to live an average of 46.6 years; those born between 2005 and 2010 may reach in average an age of 67.6 years. Maybe all those harmful chemicals are really good for you. The suggestion of the study's authors "seems" to be that "fast food" as they define it is more subject to exposure from plastics during processing, yet as I look on the shelves in my cupboard I see graham crackers and whole grain cereal packaged in plastic and cans of vegetables (remember the BPA scares?). Buy frozen to avoid that? All frozen food is processed and delivered in plastic packaging. Milk is sold in plastic bottles. The study would have been much stronger had they compared the presence of phthalates in all foods, canned, frozen, restaurant, fast food, etc. and then looked for a cause-and-effect between phthalates and illness.
Next we'll be worried about dihydrogen monoxide in food (chemists may now start laughing). There is a direct correlation between the consumption of DHMO and death. Now that's really scary.
Fitbit: Another silly fad
No surprise. Turns out that the 10,000 step rule was an invention of a Japanese marketing company trying to sell a device that measured how many steps you were taking during a day and they made up the number. "In an attempt to capitalize on the immense popularity of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the company Yamasa designed the world’s first wearable step-counter, a device called a manpo-kei, which translates as “10,000-step meter”. There is no science behind any particular number. There seems to be some agreement that exercise, perhaps 30 minutes per day, is healthier although as with the steps no one seems to ask what that means. If I exercise 30 minutes a day will I live a day, ten days, a year longer? Will it eliminate the risk of Alzheimer’s? Or, will it simply guarantee an extra year in a nursing home?
Indeed, most of the scientific studies that have been conducted to try to test whether 10,000 steps a day is optimal for health are themselves relatively arbitrary. They simply compare people who have done 10,000 steps a day with those who have done far lower numbers, such as 3,000 or 5,000, and then measure calories burned, blood pressure and blood glucose levels. [Source]
Everyone seems down on a sedentary lifestyle, but have they measured longevity (assuming that’s the ultimate goal), brain function (what if the sitting involves doing higher level mathematics?) or just watching Judge Judy. Cyclists get hit by cars, walkers get bitten by ticks and mosquitoes and catch all sorts of nefarious diseases, runners need knee replacements, and parachutists, well they occasionally go splat. And why, if millions are wearing these Fitbit devices, does the average lifespan keep falling. I know of no one ever getting injured sitting in his/her reading chair. And my cat lies around all day with no ill effects.
Indeed, most of the scientific studies that have been conducted to try to test whether 10,000 steps a day is optimal for health are themselves relatively arbitrary. They simply compare people who have done 10,000 steps a day with those who have done far lower numbers, such as 3,000 or 5,000, and then measure calories burned, blood pressure and blood glucose levels. [Source]
Everyone seems down on a sedentary lifestyle, but have they measured longevity (assuming that’s the ultimate goal), brain function (what if the sitting involves doing higher level mathematics?) or just watching Judge Judy. Cyclists get hit by cars, walkers get bitten by ticks and mosquitoes and catch all sorts of nefarious diseases, runners need knee replacements, and parachutists, well they occasionally go splat. And why, if millions are wearing these Fitbit devices, does the average lifespan keep falling. I know of no one ever getting injured sitting in his/her reading chair. And my cat lies around all day with no ill effects.
Sunday, September 02, 2018
Review: The Dark Room by Jonathan Moore
Inspector Cain is called at 2 a.m. while supervising an exhumation by his boss Lt. Nagati who said she was sending a helicopter to speed him off to city hall. No other details. After his arrival, he's sent to the Mayor's chambers where he's asked to investigate a threat and some pictures sent to the mayor anonymously.
Turns out the casket contains the bones of more than one person, and one of them had been put into the casket while still alive. The mayor, meanwhile, denies any knowledge of the person and actions in the photographs, but Cain knows he’s lying, and he suspects that the contents of the casket and the blackmail of the mayor may be connected.
That’s all I’m going to say except that this is an outstanding police procedural, done the way they should be, with interesting characters and a super plot.
