O. Henry

On this day, many things:

1148
Louis VII of France lays siege to Damascus during the Second Crusade.
1411
Battle of Harlaw, one of the bloodiest battles in Scotland, takes place.
1487
Citizens of Leeuwarden, Netherlands strike against ban on foreign beer.
1534
French explorer Jacques Cartier plants a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula and takes possession of the territory in the name of Francis I of France.
1567
Mary, Queen of Scots, is forced to abdicate and is replaced by her 1-year-old son James VI.
1715
A Spanish treasure fleet of 10 ships under Admiral Ubilla leaves Havana, Cuba for Spain. Seven days later, 9 of them sink in a storm off the coast of Florida. A few centuries later, treasure is salvaged from these wrecks.
1847
After 17 months of travel, Brigham Young leads 148 Mormon pioneers into Salt Lake Valley, resulting in the establishment of Salt Lake City. Celebrations of this event include the Pioneer Day Utah state holiday and the Days of '47 Parade.
1864
American Civil War: Battle of Kernstown – Confederate General Jubal Anderson Early defeats Union troops led by General George Crook in an effort to keep them out of the Shenandoah Valley.
1901
O. Henry is released from prison in Austin, Texas after serving three years for embezzlement from a bank.
1911
Hiram Bingham III re-discovers Machu Picchu, “the Lost City of the Incas”. Was it lost?
1915
The passenger ship S.S. Eastland capsizes while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and crew are killed in the largest loss of life disaster from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes. How is that possible?
1922
The draft of the British Mandate of Palestine was formally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations; and which came into effect on 26 September 1923. The beginning of the end.
1923
The Treaty of Lausanne, settling the boundaries of modern Turkey, is signed in Switzerland by Greece, Bulgaria and other countries that fought in World War I.
1929
The Kellogg-Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of foreign policy, goes into effect (it is first signed in Paris on August 27, 1928 by most leading world powers). This is truly precious.
1943
World War II: Operation Gomorrah begins: British and Canadian airplanes bomb Hamburg by night, those of the Americans by day. By the end of the operation in November, 9,000 tons of explosives will have killed more than 30,000 people and destroyed 280,000 buildings.
1969
Apollo program: Apollo 11 splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
1974
Watergate scandal: the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and they order him to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.
And, finally, 2009
The MV Arctic Sea, reportedly carrying a cargo of timber, is allegedly hijacked in the North Sea by pirates, but much speculation remains as to the actual cargo and events. An astonishing story that might be gun-running.

***

“It’s very hard to distinguish AI security incidents from AI marketing, and that’s actually a big problem going forward,” --Matthew Green, a security expert at Johns Hopkins University.

***

The “paperclip maximiser” is a thought experiment invented by philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003.

He describes a scenario in which people invent an AI whose only goal is to make as many paperclips as possible. But he illustrates how that could quickly become horrifying: it might wipe out the humans that could potentially switch it off and stop it making paperclips, for instance, or it could realise that the human body contains material that could be turned into paperclips and so decide to harvest them and use them for that.

***

A six-year-old, who had a genetic mutation that affected her neurodevelopment, received a gene therapy treatment designed to correct the underlying defect at Shanghai Xinhua Hospital in March 2025, according to an investigation by Science and Retraction Watch. She died days later from a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy, the magazine reported, citing documents and accounts provided by the girl’s parents.

***

Has anyone heard a coherent, sensible argument against Voter ID laws?

***

Only two companies from the Dow Industrial Average in 1976 remain on the Dow today, Procter & Gamble and Chevron, nee Standard Oil.

***

What in heaven's name is the government doing testing the testosterone levels of its citizens?

***

O. Henry

This day has some gravity. The S.S. Eastland. Operation Gomorrah. The Kellogg-Briand Pact. The British Mandate. The return of Apollo 11.  The MV Arctic Sea hijacking. 

And O. Henry, the talented author, was released from prison on this day.

O. Henry (the pen name of William Sydney Porter), author of “The Gift of the Magi,” was one of the most celebrated short story writers of his generation. His legacy is celebrated every year by the O. Henry Prize for Fiction. He got his start in prison, while serving time for embezzling funds from the First National Bank in Austin, Texas, where he had worked as a teller.

Much later, a 1916 report characterized the bank in question as “carelessly managed,” and revealed that “the patrons used to enter, go behind the counter, take out one hundred or two hundred dollars and say a week later, ‘Porter, I took out $200, last week. See if I left a memorandum of it. I meant to.’” The Times report claims that Porter, who by the time he was charged had moved to Houston and taken a job as a columnist with The Daily Post, resigned before one of the “misappropriations with which he was charged,” and that if he had simply gone back to Austin when he was summoned to stand trial, he would have been acquitted.

