Monday, July 30, 2012

Reasonableness vs. Fanaticism

For me, the paragraph below, lifted completely out of context from a Paul Krugman op-ed piece, illustrates one of the differences in the way conservatives and liberals think.
So could the euro be saved? Yes, probably. Should it be saved? Yes, even though its creation now looks like a huge mistake. For failure of the euro wouldn’t just cause economic disruption; it would be a giant blow to the wider European project, which has brought peace and democracy to a continent with a tragic history.
The key passage is "Should it be saved? Yes, even though its creation now looks like a huge mistake."

If there is a European equivalent of the US tea baggers, they are the ones who are saying "screw the Euro; it was a mistake from the beginning and this is our opportunity to kill it.  To hell with the the social and economic disruptions." `Actually those people probably do exist in all the European countries to a certain extent, but they don't have very little voice and no power.

Unfortunately the U.S. case is different.  The tea bagger influence is so strong in the Republican party that John Boehner has already expressed a willingness to shut down the government when the debt ceiling comes back as an issue in January. And he's supposed to be one of the reasonable ones. With luck, he won't still be the Speaker, but he probably will be.


Saturday, July 28, 2012

A Solution in Search of a Problem

We can hope that the courts will stop the implementation of these various state laws.  I believe a Federal court in Wisconsin has already done so there.  A Texas law is somewhere in the court system, and the Pennsylvania case went to court this past week. 

Doonesbury

Doonesbury

Doonesbury

Doonesbury

Doonesbury

Doonesbury

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder, published in October 2010.

This is not a book title that would grab me these days, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the assumption that I've already read this story.  But I heard or read a review of the book at the time of its publication that intrigued me because it was clear that this was a history that I didn't really know.  Snyder  makes use of a lot of records that formerly were locked away behind the iron curtain. 

The basic story of the book is that, in the countries between Germany and Russia (principally Poland, the three Baltic States, Ukraine, and Belorussia) between the years of 1933 and 1945, over 14 million people were deliberately murdered as political policy by Stalin and/or Hitler.  This number does not count the people who died in concentration/labor camps, in the process of deportation or relocation, civilians that died as a result of military actions (think the millions who died at Stalingrad), or soldiers from any army who were killed in battle. It does include the Jews and others who were murdered in the death camps, the Russian prisoners of war who were deliberately starved and the ones who were shot.


Stalin began the policy of murdering his own citizens when he decided in 1933 to starve the Ukranian peasants.  There were food shortages and hunger all over in the Soviet Union resulting from resistance to Stalin's collectivization of agriculture, but the author makes a clear distinction. Hunger is not policy. Starvation is. All of the Russia may have been hungry in those years, but it was only in the Ukraine and Belorussia that Stalin decided to starve the peasants by exporting 100% of their crops to get cash for his industrialization projects. The farmers of the area literally watched their production being shipped in rail cars to the ports on the Black Sea as they were dying. And of course they were shot if they tried to horde so much as a few grains for their own use.

A corollary is that after the war, the Soviet Union manipulated history so as to conceal much of this story.  For one thing, the Soviets liked to pretend that WWII began for them when Hitler invaded in June 1941. But it really began in September 1939. They invaded Poland from the east at the same time as Hitler invaded from the west. The eastern Poles were invaded by the Russians in 1939, the Germans in 1941 and then again by the Russians in 1944. The story of the Baltic states is similar.


The author mentions in passing the irony that England and France declared war on Germany when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, but they were in no position geographically, politically or militarily to do a thing to help Poland as the war was coming to an end.

Aside from the fact that it's a depressing story and one that is difficult to read, it is easy to be overwhelmed by numbers and historical incidents, but the author constantly interjects the stories of real people when he can to counteract the numbing effect of the numbers that are beyond our imagination.









Thursday, July 19, 2012

Anecdote No. 1

I love clever theater and movie stories.  This is from the actor Frank Langella's recent book, Dropped Names.  It was told by the English actress Celia Johnson, who I adored in the oh-so-sophisticated 1945 David Lean movie Brief Encounters, based on a Noel Coward play.  And I never liked Trevor Howard more than I did in that movie either.