Turns out the casket contains the bones of more than one person, and one of them had been put into the casket while still alive. The mayor, meanwhile, denies any knowledge of the person and actions in the photographs, but Cain knows he’s lying, and he suspects that the contents of the casket and the blackmail of the mayor may be connected.
That’s all I’m going to say except that this is an outstanding police procedural, done the way they should be, with interesting characters and a super plot.
Review: Close Reach by Jonathan Moore
If you like books with nice sailboats as a character, strong women leads, and really nasty villains, you’ll enjoy this book. It’s perfect for a flight, perhaps not so good if you intend to sail to the tip of South America.
The plot involves former Pinochet ruffians, now on the run, who have made a business of capturing, torturing, and then killing anyone traversing around the Horn. Anchored at Deception Island, a rapidly awakening volcanic island, they “persudae” their captives to reveal bank account and other financial information. Their most insidious, however, involves health, DNA, and blood information in order to capture a specific person for a specific purpose that I won’t reveal. Let’s just say it involves the leader of the group and some surgeons.
As it happens when they overtake Kelly and her husband Dean in their rather amazing 70 ft yacht Freefall, they have bit off a bit more than they can chew in the character of Kelly who happens to be a surgeon. Turns out when pushed she can be as mean and evil as the bad guys.
Enough said. If gore turns you off, skip this one, otherwise a fast read. I’ll get others by the author.
Check out this bit about Deception Island: http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/12/23/deception_island_is_antarctica_s_most_confusing_vacation_destination.html
The plot involves former Pinochet ruffians, now on the run, who have made a business of capturing, torturing, and then killing anyone traversing around the Horn. Anchored at Deception Island, a rapidly awakening volcanic island, they “persudae” their captives to reveal bank account and other financial information. Their most insidious, however, involves health, DNA, and blood information in order to capture a specific person for a specific purpose that I won’t reveal. Let’s just say it involves the leader of the group and some surgeons.
As it happens when they overtake Kelly and her husband Dean in their rather amazing 70 ft yacht Freefall, they have bit off a bit more than they can chew in the character of Kelly who happens to be a surgeon. Turns out when pushed she can be as mean and evil as the bad guys.
Enough said. If gore turns you off, skip this one, otherwise a fast read. I’ll get others by the author.
Check out this bit about Deception Island: http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/12/23/deception_island_is_antarctica_s_most_confusing_vacation_destination.html
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Review: Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride
DS Logan McRae is just coming off medical leave in Aberdeen (where it's usually cold and raining sideways) when he's assigned to DI Insch to investigate the murder of three-year-old David Reid. Soon, other children have gone missing and bodies are being discovered.
‘You know,’ said [DI] Insch, ‘since you came back to work we’ve had two abductions, found a dead girl, a dead boy and dragged a corpse with no knees out the harbour. All in the space of three days. That’s a record for Aberdeen.’ He poked about in his packet of fizzy, jelly shapes, coming out with what looked like an amoeba. ‘I’m beginning to think you’re some sort of jinx.’ ‘Thank you, sir.’
The prime suspect is "Roadkill," a schizophrenic with a degree in medieval history who, after leaving a mental hospital got a job picking up dead animals off the roads. Turns out he was keeping them on his small acreage and in one of the large piles was found the body of a 4-year-old girl.
The community is enraged, of course, with self-righteous anger directed at the police and this occasioned one of the funnier scenes in the book as protesters have gathered outside the police station with the usual misspelled signs. (You know the ones: "Get a Brain. Morans" or "Obama. Commander and Theif." or "No Pubic Option.") Or, as here, who can't spell paedophile. Logan winced as he read that last one. Nothing like stupid people with righteous fury and a mob on their side. Last time there had been this kind of fervour three paediatricians had their surgery windows smashed. Now it looked like they were after the foot fetishists.
The situation becomes more confused when forensics reveals one of the dead children had most likely been hit by a car.
Excellent.
‘You know,’ said [DI] Insch, ‘since you came back to work we’ve had two abductions, found a dead girl, a dead boy and dragged a corpse with no knees out the harbour. All in the space of three days. That’s a record for Aberdeen.’ He poked about in his packet of fizzy, jelly shapes, coming out with what looked like an amoeba. ‘I’m beginning to think you’re some sort of jinx.’ ‘Thank you, sir.’