Instead, he took a train to New Orleans, and then hopped on a fruit steamer headed for Honduras, where the law could not reach him. But in February of 1897, he learned that his wife was very ill, and he returned to the States to care for her. His wife died in July, and Porter was convicted the following year, and in March 1898, sentenced to five years in prison for embezzlement.

In prison, Porter “did his first serious literary work,” as the Times puts it. In order to be able to send money home to support his daughter Margaret, he wrote and published 14 short stories, under pen names, including the one with which he would become famous: O. Henry.

Porter was released early for good behavior on July 24, 1901, and returned to Pittsburgh to live with his daughter and his in-laws, before moving on to New York City. Most importantly, he kept writing, and in 1904 published his first collection of short stories, Cabbages and Kings, followed two years later by The Four Million, which would include some of his most enduring tales, including “The Gift of the Magi.” He was incredibly prolific; he would keep publishing until he died in 1910.
(from Lit Hub)

The Tie-Breaker

On this day:

1419
Hundred Years’ War: Rouen surrenders to Henry V of England completing his reconquest of Normandy.
1883
The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires, built by Thomas Edison, begins service at Roselle, New Jersey.
1915
World War I: German zeppelins bomb the towns of Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn in the United Kingdom killing more than 20, in the first major aerial bombardment of a civilian target.
1920
The United States Senate votes against joining the League of Nations.
1945
World War II: Soviet forces liberate the Łódź ghetto. Out more than 200,000 inhabitants in 1940, less than 900 had survived the Nazi occupation.
2006

The New Horizons probe is launched by NASA on the first mission to Pluto.

***

National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy points out that the executive branch of the U.S. government has no Constitutional authority, acting alone, to acquire more territory – including Greenland – for the United States, whether through purchase or conquest.


***

Chavez (and later Maduro) outsourced a lot of their policing and stability to violent leftist paramilitary groups called colectivos.

That might be a difficult negotiation.

***

Study confirms that neither Tylenol nor vaccines is responsible for the rise in autism BECAUSE THERE IS NO RISE IN AUTISM TO EXPLAIN just a change in diagnostic standards.

***

McCutchen — free agent, elder statesman, human embodiment of “good vibes only” — is still getting ambushed by Comprehensive Drug Testing (CDT) at his house on a Sunday morning.

***

The Tie-Breaker

The penalty kick shoot-out became the norm in soccer competition in 1975 to make tournament games definitive. One wonders about its impact on the acceptance of soccer in the U.S.

Americans love competition, and they hate ties.

There might be changes afoot. We now have participation trophies, sliding scales like DEI and homogenized testing. Many colleges don't require SATs; AI may force more objective interviews. Corporate "teams" are everywhere.

Maybe it takes a village, maybe the starlet's breathless podium award acceptance speech is real. Maybe everyone who worked on the film deserves the award, too.

The problem is that sometimes an individual is quite enough. Madame Curie clearly did not need a village; she could think herself out of a vault. Indeed, she may be stalking this great land right now.

But a lot doesn't apply to the rest of us mortals. Team-building, Critical Theory, whatever the homogenizing effects of AI are, all appear to be a trend to "replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

So we give participation trophies to prepare the child for the adult world of irresponsible success and defeat, of self-punishing redistribution. Success is no longer achieved on the shoulders of giants; it's just another brick in the wall, a sincere sharing like the starlet's speech, a perfect preparation for the faceless future of AI.

This is the world to come, where a prize honoring a significant peace-giver among our warring clans can be gifted, one to another, and handed around like the Stanley Cup to the losing locker room, brought home for a day or week by everyone within reach.

It may be ironic. Or satisfying. But it is symbolic of the great coming crisis: it ain't justice.

            

 

Vigilante Juries

WOD. Bellwether: noun: a wether or other male sheep that leads the flock, usually bearing a bell; a person or thing that assumes the leadership or forefront, as of a profession or industry: "Paris is a bellwether of the fashion industry."; person or thing that shows the existence or direction of a trend; index; a person who leads a mob, mutiny, conspiracy, or the like; ringleader. ety: Middle English belle 'bell' + wether 'castrated male sheep'

***

There is a book out, Dark Money, about the Koch brothers. It is a strange topic. The Kochs are generally seen as the bankers of the "Radical Right." But they are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass incarceration” policies. So, how are they the Radical Right? The answer is probably they are outspoken opponents of top-down government-mandated change, a real enemy of the powers-that-be. 

