Obsidian Wings

the 28th

by russell

So, this proposal has been making the rounds on Facebook.  It consists of three parts:

1. Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
2. Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our vote and participation count.
3. Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate "preemption" actions by global, national, and state governments.

What's not to like? 

But, to me, it's unnecessarily complicated.  There are about nineteen different concepts floating around in there, which for my simple mind are about eighteen too many.

Here's my counterproposal.  It is exactly one sentence long:

• The terms 'person', 'persons', or 'people' as used in the Constitution of the United States and all of its amendments shall be considered to refer only to natural human persons

How simple is that?

Two-thirds of both houses are needed to put it into play.  I guess we could go with two-thirds of the States demanding a Constitutional Convention, but IMVHO the alternate title for that movie is "Pandora's Box".  So, two-thirds of both houses is what it would take.

I put the odds somewhere south of 'slim', with a more or less asymptotic convergence on 'none'.  But since the zeitgeist seems to be open to bold ventures, there is mine.

A fella can dream.

Your robotic Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

It occurs to me that if we had robots handle our threads about abortion, it would give us quite a bit of time.

 

Election night mostly-open thread

by Doctor Science

I opened the polling place at 5:15am. We left at 8:30pm. I have now had a full bottle of ommegang[1] and am feeling pretty good, actually, though very much like this:

Noontime rest by Van Gogh, after by Millet. John Singer Sargent also did a drawing after the Millet, which makes me wonder (a) how this particular Millet was so widely publicized that both Van Gogh and Sargent did versions, and (b) why Van Gogh and Sargent's versions are reversed.

Anyway, talk about your local election or any results that interest you! Turnout at my NJ pollworker-place was low, compared to an even-numbered year or to a gubernatorial year, though still way above what we get for school board elections or lightly-contested primaries -- one year we pollworkers watched *3* movies (on someone's laptop) between voters. Today I "merely" got through 490 pages of "Uncle Tom's Cabin", which I'd never read before, along with some writing. Expect a discussion post some day soon.

Update just before posting: It looks as though the Mississippi Personhood Amendment is going down to defeat. If they can't make it there, they can't make it anywhere -- at least, I hope not.
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[1] though, OMGang! all of a sudden the microbrew store is HIP DEEP in Belgians! What the heck happened, and which ones besides Ommegang are worth trying? Bear in mind that my local store carries well over 500 types of beer.

A pavilion in Belgium built out of 33,000 beer crates. Because who wouldn't?

Uncle Tom's Cabin in American novels

by Doctor Science

I just finished reading Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America by David S. Reynolds. I highly recommend it for giving some real sense of how and why Uncle Tom's Cabin became the most popular and influential American novel of the 19th century.

One point I hadn't appreciated before is how huge "Uncle Tom plays" were for shaping American popular culture. I knew that Stowe's novel had epic sales, though I hadn't realized how important it was in Great Britain, where it sold a *million* copies in its first year (all without any money coming back to Stowe, as this was before international copyright). But it was the stage productions that really brought Uncle Tom's Cabin to most Americans -- they were the first true American mass culture performances.

Although the main roles were usually taken by white actors in blackface, Tom Shows were also the first opportunity for many African-American entertainers to perform for white audiences. This photo of a Tom Show performance is from the University of Virginia's Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture archive, a fascinating and invaluable resource.

A single cell is not a person: the problem of twins

by Doctor Science

As I hope you all know, Mississippians are going to be voting on a "Fetal Personhood Amendment" on Tuesday. The amendment states:

The term 'person' or 'persons' shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.

Now, the American Family Association (among others) says

the inclusion of the word cloning in the proposed Amendment is designed to prevent cloning embryos for fetal experimentation and does not in any way condone cloning

I suspect that this is a lie. What they are *trying* to do is to get around the problems twins pose to the idea that human life begins at fertilization.

Twins Sarah and Ann with their mother, Elizabeth Gay Bolling, by Mathew Pratt, 1773. The objects the babies are holding are teething/pacifier/rattles of coral and gold. I don't blame Mom for looking a bit staggered about the eyes.

Your Herpetology Friday open post

by liberal japonicus

My wife and I were marveling at this

A Burmese python slithering through the Everglades proved that her eyes weren't bigger than her stomach, swallowing intact a 76-pound deer.

At 15.65 feet, the python isn't the largest on record. But the size of her prey both impresses and concerns state and federal wildlife scientists and land managers trying to control the non-native species.

A necropsy conducted by Everglades National Park wildlife biologists showed the python had a girth of 44.1 inches after devouring the adult female deer. The snake normally weighed 139 pounds.

While on this side of the Pacific, there is this

A research institute in Okinawa Prefecture said Monday that the world's longest habu snake, at 2.42 meters, has been found in the village of Onna in the center of the prefecture's main island.

According to the institute, a man in a car on Oct. 12 found the snake creeping across a street near a residential area of the village.

While I don't currently suffer from ophidiophobia, I may have to reconsider...

