Sunday, November 30, 2014

It's Too Bad

It's too bad George Orwell isn't around today. He could write a sequel to “1984” where Winston Smith regains his senses and his independence and actually triumphs over Big Brother. Or maybe an update of his seminal essay "Politics and the English Language." Political rhetoric in our country has become totally vapid and meaningless. Right now we could all use a little more hope about the world.

Saturday, November 29, 2014

The Right Wing Brain

Why are these clowns winning? Secrets of the right-wing brain

Bush tanked the country. Now the right's again running the show. Neuroscience explains incompetence of all sides

Why are these clowns winning? Secrets of the right-wing brainTed Cruz, Rand Paul, Scott Walker (Credit: Jeff Malet, maletphoto.com/AP/Ed Reinke/Andy Manis/Photo montage by Salon)
When George W. Bush became president in 2001, it marked the first time in 70 years that conservative Republicans controlled all three branches of government. By the time Bush left office, we were all reminded why. The financial crisis and resulting global economic meltdown Bush left us with were eerily reminiscent of the Great Depression, but there was also 9/11, the Iraq War and Katrina—a multifaceted record of spectacular failure so stunning that it should have disqualified conservative Republicans from holding power for at least another seven decades.  Yet, the Democrats’ political response to the many messes Bush left behind has been so spectacularly inept that they’ve not only lost both houses of Congress, they’ve also lost more state legislative seats than any time since before the Great Recession.
There are many ways one might explain this state of affairs—and certainly the rise of Wall Street Democrats and the decline of labor played crucial roles. But beyond any particular issue area, there’s also the matter of differences in how liberals and conservatives think—and how they act and organize as a result.
As I’ve written before, a growing body of literature reveals that liberals and conservatives think differently from one another in ways that can even be traced back, in part, to the level of instinctual response, reflecting conservatives’ heightened sensitivity to threat bias. This work is congruent with an integrated multi-factor account offered by John Jost and three co-authors in the 2003 meta-analysis “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.” In their abstract, they explained,  “Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification).” Their meta-analysis integrated findings from 88 sample studies in 12 countries, with 22,818 individual subjects—meaning it drew on a substantial body of work by others.

