Obsidian Wings

Your Martian open thread

by Doctor Science

liberal japonicus seems to have been eaten by a grue again, so I'll do the open thread.

I can't see Ray Bradbury's death this week as a tragedy: he lived an extremely long, fruitful, and honored life, shaping the imaginations of millions of people, myself included.

The fact that his death occurred during the last Transit of Venus for the next hundred years makes me think of his story All Summer in a Day, one of the Bradbury stories burned most searingly into my mind.

Of course, I also think of Bradbury and Mars together, so have some Martian art:

The Blue Scorpion, one of the images from Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea by Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick. The project incorporates images from NASA's Mars rovers, along with Terran photographs, models, and constructions.

Travel Poster - Cryptic Region Geysers, Mars by Ron Guyatt. Be sure to visit the south polar region during the spring thaw to see this unique phenomenon, unlike anything on Terra!

Talk about Bradbury, vacation spots of the solar system, or whatever.

I Don't Like the Result, So Let's Make the Whole System Worse!

--by Sebastian

Over at the legal blog, Balkinization, Magliocca seems concerned about the possibility of the Supreme Court striking down the individual mandate of the Health Care bill, so he proposes a counter measure which on about a moment's thought seems highly dangerous if legitimized:

In the absence of a line-item veto, legislatures can coerce the executive to sign a controversial provision into law by putting it into an omnibus bill that contains lots of popular things.  In effect, a dare is made that a President or a Governor would rather swallow one bad part rather than block many good parts.  This dare does not always work, of course, and legislation structured in this way cannot always pass, but omnibus bills do tilt the balance of power in favor of popular assemblies.

Why can't the same be done with respect to courts?  Suppose Congress knows that a certain provision (say about campaign finance) will be constitutionally suspect.  They could bundle it with lots of unrelated matters and insert a non-severability clause providing that: "If any portion of this legislation is found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, then every other portion becomes inoperative." In that case, the SG would solemnly tell the Justices that striking down the contested provision would deprive orphans of milk, stop the construction of a dam in Utah, and so on.  This doesn't preclude the Court from acting.  It just makes it harder.

As far as I can see, there is nothing unconstitutional about this tactic at the federal level.  (At the state constitutional level there may be impediments to omnibus legislation.)  There are political checks on the abuse of this sweeping authority by Congress.  Many members will not want to risk their pet projects by tying them to an uncertain constitutional fight.  Moreover, you need the President (and perhaps 60 senators) to go along.  If you jump those hurdles, though, then the Court would face an all-or-nothing choice in constitutional litigation.  (An as-applied challenge might not come within a given non-severability clause, but that would depend on how the legislation was drafted.)

In the context of health care, this framing of the issue might have made a big difference.  There may be five votes to strike down the individual mandate. It's less likely that there are five votes to strike down the entire 2,000-plus-page statute.  If the Court's only choice was between this and upholding the individual mandate, the result might be different from what we will see in a few weeks.

This is a horrible idea.  It took me about ten seconds to come up with a plausible hypothetical: RomneyCare Health and Indefinite Secret Detention of Terrorists Act.  This near future act would solidify the funding of the Affordable Health Care law by creating funding sources to make up for the hypothetically struck down individual mandate, while also offering the President indefinite secret detention of citizens deemed by the administration to be terrorists and small print authorizing torture, but only in extreme but unreviewable instances.  Non-severability clause duly inserted.  The biggest problem would be getting enough Republicans to sign on to the health care side, finding enough Democrats to support the 'national security' side would be trivial.  So now to get the court to review the most basic civil right--not to be indefinitely detained without court oversight, the Supreme Court will have to strike down the whole health care act. 

What could possibly go wrong if we designed court challenges like that? 

File this under: don't give sweeping new powers to a branch of government that you wouldn't ever want to see in the hands of your political opponents. Magliocca correctly notes that it is much more likely that the Supreme Court will just invalidate the indivdual mandate rather than the whole act.  Turning irritation at the loss of a political skirmish (while leaving the Affordable Health Care Act largely intact) into a suggestion that could easily and literally endanger civil rights across the board is horribly short-sighted.  The 'tough on crime' streak in the US makes all sorts of civil rights curtailments much too easy.  This would make fighting them in court later almost impossible. 

 

Pollworker report

by Doctor Science

Pollworkers: 3.

Voters: 32.

Number of voters who showed up for 2008 General Election: 503. Prediction: We will be *really* busy in November.