Let's call them "Elitist deniers."

***

One popular and recurring concern is the fear that immoral people might get control of the government, might get their evil hands on the levers, and do egocentrically motivated damage to the rest of us. But isn't this a risk inherent to any government? And isn't the solution to limit the potential damage by limiting the government power in the first place, not counting on the random and unpredictable election of a good guy?

***

A shooting at a bar in Penn Hills has left two people dead and seven others injured, police said Sunday.

And, one 27-year-old male was killed and 24 people were wounded by gunfire in an overnight shooting at a birthday party in Akron, Ohio, according to local police. Evidence is consistent with a drive-by shooting, and people at the party may have returned fire.

***

Vigilante Juries

Regardless of one's politics, the Trump case raises at least debatable legal points. (Andrew McCarthy says there are 12 specific reasons for an appeal to overturn the decision.) And nothing in a culture is more dangerous than allowing the courts and the law to become a sword rather than a shield. Or to allow for that perception.

Jury nullification occurs when a jury believes a defendant is guilty but renders a “not guilty” verdict because it regards the relevant law as unjust.

John Adams said about jurors, “It is not only his right, but his duty … to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.”

It has been said that such an attitude prevailed in the pre-Revolution period when English law was thwarted in the colonies because it was felt the individual was guilty of violating the law but that the law was wrong. Conscience is a difficult bellwether when the culture does not have common ground. How would someone advocating jihad vote on a matter of terrorism, for example?

States and cultures are organized on basic precepts. That is, basic assumptions. This unanimity among people's beliefs on the nature of life--or the organization of life, the state--is the state's DNA. Law and the courts are a culture's epicenter.

How much latitude can such a system tolerate?

 

Lessons From the Supreme Court Hearings

 Lessons From the Supreme Court Hearings

A candidate for the Supreme Court can decline to give an answer to a senator's question.

The key point is not that a candidate can not define a woman, the key point is that she is qualified and can't define a woman.

While the Supreme Court is supposed to be above the political fray, a candidate will fear the political implications of an obvious question so much she will risk looking like a fool by declining to answer it.

The power of a political subset is not related to its size or its importance to the culture.

Politically motivated savagery at the Supreme Court nomination hearings is limited to one party.

Brown Jackson signed a brief accusing George Bush of being a war criminal. This is not a comment on her legal abilities but is a comment on her associations and political mindset which do influence her legal abilities.

These hearings are revealing about the politics of the nation and these lessons are obvious to the average guy.

Flynn, FBI, and Strassel

                   Flynn, FBI, and Strassel

I've heard a lot of opinions about the Flynn/FBI problem recently. Divergent ones. There seems to me to be several questions. What did Flynn actually do that was criminal? And were the FBI's actions defending us and the country or motivated by something quite different? In the haze of political mendacity, it is sometimes hard to believe in clarity--but the FBI is not a political organization. Here is the fierce Kim Strassel's column on it.

The newest Federal Bureau of Investigation documents in the case of former White House national security adviser Mike Flynn are stunning in themselves. But the totality of Mr. Flynn’s treatment shocks the conscience.

Mr. Flynn in 2017 pleaded guilty to a single count of lying to FBI agents about conversations he had with Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Thanks to new documents the feds belatedly turned over to his attorneys, we know the FBI engineered this “crime.” Handwritten notes from former FBI counterintelligence head Bill Priestap, made before the bureau’s interview of Mr. Flynn, ask the following: “What is our goal? Truth/Admission, or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”

One of the frustrations of the Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative is that the evidence of law enforcement’s abuse of power keeps emerging in dribs and drabs. To grasp the outrageous conduct fully, the Flynn documents need to be added to what we already know. The overall evidence paints a scandalous picture: Having labored and abysmally failed in 2016 to build a case that Mr. Flynn was an agent of the Russians, the FBI and Justice Department changed gears—rifling through his communications, inventing a fake crime, and entrapping him on a “lying” charge.

The latest documents reveal the FBI was officially closing its Flynn case on Jan. 4, 2017. The FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team spent 2016 checking “databases” for “derogatory” information on him, running down accusations that he had ties to Russians. They struck out, and the closing document admits Mr. Flynn “was no longer a viable candidate” for investigation. Then, suddenly, also on Jan. 4, FBI agent Peter Strzok sends a text saying: “Hey, if you haven’t closed [the Flynn case], don’t do so yet.” Mr. Strzok explained: “seventh floor involved”—a reference to FBI top brass.