Who watches the watchers lose their tempers?

by Doctor Science

I'm not *completely* crazy, so I'm not doing NaNoWriMo, but I am going to try WriSoMiFu. The specific variant I am choosing: write a blog post per day, spending no more than one hour on the writing part. For me this will be practically Twitter-like, real high-speed stream-of-consciousness stuff.

The first second[1] thing to bob to the surface in the primordial soup that is my brain is a question. Late last week, the NY Times ran a story, Officers Unleash Anger at Ticket-Fixing Arraignments in the Bronx:

A three-year investigation into the police's habit of fixing traffic and parking tickets in the Bronx ended in the unsealing of indictments on Friday and a stunning display of vitriol by hundreds of off-duty officers, who converged on the courthouse to applaud their accused colleagues and denounce their prosecution.

My question relates to a specific quote in the story:

"It is hard to see an upside in the way the anger was expressed, especially in Bronx County, where you already have a hard row to hoe in terms of building rapport with the community," said Eugene J. O'Donnell, a professor of police studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "The Police Department is a very angry work force, and that is something that should concern people, because it translates into hostile interactions with people."

The article doesn't get O'Donnell to say why the Police Department is "a very angry work force". Do any of you have an ideas about why? Are the Police (in NYC or in the Bronx or in general) really more upset than other work forces in These Difficult Economic Times? Is more of their upset anger, or do they have something specific to be angry *about*?

The crime rate has been going down for some time, especially in NYC. Does this make the police angry, because it threatens their jobs, somehow? Or is their anger about CompStat and the numbers-driven approach to policing?

Tell me what's going on.

The Night Watch is what immediately sprang to mind when I thought, "a picture of the police". Not terribly relevant to New York's Finest, perhaps, but that's how my brain works.

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[1] The first thing got too long. Coming later this week, I hope.

Niallism

by Eric Martin

There have been two recent reviews of Niall Ferguson's most recent book that are very worth reading. The first, by Pankaj Mishra, is a methodical survey of Ferguson's recent works, with a concise accounting of the many glaring gaps in knowledge and sloppy methodology that afflict Ferguson's pseudo-scholarship (including, of course, in his latest offering). 

While Mishra discusses the white supremacist undertones that inform Ferguson's incessant anxiety about the decline of "Western" civilization, Noah Smith really homes in on this aspect of Ferguson's world-view:

First, Ferguson's thesis:

I believe it’s time to ask how close the United States is to the “Oh sh*t!” moment—the moment we suddenly crash downward... 

The West first surged ahead of the Rest after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations that I call the “killer applications”: 

1. Competition... 

2. The Scientific Revolution... 

3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government... 

4. Modern Medicine... 

5. The Consumer Society... 

6. The Work Ethic... 

For hundreds of years, these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia. They are the best explanation for what economic historians call “the great divergence”: the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living and those in the rest of the world... 

Beginning with Japan, however, one non-Western society after another has worked out that these apps can be downloaded and installed in non-Western operating systems...

Now, before I move on to the really annoying part of Ferguson's article, this talk of "non-Western operating systems" has already rankled. What the heck is the "operating system" of a society? What inherent quality of "Western-ness" does Ferguson imagine Japan fundamentally lacks, such that even though Japan has representative democracy, property rights, competitive capitalism, work ethic, science, and medicine, the Land of the Rising Sun is still running on a "non-Western operating system"?

Is it Christianity? But then South Korea would be "Western," since it is majority Christian (and far more religious than, say, France). And Ferguson cites Korea as a "non-Western" civilization in his very next paragraph (which I'll get to in a moment). 

Is it geography? Would Ferguson exclude Australia and New Zealand from "the West"? 

I think you see what I'm getting at, and just to drive it home, here's Ferguson's next paragraph:

Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here. And you don’t have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans. (emphasis mine)

So a sign that American civilization is in decline is that...Asian-Americans study hard?

Labeling Asian Americans as "non-Western" gives away the game completely. By "Western," Niall Ferguson is not referring to a geographic region, a political system, an economic system, or a religion. He is not even referring to a specific set of countries. He is referring to a set of people; people who have pale pinkish skin, fine wavy hair, and prominent eye ridges. By "Western," Niall Ferguson means "white people." Asian Americans may have American passports, Ferguson thinks, but civilizationally speaking they are permanent foreigners.

So, according to Ferguson, my wife, son and daughter aren't really Americans because my wife is of Korean descent.  On the other hand, should Ferguson fully emigrate to the United States, and should he marry a Caucasian [er, after divorcing his current wife], he and his progeny would be Americans. Neat.

Aside from the fact that his historical scholarship is so laughably shoddy, these repugnant views should be enough to garner him a healthy dose of scorn and hinder any type of career advancement. On the contrary, his imperial apologia, infused with indulgent white supremacist ego-stroking, has carried his star ever higher in the United States.

Ferguson's popularity itself is evidence that we're not exactly living up to some of the more exalted principles of Western civilization.