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Yet, once publicized, it drew such a hostile response there was even talk of Congress defunding the entire field of research into political attitudes. In response, Jost and one co-author wrote a Washington Post Op-Ed, which defused the crisis. In it, they wrote:
True, we find some support for the traditional “rigidity-of-the-right” hypothesis, but it is also true that liberals could be characterized on the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity — all of which may be liabilities in mass politics and other public and professional domains.
This statement underscores the point that liberal cognitive tendencies can be as problematic in their way as conservative ones are.
The multi-factor distinction Jost and his colleagues analyzed is roughly congruent with a broader distinction, discussed by Chris Mooney in”The Republican Brain” (which  I wrote about here), related to two of the “Big Five” personality traits—conservatives score higher on conscientiousness, while liberals score higher on openness to new experience.
As these few examples suggest, there are multiple ways to characterize the differences in how liberals and conservatives think. For instance, Mooney argued that liberals, still fundamentally inspired by the Enlightenment promise of ever-growing knowledge about the world, are fundamentally mistaken about the nature of human reason, which they see as knowledge- and truth-seeking. But modern cognitive science teaches us that our brains are much more fundamentally shaped by the need to make persuasive arguments, which only require the appearance of rational argument.
In “The Battle for God,” Karen Armstrong illuminates a slightly different, though related, difference, contrasting the modalities of mythos and logos. As Armstrong explains, logos is concerned with the practical understanding of how things work in the world, while mythos is concerned with ultimate meaning. Either modality can be used by liberals and conservatives alike in their everyday lives. But macro-historically, there’s been a distinct bias—and weird twist on top of it—at least since the dawn of the modern era. That’s when logos began becoming so all-pervasive that it seemed destined to dislodge mythos, and some defenders of mythos (now commonly known as fundamentalists) fought back paradoxically by assuming the framework of logos, and arguing that their mythos was literally true—a move that true traditionalists would have found to be deeply in error, because it devalued the essential purpose of mythos.
The congruence with Mooney’s argument is obvious: There’s a clear kinship between logos and the Enlightenment model of reason on the one hand, and mythos and persuasion on the other. If conservatives under George W. Bush once again proved themselves incompetent in the logos of governing, liberals under Obama proved themselves incompetent in its mythos.
Or so I hypothesized. But I wanted to check things out with perhaps the world’s leading expert on incompetence, psychologist David Dunning, the senior researcher in the team that discovered the Dunning-Kruger effect, which Wikpedepia defines as “a cognitive bias whereby unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate.” Wikipedia added that “This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.” Or, as Dunning explained to Errol Morris, writing an essay series, “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is,” for the New York Times, “If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent … [T]he skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”  A recent article by Dunning, “We Are All Confident Idiots,” provides both humorous and serious examples showing just how pervasive the problem is.
Like many, I first learned of the Dunning-Kruger effect from that NYT series—and made some observations based on it at the time. There are obvious conclusions one can draw from the Dunning-Kruger effect: perhaps most important, that none of those obvious conclusions will apply to your own shortcomings, even though those are the ones that ought to concern you most. But this is specifically an individual effect, and my observation was about groups—and rather large ones, at that. So in reaching out to talk with Dunning, behind any specifics, I had two questions in mind: Could it apply to groups as well as individuals? And was it possible to do something about it?
In both cases, he answered yes, but some of the specifics surprised me. Which is just what I should have expected—to discover some limits of my own understanding. (Dunning himself has referenced Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase “unknown unknowns” to describe what we’re up against, just by the very nature of being human. But don’t have a cow, man. He’s also referenced Socrates, as well.)
To begin with, I wanted to make sure we were on the same page. An example that came readily to mind was the GOP’s claims to have 46 jobs bills that had passed the House, and were languishing in the Senate. If only Obama and Harry Reid would act on them!  The reality, of course, is that these bills would not actually do very much in the way of job creation, as critics have pointed out repeatedly over the past several years. In late October, the New York Times even interviewed some top GOP economists who admitted as much, along with independent analysts who said it would be hard to measure much impact.
In short, the GOP “jobs bills” aren’t seriously intended to create jobs. They’re intended to create talking points about creating jobs — and to counter Democratic talking points (while also doing favors for GOP donors, of course). They reflect both the persuasive nature of human cognition highlighted by Chris Mooney, and the meaning-making function of mythos described by Karen Armstrong. They might not create many jobs, I noted early in my conversation with Dunning—it’s aggregate demand that’s the primary driver in doing that—but they do resonate with the “job creator” mythos, which has been so prominent in conservative circles these past several years, and which makes perfect sense in the world of small businessmen I’ve known.
Dunning thought it was an apt example. He noted that people are often perplexed over where a never-ending, chicken-and-egg cycle begins. “You have business people, they don’t just decide there is going to be a market, they respond to the market, they respond to a demand,” Dunning said. “But they start the process where they enter the picture … People tend to think of themselves sort of as creators who come in and are imposing their will and their desires on the environment, and sort of filter out the conditions that they are really reacting to. They can recognize it pretty accurately for everybody else, they just miss that for themselves. Which I think is interesting.”
Understanding an example of how conservatives’ thinking leads them astray is the easy part, however. It helped to get our thinking in sync. But the real challenge would be making sense of how liberals and Democrats make comparable kinds of errors—errors they cannot see. And here is where things had to get a bit tricky, since I had some ideas of what the errors might be, but given the Dunning-Kruger effect, I had to expect some ideas I’d never thought of, too.
The next thing out of Dunning’s mouth wasn’t quite that—but it did have some of that flavor. Above I mentioned a paper by John Jost that represents the integration of work done by hundreds, if not thousands of researchers over a period of several decades. That integration very much represents the broad consensus view of how liberal and conservative thought relate to one another—a consensus that has since been significantly strengthened with the addition of a related finding in the physiological dimension. But there are at least two notable voices who stand out with somewhat contrasting views—Jonathan Haidt and Dan Kahan—and Dunning quickly mentioned both of their work as being harmonious with what I was saying.
I could have gotten down into the details of their theories, but in a big picture sense, Dunning was perfectly right: They’re all saying something similar—that liberals and conservatives do think differently from one another, which means that they can both fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect in ways that may be different—in terms of cognitive processes—as well as similar—produced by similar sorts of situations, for example.  What’s more, if one is concerned with trying to identify ways in which people are blind to their own shortcomings, then it’s helpful to have as many different accounts as possible.
Kahan’s work is particularly challenging, because he prefers to use a two-factor model of orientation—hierarchical/egalitarian and individualist/communitarian—rather than the single-factor measures used by most investigators, which can then be correlated with liberalism/conservatism. But he still does encounter and deal with real-world political questions where things tend to divide into two. One striking example is the “white male effect,” so-called because white males have been observed to be significantly less fearful about certain sorts of risks—most notably ones associated with guns and the environment. In a 2007 paper, for example, Kahan and his colleagues wrote, “The insensitivity to risk reflected in the white male effect can thus be seen as a defensive response to a form of cultural identity threat that afflicts hierarchical and individualistic white males.” Even though two factors were involved, the result was an effect most notable for setting one sub-population apart from the rest of the public—a cognitive bifurcation of sorts.
“Essentially you have each side interpreting what’s going on through different lenses,” Dunning said of Kahan’s work, and what connects this to his work is “the idea that people either have no idea that the other side has a different lens—they literally don’t know it, so that if you are looking at things the logos way, you really don’t know that there’s an alternative way of viewing the world is the mythos way. Or, if you are exposed to it, you think it’s not real.” Expanding on the later alternative, Dunning said, “I can guess if you described the logos world to a person who was into mythos, and vice a versa, their response would be, well, that’s a very interesting way of viewing the world, I wonder what took them off the right track.”
Although this made sense, my working thesis was not that most people don’t have both mythos and logos in their experience—that may or may not be true—but that the political worlds of liberalism and conservatism are organized differently, so that only certain aspects of the personal resonate strongly with the political.
“Well, that makes sense,” Dunning told me, then quickly added, “I’m from the other world, though, where I find it very easy to focus on the individual level.” Which led directly to the next question on my mind: Is there specific evidence for the Dunning-Kruger effect overlapping from the individual level to larger social groups?
“The answer is, yes it can,” Dunning told me. He’s still working on writing up experimental results, but he was happy to share some broader observations. “It’s likely to happen in two different ways,” he said. “The first is often you have organizations that are well set–you can say they’re very competent–in their ways. They can have a problem when conditions on the ground shift, and you could say that in the last 10 or 20 years, the conditions on the grounds shifted demographically, in terms of the people, for example who vote in the midterm.” Twenty years ago, these older voters had come of age during the Great Depression, and leaned Democratic as a result. But older voters now are much more Republican, which tends to skew the midterms in the opposite direction from the past. (The age-based difference in participation rates has also grown over time, as well.) As a result, Dunning said, “You have Republicans in midterms, and the occasional voters now are the young, and they’re rather Democratic so there is oscillation between elections and that’s a changed situation,” which is precisely the first sort of thing that tends to trip up organizations.
“The other thing is that the most recent work we’ve done suggests that the real cost of the Dunning-Kruger framework at the organizational level is that when a very smart idea or very smart person comes along, the organizations are not necessarily very skilled at recognizing that person’s genius,” Dunning said.  “We have lots of data showing that very top performers, their top performances are very much missed. The genius of their ideas are just missed by the group.”
Three examples on the Democratic side came readily to mind when Dunning said this. First was civil rights lawyer and Harvard law professor Lani Guinier, whose work on voting rights and representational fairness was easily demonized by the right when she was nominated to head the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, in part because Joe Biden (then chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee) couldn’t understand it, and Bill Clinton didn’t even take the time to try. Yet, in retrospect, if they had stood behind her, most of the GOP’s voting rights mischief in the past 20 years—including the theft of the 2000 election—could have been avoided, or defeated, and there would be a much stronger foundation for multi-racial coalition politics at all levels of government.
Second was Princeton political scientist Jacob Hacker, who has done pioneering work on asymmetric polarization and the devastation of the middle class, as well as developing the public option as a complement to Medicare in providing insurance for those left uninsured as employer-provided health insurance becomes increasingly expensive and less common. In all three areas, Hacker’s thinking has involved considerations that are mostly not even understood by those who’ve ignored, dismissed, or, more rarely, criticized them.