The story, as told by Celia Johnson, is about her neighbor and fellow actor, Alastair Sims:


One day, I was pulling into the courtyard in the pouring rain, and I could hear the phone ringing. I'd just been to the market and I had quite a lot of bags with me.  I came round to open the boot, the pelting rain flooding over my hat and into the bags.  One bottom began to break and I was trying desperately not to drop the eggs.  Still the phone kept ring incessantly.  Bloody hell, I thought, go away.  I got everything in the kitchen on the counter.  I was soaked and furious.  The phone did not stop.  I picked it up and shouted into it:
Hallo!
Celia?  Alastair here.  Darling, I just saw you in the market.  You were marvelous!
ta120718.gif

Make Of It What You Wish

Three stories...generalize as you like.

This morning, after searching in every possible place, I had to admit that the little coin purse which had my free subway pass was lost. The purse didn't have much money, but that wasn't my concern. The problem was that I had just replaced my subway pass last Friday after having lost my original one, and there was no way I wanted to go back three or four days later  and sign a "declaration of a lost ticket" again.


I went to SESC (I'm not going to explain SESC; see earlier posts if you want to know.) like I do about four times per week and, with nothing to lose, I went to the lost and found area and asked if a coin purse had been turned in yesterday.  It had been, with everything intact.


Back in the early 1980s I was working as a temp at General Mills Headquarters, in the Building Services Department, which included the lost and found department.  I had just finished complaining to a co-worker one day that I was missing a $20 bill, that it must have fallen out of my pocket at the company store when I bought my daily newspaper. Thirty minutes later, somebody came in to report that they had found a $20 bill in the company store.  I can't even imagine being so trusting as to turn in cash.


Finally, in 2003 (I think), I had arranged my vacation in Thailand so that I had a 3 or 4-day stop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on the way out, and about an 18-hour stop there on the way back to California. Things went really wrong on the way back and I arrived in KL sometime after midnight, several hours late, and really, really tired. I made a quick phone call and then caught the train into the city. Just as the train was leaving, I realized I had left a bag on the floor next to the phone. I checked the next day to see if it had been turned in to lost and found, but it wasn't there. About three months later, the bag was returned to me in California. It turns out it had been turned in at the airport in KL and, because a copy of my flight information was in the bag, it had been sent to LA, probably on the same flight that I took.  The delay was in getting it from LA to Tulare, California.


Again, generalize as you wish, but one possibility is that people the world over are basically honest.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Uncle Drew

Thanks to my brother-in-law, Conrad, for this.  I laughed till I cried.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Boy Scouts Reaffirm Discrimination

The Boy Scouts of America have reaffirmed their policy of excluding openly gay boys as member and gay or lesbian adults as leaders.  And of course they have the Supreme Court-affirmed right to do this because of a 5-4 ruling in 2000.

The Supremes, in their wisdom, said the BSA, as a private organization, can decide "what values it wants to inculcate."  By this logic, why can't a private business refuse to sell to blacks or gays or, in Arizona, those damn Mexicans?

Here's the trouble with that kind of legalistic thinking, or at least one of the troubles. It ignores the fact that, in daily life (and these decisions always involve real lives, remember) the distinction between what is private and  what is public is blurred. Obviously that bigoted store owner who might like to decide who he sells to, ignoring the financial stupidity of such a policy, can't do so because his private store doesn't exist in some geographical or social vacuum.

And neither to the Boy Scouts.  Imagine this scenario.  The Boy Scouts in Anytown USA get free use of some public space, perhaps the school, perhaps a city recreation area, perhaps a campground.  Any gay teenage in that town who is denied his desire to join the scouts, or parent of such a gay teenager, knows that the city is probably violating one of its own ordinances, or a state ordinance, about providing public aid to organizations that discriminate.

But because of the five Supremes in 2000, who live in some imaginary world of abstractions, or who try to imagine how many homophobic founding fathers could have danced on the head of a pin, that boy and his family will have no good options.  They could just sigh and accept the discrimination, which they're probably already familiar with, or they could spend time and money suing their city, with no guarantee of winning short of somewhere at the appellate level.  And when, after all this time and effort, they finally win their lawsuit, the city may have to stop supporting the scouts, but the scouts are still allowed to discriminate and the boy still can't join.  Because the scouts are a "private" organization.