The prime suspect is "Roadkill," a schizophrenic with a degree in medieval history who, after leaving a mental hospital got a job picking up dead animals off the roads. Turns out he was keeping them on his small acreage and in one of the large piles was found the body of a 4-year-old girl.
The community is enraged, of course, with self-righteous anger directed at the police and this occasioned one of the funnier scenes in the book as protesters have gathered outside the police station with the usual misspelled signs. (You know the ones: "Get a Brain. Morans" or "Obama. Commander and Theif." or "No Pubic Option.") Or, as here, who can't spell paedophile. Logan winced as he read that last one. Nothing like stupid people with righteous fury and a mob on their side. Last time there had been this kind of fervour three paediatricians had their surgery windows smashed. Now it looked like they were after the foot fetishists.
The situation becomes more confused when forensics reveals one of the dead children had most likely been hit by a car.
Excellent.
Review: Broken Ground by Val McDermid
A Scottish police procedural (thanks to Net Galley for their free preview in exchange for an honest review.) I haven't read a ton of McDermid and I didn't much care for her protagonist DCI Karen Pirie who ostensibly is still suffering from the loss of her significant other and seems to be taking it out on everyone else. That her boss has it in for the Historic Crimes Unit and has planted a spy in her midst in the form of DS McCartney doesn't help. Her boss is but a caricature of the bitch boss. I would have liked to understand her more. But I suppose seeing her only through Pirie's eyes the view we get is biased in the extreme.
A body has been found by a couple with the help of a crofter. They had been trying to dig up two Indian motorcycles, presumed now to be worth a considerable sum, that had been buried by the woman's grandfather who was "taking" them rather than let them be destroyed as post-war trash. Unbeknownnst to them, the pannier of one also contained a slug of diamonds that another GI was trying to smuggle out of Europe. I was a bit surprised they hadn't bothered to look in the pannier before burying it, but never mind.
I was a bit disappointed with this book. The characters just weren't particularly likeable, not that it's a necessary criteria for liking a bit. They just seemed a bit "off."
Note that the formatting in this ARC for Kindle is really awful, but I assume it will have been fixed by the time of publication.
A body has been found by a couple with the help of a crofter. They had been trying to dig up two Indian motorcycles, presumed now to be worth a considerable sum, that had been buried by the woman's grandfather who was "taking" them rather than let them be destroyed as post-war trash. Unbeknownnst to them, the pannier of one also contained a slug of diamonds that another GI was trying to smuggle out of Europe. I was a bit surprised they hadn't bothered to look in the pannier before burying it, but never mind.
I was a bit disappointed with this book. The characters just weren't particularly likeable, not that it's a necessary criteria for liking a bit. They just seemed a bit "off."
Note that the formatting in this ARC for Kindle is really awful, but I assume it will have been fixed by the time of publication.
Review: Unforgotten by Clare Francis
Hugh Gwynne, in the middle of a court case, becomes obsessed with the idea that his wife, Lizzie, was killed by an arsonist. She had died in a fire at their home, a fire the police insisted was accidental, but nothing seemed to fit, there were too many things out of place.
In the meantime, his client, Tom Deacon, a war veteran claiming PTSD after a car crash in which he saw his daughter burned to death, is furious with Hugh because Hugh had revealed some negative information about Tom that threatens his case which had appeared headed for victory until an anonymous letter arrived with the information.
Hugh's son Charlie has a history with drugs and Hugh worries that perhaps one of his contacts had killed his wife. But she was also involved in finding a witness to a killing that she had stumbled on while working with her clients in the projects.
An interesting story that has less mystery and more a treatise on bereavement and obsession. Still, I would read more of her work.
In the meantime, his client, Tom Deacon, a war veteran claiming PTSD after a car crash in which he saw his daughter burned to death, is furious with Hugh because Hugh had revealed some negative information about Tom that threatens his case which had appeared headed for victory until an anonymous letter arrived with the information.