Third was University of California, Berkeley, cognitive linguist George Lakoff, whose work illuminating the cognitive and communicative differences between liberals and conservatives—”Moral Politics,” “Don’t Think of An Elephant,” “Whose Freedom,” etc.—has found a wide audience centered in the progressive activist base, but has yet to seriously impact the political professionals whose collective failure I alluded to in this story’s first paragraph.
When I interviewed him recently for Salon, Lakoff even highlighted the concept of hypocognition—that “we don’t have all the ideas we need.” One example he cited was the concept of reflexivity, “the fact that thought is part of the world. That when you’re thinking, it’s not separate from reality, it’s part of reality. And if your understanding of the world is reflected in what you do, then that thought comes into the world through your actions,” which helps to explain, in part, the power of conservative mythos, even when it’s mistaken as a matter of fact, a matter of logos.
Lakoff also pointed out that “Hypocognition itself is an idea that we need.” There are things going on in our social and political world that we don’t have names for—and because we don’t have names for them, we can’t think and talk about them coherently.  So, we have conservatives on the one hand acting on their mythos, mistakenly believing it’s true as a matter of logos—which is one kind of incompetence—and yet, nonetheless reshaping reality through the power of reflexivity. (Think of how invading Iraq in response to 9/11 helped bring ISIS into existence, for example.) On the other hand, we have liberals seeing things only in terms of logos, who can’t understand how wildly mistaken conservatives can nonetheless reshape the world to reflect their paranoid fantasies, because they’re missing the crucial concept of reflexivity (and even the very concept of missing concepts, the concept of hypocognition)—which is another, very different, but very real form of incompetence.
So, when Dunning told me, “The genius of their ideas are just missed by the group,” Lakoff’s discussion of hypocognition naturally came to mind.  What could be a worse idea to miss than the very idea of missing ideas?  If you don’t think they’re out there, you’ll never go looking for them—never believe anyone who claims to have found one of them, either.
In fact, Democrats appear to face a situation in which both the phenomena Dunning pointed to are happening at once.  The demographic shift in midterm voters has happened in the same time frame that Guinier, Hacker and Lakoff have been writing, arguing for new ways of doing things, and more often than not seeing the genius of their ideas being “just missed by the group.”
Dunning also suggested that collective cognitive differences could manifest in group blind spots. “If you’re in a group that tends things in a logos box or a mythos box you may very well not know that the other box exists,” Dunning said. “It just doesn’t occur to you even though, as you mentioned before, in everyday life you are probably switching from a mythos to logos person.”
“I think the best examples come from cross-cultural understanding,” he quickly added. “That is, what we don’t know happens in other cultures—you know, their ideas, the meanings of certain actions, certain concerns that just don’t occur to us because we grew up in the United States, as supposed to Japan or China or Africa, for example. So if you think about the mythos/logos distinction as cultural distinction, it wouldn’t be surprising that there are ‘unknown unknowns.’”
Dunning then went on to cite “some empirical work being done by Rob Willer and Matthew Feinberg … showing that you can get ‘the other side’ to support your side more if you make sure to approach or political arguments into language or have it address the concerns of the other side. So, for example, if you talk about environmentalism as maintaining the purity of the earth, and get conservatives much much more excited about the idea of sustainability and environmentalism.” [Article press release here.] On the other hand, they also showed that emphasizing the military’s role in providing equal opportunities for minorities impacts liberals to make them more supportive of the military—so adopting different basic frameworks can reach people on both sides of the ideological divide. Their research doesn’t show that differences are erased, but they can be diminished, which is a start.
I started this article by taking note of the colossal failures of the Bush administration, in part because they’re so staggering that they’re impossible to miss.  But Dunning cautioned against being misdirected. “The real effect of suffering from Dunning-Kruger is not that you suffer obvious losses but that there are so many opportunities you will never notice, or know about in your life,” Dunning said, “and that’s absolutely true that the collective level … People at collective level are going to make mistakes, even if they’re expertly interested in doing the best they possibly can.”
While Dunning already touched on one reason for this—a collective failure to appreciate new, breakthrough ideas—he now turned to an opposite kind of problem, failures that can come from a lack of group coherence, from people seeming to work together, while actually having significantly different sorts of goals.  “I have often wondered, if everybody has a hymnal, is everybody’s hymnal the same,” Dunning said. “So for political operatives, sometimes I wonder if their task is to get candidates elected or to make sure that they earn enough money from the election that they can live a good life, and can continue to have their political business.” It’s a question many in netroots have raised repeatedly over the years.
It’s not limited to politics, of course. Dunning also cited a similar problem in the business world, where “if you’re a CEO, you get graded on how well you do this past quarter, so the task is to maximize profit for this quarter. And that may not be the best strategy in the long-term.”
More generally, Dunning said, “Whenever you see somebody acting in what looks like an incompetent way you have to ask yourself if they actually perceive themselves doing a different task than what you think they’re doing, and being very competent in [that task].” He cited an example from his own experience, a dean at a university he had observed, who “would speak in non sequiturs,” hardly a sign of intellectual competence, “until I realized this task was to outlast everybody, just so he got his way, and that he was brilliant. But if you thought his task was to bring many minds in together, and come to an understanding … no, that was not the task.”
What all these examples seem to suggest is that we can identify potential sources of failure—even if we can’t see them all.  We will always be limited in our understanding—and limited in our understanding of our understanding. But we can still make progress, nonetheless, particularly if we stay mindful of our limitations.
Dunning offered two broad observations of what groups can do in this regard when they encounter recognizable failure—which would seem to be the most opportune time for change. First, he said, was to do “an honest autopsy of what just happened, and then to actually apply the lessons of that autopsy, as opposed to just go through the exercise and then do what you did the last time.” Dunning specifically noted the need to “talk to a lot of people, including people who might be opponents, people who certainly have an opposing view to people of your own, politically.” The Republicans’ post-2012 autopsy doesn’t exactly look like it meets these criteria—but the midterm electoral disconnect Dunning mentioned earlier “saved” them from suffering as a result, which might well only make it even more difficult for them to change in the long run.
The second way out, Dunning suggested, was turning to history—which can still be tricky, since one must decide which historical examples are relevant, and what the suggested answers from them are. It’s popular among pundits, for example, to say that Bill Clinton saved the Democratic Party by moving it to the center—a claim that rather strikingly ignores the massive, historic losses at all levels in the 1994 election, losses that were duplicated even more deeply in 2010, after Obama had similarly sought to bring both sides together—and been spurned, just as Clinton had been. Still, the general principle seems sound: by looking to history, we can examine a situation as outsiders, and see things in it that we may well be blind to as insiders.  As with the autopsy example, the possibility of successful reorientation is present, there is no guarantee it will be achieved.
There’s another line of research Dunning’s been involved with more recently, in collaboration with Clayton Critcher of U.C. Berkeley, which struck me as having direct relevance to my interest in bipartisan incompetence. This involves gaining deeper insight into how people construe the inner workings of others, based on what they know (or believe) about themselves, what Critcher and Dunning call “egocentric pattern projection.” It was my take, as a layman, that this could play an interesting role in how groups come to theorize about one another—and a possible source of blindness as well as insight.
As I explained in an email to Dunning before the interview, “I see this as connected, because I believe that both liberals and conservatives tend to misunderstand one another in various ways, and that one of those ways is via projecting self-derived assumptions onto the other. These projections both feed into and derive strength from beliefs that their cognitive competencies are all that’s needed to win politically, and that their cognitive incompetencies aren’t incompetencies at all.”
As with the Dunning-Kruger effect, egocentric pattern projection is not a wholly new idea at bottom; it’s long been widely understood that we tend to view the world through our own particular framework of assumptions. But, again, it’s a matter of seeing something old in a new light. A 2009 paper they co-authored showed that “If two traits go together in the self, then they are assumed to go together in other people. If two traits clash in the self-concept, then they are presumed not to co-occur in other people.”  The shift from projecting traits to projecting patterns is not only significantly more sophisticated, it opens the doorway for a whole progression of further steps.
These weren’t controversial or political traits, but commonplace, representative ones—idealistic, perceptive, generous, wordly, resigned, bashful, reserved, prideful, considerate, persistent and dependent. Which is precisely why we’ve got every reason to believe that it’s generally true. But how much of a leap beyond that is it to the sort of group misunderstanding I was wondering about?
“It’s not very much,” Dunning told me.  Egocentric pattern projection “turns out in the main to be a good thing,” he said, “because you’re a human like other people, and it turns out you can make some good guesses about other people,” but “It can get you into trouble when people do think differently, like when you have this divide in terms of mythos and logos.” He then went on to tell me about a new paper, not yet published, studying how people build explanations for the patterns they perceive. As that paper explains, “Causal trait theories—created to explain trait co-occurrence in a single person—are exported to guide one’s implicit personality theories about people in general.”
Obviously, once people have such theories, they are one step closer to sharing them with others, and through sharing, building collective theories—just the sorts of theories that could lead liberals and conservatives to misunderstand one another. We’re still a long way from knowing for certain that this broadly general process underlies what’s happening in our political culture today, but it’s starting to look more and more likely that it is.
While Dunning and others referred to are doing remarkable work to illuminate both the nature and limits of our self-understanding, a nagging question remains: How much does it all matter?  By understanding how we misunderstand each other, for example, we may find better ways to overcome misunderstanding, as the work by Willer and Feinberg suggests. But that’s still presuming a common desire for mutual understanding, which may be found in a laboratory setting. But is it truly a realistic presumption to hold onto in America as a whole today? Or is it just another broad expression of liberals’ problem-solving, logos-based orientation, which conservatives fundamentally reject? And does the hope of finding common ground willfully ignore the role of reflexivity linked with conservative counterfactual beliefs to create conditions in which bipartisan problem-solving simply isn’t possible?
In short, it may be heartening when cognitive research suggests roughly symmetrical mechanisms and ways of overcoming differences, but that could be just another example of liberal intellectuals projecting their framework of assumptions, blinding themselves to more fundamental and intractable differences, which conservatives are, in their own way, smart enough to stick with and exploit, while depending on liberals’ relative disorganization, indecision and attraction to ambiguity to allow them to win the day, even if they can’t win an outright majority in a presidential election any more.
Once you’re aware that the Dunning-Kruger effect is involved, it’s anybody’s guess, really, who is more incompetent than whom.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Black Friday

