Several years ago there was this Englishwoman – I forget her name – who wrote a book, it was probably one of many, about dogs. It was called No Bad Dogs. She was really quite an amazing person: she would approach any dog even dogs with a reputation for being vicious, and these dogs would accept her like one of the family. None of them ever attacked her or was anything but nice to her. It was really quite an amazing thing to see. And as a dog lover, I've often had that phrase "no bad dogs" reverberate in my head whenever I'm around a dog who's skittish or nervous or even threatening. I often had this thought about dogs when I see the K-9 corps dogs, cop dogs, dogs who've been trained to either attack people on command or sniff out drugs, explosives, etc. Not that these jobs are necessary sometimes, although I do question attack dogs almost on principle, because somehow it seems unfair to the canines to put them to such uses. Because basically it goes against the nature of the dog, its basic nature, to do things harmful to human beings. Dogs are at their core devoted to people. Of all the animals on earth, their lives are the most closely integrated with ours.
Anyway, all this just leads up to a satisfying report on the Supreme Court's decision in Florida v. Jardines, an opinion was handed down recently. "In an opinion written by Justice Scalia, the Court affirmed the Florida Supreme Court. The Court held a dog sniff at the front door of the house where the police suspected drugs were being grown constitutes a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment." And it was therefore illegal without a warrant. In essence, they found that the police would be trespassing in this case.
You got to get a picture here. The cops, or the DEA guys, with their dogs just come up on your porch– without a warrant – and let them have a sniff around. If the dogs alert, they bust in your door and collar you for those pot plants or your stash. (Or they say "whoops" because I can't find anything. either way, they bust into your house and search it without the authority to do so.) The Supreme Court said that's a no-no. You can read more about the Court's reasoning here. But it should be noted that it was a 5-4 decision, in the most unlikeliest of justices was the swing vote here. So the American people came within an ace of seeing their civil liberties erode even more.
But never fear: that will happen again soon enough.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Legalities
My son Ben is going to graduate from the law school at the University of Florida in a few weeks. I'm really quite proud of him, as I am of all my kids. He's done really well in school, and in a way following the late bloomer path his father did, spending some years out in the world before deciding what he wants to do with his life. And now he's about to launch the rest of his life as an attorney. Already has a job at a good firm. Way to go, son!
I've often thought and others have occasionally observed that I might've been a lawyer. I'm not unacquainted with law school. I did fairly well on the JSAT years ago and actually began law school in the fall semester of 1965.That's a long time ago. I was 22 years old at the time and had yet to grow a brain. But I did have the presence of mind to know I did not want to be shoveled into the maw that was the Vietnam war, an absurd Cold War exercise in "stopping Communist aggression" that cost over 58,000 American guys their lives. I wanted no part of that damn war, so I enrolled in law school at LSU. Long story short: I attended about six weeks . . . and was crushingly bored. The only good things that happened to me that semester were: I met my darling wife Susan in the Catholic Newman Center next to the law school (where I used to go to nap between classes) and I kept my ass out of Vietnam. It was all perfectly above board. Those were back in the days of the draft, and you could be deferred if you were a full-time student. (It was an excellent way, it might be observed, to make sure that only the poor and disadvantaged of the nation did most of the dying for the rest of us. The kids who could not afford college were the guys who got drafted.)
I didn't mean to drag this on and on. Suffice to say, I eventually had to spend four years in the Air Force, but I never got sent to Vietnam. And I never became a lawyer. I became a historian instead when, after growing a brain, I went to grad school and got a Ph.D. in American history thereby assuming the mantle of pointy-headed intellectual, which I leave it to others to determine whether it's an apt description or not. I'm not for a moment insinuating that my son Ben did not grow a brain long before his old man did. Indeed, he had a firm business foundation and was doing well before he departed for law school. I can only wonder what might have been had I stuck with the law, which, by the way, has always remained interesting to me, if you're talking about constitutional law, philosophy of law, stuff like that. But not the day-to-day grind of it.