What changed? In late December, Mr. Flynn spoke to Mr. Kislyak. Federal law gives investigators the authority to wiretap foreigners but also requires strict privacy protections for U.S. citizens with whom they speak. The Obama administration superseded those protections and “unmasked” Mr. Flynn in the days following his discussions. They later leaked the classified contents of the call to the press.

The snooping gained them nothing substantive. Mr. Flynn’s conversations were lawful and routine. So Justice Department and FBI officials instead manufactured the absurd theory that Mr. Flynn had violated the Logan Act of 1799, which bars citizens from engaging in unauthorized negotiations in disputes between the U.S. and foreign governments. No one has ever been convicted of violating the act. This week’s handwritten notes show that among the FBI’s hopes in interviewing Mr. Flynn was to “get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act.”

The real goal was to trap him. Remember, the FBI didn’t need to ask Mr. Flynn what he’d said to the Russian ambassador; they had a recording. The only reason for an interview was to coax Mr. Flynn into saying something at odds with that transcript. They worked hard at it. Then-Director James Comey has previously bragged that the FBI went around the White House legal counsel to make sure Mr. Flynn had no lawyer present.

This week’s documents include an email from former FBI lawyer Lisa Page debating ways for the bureau to get around its standard formal admonition against lying, suggesting agents just “casually slip that in” when talking to Mr. Flynn. A document from former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe says that he urged Mr. Flynn to conduct the interview without a lawyer, and that the FBI deliberately dispensed with the admonition altogether.

The abuse then continued under former special counsel Robert Mueller. Mr. Flynn initially explained that he misremembered what he’d discussed with the Russian, a highly plausible claim. But Mr. Mueller’s lawyers pursued him to near penury and threatened to prosecute his son. He succumbed and agreed to a plea deal.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this week’s documents is what isn’t in them. The FBI expresses no concern that Mr. Flynn was “colluding” with Russia or otherwise threatening national security—supposedly the rationale for the FBI’s intrusive investigation. By this point, it just wanted a scalp, a means to keep its broader narrative rolling.

The FBI exists to investigate crimes, not to create them. Some might add this shameful behavior to the long list of the FBI’s “collusion” malfeasance: the surveillance-court abuse, the Steele dossier, the leaks. But the Flynn case is something different. This isn’t the FBI playing fast and loose with sources or the courts. This is law enforcement abusing its most tyrannical power—to strip citizens of their reputations, their livelihoods and their liberty.

The FBI’s treatment of Mr. Flynn lives up to Americans’ worst fears. Attorney General William Barr was right to order a review of the case. Now someone must be held to account.

Tweaking the Scales

                     Tweaking the Scales

Britain’s Prince Andrew has provided “zero cooperation” to the American investigators who want to interview him as part of their sex trafficking probe into Jeffrey Epstein, a U.S. prosecutor said Monday. Speaking at a news conference outside Epstein’s New York mansion, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said prosecutors and the FBI had contacted Andrew’s lawyers and asked to interview him. “To date, Prince Andrew has provided zero cooperation,” said Berman, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment.

At a news conference outside Epstein’s New York mansion? Why is that? And why was there a news conference at all? Aren't there well-worn pathways for the wagon wheels of justice to follow? Procedures and policies? Cautious and constitutionally sensitive routines to pursue in investigations?

Or is this just Schiff-like tropism, seeking the light of the camera?

It sounds like more, more than just self-aggrandizing or an hour to make the wife proud. Outside Epstein’s New York mansion? It sounds like a planned effort to garner publicity. The Feds are doing publicity stunts?

Putting aside the theoretical problems of influencing potential jurors, is this what we want? Having the Feds scrounging some downtime in the very free press to hype an investigation? Or, as Chris argues, is the system--and the Press--so corrupt and in thrall to political and financial interest that Justice needs the help?

You Say Tomato...

It is getting harder and harder to know what is going on in the world. The Left is currently furious that the nationalist Trump just met Putin and did not act like more of a nationalist.

The silliness of government sometimes requires the willing suspension of disbelief. It is a tempest in search of a teapot.

Let us return to the government that we know and fondly remember, a government that took on hard, dark questions and led us into the clear day. Like, for example, is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable? You will be pleased to know this botanical question was decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, in 1893. it did not go well.