First of all, I hate shopping. Second of all, I hate fighting traffic and crowds. Thirdly, it's cold out there. Fourthly, though it's cold it's a drop dead gorgeous day in Shelby County. Why spoil it in a mass of humanity?
Fifthly, I am not in the market for the kind of big ticket items that are on sale. Sixthly, my spotty sanity is a precious thing and I guard it religiously.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

A Good Take on the Ferguson Decision

One question explains why what happened in Ferguson isn't justice












Ferguson outrage proves we can no longer ignore problem with raceSt. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch presented both sides and all evidence to the grand jury. Would he have done the same had Brown killed Wilson?  
I called a few of my lawyer friends to pick their brains for something original or thoughtful to say about Ferguson. At this point, it seems like everything has been said and played on repeat.
The most interesting thing I came away with was this - the prosecutors thought the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch did the right thing in how he handled the grand jury there, while my defense lawyer pals all said he blew it.
In the press conference Monday night, you could hear it. McCulloch gave every reason not to prosecute Darren Wilson - eyewitness testimony was inconsistent and conflicting, the physical evidence supported Wilson's version of events, and the media, the media, the media. Ultimately, the grand jurors there, after having reviewed all of the evidence, decided not to prosecute Wilson.
But here's the thing - the grand jurors were presented with all the evidence. While on the face of it that might seem fair, that's hardly how the system works for anybody else. The job of a grand jury is to establish probable cause, and the burden of proof for that is low - lower than the burden of proof in a civil trial, much less a criminal trial.
It's a constant refrain among defense lawyers that prosecutors could indict a ham sandwich if they wanted to. The grand jury is not meant to be fair and is an inherently biased construct - for the most part, it's prosecutors who decide which witnesses to call and what evidence to present. There's no judge present, and no cross-examination. In short, it's not a public trial by jury.
But that's what McCulloch tried to fashion this one to be.
As one of my prosecutor friends said to me, if you can't get probable cause after putting all the evidence out there, how are you going to get proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a trial? When you look at the conflicting testimony, the exculpatory evidence, the tendency of the public to trust police officers over someone who just committed a crime on video tape - it all adds up to a defense lawyer's dream.
It's hard to blame McCulloch for trying to kill this baby in its crib before he had to raise it. It's understandable.
But wrong.
Birmingham defense lawyer Hube Dodd said that, like in war, truth was a casualty in Ferguson.
"What this means is that we'll never get to the truth of what happened," Dodd said. "Now the truth is obscured by everybody asserting their agendas, from the prosecutor to the police to the protestors and the media, too."
A trial is about getting to the truth, he said, and that's in the public interest.
Tommy Spina, another Birmingham defense lawyer, concurred.
"I believe that a grand jury was used by the DA to essentially have a majority of jurors determine guilt or innocence, without any rules of evidence nor any cross examination of the evidence, using a probable cause standard of proof," Spina said. "The cause should have been charged and the evidence presented to a jury in a public trial subject to cross examination where a jury could determine unanimously beyond a reasonable doubt, the highest standard of proof, the guilt or innocence of the accused."
Many others have said the same things since Monday night, and I thought at first my quest for an original thought had hit a dead end, at least until I realized I'd never asked any of these questions before.
And why?
Because I never had to. Because this isn't the way the system usually works.
Ask yourself this: Had Michael Brown been the one to kill Wilson, would the prosecutor have presented both sides of the case to the grand jury?
There's just no way that ever would have happened, and therein is the proof that something different happened here - that justice isn't blind, and in fact, it's not even justice.