I've often thought and others have occasionally observed that I might've been a lawyer. I'm not unacquainted with law school. I did fairly well on the JSAT years ago and actually began law school in the fall semester of 1965.That's a long time ago. I was 22 years old at the time and had yet to grow a brain. But I did have the presence of mind to know I did not want to be shoveled into the maw that was the Vietnam war, an absurd Cold War exercise in "stopping Communist aggression" that cost over 58,000 American guys their lives. I wanted no part of that damn war, so I enrolled in law school at LSU. Long story short: I attended about six weeks . . . and was crushingly bored. The only good things that happened to me that semester were: I met my darling wife Susan in the Catholic Newman Center next to the law school (where I used to go to nap between classes) and I kept my ass out of Vietnam. It was all perfectly above board. Those were back in the days of the draft, and you could be deferred if you were a full-time student. (It was an excellent way, it might be observed, to make sure that only the poor and disadvantaged of the nation did most of the dying for the rest of us. The kids who could not afford college were the guys who got drafted.)
I didn't mean to drag this on and on. Suffice to say, I eventually had to spend four years in the Air Force, but I never got sent to Vietnam. And I never became a lawyer. I became a historian instead when, after growing a brain, I went to grad school and got a Ph.D. in American history thereby assuming the mantle of pointy-headed intellectual, which I leave it to others to determine whether it's an apt description or not. I'm not for a moment insinuating that my son Ben did not grow a brain long before his old man did. Indeed, he had a firm business foundation and was doing well before he departed for law school. I can only wonder what might have been had I stuck with the law, which, by the way, has always remained interesting to me, if you're talking about constitutional law, philosophy of law, stuff like that. But not the day-to-day grind of it.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Man, We're Doin' Great, Aren't We?
It's April Fool's Day today. Somehow this post seems entirely appropriate for all of those millions of fools in this country who think we have anything that resembles justice and equality in this society. Here in its entirety, another little insight (from Salon a few days ago) into just how the richest people in this country since the beginning of Reaganomics have stuck it to the rest of us hard and repeatedly while laughing all the way to the Cayman Islands.
Pulitzer Prize-winner David Cay Johnston has highlighted yet more statistics that illuminate the spike in income inequality in the U.S. in recent decades. Flagging Johnston’s analysis, HuffPo noted Monday, “Incomes for the bottom 90 percent of Americans only grew by $59 on average between 1966 and 2011 (when you adjust those incomes for inflation)… During the same period, the average income for the top 10 percent of Americans rose by $116,071.”
Johnston offered a visual analogy for the disparity in a column for Tax Analysts last month:
The vast majority averaged a mere $59 more in 2011 than in 1966. For the top 10 percent, by the same measures, average income rose by $116,071 to $254,864, an increase of 84 percent over 1966.
Plot those numbers on a chart, with one inch for $59, and the top 10 percent’s line would extend more than 163 feet.
Now compare the vast majority’s $59 with the top 1 percent, and that line extends for 884 feet. The top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, whose 2011 average income of $23.7 million was $18.4 million more per taxpayer than in 1966, would require a line nearly five miles long.We're doing just great in the land of the free, aren't we?
Saturday, March 30, 2013
It Won't Be Pretty
I know I'm beginning to sound like a broken record on this subject of income and wealth disparity, but I'm a historian, and I know what befalls civilizations when prosperity is not fairly broadly shared. Quite simply, it's a recipe for the downfall of that civilization. There are a couple of recent pieces that I've run across that just drum the message in again. The first can be found here, and the article that it references is here.
Just a few random facts are enough to get me worked up . . . until I realize that getting worked up is just an exercise in futility. Because nothing is going to fix this situation until millions of us are worked up by the screaming injustice of it all. To wit:
Just a few random facts are enough to get me worked up . . . until I realize that getting worked up is just an exercise in futility. Because nothing is going to fix this situation until millions of us are worked up by the screaming injustice of it all. To wit:
- The Koch brothers made $3 million an hour last year. The person who served you your food at Denny's or Red Lobster last week made $2.13 an hour (They live on tips, remember.), less than a millionth of the Kochs' hoard.
- Any one of this country's ten richest citizens could pay for a room for every single one of our estimated 633,000 homeless people for an entire year (figuring on about $560 per month).
- The combined wealth of the ten richest surpasses the entire U.S. federal housing budget.
- The poorest 47 percent of Americans own ZERO percent of this country's wealth--because their debts overshadow their income.
- America, land of the free and home of the brave, has the fourth highest level of wealth inequality in the entire world (out of 141 countries).