At the time the Port Authority of New York classified tomatoes as vegetables, which were subject to a 10 percent import tax.
When one Manhattan wholesaler — John Nix & Co., owned by John Nix and his four sons — got hit with the tariff on a shipment of Caribbean tomatoes, he disputed the tax on the grounds that tomatoes were not technically vegetables. 


The case, filed in 1887, made its way to the Supreme Court in 1893 as Nix v. Hedden. There, the court disagreed with the Nixes, ruling that people neither prepare nor eat tomatoes like fruits — and that they should be taxed accordingly.
In the case, witnesses read from dictionaries, and definitions for "fruit" and "vegetable" were read in court. Also definitions of "tomato," "pea," "eggplant," "cucumber," "squash" and "pepper."

In the Supreme Court decision, the justices distinguished between science and everyday life. The justices admitted that botanically speaking, tomatoes were technically fruits. But in everyday life, they decided, vegetables were things "usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats ... and not, like fruits generally, as dessert."

So under customs law, the court ruled, tomatoes counted as vegetables — and the importer had to keep paying the tariff.

Sometime the government just can not say "no."

But there is rebellion in the winds. Tennessee and Ohio have named the tomato their state fruit, without Federal consequences, at least as yet. New Jersey has made it the state vegetable, specifically citing Nix v. Hedden, setting up possible intra-state conflict. The Union trembles on the fault line.
 

To my knowledge no group violence or harassment has developed from this discrepancy and injustice.

​

An ad for John Nix & Co. (Fruit Trade Journal and Produce Record/Google Books)

Waiting for Kurtenbach

The Wilson play recently reminded me of the unspoken rules of old time hockey.

Years ago in Montreal my classmates were introducing me to the game. We would all go on Wednesday early and get standing room tickets and watch the Montreal Canadians, a great team at the time. One night the Canadians were getting badly beaten by the Leafs; a local hero who played for the Leafs got all three goals and the crowd had turned against the home team. Late in the period a Leafs rookie--Malone, I think--scored, his first in his career. He was thrilled and sought out the puck as a keepsake. A defenseman, furious at the turn of events, dropped his gloves and sucker-punched him in the face, knocking him unconscious.

The crowd around me went silent, then everyone stood.

"What's happening?" I asked.

"That was a terrible foul," I was told--even if  by the home team.

"But what is everyone doing?"

"Waiting for Orland Kurtenbach."

"What's that," I asked.

"Toronto's fighting center.' (Apparently a rare breed.)

"What are they waiting for?"

My companion looked at me curiously. "For justice, " he said.

Indeed, moments later, Orland Kurtenbach came over the boards, he and the defenseman (Terry Harper, I think,) met in front of the net, squared off and Kurtenbach knocked him unconscious with a professional looking left hook.

Meritocracy

The Scourge of Success

Think about this for a minute: Wilfred M. McClay of the University of Oklahoma decries higher education's "dysfunctional devotion to meritocracy," which he says is subverting the ideal that one's life prospects should not be substantially predictable from facts about one's family. Meritocracy, "while highly democratic in its intentions, has turned out to be colossally undemocratic in its results" because of "the steep decline of opportunity for those Americans who must live outside the magic circle of meritocratic validation." Or this, written about recently by Will: 'In "A Theory of Justice," the 20th century's most influential American treatise on political philosophy, John Rawls argued that "inequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved."'

Undeserved. I originally misread that as "underserved." But no. Good and bad qualities are inflicted upon an undeserving person by harsh fate. The luck of the draw is not just luck, it is a perversion of justice.

This is an astonishing step for the social homogenizers to take, apparently without criticism. What is under contention here is the nature of man. Are those distinguishing characteristics, that we so worship in diversity, evil when they become practical impairments? A bright student has an unfair advantage, a diligent one the same. But it gets worse. There is a selective process insidiously working through this system. Bright men, bright women seek each other thus perpetuating the injustice. Their children have a better chance of being bright. And their homes are more encouraging toward success than their less fortunate competitors.

If you can't improve the failures, harm the successes. No society could consider a more damaging self-inflicted wound. Years ago Vonnegut had a society where, for the sake of equality and the self-esteem of the less able audience, wonderfully talented athletic and coordinated ballet dancers had to wear weights to hamper their movements. But he was writing about esthetics and art, fields a culture can chose to ignore. The culture can not ignore the quality of its people and their production.
 

Has there ever been a more unreasonable time in history where such nonsense would be taken seriously?

Ex Post Facto

 

Imagine what it would be like if Roe vs. Wade was not only overturned but the government pursued and prosecuted women and physicians who had participated in abortion procedures when it was legal.