Nicholas Wapshott - The Sphinx

I am enjoying this wonderful book and will comment as I go along.  The story of how FDR prepared the country for war in the late 30's and fought off the isolationists has been told before but never as well as this.  FDR walked such a tightrope in the late 30's as we headed toward Pearl Harbor.

There is a lot in this book about Joe Kennedy.  The author plays up the fact that JPK wanted to be President.  Of course, he was doomed to failure in this ambition.  FDR used him, abused him, toyed with him.  I love it!

The book brings out the extent of Roosevelt's tangled relationship with Joe Kennedy and what a rascal this Kennedy was.

Then there is the saga of Charles Lindbergh.  Can anything good be said about this dangerous man?

The way FDR taunted Joe Kennedy is hysterical.  P. 1

FDR isolated the isolationists slowly but surely as American opinion moved toward preparedness, and in this book the focus is on Joe Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh.  P. 124

Like President Obama FDR had to prepare the country for the war he knew was coming without any Republican help.

Lindbergh's name was certainly floated for the 1940 Republican presidential nomination.  If he had been the political type and had been elected in that year the history of Western Civilization would have markedly different.  P. 145

By December of 1939 FDR was convinced that a German and Soviet Union victory would put in jeopardy Western Civilization. P. 152

The chilling thing about reading about the buildup to our participation in World War II is that even though I know how everything turned out, I still get tense.

I can see now why and how FDR played cat and mouse with everyone as to whether he would run again in 1940.  Calling him The Sphinx was appropriate I'm sure.

Roosevelt was in a quandary as to how to deal with this disciple of appeasement.  P. 173

For reasons unclear to this day, FDR insisted on Henry Wallace as his running mate in 1940 to the chagrin of the Democratic Convention that was forced to nominate him.  P. 188

As Americans were selecting a President in the summer and fall of 1940 Great Britain stood alone against Germany.  P. 190

Hitler's attach on Russia sealed his fate.  P. 312

But I am above all grateful to Roosevelt and those who thought like him, who worked so hard to ensure that Nazism was defeated.  Had a less brilliant and persuasive leader been at the helm of the United States at this critical turning point in history, this story would have had a tragic outcome.  And it would most likely have been written in German.  P. 354

Grand Jury Duty 2007

I served on the grand jury in Shelby County, Alabama, in October of 2007. Naturally I was the jury clown. When presented with the list of cases I asked the DA, "Where is the ham sandwich?" Everyone including the DA laughed knowing the reference. When a Sgt from the sheriff's office talked to us about what was going on in the county I asked him, "If I really need you, Sgt, which doughnut shop should I go to?" Everyone including the DA snickered except the Sarge. He looked at me with cold brown eyes and responded, "Call the PD or 911." When I left that day I looked to see if anyone was following me.
By the end of it I knew where every discovered meth lab in the county was.
We returned True Bill in every case except one where the alleged rape victim came to speak to us but after a conversation in the hallway with the DA he came in to tell us that "she's changed her story." In other words, jury, return No Bill.
Indeed, a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich from a competent DA. If a DA desires a indictment he/she will get it. A grand jury will do what the DA wants. At least that was my experience.

Monday, November 24, 2014

11/24/14 Today in the News

Republicans continue to rage at the President's actions on immigration.
We wait for grand jury results in Ferguson, Mo which could set off riots.
Secretary of Defense Hagel resigns.

Three Books

Photo
Credit Peter Sis
“I was the only foreigner in the English Department and took it as a personal affront that she thought I could not understand Twain or Faulkner as well as she did,” Azar Nafisi writes of a fellow student at the University of Oklahoma. “Of what value is a novel if you have to have been born in a certain latitude in order to enjoy it?”
Indeed. One certainly doesn’t have to be American to comprehend American literature. Perhaps the greatest work of criticism ever devoted to the subject is D. H. Lawrence’s “Studies in Classic American Literature,” which remains as fresh and biting as it was when first published by the English novelist in 1923. The French, on the whole, appreciate Edgar Allan Poe better than we do, perhaps because of Baudelaire’s excellent translations. In “Written Lives,” the contemporary Spanish novelist Javier Marías writes piercingly about Henry James, William Faulkner and other Americans. Some of my favorite insights into Emily Dickinson’s poetry come from two Dutch writers, Bert Keizer and Henk Romijn Meijer. And so on, endlessly. You don’t have to be an insider to be admitted to the club.
Nafisi, the author of the best-selling “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” would like to have it both ways. She wants to hold on to the outsider status she earned by being born and raised in Iran. At the same time, she wants to claim and perhaps in some ways vindicate her American citizenship. As she tells us perhaps one too many times in this new book, she swore her loyalty to the United States, in 2008, in a “drab,” “bland” government office building in Fairfax, Va. This makes her as American as anyone: We are, after all, a nation of immigrants. So nationality isn’t really what’s at issue here.
Ethically and politically, Nafisi is clearly an admirable person. She is also a courageous one, as her accounts of the dangers she endured in Iran and the resistance she put up duly attest. For all I know, she may be a tremendously inspiring teacher. But she is neither a sensitive enough critic nor a subtle enough writer to tackle the project she has now set for herself.
“The Republic of Imagination” bills itself as an exploration of American culture and values through the careful examination of three works of literature: Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt” and Carson McCullers’s “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” (There is also an epilogue that focuses on James Baldwin, which might be seen as a nod to diversity, though Nafisi explicitly disclaims any tendency toward “political correctness.”) She hopes to use these literary works to demonstrate certain ideas she has about the American mind, the American way of life and American writing in general. She also intends to put forward a larger theory about the function of literature in relation to society — its enduring importance and meaning within any culture.
This is all very commendable, and certainly the book is filled with commendable thoughts, but they’re mainly couched in a language of anodyne politics sifted through a scrim of mass and social media. “Against the onslaught of consumerism, against all the overwhelming siren voices that beckon, our only weapon is to exercise our right to choose,” Nafisi says in her chapter on “Babbitt.” “And to make the right choices, we need to be able to think, to reflect, to pause, to imagine, because what is being sold to you is not just toothpaste or deodorant or a bathroom fixture, but your next president or representative, your children’s future, your way and view of life.” True enough in some ways (though the “right to choose” hardly belongs to all of “us” equally), but do we really need to hear thoughts like this once again, and from a literature professor? Literature, Ezra Pound said, is supposed to be “news that stays news,” but Nafisi, rather than taking advantage of this, seems determined to recycle a plethora of stale notions.
Her platitudinous solemnity serves her particularly ill when she takes up Mark Twain. “Huckleberry Finn” is a hard-edge, multifaceted, extremely sharp object. Whatever angle you pick it up from, it will cut you, especially if you try to use it as an implement to slice something else. Nafisi treats it as if it were an easily graspable safety razor with which she can shape a nice little moral. “In the end, Huck is not yet completely cleansed of his racist conscience,” she tells us, “nor is his future necessarily brighter than it was at the start of his adventures. But whatever might happen, no one can erase the bond between Huck and Jim.” Such remarks (and the chapter is filled with them) hardly do justice to the complicated, hilarious, searing, deeply intelligent tone of Twain’s masterpiece.
The section on “Babbitt” is much better — actually, the best in the book — because, among other things, it gives Nafisi a chance to mount a well-grounded attack on the dire principles of the Common Core curriculum. She also seems in sympathy with both Sinclair Lewis and his poor, pathetic butt of a satiric character, and this gives her account of the novel a complexity largely absent from the other two sections. She understands what’s sad about Babbitt as well as what’s laughable. “When I first read ‘Babbitt,’ in college, I was too caught up with the obvious satire on conformity to pay much attention to the murmuring of its protagonist’s heart. It is easy to catch the satire, less so the pathos,” she wisely comments. And this, in turn, allows her to measure the extent to which the culture at large (not to mention his author’s willfulness) can be blamed for Babbitt’s flaws.
Her chapter on Carson McCullers isn’t bad, but it doesn’t tell us anything new about the work. Instead, Nafisi veers between biographical tidbits about the author and straightforward plot summary, intercutting these with reflections on her own undergraduate past. At one point, though, the argument gets sidetracked by a digression about Oprah Winfrey, who apparently invited two deaf people onto her show to talk about John Singer, the “deaf-mute” in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Expounding on Singer, Nafisi says he is so mysterious that he allows the other characters “to shape him in their own desired images — like Jesus, in a sense, or Oprah.” And before you can even come back with a startled “Huh?” Nafisi has launched herself into the airwaves. “When Oprah speaks to millions,” she asserts, “she appears to be addressing each one of us individually, speaking not just to us but also for us. We believe that she has a personal message for each one of us, but in fact she is looking into the camera, not into our souls.”
“Well, duh” is the phrase that may leap to mind, but that reaction fails to acknowledge the positive looniness of this statement. Can there be a single person in the world capable of reading and understanding McCullers’s difficult novel (not to mention making her way through this long chapter and the two preceding ones), but at the same time so ignorant as to believe that people on television are speaking directly to her? What kind of reader, in short, is “The Republic of Imagination” addressed to? I don’t think Nafisi ever asked herself that question, and the result is a book that’s dutiful and well intentioned, but far short of what its ambitious nature demands.