- For every dollar of assets owned by a single black or Hispanic woman--the average one has about $100 net worth--a member of the Forbes 400 has over $40 million.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
And They Gotta Live Here
Lemme balance off the bad news of the last post with some really good news in this one. I have for several years been aware of what I think is one of the grossest pieces of evidence of what's wrong with the planet and what's wrong with us. To wit: gigantic and monstrous dead zones in all of the oceans of the world--the Seven Seas--caused by concentrations of tons and tons of plastic debris. The so-called North Pacific gyre contains an estimated 100 million metric tons of plastic garbage . . . and that's just one concentration. If people could see this horrible mess, it might spur them to some sort
of action. It's largely invisible because the oceans are so vast. Because the stuff breaks up into tiny bits, satellites can't capture pictures of this horrendous mess for all to see . . . but it's there and it's fouling the water and it's entered the food chain of countless marine animals.
But the good news is there are some pretty smart kids out there who have one characteristic they don't share with geezers like me. They have to live in the crap we are going to bequeath to them, and they've put their fantastic minds and imagination to cleaning up our mess. Here's the story:
 |
| It could do the job in five years. |
19-year-old Boyan Slat has unveiled plans to create an Ocean Cleanup Array that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans. The device consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Instead of moving through the ocean, the array would span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from plankton, filtered and stored for recycling.
At school, Boyan Slat launched a project that analyzed the size and amount of plastic particles in the ocean’s garbage patches. His final paper went on to win several prizes, including Best Technical Design 2012 at the Delft University of Technology. Boyan continued to develop his concept during the summer of 2012, and he revealed it several months later at TEDxDelft 2012.
Slat went on to found The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a non-profit organization which is responsible for the development of his proposed technologies. His ingenious solution could potentially save hundreds of thousands of aquatic animals annually, and reduce pollutants (including PCB and DDT) from building up in the food chain. It could also save millions per year, both in clean-up costs, lost tourism and damage to marine vessels.
It is estimated that the clean-up process would take about five years, and it could greatly increase awareness about the world’s plastic garbage patches. On his site Slat says, “One of the problems with preventive work is that there isn’t any imagery of these ‘garbage patches’, because the debris is dispersed over millions of square kilometres. By placing our arrays however, it will accumulate along the booms, making it suddenly possible to actually visualize the oceanic garbage patches. We need to stress the importance of recycling, and reducing our consumption of plastic packaging.” To find out more about the project and to contribute, click here.More power. More power to these bright young people. We should be ashamed of ourselves that we've left them such a messed up world in so many ways.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Among Other Things, Our Water's Rotten
There's a famous line in Hamlet where he says, "Something's rotten in the state of Denmark." (At least, I think it was him.) But there's more than one thing rotten in the state of the USA. You can write your own litany. I just want to talk about one: the watercourses of this nation. Inspiration from this piece I ran across recently. A long while back, I think it was in the Nixon administration, the Environmental Protection Agency was established to keep track of how we're screwing up the ecology of the nation and to enforce what laws the people passed to preserve it. Well, way down the line from then--and the environment was pretty screwed up then--we are here. And the EPA reports that more than half--MORE THAN HALF--the water in the United States is unfit for living things.
Fifty-five percent of U.S. river and stream lengths were in poor condition for aquatic life, largely under threat from runoff contaminated by fertilizers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday.
High levels of phosphorus and nitrogen, runoff from urban areas, shrinking ground cover and pollution from mercury and bacteria were putting the 1.2 million miles of streams and rivers surveyed under stress, the EPA said."Under stress"--a polite euphemism for "not fit water to support insect life and crawfish." Do you realize how filthy bad water has to be not to support a mud bug?
Monday, March 25, 2013
Here's What We're Up Against, Folks
Normally I don't give stuff like what follows the time of day, but in this case I'll make an exception. My mailbox gets defiled every now and again by such stuff, but thankfully not too often. What follows is from what is described as "A USMC vet." Like that is immediately supposed to impress me with this dude's sagacity. In fact, it has the opposite effect because it tempts me to simply drop my USMC stereotype in place and expect just exactly what I get here: flag-waving blather with not an ounce of true information to sustain it. I know for a fact that all marine vets aren't like this, but I fear many are. And many more agree even though they never spent an hour in uniform. It just depresses the hell out of me to realize that this pinhead represents literally millions of others in this country who actually believe this nonsense.
It's not worth a single moment of my time to go about refuting the "arguments" presented in this screed. But I will make several observations. And forgive me if the observations seem too jejune and obvious to make at all. It's just therapy for me to do this. These thoughts are in no particular order.