Hugh's son Charlie has a history with drugs and Hugh worries that perhaps one of his contacts had killed his wife. But she was also involved in finding a witness to a killing that she had stumbled on while working with her clients in the projects.
An interesting story that has less mystery and more a treatise on bereavement and obsession. Still, I would read more of her work.
Friday, August 17, 2018
W.E.B. DuBois on Robert E. Lee and Confederate Monuments
I just happened to run across this essay by WEB DuBois written in 1928 about Robert E Lee. Cogent.
1928. Source: The Crisis, March 1928, v.35, n.3 [found in the “Postscript” section]
Robert E. Lee
"Each year on the 19th of January there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristocratic birth and his military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing–one terrible fact–militates against this and that is the inescapable truth that Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery. Copperheads like the New York Times may magisterially declare: “of course, he never fought for slavery.” Well, for what did he fight? State rights? Nonsense. The South cared only for State Rights as a weapon to defend slavery. If nationalism had been a stronger defense of the slave system than particularism, the South would have been as nationalistic in 1861 as it had been in 1812.
No. People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War. And Lee followed Virginia. He followed Virginia not because he particularly loved slavery (although he certainly did not hate it), but because he did not have the moral courage to stand against his family and his clan. Lee hesitated and hung his head in shame because he was asked to lead armies against human progress and Christian decency and did not dare refuse. He surrendered not to Grant, but to Negro Emancipation.
Today we can best perpetuate his memory and his nobler traits not by falsifying his moral debacle, but by explaining it to the young white south. What Lee did in 1861, other Lees are doing in 1928. They lack the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro because of the overwhelming public opinion of their social environment. Their fathers in the past have condoned lynching and mob violence, just as today they acquiesce in the disfranchisement of educated and worthy black citizens, provide wretchedly inadequate public schools for Negro children and endorse a public treatment of sickness, poverty and crime which disgraces civilization.
It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. it is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God."
******************
Kevin Levin in DuBois in his civil war blog also posted this DuBois comment on Confederate monuments. (http://cwmemory.com/2017/05/29/w-e-b-dubois-on-confederate-monuments/)
W.E.B. DuBois on Confederate Monuments
cwmemory.com
Thanks to all of you who have offered suggestions on how to improve #NOLASyllabus. The list has expanded and deepened in a number of ways, though I am still trying to get a sense of where it is going.
Certainly the most exciting part are the references that I most likely would never have come across on my own. Consider the following reference to a 1931 issue of The Crisis in which W.E.B. DuBois offers some brief remarks about Confederate monuments while traveling through parts of the South.
DuBois’s reflection on the selective memory and history of Confederate monuments comes right in the middle of a narrative on the challenges and contradictions of traveling through the South at the height of the Jim Crow era.
DuBois pushes right back against the myth of the Lost Cause. He refuses to draw a distinction between the Confederate government and the men in the ranks. DuBois clearly understood that as long as white southerners were able to mythologize the war through their monuments, African Americans would remain second class citizens.
Confederate monuments did not just occupy the Jim Crow landscape. For Dubois, they helped to make it possible.
1928. Source: The Crisis, March 1928, v.35, n.3 [found in the “Postscript” section]
Robert E. Lee
"Each year on the 19th of January there is renewed effort to canonize Robert E. Lee, the greatest confederate general. His personal comeliness, his aristocratic birth and his military prowess all call for the verdict of greatness and genius. But one thing–one terrible fact–militates against this and that is the inescapable truth that Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery. Copperheads like the New York Times may magisterially declare: “of course, he never fought for slavery.” Well, for what did he fight? State rights? Nonsense. The South cared only for State Rights as a weapon to defend slavery. If nationalism had been a stronger defense of the slave system than particularism, the South would have been as nationalistic in 1861 as it had been in 1812.
No. People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege and that was what Virginia fought for in the Civil War. And Lee followed Virginia. He followed Virginia not because he particularly loved slavery (although he certainly did not hate it), but because he did not have the moral courage to stand against his family and his clan. Lee hesitated and hung his head in shame because he was asked to lead armies against human progress and Christian decency and did not dare refuse. He surrendered not to Grant, but to Negro Emancipation.