Ex post facto laws retroactively change the rules of evidence in a criminal case, retroactively alter the definition of a crime, retroactively change punishment for a criminal act, or punish behavior that was legal when that behavior was committed.

In essence it redefines the rules of the past.

 Inherent in the concept of Western justice is the concept of "due process," where a citizen knows what behavior is legal, what is not and how the government can use the legal system to distinguish and punish bad behavior. It  is essential that those rules be known and not whimsically changed.

An ex post facto law is considered a hallmark of tyranny because it deprives people of a sense of what behavior will or will not be punished and allows for random punishment at the whim of those in power. More, it allows a government or group to target a person or group specifically, using legal past behavior as a weapon.

So ex post facto laws --along with its tyrannical cousin, the bill of attainder--are specifically prohibited (Article 1, Section 10 Clause 1, and Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3) in the U.S. Constitution.

Ex post facto is more than a despotic tool, it is a way of thinking. Take, for example, the recent request of a Chicago pastor to remove George Washington's name from a city park because he owned slaves. Washington did indeed own slaves. But it was legal when he did. One might want to hold him responsible for an immoral act of owning slaves but, at the time, while  slave ownership was debated it not considered immoral by any culture. Some thought it immoral, like the debate over abortion today, but it flourished at the time of the American Revolution. Indeed, the ambiguity over slavery evidenced by the founders of the American nation was unusual.

Holding people responsible for moral principles not yet accepted requires a lot of confidence; one might find oneself on the long end of the police baton in the future. It also requires purity, the belief that you and your judgment are beyond question and you can apply your judgment righteously against people quite unaware of the debate. Your enemy just need be flawed. The victim is like Dante's Virgil, subjected to the spiritual laws of a man he never heard of, from a time he never knew.

If that makes you think of cruel and outrageous religious groups, you are right.

Hendrickson

Most wanderers make no mark.

Sue Hendrickson is a wanderer. She has been a diver, an explorer, and a collector of insects encased in amber (a la Jurassic Park) many of which have wound up in the collections of natural history museums and universities around the world.

 

In 1990 she was a fossil hunter. She was near Faith, South Dakota hunting fossils where she found three large bones sticking out of a cliff. At the time she was working for the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research. Further evaluation revealed a large skeleton, over 90 per cent complete, of a T. Rex.  Black Hills Institute of Geological Research paid $5,000 to the land owner, Maurice Williams, for the right to excavate the dinosaur skeleton, which was cleaned and transported to the company headquarters in Hill City. They named the dinosaur "Sue," after her. It was the largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered.

 

In 1992, a long legal battle began over Sue. The U.S. Attorney’s Office claimed Sue’s bones had been seized from federal land and were therefore government property. It was eventually found that Williams, a part-Native American and member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, had traded his land to the tribe two decades earlier to avoid paying property taxes, and thus his sale of excavation rights to Black Hills had been invalid.

 

When ownership was finally awarded to Williams after a protracted legal battle he put the skeleton up for auction. In October 1997, Chicago’s Field Museum purchased Sue at public auction at Sotheby’s in New York City for $8.36 million. Sue’s skeleton went on display at the Field Museum in May 2000. The tremendous T. rex skeleton–13 feet high at the hips and 42 feet long from head to toe–is displayed in one of the museum’s main halls.

Sue’s extraordinarily well-preserved bones have allowed scientists to determine many things about the life of T. rex. They have determined that the carnivorous dinosaur had an incredible sense of smell, as the olfactory bulbs were each bigger than the cerebrum, the thinking part of the brain. In addition, Sue was the first T. rex skeleton to be discovered with a wishbone, a crucial discovery that provided support for scientists’ theory that birds are a type of living dinosaur.

 

The original discoverer, Hendrickson, and the original  researchers, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, got nothing out of all this.
In 2005, Glamour magazine honored Hendrickson in their "Glamour Woman of the Year Awards."

Who is Jamie Gorelick?‏

President Obama has nominated Merrick Garland to serve on the Supreme Court.

In a recent interview, Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general who worked with Garland at the Justice Department in the Clinton administration, considers her former colleague “supremely qualified” for the high court.

High and reassuring praise. But who is Ms. Gorelick?

Jamie Gorelick is the woman who constructed the "wall of separation" that kept the CIA and the FBI from comparing notes and therefore invading the privacy of  Muhammed Atta and Zacarius Moussaoui. While countless problems were uncovered in our intelligence operations in the wake of 9-11, no single factor comes close to in importance to Jamie Gorelick's wall.
Then she was appointed by Tom Daschle to serve on the "non partisan" 9-11 Commission.