A coalition of Blacks, Latinos, Feminists, Gays, Government Workers, Union Members, Environmental Extremists, The Media, Hollywood, uninformed young people, the "forever needy, on disabiliy", the chronically unemployed, illegal aliens and other "fellow travelers" have ended Norman Rockwell's America.
The Cocker Spaniel is off the front porch...the Pit Bull is in the back yard.
The American Constitution has been replaced with Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" and Chicago shyster David Axelrod, along with international Socialist George Soros will be pulling the strings on their beige puppet to bring us Act 2 of the New World Order.
Our side ran two candidates who couldn't even win their own home states, and the circus fattster Chris Christie helped Obama over the top with a glowing "post Sandy" tribute that elevated the "Commander-in-Chief" to Mother Teresa status.
People like me are completely politically irrelevant, and I will never again comment on or concern myself with the aforementioned coalition which has surrendered our culture, our heritage and our traditions without a shot being fired.
You will never again out vote these people. It will take individual acts of defiance and massive displays of civil disobedience to get back the rights we have allowed them to take away. It will take Zealots, not moderates--not reach-across-the-aisle RINOs [Republicans in name only] to right this ship and restore our beloved country to its former status.
Those who come after us will have to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to bring back the Republic that this generation has timidly frittered away due to "white guilt" and political correctness.....
I'm done.
It's not worth a single moment of my time to go about refuting the "arguments" presented in this screed. But I will make several observations. And forgive me if the observations seem too jejune and obvious to make at all. It's just therapy for me to do this. These thoughts are in no particular order.
- The "American Dream", if ever there was one, has been gone for a long time. It did not just end for the poor and middling folk of the US when Obama was reelected.
- "Norman Rockwell's America" is a figment of the imagination. It never existed.
- This piece is suffused with the terrifying racism that still exists in this country well into the 21st century. It's crude and it's scary. And truth be told, the hatred of Barack Obama that we see and hear every day and that's so evident in this piece is at its fundamental roots because the man is black.
- Want a litany of those who are responsible for all the problems? Read paragraph 2 carefully. You're probably on the list.
- Since when are marines not government workers?
- This guy knows nothing about rules of capitalization, except what maybe he learned as a Marine, and of course, they don't know the rules either. "Militarese" and "federalese" are among the most abominable crimes committed on the English language. I know. I spent my entire working life reading it.
- The best two words in the whole piece are the last two.
A coalition of Blacks, Latinos, Feminists, Gays, Government Workers, Union Members, Environmental Extremists, The Media, Hollywood, uninformed young people, the "forever needy, on disabiliy", the chronically unemployed, illegal aliens and other "fellow travelers" have ended Norman Rockwell's America.
The Cocker Spaniel is off the front porch...the Pit Bull is in the back yard.
The American Constitution has been replaced with Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" and Chicago shyster David Axelrod, along with international Socialist George Soros will be pulling the strings on their beige puppet to bring us Act 2 of the New World Order.
Our side ran two candidates who couldn't even win their own home states, and the circus fattster Chris Christie helped Obama over the top with a glowing "post Sandy" tribute that elevated the "Commander-in-Chief" to Mother Teresa status.
People like me are completely politically irrelevant, and I will never again comment on or concern myself with the aforementioned coalition which has surrendered our culture, our heritage and our traditions without a shot being fired.
You will never again out vote these people. It will take individual acts of defiance and massive displays of civil disobedience to get back the rights we have allowed them to take away. It will take Zealots, not moderates--not reach-across-the-aisle RINOs [Republicans in name only] to right this ship and restore our beloved country to its former status.
Those who come after us will have to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to bring back the Republic that this generation has timidly frittered away due to "white guilt" and political correctness.....
I'm done.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Friday, March 22, 2013
Too Stupid for Democracy?
 |
| Your typical American . . . |
- In 2011, Newsweek asked 1,000 Americans to take the standard U.S. Citizenship test, and 38 percent of them failed. One in three couldn’t name the vice-president.
- Widespread ignorance of objective reality poses a genuine threat to democracy. The people of the United States have ignorance in abundance.
- People don’t recognize their lack of competence[and] can't judge the competence of politicians
- Politicians think their constituents are much further to the right than polls suggest. (Oh yeah: two scholars polled 2000 state legislators and found this out. And the more conservative the politician, the more wrong they were about what the voters really think).
- The wealthy think the wealthy should pay more taxes, but they don't think they're wealthy. (Almost all Americans – even those in the top 5% of the wealthy – consider themselves "middle class." In fact, if you earn more than $250,000 a year, you are in the top 4% of the wealthy in this country.)