THE REPUBLIC OF IMAGINATION

America in Three Books
By Azar Nafisi
Illustrated by Peter Sis
338 pp. Viking. $28.95.

Sunday, November 23, 2014

NASA Admits Alcubierre Drive Initiative: Faster Than The Speed Of Light

earthweareone.com
12 September 2014

NASA is currently working on the first practical field test toward the possibility of faster than light travel.

Traveling faster than light has always been attributed to science fiction, but that all changed when Harold White and his team at NASA started to work on and tweak the Alcubierre Drive. Special relativity may hold true, but to travel faster or at the speed of light we might not need a craft that can travel at that speed. The solution might be to place a craft within a space that is moving faster than the speed of light! Therefore the craft itself does not have to travel at the speed of light from it’s own type of propulsion system.

It’s easier to think about if you think in terms of a flat escalator in an airport. The escalator moves faster than you are walking! In this case, the space encompassing the ship would be moving faster than the ship could fly, keeping all the matter of the ship intact. Therefore, we can move faster than light, in a massless cloud of space-time.

What is the Alcubierre Drive? It’s actually based on Einsteins field equations, it suggests that a spacecraft could achieve faster-than-light travel. Rather than exceed the speed of light alone in a craft, a spacecraft would leap long distances by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it. This would result in faster than light travel (1). Physicist Miguel Alcubierre was the first that we know to identify this possibility. He described it as remaining still on a flat piece of space-time inside a warp bubble that was made to move at “superluminal” (faster than light) velocity. We must not forget that space-time can be warped and distorted, it can be moved. But what about moving sections of space-time that’s created by expanding space-time behind the ship, and by contracting space-time in front of the ship?

This type of concept was also recently illustrated by Mathematician James Hill and Barry Cox at the University of Adelaide. They published a paper in the journal proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences (3).

It was once believed that Einsteins theory of special relativity means that faster than light travel is just not possible. This is a misconception, special relativity simply states that the distance you travel depends on how fast you move, for how long you’re moving for. So if you are driving at 70 mph you will have covered 70 miles in one hour. The confusing part is that, no matter how fast you are moving you will always see the speed of light as being the same. It’s similar to sound, if you close your eyes and imagine that the only sense you have is hearing, you will identify things by how they sound. So if a car is driving at a rapid speed and honks its horn, we know that the horn is always tooting the same tone, it’s just the car’s motion that made it appear to change.

Special relativity also showed us that the atoms and molecules that make up matter are connected by electromagnetic fields, the same stuff light is made up of. The object that would break the light speed barrier is made up of the same stuff as the barrier itself. How can an object travel faster than that which links it’s atoms? This was the barrier.

The only problem with our modern day science is that creating distortions in space-time require energy densities that are not yet possible for humans, or so they say. NASA scientists are currently working on tweaking Alcubierre’s model.

Faster-than-light travel, also known as hyper space or “warp” drive from what the masses know for sure is currently at the level of speculation. Although there is already a lot of evidence that shows it is possible and has already been accomplished, mainstream science is still catching up. We are at the point right now where faster-than-light travel is still theoretical, but possible.

At the same time, we have to look at other factors that are now coming to light. As former NASA Astronaut and Princeton Physics Professor Dr, Brian O’leary Illustrates. This topic has recently had another media explosion and congress recently discussed and looked at evidence for Earth like planets recently found by Kepler Telescopes. Three “super-Earths” to be exact that are most probably teeming with life (4). Furthermore, former congressmen and women recently participated in a citizens hearing on the subject of UFOs a few weeks ago. You can read more about that here. I’ve used this video in many articles before, but it’s just a great clip from when Dr O’leary was still with us.

Ian Leslie - Curious

My Mother knew the old fashioned meaning of the word "curious."  To her curious meant strange.  If you said someone was curious you meant they were strange, eccentric, weird.  Today curious is a good word.  It IS good to be curious, isn't it?

This is a book about curiosity.  Some of the points raised in the book arouse my curiosity.