Monday, July 16, 2012

"Five Obamacare Myths"

From today's Bill Keller Op-Ed piece "Five Obamacare Myths"...to commemorate the House Republicans' recent "33rd theatrical vote" to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

If the Obama campaign needs a snappy one-liner, it could borrow this one from David Cutler: “Never before in history has a candidate run for president with the idea that too many people have insurance coverage.”

Fair and Balanced

Seems about right to me.


Sunday, July 15, 2012

Having Fun on the Job

For some reason I can no longer remember, but continuing the theme of having fun at work, I was thinking recently of how much I used to enjoy the punning headlines in the Minneapolis Star Tribune when I lived there in the 1980s and 1990s.  I decided to see if they still do it.  Actually, I don't know if these are puns per se, but they are at least clever and make you groan in the way puns do.

"Oakland batters Duensing, Twins.
"To Boost Tourism, Cities Want to Make Lake Minnetonka Liquid Asset."
"New Force in Anti-Bullying Joins Front Line in Anoka-Hennepin."


The LA Times is pretty good sometimes too:
"A New Dawn for Sunset Boulevard."
"Abuzz About Bee Keeping in Los Angeles"
(with a subtitle of "Give Bees a Chance")

And even the very proper NY Times couldn't resist this one:
At Comic-Con, You Can't Defy Gravitas



If you have a boring job, bring your sense of humor to work with you.

The following is from the first page of an ebook I recently downloaded.  Read it to the end.


A Strange Disappearance
First published in 1880
ISBN 978-1-775450-38-2
© 2010 The Floating Press
While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

The Unregulated Internet

For the past three or more years, I have subscribed to MLB.com TV, which allows me to watch any major league baseball game, either in real time or after they´ve been played.  In the U.S. there are market blackouts on live games, but I don't have that problem in Brasil.

When I first started watching games this way, the intervals between half innings were usually just dead time, with an MLB logo and a printed message saying that the game was in a commercial break.  But there came to be more and more more advertisements, so that today most of that interval is filled with boring commercials.

One of the ads I've seen several times this year is one that supposedly celebrates "the American spirit."  It has generic images that suggest excitement and adventure while an insipid voice over drones on and on.  Frankly, the only image I remember is a still shot of a motorcycle, and I don't remember a word of the mindless drivel.  The point is that, as you listen to this schlock, you begin to wonder what in the hell is this commercial pushing.  At the end you learn, as a hand slaps down a bottle of Jack Daniels and the voice says something again about the American spirit.

After seeing this ad about a dozen times (the ads repeat even more frequently than the ads do during sports events on TV), the inappropriateness of it struck me.  What the hell can Jack Daniels do to enhance the enjoyment of life as represented by the images I've just seen?  I thought, this romanticization of alcohol should not be allowed.  And then I remembered, it isn't allowed on TV or radio. It is just that the booze industry figured out what regulators and legislators haven't...there is another medium out there for us to use.

At least the motorcycle was a still shot without a rider anywhere to be seen. That tells you the corporate lawyers were involved in the production; you can imagine what the ad men wanted.

And, mind you, I had these crystal clear thoughts about the evils of booze after having downed a fair amount of vodka. Thank gawd I don't own a motorcycle.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

The Oprah Bump

For several days now I've been reading the new translation of Anna Karenina. Actually, when I checked the other day, I found out this widely-praised new translation is ten years old.  I'm just a little bit behind in my reading.  I can't die yet; there is so much to read.

Everytime I turn on my Kindle, on the home page I see "Anna Karenina (Oprah's Book Club). What would Tolstoy have been without her?

Friday, July 6, 2012

Alternative History

Of all the posts I've made just to satisfy myself, this probably needs to go near the head. What I had in mind when I first thought of this post yesterday probably isn't true anymore, but I still find it interesting.  You don't have to.