- Americans like Sweden's distribution of wealth, and think they already have it. (I talked about this a few days ago.)
- Government spending has decreased under Obama, but nobody knows it. (It's way, way down under Obama.)
- The deficit has been stabilized and is shrinking, but only six percent of Americans know it.
- "A 2011 poll conducted by CNN found that Americans, on average, think we spend 10 percent of the federal budget on foreign aid, and one in five said we spend 30 percent or more helping others abroad. The actual figure: about one percent. The average American also thinks we spend 5 percent of the budget on public broadcasting, when in fact it’s just one tenth of one percent." Here's where the tax dollars actually go.
I would definitely answer the title question in the affirmative. The writer of this piece is a little kinder, saying no, they're not too stupid, but they could be a lot smarter. I wish I were as kind or optimistic. But I look at our educational system, I look at our addiction to mindless entertainment, I look at the almost pride people taking their own ignorance, and I don't see any rosy future for us. I also observe both parties in this country, but especially the Republicans, just outright lying to people. The gross falsehood that Obama is responsible for most of the deficit is just one of the whoppers. I wish I could be more sanguine. But I do see things getting worse, and I don't see the American people getting one whit smarter.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Can You Believe It: Nixon Worse Than Previously Thought
First of all, you have to get past the notion that someone is vain enough to want to record everything they say. The first person that comes to mind, if you are aware of history at all, is Richard Nixon. All of us who are old enough remember the Watergate affair, and the key role that tape recordings of Nixon and his cronies' conversations in the White House had in bringing down the president. What I didn't know, and I suspect you didn't either, was that Nixon's predecessor in the Oval Office Lyndon Johnson also recorded himself in the midst of his duties. And it's because of these recordings that we now know Richard Nixon is a worse scumbag than we ever suspected. I mean, we knew that he was an evil guy, that his little engine of revenge and meanness never stop chugging. We know that he trampled all over the Constitution while he was president.
But as this article shows, Nixon was up to his nefarious tricks before he was elected president. The gist of it is this: during the 1968 presidential campaign against Hubert Humphreys, Nixon through an intermediary tried to get the South Vietnamese leaders to sabotage the peace talks which had just begun in Paris, and which, according to the article, were off to a promising start. Nixon, who was promising a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam war "with honor" during the campaign, did not want to see the peace talks succeeding or give Lyndon Johnson a chance to call another bombing halt. (Full disclosure: to my everlasting shame, I have to fess up to voting for Nixon in 1968 – still under the spell of my hyper conservative father, but that's no excuse – largely on the basis of this "secret plan" because like many American youth at the time, I loathed the Vietnam war and I wanted us out of there and just as soon as possible. This is still one of the great embarrassments in my life to have to admit this, but I can say with pride that I have not cast a ballot for a Republican ever since.) Long story short, LBJ found out about this and put kibosh on it, threatening Nixon with charges of treason for interfering in foreign affairs. Quite a gripping tale. All the details are in the story.
So if you didn't particularly like tricky Dick Nixon before, your feelings are going to be substantiated. and if you did like Dick Nixon before, no amount of truth about the scoundrel will probably change your mind.
But as this article shows, Nixon was up to his nefarious tricks before he was elected president. The gist of it is this: during the 1968 presidential campaign against Hubert Humphreys, Nixon through an intermediary tried to get the South Vietnamese leaders to sabotage the peace talks which had just begun in Paris, and which, according to the article, were off to a promising start. Nixon, who was promising a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam war "with honor" during the campaign, did not want to see the peace talks succeeding or give Lyndon Johnson a chance to call another bombing halt. (Full disclosure: to my everlasting shame, I have to fess up to voting for Nixon in 1968 – still under the spell of my hyper conservative father, but that's no excuse – largely on the basis of this "secret plan" because like many American youth at the time, I loathed the Vietnam war and I wanted us out of there and just as soon as possible. This is still one of the great embarrassments in my life to have to admit this, but I can say with pride that I have not cast a ballot for a Republican ever since.) Long story short, LBJ found out about this and put kibosh on it, threatening Nixon with charges of treason for interfering in foreign affairs. Quite a gripping tale. All the details are in the story.
So if you didn't particularly like tricky Dick Nixon before, your feelings are going to be substantiated. and if you did like Dick Nixon before, no amount of truth about the scoundrel will probably change your mind.
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