If there is one great takeaway from this book it is this.  Because of Google and Wikipedia knowledge is not obsolete like some fools say; knowledge is king.  You can't think and solve and analyze if you don't have a proper knowledge base.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it is necessary for the good life for us humans.

"I have no special talents," said Albert Einstein.  "I am just passionately curious."

Rather than just getting more people to school and university the new challenge is to find ways of making more people hungry to learn, question, and create.  The world is in need of more curious learners.  P. XV

Light curiosity is diversive curiosity.  Epistemic curiosity is deep curiosity.  P. XX

Empathic curiosity is curiosity about the thoughts and feelings of others.  P. XX1

Curiosity is contagious.  So is incuriosity.  P. XX11

The world is in need of more curious learners.  P. 15

In Roman times curiosity was considered a bodily urge, like an appetite, which had both its good and bad features.  P. 60

Curiosity wasn't always considered a positive trait.  Saint Augustine discounted it.  P. 60

Economist John Maynard Keynes once offered advice on how to conduct oneself in a bookstore.  "A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants.  One should enter vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye.  To walk the rounds of the bookstore, dipping in it as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon's entertainment."  Unlike Google where you are supposed to know what you are looking for.  A truly curious person doesn't always know what he wants to know about.  P. 73

The Web is easier to search than ever, but it doesn't necessarily stoke our curiosity.  Curiosity is sustained by unanswered questions but Google never says "I don't know."  P. 74

"Good bookstores are still better than Amazon at attracting your attention to books you've never heard of before or didn't set out to acquire (a recent study found that people are twice as likely to buy a book on impulse in a bookstore than online).  In this way the old media were better at broadening our horizons."  P. 75

The internet can make happily ignorant of what we don't know and what we don't know that we don't know.  P. 75

Online research is more efficient than library research but it has the effect of shrinking the scope of investigation.  P. 76

Information may flow liberally but out attention span is parochial  and tribal.  P. 76

The internet is making smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.  P. 86

We are at the point of a great polarization between the curious and the incurious.  P. 86

The more we know the better we are at thinking.  P. 118

Darwin was influenced by Malthus.  P. 152

(Henry) James didn't feel the need to go chasing after experience, preferring to discover what was interesting in the experiences he had.  P. 173

You can take anything and by paying close attention to it make it interesting.  P. 173

The key to a successful retirement may be to find a way to make a boring life interesting.  P. 175

On Serious Reading

Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say


Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won’t commit to.
“I give it a few seconds — not even minutes — and then I’m moving again,” says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University.
But it’s not just online anymore. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel.
 
 
 
“It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.”
To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.
“I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”
If the rise of nonstop cable TV news gave the world a culture of sound bites, the Internet, Wolf said, is bringing about an eye byte culture. Time spent online — on desktop and mobile devices — was expected to top five hours per day in 2013 for U.S. adults, according to eMarketer, which tracks digital behavior. That’s up from three hours in 2010.
Word lovers and scientists have called for a “slow reading” movement, taking a branding cue from the “slow food” movement. They are battling not just cursory sentence galloping but the constant social network and e-mail temptations that lurk on our gadgets — the bings and dings that interrupt “Call me Ishmael.”
Researchers are working to get a clearer sense of the differences between online and print reading — comprehension, for starters, seems better with paper — and are grappling with what these differences could mean not only for enjoying the latest Pat Conroy novel but for understanding difficult material at work and school. There is concern that young children’s affinity and often mastery of their parents’ devices could stunt the development of deep reading skills.
The brain is the innocent bystander in this new world. It just reflects how we live.
“The brain is plastic its whole life span,” Wolf said. “The brain is constantly adapting.”
Wolf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the study of reading, was startled last year to discover her brain was apparently adapting, too. After a day of scrolling through the Web and hundreds of e-mails, she sat down one evening to read Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game.”
“I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it,” she said. “It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.”
Adapting to read
The brain was not designed for reading. There are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. But spurred by the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, Chinese paper and, finally, the Gutenberg press, the brain has adapted to read.
Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. Sure, there might be pictures mixed in with the text, but there didn’t tend to be many distractions. Reading in print even gave us a remarkable ability to remember where key information was in a book simply by the layout, researchers said. We’d know a protagonist died on the page with the two long paragraphs after the page with all that dialogue.
The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade when dealing with other mediums as well.
“We’re spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scroll­ing and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you,” said Andrew Dillon, a University of Texas professor who studies reading. “We’re in this new era of information behavior, and we’re beginning to see the consequences of that.”
Brandon Ambrose, a 31-year-old Navy financial analyst who lives in Alexandria, knows of those consequences.
His book club recently read “The Interestings,” a best-seller by Meg Wolitzer. When the club met, he realized he had missed a number of the book’s key plot points. It hit him that he had been scanning for information about one particular aspect of the book, just as he might scan for one particular fact on his computer screen, where he spends much of his day.
“When you try to read a novel,” he said, “it’s almost like we’re not built to read them anymore, as bad as that sounds.”
Ramesh Kurup noticed something even more troubling. Working his way recently through a number of classic authors — George Eliot, Marcel Proust, that crowd — Kurup, 47, discovered that he was having trouble reading long sentences with multiple, winding clauses full of background information. Online sentences tend to be shorter, and the ones containing complicated information tend to link to helpful background material.
“In a book, there are no graphics or links to keep you on track,” Kurup said.
It’s easier to follow links, he thinks, than to keep track of so many clauses in page after page of long paragraphs.
Kurup’s observation might sound far-fetched, but told about it, Wolf did not scoff. She offered more evidence: Several English department chairs from around the country have e-mailed her to say their students are having trouble reading the classics.
“They cannot read ‘Middlemarch.’ They cannot read William James or Henry James,” Wolf said. “I can’t tell you how many people have written to me about this phenomenon. The students no longer will or are perhaps incapable of dealing with the convoluted syntax and construction of George Eliot and Henry James.”
Wolf points out that she’s no Luddite. She sends e-mails from her iPhone as often as one of her students. She’s involved with programs to send tablets to developing countries to help children learn to read. But just look, she said, at Twitter and its brisk 140-character declarative sentences.
“How much syntax is lost, and what is syntax but the reflection of our convoluted thoughts?” she said. “My worry is we will lose the ability to express or read this convoluted prose. Will we become Twitter brains?”
Bi-literate brains?
Wolf’s next book will look at what the digital world is doing to the brain, including looking at brain-scan data as people read both online and in print. She is particularly interested in comprehension results in screen vs. print reading.
Already, there is some intriguing research that looks at that question. A 2012 Israeli study of engineering students — who grew up in the world of screens — looked at their comprehension while reading the same text on screen and in print when under time pressure to complete the task.
The students believed they did better on screen. They were wrong. Their comprehension and learning was better on paper.
Researchers say that the differences between text and screen reading should be studied more thoroughly and that the differences should be dealt with in education, particularly with school-aged children. There are advantages to both ways of reading. There is potential for a bi-literate brain.
“We can’t turn back,” Wolf said. “We should be simultaneously reading to children from books, giving them print, helping them learn this slower mode, and at the same time steadily increasing their immersion into the technological, digital age. It’s both. We have to ask the question: What do we want to preserve?”
Wolf is training her own brain to be bi-literate. She went back to the Hesse novel the next night, giving herself distance, both in time and space, from her screens.
“I put everything aside. I said to myself, ‘I have to do this,’ ” she said. “It was really hard the second night. It was really hard the third night. It took me two weeks, but by the end of the second week I had pretty much recovered myself so I could enjoy and finish the book.”
Then she read it again.
“I wanted to enjoy this form of reading again,” Wolf said. “When I found myself, it was like I recovered. I found my ability again to slow down, savor and think.”