With no real estate or finance experience, she was appointed as Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae in 1997 and fearlessly served in that role through 2003, which is when most of the systemic predatory birds that came home to roost today happened. She was instrumental in covering up problems with Fannie Mae while employed there and took multiple millions in bonuses as she helped construct this house of cards.

From Wikipedia:

One example of falsified financial transactions that helped the company meet earnings targets for 1998, a "manipulation" that triggered multimillion-dollar bonuses for top executives.  On March 25, 2002, Business Week  Gorelick is quoted as saying, "We believe we are managed safely. Fannie Mae is among the handful of top-quality institutions." One year later, Government Regulators "accused Fannie Mae of improper accounting to the tune of $9 billion in unrecorded losses"

Later she worked for Duke University in the Lacrosse fiasco to protect that school from it's astonishing behavior.

Much earlier she worked at the Department of Defense, when she served as legal counsel there in 1993, she drafted the "Don't ask /don't tell" policy.

In the phraseology of the sports guys, quite a body of work.

The Vulnerability of Those With Something to Lose

A young college student was beaten in front of my house in broad daylight recently by a local man and badly hurt. The circumstance are simple: The boy objected to an  unprovoked insult as he passed by. The attacker has a criminal history and is living in the neighborhood--a nice city community--apparently through the largess of his mother-in-law. His wife is the only witness and presumably nothing will result from this attack.
There are few cultures, other than some religious shards, that encourage gratuitous attacks and damage outside of warfare. Indeed the limiting of such behavior is the basis of most social law. But this threatening element is always lurking in every culture.
The disparities--or inequities, if you prefer--are glaring here. First there is some expectation that the law-abiding community has for justice. There will be none. There is some expectation the law-abiding have for simple safety. There is none. The courts clearly give us decisions, not justice; the police are usually little more than armed secretaries who rarely intervene. But the most important inequity is the disparity of futures. Here is a confrontation between a student with hopes and aspirations and a man with none. The young man has a future, the criminal has none. As a result the confrontation has no implications for the criminal and broad implications to the student. There is no way the student can win this. Even if he wins the fight he will be caught up in the legal whirlpool with its notoriously random results so a successful defense might ruin his life. 
This is a difficult realization for the young. The productive member of society cannot win in this situation and the predator knows it. Meeting the predator on his terms is an unqualified disaster. The only option is flight and isolation. The society has no interest in the old virtues and anyone who abides by them is an anachronistic idealist who needs good insurance if he loses and good legal help if he wins.
In a culture that mouths its hatred of inequities, here is a place it could start.

Mistaking Defiance for Principle

Apparently there will be some debate over the legacy of Eric Holder at Justice. This goes to show how wonderfully diverse our community thinking has become; some people actually think his tenure has been reasonable.  As a deputy attorney general in 1999, he recommended pardons for 14 Puerto Rican terrorists. A year later, he did the same for fugitive financier Marc Rich. Marc Rich! He then, as AG, created the Fast and Furious program that provided weapons for drug cartels for some still unexplained reason, ignored the IRS abuse and political targeting, developed a program for dealing with illegal immigrants that can only be called a non-program, created a similar non-policy toward the perpetrators of the sub-prime crash, became the first AG in the history of the nation to be held in criminal contempt of Congress and somehow, aided and abetted by the President of the United States, turned race into the prime focus of the country's legal system.

In a society that mistakes defiance for principle, Holder has found a niche.
The debate should not be over the quality of his leadership but rather whether or not the disasters he created were criminal or just stupid.

Affluenza

Breanna Mitchell got a flat tire on a dark, narrow Tarrant County, Texas road. Hollie Boyles and her daughter Shelby walked over from their home to help. Youth pastor Brian Jennings was driving past the scene and he pulled over to help as well.

Then, according to the police, Ethan Couch's car, loaded with kids, slammed into everyone. Couch, 16, was drunk. 4 were killed and 8 were injured.

Lawyers for Couch argued that there the boy’s parents should share the blame for the crash, because they gave him everything he wanted. They pleaded for a sentence that involved therapy in California, at cost $450,000 a year, rather than years behind bars. Defense witness psychologist Gary Miller said the boy suffered from "affluenza." (A clever little term coined in a book to describe excessive consumerism.) Affluence, indulgent parents were extenuating circumstances. Here, in the United States, wealth and indulgent parents are burdens to overcome. Apparently young Mr. Couch was not up to the task.