Today we can best perpetuate his memory and his nobler traits not by falsifying his moral debacle, but by explaining it to the young white south. What Lee did in 1861, other Lees are doing in 1928. They lack the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro because of the overwhelming public opinion of their social environment. Their fathers in the past have condoned lynching and mob violence, just as today they acquiesce in the disfranchisement of educated and worthy black citizens, provide wretchedly inadequate public schools for Negro children and endorse a public treatment of sickness, poverty and crime which disgraces civilization.
It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. it is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel–not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God."
******************
Kevin Levin in DuBois in his civil war blog also posted this DuBois comment on Confederate monuments. (http://cwmemory.com/2017/05/29/w-e-b-dubois-on-confederate-monuments/)
W.E.B. DuBois on Confederate Monuments
cwmemory.com
Thanks to all of you who have offered suggestions on how to improve #NOLASyllabus. The list has expanded and deepened in a number of ways, though I am still trying to get a sense of where it is going.
Certainly the most exciting part are the references that I most likely would never have come across on my own. Consider the following reference to a 1931 issue of The Crisis in which W.E.B. DuBois offers some brief remarks about Confederate monuments while traveling through parts of the South.
DuBois’s reflection on the selective memory and history of Confederate monuments comes right in the middle of a narrative on the challenges and contradictions of traveling through the South at the height of the Jim Crow era.
DuBois pushes right back against the myth of the Lost Cause. He refuses to draw a distinction between the Confederate government and the men in the ranks. DuBois clearly understood that as long as white southerners were able to mythologize the war through their monuments, African Americans would remain second class citizens.
Confederate monuments did not just occupy the Jim Crow landscape. For Dubois, they helped to make it possible.
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Russian Meddling
We're in the midst of political outrage over Russian meddling in Trump's election. Trump's close monetary ties to Russian oligarchs are politically unique. Russian meddling is not.
In 1960 I was in 8th grade and we all watched in rapt attention as the first ever televised debates occurred between Nixon and Kennedy. Little did we understand or know the influence of the U-2 incident and how the internal machinations of Kremlin politics might affect the outcome in the United States. Khruschev always maintained he helped Kennedy win the election. He was upset with Eisenhower, disliked Nixon, and thought Kennedy would be easier to manipulate because of his inexperience.
By autumn, the Eisenhower administration had increased its appeals to Khrushchev to release Gary Powers and the RB-47 airmen who had been shot down over the Arctic. Khrushchev recalled later that he had refused after calculating that the election was so close any such move might have swung the outcome. “As it turned out, we’d done the right thing,” he would say later. Given the margin of victory, he said, “The slightest nudge either way would have been decisive.”
I'm reading a fascinating book by Frederick Kempe on the 1961 crisis in Berlin and he lays the groundwork by an examination of the election and the characters of the major players. Had Khruschev wanted to help Eisenhower or Nixon, he could have released Gary Powers sooner. His shoe banging at the United Nations in September helped focus the United States electorate on foreign policy.
Publicly favoring neither candidate ("which is better? the left shoe or the right shoe?")
But behind the scenes, he worked toward Nixon’s defeat. As early as January 1960, over vodka, fruit, and caviar, Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Mikhail Menshikov had asked Adlai Stevenson how Moscow might best help him defeat Nixon. Was it better for the Soviet press to praise him or criticize him—and on which topics? Stevenson responded that he did not expect to be a candidate—and he then prayed that news of the Soviet proposition would never leak. Yet both parties so deeply recognized Khrushchev’s potential to swing votes, either by design or by accident, that each reached out to him. [my emphasis - shades of 2016] Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who had grown close to Khrushchev during his first U.S. trip, had flown to Moscow in February 1960 to convince the Soviet leader that he could work with Nixon. Lodge, who would become Nixon’s running mate, said, “Once Mr. Nixon is in the White House, I’m sure—I’m absolutely certain—he’ll take a position of preserving and perhaps even improving our relations."
The Democrats sent Averill Harriman to Moscow to argue that any endorsement of Kennedy would redownd to Nixon's benefit.