Saturday, November 22, 2014

November 22, 1963

I have never bought into any of the conspiracy theories.  Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy and he acted alone.  There were influences on him certainly but no conspiracy.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Bryan Stevenson - Just Mercy

This is a compelling book about a Harvard trained lawyer who has spent his career defending the people most in need of legal help: the poor, the wrongly convicted, and women and children trapped in the unfairness of our criminal justice system.  He founded an organization in Montgomery called the Equal Justice Initiative as a legal practice dedicated these ends.

The book recounts stories of people unfairly treated by our legal system.  We're talking about people unable to afford proper representation and people who received poor representation by court appointed public defenders.  The stories will break your heart.  The flaws in our criminal justice system that unfairly target the poor are legion.

The primary story is that of Walter McMillian who spent years on death row for a murder he did not commit.  Approximately 1 in 9 of death row inmates have been freed by DNA testing.  This is appalling.  McMillian was victimized by corrupt police and uncaring judges in Monroeville.  The legal hoops that have to be surmounted in our system for the poor are unbelievable.

McMillian was eventually freed but he was scarred for life.  How many people have been scarred for life by our unfair legal system?  Too man to count.

Attorneys doing this kind of work deserve our praise and support.  It is difficult work.  There is hope going forward, but this book will bring tears along the way.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

The Simple Truth: President Obama is Too Intelligent for Republicans to Understand

BY Allen Clifton
Forward Progressives
17 November 2014

A few years back I worked with a guy who was probably a genius. In fact, he often struggled in life interacting with people because his brain simply performed at a higher level than the average person. I remember asking him what his biggest belief was in making life decisions and he always, without fail, told me “think of the bigger picture.” And while I’ve always tried to be a big picture thinker, knowing him when I did helped me understand it a little better.

He always told me the biggest issue he faced when dealing with people was that he’d see things in a bigger scope that most people simply couldn’t follow. While many people tend to not see beyond a particular moment, day, week or even month, he operated with a sense of “is what I’m doing now the best course of action to set me up for success not just now, but later on.” He used to tell me people would come to him for advice every once in a while and often walk away angry because what they wanted to hear wasn’t usually what they needed to hear. He was actually one of the first people who made me aware of the fairly obvious (though I was young and had never really thought about it) human characteristic of adoring people who tell them what they want to hear, or what they understand, while condemning those who don’t. Most people really just want to be assured of what they hope will happen rather than take a good long look at what’s best for themselves in the long run.

And while he wasn’t right about everything, he was fairly brilliant when it came to a lot of things. I will say as a young person at the time, this person – who I haven’t spoken to in years – made a profound impact on how I viewed life going forward.

Which brings me to President Obama. While I’m not calling him a genius, I do think he’s extremely intelligent. I also believe that his tendency to use “big picture” thinking while drafting policy is something most Republican voters simply can’t understand.

Take “Obamacare” for instance. It’s not a “fix health care today” law. In fact, the law itself is made to grow and evolve over time. My belief is that it’s a springboard to true socialized medicine. But, as it is now, it’s a long-term outlook on our health care. While many Republicans want to look at the “now” aspect of the Affordable Care Act, they seem unable to grasp the reality that as more Americans get health insurance, giving them access to preventable care, this lowers expenses down the road for everyone. If people can prevent very costly heart attacks, strokes or other debilitating health issues now, that’s an overall savings for practically everyone from consumers to health insurers to doctors who now have more patients. Quite literally, improving the overall health of Americans will improve the health of this country. It even makes sense for our economy. If workers are healthier, because they have access to quality health care, that means there will be fewer people calling in sick to work, showing up sick to work (putting other employees at risk) or relying on government programs because their health conditions (that were preventable) render them unable to work at all.

But to see all of that requires “big picture” thinking and Republicans seem unable to understand anything beyond the spoon-fed bumper sticker talking points they’re given by the GOP and the conservative media.

Minimum wage is another issue you see this with. Republicans constantly paint it as a “job killer” (it’s not) while also rallying against the millions of people who are on government assistance. Funny thing though, a good portion of the Americans who are on government assistance have jobs. If we made sure that no American working full-time had to rely on government programs just to survive, instantly we would save our country hundreds of billions of dollars over the years. Not only that, but when Americans have more money, they have more to spend. And what’s the biggest driver of economic growth? Consumer spending. More consumer spending means higher profits and higher demand, which means - more jobs.

But once again, when it comes to Republicans and explaining job creation, anything outside of “tax cuts create jobs” is often too complex for many of them to understand.

The same goes for war. When it comes to ISIS, Republicans just want to send in troops and “crush the terrorists.” They’ve hammered President Obama relentlessly about how he’s handled the entire situation. See, to many of them, they just want to go in guns blazing because that’s what sounds good. But as we’ve learned by our previous war in Iraq, going into these situations haphazardly without a plan leads to absolute chaos. Remember, the existence of the ISIS we see today is a direct result of Bush’s Iraq War.

When it comes right down to it, I really do believe a huge part about why so many of the non-racist Republicans are against President Obama is because many of them are simply unable to grasp his “big picture” thinking that drives a lot of his policies. That requires intelligence and far too many conservative would rather just be told what to think by Fox News. They want their policies to be so simplified and catchy that they fit on bumper stickers.

It’s like I’ve often said, Democrats are trying to use science, math, reality, history and education to reason with people who deny science, don’t trust math, create their own reality, distort history and often devalue quality education.

And that’s a big reason why we’re not getting anywhere in this country.