A post on the SCOTUSBlog in April says of Chief Justice Fred Vinson:
 There’s a pretty strong consensus that Chief Justice Fred Vinson was the worst Chief Justice of the twentieth century.  The conventional view goes something like this: Vinson was a bumbling, incompetent political hack, an intellectual lightweight with minimal understanding of complex legal issues, a card-playing crony of Harry Truman who continued to advise Truman even after taking his seat on the Court, a reactionary with horrific instincts in key civil liberties cases, and, worst of all, a major obstacle to unanimity in Brown v. Board of Education.  By this account, the best thing Vinson ever did was to die of a heart attack at precisely the right moment – in the middle of the Brown proceedings in 1953, thus allowing his successor, Chief Justice Earl Warren, to author a unanimous opinion invalidating racial segregation in public schools.
The conventional wisdom for years, and which I assumed was still true when I made my last post, was that the Brown v Board of Education ruling, from a Vincent Court would have been a divided ruling. Apparently there is even a would-be-confidential memo from Justice Douglas which asserts that very notion. And there are so many demeaning opinions about Vinson which make it an appealing conclusion.

One of his former law clerks said of Vinson:
“He was a mean little despot who was so deficient in many respects as man and judge. This man is a pygmy morally and mentally. And so uncouth.”
Talk about having problems with your boss!
 
His colleague on the Court, Felix Frankfurter, said upon hearing of Vinson´s death:
 “This is the first indication that I have ever had, that there is a God.”
I've worked with people like that too.


What I didn't know when I made the last post was that, in the Spring of 2011, the Indiana Law Review hosted a symposium on counterfactuals in constitutional history, and one of the topics was "What if Chief Justice Fred Vinson Had Not Died of a Heart Attack in 1953?: Implications for Brown and Beyond." The following is from the abstract of their conclusion:
....Chief Justice Vinson’s untimely death deprived him of the historical stature to which he otherwise would have been entitled. It concludes, contrary to many accounts, that Vinson would have authored a unanimous opinion of the Court in Brown v. Board of Education invalidating segregation in public schools. This conclusion is bolstered by Vinson’s decisions in prior race cases, by his consistent support for the policies of the federal government, by his fervent anti-Communism, and by his close friendship with President Harry Truman. Authorship of Brown would have given Vinson instant historical immortality, guaranteeing his place among the nation’s most significant chief justices.

Moreover, if Vinson had survived, Earl Warren would not have become Chief Justice. Vinson’s more likely successors would have been John Marshall Harlan (under Eisenhower) or Byron White (under Kennedy). Depending on the timing of Vinson’s ultimate departure from the court, certain key Warren Court precedents might have been decided by 5-4 votes in the other direction.
For example, we would still have had the Brown decision but Miranda would have gone the other way.

The reason I went ahead with this blog anyway is that I find the subject of alternative history, or counterfactuals, mildly intriguing.  I liked the observation I read somewhere and can no longer find which pointed out that we deal in counterfactuals all the time without giving it a thought.  If Gore were President instead of Bush, we wouldn't have gone to war in Iraq.  If Kennedy hadn't been shot, he would never have allowed the country to get as deeply committed in Vietnam as did Johnson.  If the Obama stimulus package had been of the size that Paul Krugman recommended at the time, the recovery would be further along. If McCain had picked a real Vice Presidential candidate instead of a space alien...etc. etc. etc.


 


Thursday, July 5, 2012

Today's Book Review and History Lesson

For whatever reason, lately I seem to keep coming back to matters that concern the Supreme Court.  The latest example was my decision to read the 2000 biography Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, by Juan Williams.

Marshall was certainly one of the giants of the civil rights movement, whose life was a continual effort to bring about an end to racial segregation in the U.S.  Working for the NAACP and later the Legal Defense Fund arm of that organization, he had a series of important victories before the Supreme Court that forced an end to "separate but equal."  The first cases, beginning in the mid-1930s, involved law schools and medical schools. I don't know if it is still true, but at one time he had argued more cases before the Supreme Court than anyone else in history, and it was only after a string of victories that he was prepared to argue the famous Brown v. Board of Education case (which was really 5 different cases from around the country consolidated into one and remembered with the name of one of them.)

After the Brown case, Marshall was appointed as a Federal Judge on the Appellate Court in NYC, and in 1962 LBJ named it as the U.S. Solicitor General. (There is an interesting story here that I don't think Juan Williams has necessarily got to the bottom of.  Marshall had a lifetime appointment to the Appellate Court and he gave that up to take a political appointment as Solicitor General. Marshall and LBJ always denied there was an agreement that Marshall would get the next appointment to the Supreme Court, and Johnson even told Marshall, on the night before he named him, that he was not going to name him. And there is plenty of testimony by LBJ's inner circle that he was considering others. Still it seems like there is more to that story.)