Couch got probation. We got four funerals, eight hospitalizations and a living satire of justice, experts and responsibility.

The Fox Applies for the Henhouse Job and He Has an Agent

'I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable," President Obama said in a speech Thursday at the National Defense University. "Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs." He continued, "I have raised these issues with the attorney general, who shares my concern. So he has agreed to review existing Department of Justice guidelines governing investigations that involve reporters, and will convene a group of media organizations to hear their concerns as part of that review. And I have directed the attorney general to report back to me by July 12."

Now the Doppelganger alert. NBC News has reported that the attorney general, Eric Holder, personally signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a "possible co-conspirator" in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails.
So the President is shocked--shocked!-- that pressure has been brought against the free press by the government's legal arm and is asking the guy who authorized it to investigate where it came from.

Fortunately he "shares..[the president's] ..concern."

Ahab the Felon

A federal court is considering whether to include constitutional protection to five orcas--killer whales--owed by Seaworld. The complaint, brought by PETA, asks that rights against slavery be applied to the five mammals held in captivity at a Seaworld park.

"This case is on the next frontier of civil rights," said PETA's attorney Jeffrey Kerr, representing the five orcas. One assumes this case is pro bono. The orcas have made no public statement.

There are many observations one can make here, not the least is the danger of lawyers with too much time on their hands. What is of most concern is the lack of embarrassment, the lack of mortification. What rewards does this culture offer that would induce such a disregard for logic, common sense and triviality? How could a clear thinking individual allow himself to be associated with such an intellectual outrage? How could a lawyer allow himself to trivialize his own profession? And how could the judge allow law to be so abused?

Certainly no one is exempt from debating angels and pinheads.

Justice and Honor 2

Anyone searching for metaphors on how the courts deliver a decision, not justice, need go no further than the Casey Anthony case.

One may offer countless rationalizations: The jury wanted to go home, there was a reasonable doubt as there was no witness, there was no definitive motive, the television crime programs have raised the bar for evidence, people are uncomfortable with the death penalty. But this case was a battle between circumstantial evidence and innuendo. The family itself has been destroyed by the women's defense. Sexual abuse, conspiracy in an accidental death, perjury have been lightly raised as compliment to the heavy prosecution circumstantial suggestions.

The essence here is that this is a combat for victory, not truth, and the major weapon is uncertainty. The minor benefit is entertainment. Strangely, this culture is remarkably certain about a lot of difficult questions--global warming, WMDs, how to raise children, the effect of deficit spending--but when faced with a staggering imbalance of evidence, it defers.

Perhaps later, Casey and O.J. will meet and search for the two perpetrators together. A reality series may develop. Love may bloom.

Justice and Honor

A man is in line at a nightclub when is and his party are approached by a drunk. The drunk blathers obscenities and, when ignored, sucker punches the man from behind. The man turns on him and the drunk retreats to a nearby policeman and claims he was attacked by the man in line.

A man is walking through a large crowd with small group, one a voluptuous woman. Pushing their way through the crowd towards them is a group of young men. As the two groups merge a moment, one young man grabs the girl's breasts and then the two groups separate in the crowd.

A man is returning from the night shift and is stopped at a red light at about eleven o'clock when he is rear-ended. He get out and inspects the damage. His car is scratched but the car that hit him has serious grill damage. The other driver gets out of the car full of apologies and is clearly drunk. He says the accident was his fault and is terrified if the event is reported he will be arrested. He promises to have the car fixed if only the man will keep the event private and not call the police. The man feels sorry for the drunk and agrees. They exchange phone numbers and he goes home. The next morning he is awakened by a state trooper who says he is being arrested for backing into a man's car at a red light and fleeing the scene.

There are probably a number of problems in society that would be solved by the re- institution of dueling but not many because, as as most feudal societies recognized, most people will not play by the rules. (In most feudal societies, the very possession of weapons was illegal for the lower class.) In daily intercourse one is tempted to look for honor and justice but any such search in the examples above would be dangerous and perhaps fatal. There is no protection for the average man from someone who will not play by the rules, especially if one has much to lose and one has little. The only sane position is self-defense: Call a cop, report the event, state your position for the record and end it.

Justice and honor are pursuits, ideals, which guide peoples' lives. They are not endpoints. They are learned and taught in time, not in a moment, and only to the willing. And they can not be enforced. Even the courts know the truth when they say, "In court, you don't get justice, you get a decision."