Books read: 2.3

1. American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan.

I heard about the book Ta-Nehisi Coates. TNC said:

Morgan's basic contention, one which I increasingly find convincing, is that American slavery made American freedom possible. Thus, it is an understatement--and perhaps even a falsehood--to cast slavery, as Condoleeza Rice has, as the "birth defect" of American freedom. The term "birth defect" conveys the notion of other possibilities and unfortunate accidents. But Morgan would argue slavery didn't just happen as a byproduct, it was the steward. Put differently, slavery is America's midwife, not it's birth defect.

Now I've read Morgan's book, and I disagree with both TNC and Morgan.

The ruins of Jamestown, as seen (or imagined) around 1854.

Morgan adduces no evidence IMHO that slavery was *necessary* for American ideas about politics and freedom to develop. He does not demonstrate, for instance, that "freedom" was a more salient concept for the colonists of Virginia than it was for those of New England. Indeed, the fact that the New England colonists spit out Governor Andros and the idea of a Dominion, but Virginia accepted both, suggests that the idea of political independence was more firmly grounded in the North than in Virginia.

I side with those who view slavery as neither "birth defect" nor "midwife", but as "original sin". That is, slavery was a choice, and it was a choice to be evil -- and the consequences have reverberated down from generation to generation of people who made no choice about the matter at all. It is a choice we inherited and the consequences of which we have to deal with even hundreds of years later, which we can't escape by saying that we never made that choice ourselves.

Morgan's book (published in 1975) gives a well-rounded picture of the development of the Virginia colonies from Roanoke forward; as far as I can tell it's not terribly outdated by more recent research. One persistent theme is the consistent contempt the English showed toward agricultural labor and the people who do it. Jefferson rhapsodized about "yeoman farmers", but the history of Virginia is full of men who felt *anything*, up to and including actual cannibalism, was better than working in the fields or paying people well to do it. Jefferson's "yeoman farmers" had no dirt under their nails, they had indentured servants or outright slaves to do the grubby work.

If Jefferson and Madison were eloquent, impassioned philosophers of republican freedom, maybe they had to be eloquent to conceal from themselves that their "independence" was absolutely dependent on other people doing their subsistence work: they could not feed themselves.

2. Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels.

Not very long, not terribly detailed. Her interesting theory: that John of Patmos was warning various (Jewish-)Christian churches not to be seduced by the followers of Paul and their Gentile-favoring laxity about the Torah.

She talks a lot about similarities and differences between Revelations and various of the Nag Hammadi texts, but IMHO overlooks one crucial difference which makes Revelations much more like the rest of the (New and Old) canon: Revelations talks about social and political justice, not a path for personal spiritual development.

For instance, she says the First Horseman is "War", when it's clear to me that he is Tyranny, the over-powerful ruler. The Second Horseman is clearly War. During most of the past two millennia, though, it's been dangerous to recognize that the First Horseman represents something that can be wrong with kingship, so he gets re-cast a lot. Similarly, I think it's obvious that the Third Horseman is Economic Injustice, a constant refrain of the Hebrew prophets -- but very uncomfortable for the temporal powers to recognize. Better to call him Famine, as though he's the fault of the weather -- instead of being the embodiment of Amartya Sen's theories about famine arising from economic inequality.

The Four Cocktail Rings of the Apocalypse, by Justified-Sinner.

+0.3= bits of:

3.1 St. Patrick's Gargoyle by Katherine Kurtz.

I was hoping it would be a light Dublin confection; it turned out to be a rather tedious guidebook. I couldn't hear the Irish voices, and the characters were lecturing me and each other, so I quit.

3.2 When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson.

A gorgeous writer who makes you work for her meaning. I only read three pieces in this essay collection before it was time to go, and I found her prose better than her thinking. In particular, her examples aren't *specific* enough, too much of the time she's generalizing about These Modern Times. And I don't think she recognizes that infection with Cicero's prose isn't just her problem, but is endemic in Western literature -- I'm not sure I'm completely over it myself.

4. It turns out that it's possible for a beer to be too chocolaty. Now I know.

Pre-Primary Tab Dump

by Doctor Science

I'm a pollworker tomorrow, so I have to go to bed at 10 tonight and get up at 4:30am, to be at the polling place by 5:15. Here are my tabs, in lieu of an actual post:

• Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era | Matt Richel, New York Times: part of the Times' ongoing series, Kids These Days and That Music They Play on My Lawn. Summary: oh noez! Now poor and/or non-white kids have computers, they mostly use them to waste time! It's the fault of their shiftless parents.
• Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds: the 2010 report which is the only source of actual data cited in the NYT article. It found:
  • race and economic status actually made no difference to the amount of time teens spent using the Internet for homework.
  • the big difference is that black and Hispanic kids watch (or watched -- data are from 2009, which is the Pleistocene in Internet terms) YouTube a lot more, and listen(ed) to music more
  • no information about how much time teens "waste" online reading or writing. It's my observation that, compared to my youth, Kids These Days read and write a *lot* more on average, because so much of their entertainment comes embedded in text and so many of their social interactions are text-based.
• What Filesharing Studies Really Say - Conclusions and Links; by Drew Wilson at ZeroPaid. Wilson did an exhaustive, exhausting look at scientific research on file-sharing:

  Based on all the scientific reasoning, scientific predictions and models and a whole lot more that we got from this series, we shouldn’t even be anywhere near the kinds of debates we are having now with respect to copyright enforcement (yes, not even close). Instead, we should, at minimum, be seriously considering things like an ISP levy or creating a framework for legal file-sharing or trying to think of services that imitate the file-sharing structure to help artists and the industry make money. It’s like we’ve shunned all science and economics and headed down the road of trying to constrain, restrict and, in some ways, shut down the Internet instead. It really puts into perspective just how shocking idea’s like the “graduated response” or three strikes laws and censoring websites really are.

• Marriage Compromise and a Counteroffer They're doing it again: driving up my blood pressure by saying, as Bob Hyatt does,

  The State needs to get out of the “marriage” business. It should recognize that as long as it uses that term, and continues to privilege certain types of relationships over others this issue is going to divide us as a nation, and is only going to become more and more contentious. We need to move towards the system used in many European countries where the State issues nothing but civil unions to anyone who wants them, and then those who desire it may seek a marriage from the Church.

  vorjack at Unreasonable Faith comes around to noticing the problem:

  exactly what claim does Hyatt think Christianity has over a civil institution that predates the religion, and which the religion resisted for centuries? So here’s a counteroffer for Hyatt: let’s leave "marriage" as a civil institution. It has an extremely long history of being a civil institution, and for most of its history the Christian church was happy to leave it as such. Perhaps the Church could use a more theologically loaded word like "covenant," since that already has some legitimacy among conservatives.

• Paul Krugman on Newsnight, 30 May 2012 - YouTube: from Krugman's UK tour. A particularly clear demonstration of what the K-Man is up against, because we can see people, more coherent than most of their US counterparts and not carrying the baggage of US political familiarity, stating clearly what they believe: that the government throwing people out of work will give business "confidence", which will lead to more hiring. Because virtue (which is money) must be rewarded, and vice (which is debt and poverty) punished.

  

  The fact that he doesn't do this is one of the things I most respect about The Shrill One. At Digg; I don't know the original source.
• It turns out that newspapers are still good for something, and here are two shining, Pulitzer-worthy examples:
  • Stand your ground law, Trayvon Martin and a shocking legacy | Tampa Bay Times:

    Florida's "stand your ground" law is being used in ways never imagined — to free gang members involved in shootouts, drug dealers beefing with clients and people who shot their victims in the back.

    Defendants have invoked the law to excuse all manner of mischief, from minor fistfights to drug possession to killing an endangered species.

    And who goes free can sometimes depend as much on where a case is heard as its merits.

    Includes a *searchable database* of cases, so you can check their work or take it further.
  • Louisianna Incarcerated: How We Built the World's Prison Capital by Cindy Chang, Scott Threlkeld, and Ryan Smith at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, linked from Charles Blow.

    A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.
    ...
    Locking up as many people as possible for as long as possible has enriched a few while making everyone else poorer. Public safety comes second to profits.



• While at Princeton Reunions, I nipped into the Art Museum and saw the Constable Exhibit. Among the great things:

  

  Elm trees in Old Hall Park, East Bergholt.

  I had never before appreciated how great a draughtsman Constable was.

  The plaque surprised me, because it mentioned that the man is in the picture to give an idea of the trees' "enormous size". I measured, and if the man (including top hat) is 6 feet tall, then the largest tree is about 60 feet: large, true, but not what I'd call *enormous*.

  Just outside the museum, for instance, was a scene rather like this:

  

  By Joe Shlabotnik, on Flickr

  The building is Nassau Hall, and it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 feet tall to the top of the spire. Some of the White Ash trees are as tall or taller than the spire; they were probably planted around 1825 -- which is pretty old for America, but not a big deal in England. I guess I expected planted English trees to be taller -- but maybe they aren't planted as close to each other as American trees often are, so that they force each other to be tall and thin.

Your musical woodworking open Friday thread

by liberal japonicus

The video below the fold is for a japanese mobile phone and is quite neat. Obviously, woodworking and music are the two suggestions for the thread, but anything that moves you is fine.