One of the things I did not know about this time in the civil rights movement is that the goal of integration, while always in Marshall's sights, was not universally shared.  Many people thought it was much more practical, and therefore desirable, to use the courts to make the segregated black schools truly equal.  The worry was that Marshall's and the NCAAP's quest for the perfect solution would prevent an acceptable improvement of the current reality.  While it may seem like an interesting historical abstraction today, these were the real concerns of real people who wanted the best possible education for their children, and for whom the failure to end segregation meant the continuation of some truly horrific schools in many locales.  The black community was truly split on this issue, if not 50-50 at least significantly, and with a lot of important leaders on both sides.

Also, it took an amazing amount of personal courage for a black family to allow themselves to be used in an integration case, while a case to bring about truly equal schools could have been filed with less threat to any individual black family.  The truly heroic aspect of the ordinary people involved in these cases, people who risked literally everything, reminds me to reread Juan Williams' other book, Eyes on the Prize, which was a companion to the PBS series of the same name...way back when.

Marshall and the NAACP never wavered in their commitment to integration, and one of the reasons the Topeka case was chosen over others is that the black schools in Topeka were very nearly on a par with the white schools.  Juan Williams cites evidence that the best black schools may even have been better than the worst white schools in Topeka. The rationale was that they wanted to remove the option from the courts of simply ordering the city to make the schools truly equal, since they virtually were already.

Marshall's story ultimately becomes rather tragic, as the civil rights movement took a different direction from the legal approach he had followed, and he felt less than appreciated by the last decade of his life, especially as the make up of the Supreme Court had changed and he was relegated to the role of perpetual dissenter.

Enough history for today.  Next up is an alternative history lesson of what would have it meant to history if Chief Justice Vinson had not died of a heart attack between the time the Brown case was first argued before the court and the time it was finally decided.

Craigslist Personal Ad




Monday, July 2, 2012

Privatized Debtors' Prisons

According to a scary story in the NY Times, the latest trend in our so-called judicial system is for municipalities to turn their courts into profit centers by handing their uncollected misdemeanor fines over to private companies, who have the authority to jail people and to levy additional fees of their own.  To paraphrase one person cited in the story, it's now about generating revenue and not about meting out justice.


The private companies who go in for this line of work don't charge the cities anything, of course. They make their money by assessing fees onto the fines of the defendants and charging jailed defendants a daily charge for being held.  The story cites one county in Pennsylvania that has authorized 26 different fees, totaling $2500, that the private companies can charge in addition to the original fine.  In one Alabama case, a $179 traffic ticket is now a bill of over $3000 to the private company, and the defendant has already spent 40 days in jail.

And forget all Supreme Court rulings about the rights of defendants to legal representation. I don't think the Miranda ruling applies to people charged with misdemeanors.  But when misdemeanors can mean jail time, it should.  


These companies are bill collectors, but they are given the authority to say to someone that if he doesn’t pay he is going to jail,” said John B. Long, a lawyer in Augusta, Ga., who is taking the issue to a federal appeals court this fall. “There are things like garbage collection where private companies are O.K. No one’s liberty is affected. The closer you get to locking someone up, the closer you get to a constitutional issue.”
  J. Scott Vowell, the presiding judge of Alabama’s 10th Judicial Circuit, said in an interview that his state’s Legislature, like many across the country, was pressuring courts to produce revenue, and that some legislators even believed courts should be financially self-sufficient.
All government functions cannot be expected to generate revenue, nor can they legitimately be turned over to private companies.  The failure stories mount up, from for-profit schools all over the country, to New Jersey's privatized and under-supervised halfway houses where a misdemeanor defendant was killed a few weeks ago, and now this.

What all of these private companies have down pat is their sales pitch for gullible and gutless politicians who are looking for easy answers, and that is always what is promised, the answer to whatever might be the problem of the moment.  What they're not so good at is delivering the services they promise or safeguarding the constitutional rights of the people in their control.

But we keep going back for more.