Khruschev was coming under pressure from within his own party as well as that of Mao in Communist China who wanted a less conciliatory position than the "peaceful coexistence" strategy being promoted by Kruschev. The situation in East Germany was also becoming dire as more and more East Germans fled to the West.
It was clear that Khruschev wanted Kennedy to win. “We thought we would have more hope of improving Soviet–American relations if John Kennedy were in the White House.” He told colleagues that Nixon’s anticommunism and his connection with “that devil of darkness [Senator Joe] McCarthy, to whom he owed his career,” all meant “we had no reason to welcome the prospect of Nixon as President.” Khrushchev believed he could outmaneuver Kennedy, a man whom his foreign ministry had characterized as “unlikely to possess the qualities of an outstanding person..... "The consensus in the Kremlin was that the young man was a lightweight, a product of American privilege who lacked the experience required for leadership." They had yet to meet Trump whose extreme narcissism and financial needs will clearly make him a tool of Putin.
In 1960 I was in 8th grade and we all watched in rapt attention as the first ever televised debates occurred between Nixon and Kennedy. Little did we understand or know the influence of the U-2 incident and how the internal machinations of Kremlin politics might affect the outcome in the United States. Khruschev always maintained he helped Kennedy win the election. He was upset with Eisenhower, disliked Nixon, and thought Kennedy would be easier to manipulate because of his inexperience.
By autumn, the Eisenhower administration had increased its appeals to Khrushchev to release Gary Powers and the RB-47 airmen who had been shot down over the Arctic. Khrushchev recalled later that he had refused after calculating that the election was so close any such move might have swung the outcome. “As it turned out, we’d done the right thing,” he would say later. Given the margin of victory, he said, “The slightest nudge either way would have been decisive.”
I'm reading a fascinating book by Frederick Kempe on the 1961 crisis in Berlin and he lays the groundwork by an examination of the election and the characters of the major players. Had Khruschev wanted to help Eisenhower or Nixon, he could have released Gary Powers sooner. His shoe banging at the United Nations in September helped focus the United States electorate on foreign policy.
Publicly favoring neither candidate ("which is better? the left shoe or the right shoe?")
But behind the scenes, he worked toward Nixon’s defeat. As early as January 1960, over vodka, fruit, and caviar, Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Mikhail Menshikov had asked Adlai Stevenson how Moscow might best help him defeat Nixon. Was it better for the Soviet press to praise him or criticize him—and on which topics? Stevenson responded that he did not expect to be a candidate—and he then prayed that news of the Soviet proposition would never leak. Yet both parties so deeply recognized Khrushchev’s potential to swing votes, either by design or by accident, that each reached out to him. [my emphasis - shades of 2016] Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who had grown close to Khrushchev during his first U.S. trip, had flown to Moscow in February 1960 to convince the Soviet leader that he could work with Nixon. Lodge, who would become Nixon’s running mate, said, “Once Mr. Nixon is in the White House, I’m sure—I’m absolutely certain—he’ll take a position of preserving and perhaps even improving our relations."
The Democrats sent Averill Harriman to Moscow to argue that any endorsement of Kennedy would redownd to Nixon's benefit.
Khruschev was coming under pressure from within his own party as well as that of Mao in Communist China who wanted a less conciliatory position than the "peaceful coexistence" strategy being promoted by Kruschev. The situation in East Germany was also becoming dire as more and more East Germans fled to the West.
It was clear that Khruschev wanted Kennedy to win. “We thought we would have more hope of improving Soviet–American relations if John Kennedy were in the White House.” He told colleagues that Nixon’s anticommunism and his connection with “that devil of darkness [Senator Joe] McCarthy, to whom he owed his career,” all meant “we had no reason to welcome the prospect of Nixon as President.” Khrushchev believed he could outmaneuver Kennedy, a man whom his foreign ministry had characterized as “unlikely to possess the qualities of an outstanding person..... "The consensus in the Kremlin was that the young man was a lightweight, a product of American privilege who lacked the experience required for leadership." They had yet to meet Trump whose extreme narcissism and financial needs will clearly make him a tool of Putin.
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