Supreme Court Archives - Page 9 of 13

The value of the humanities

A demand for saving art, keeping music, teaching civics in the schools is not asking for favors, Justice Souter proclaimed. Rather, it is vital for the stability, even the very survival of the United States, which is hampered by a voting citizenry that is grossly unaware about how the government of the country is supposed to work.

Last month, I attended a lecture by former US Supreme Court Justice David Souter about the importance of the humanities. There was an article in the Times Union that was factually accurate. Still, I’m going to muse on what I got out of the talk.

Justice Souter assumed everyone in the room was his ally in the fight to save the arts, music, civics, and the like, so it was not his intention to persuade those of us who were already convinced of its efficacy. Instead, he spoke of poetry and its fundamental importance. Noting the famous poem, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, Souter said he got to see the poet recite without reading it; Souter did the same with this audience. The justice said that the cursory reading of the poem would suggest that we ought to take “the road less traveled by.” Yet, a study of the poem, its context, its history, would reveal that it was meant ironically, as it was a parody of an indecisive friend who always was uncomfortable with whatever choice he made.

Justice Souter’s observation is that our best thinking may in fact take us to the wrong conclusion. This sounds like an influence of one of his heroes, and predecessors on the Supreme Court, Learned Hand, who wrote in 1951: “‘I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken.’ I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every courthouse, and, may I say, of every legislative body in the United States. I should like to have every court begin, ‘I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, I think we may be mistaken.'” Hand is quoting Oliver Cromwell’s letter of August 1650 to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland. Moreover, that lack of certainty, Souter opined, is a good thing.

A book that has had a profound effect on Justice Souter is The Education of Henry Adams, something he has read thrice through already, and hopes for another read. It’s about, among other things, the constant need for an education that adapts to a changing world, which most certainly would include the humanities.

A demand for saving art, keeping music, teaching civics in the schools is not asking for favors, Justice Souter proclaimed. Rather, it is vital for the stability, even the very survival of the United States, which is hampered by a voting citizenry that is grossly unaware of how the government of the country is supposed to work.

In the question and answer period, Souter acknowledged his own limitations. He could not answer the question – OK, my question – about whether the instant Internet news cycle was interfering with rational thought because he’s not on the Internet, and doesn’t even have e-mail, though his secretary does. He’s also a man who would not miss the music post-Bach. This may mean that, in the Henry Adams context, he is the imperfect messenger, but aren’t we all?

I found the talk to be personally engaging, and more inspiring than I would have assumed from the plain-spoken man from New England.
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The week I wrote this, Berowne used this in his weekly quiz.

M is for Monsanto, modified foods and mischief

Monsanto uses “alarming legal and political tactics to maintain this monopoly [that] are the subject of worldwide concern, with baleful consequences for the world’s small-scale farmers.”

Monsanto, a large agricultural entity in the US, apparently needs protection, for the US Congress has passed, back in the spring of 2013, what has been dubbed the Monsanto Protection Act, which, critics claim, “effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of controversial genetically modified (aka GMO) or genetically engineered (GE) seeds, no matter what health issues may arise concerning GMOs in the future”. The bill has been recently reauthorized in the House, but not the Senate. (Meanwhile, while supporting corporate welfare, the House GOP axes food assistance for millions of Americans.)

So what’s the issue with GMOs? It is believed that GMOs are not safe. “They have been linked to thousands of toxic and allergenic reactions, thousands of sick, sterile, and dead livestock and damage to virtually every organ and system studied in lab animals.”

Also, many scientists are calling for further study of a genetically modified bacteria which is used to create aspartame. Moreover, some fear that the use of the Monsanto product RoundUp will cause birth defects.

The desire among many, short of banning these products, is for GMOs to be labeled, but GMO manufacturers are even resistant to that unless they are voluntary. Worst-case scenario, once the FDA finalizes its GMO labeling guidance, the industry uses the FDA guidance to preempt state laws requiring mandatory labeling of GMOs. “Currently, states have the right to enact GMO labeling laws precisely because the FDA has not formally ruled on GMO labeling.”

It’s interesting that a whole lot of the world wants them banned. Activists in Chile are fighting Monsanto’s bid to patent food crops. Also, more than 1000 acres found to have been planted with genetically altered maize crops have been destroyed in Hungary. “The country has boldly banned GMO seed. Peru has passed a ban for at least ten years on GM foods, along with Italy, Greece, Spain, and Austria with their own bans, as well as many other countries.” Here is a list of countries & regions with GE food/crop bans.

According to The World According to Monsanto, which charts “documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin’s three-year journey across four continents to uncover the disturbing practices of multinational agribusiness corporation Monsanto, it uses “alarming legal and political tactics to maintain this monopoly [that] are the subject of worldwide concern, with baleful consequences for the world’s small-scale farmers.” This parody piece from The Daily Show illuminates how litigious Monsanto is when farmers try NOT to use their patented seeds which need to be purchased every year, contrary to the agricultural practice of reusing seeds that go back millennia. And the US Supreme Court has supported Monsanto in 2013.

In the Philippines, GMO corn farmers are losing their land and going into debt, thanks to bait-and-switch pricing tactics.

There will a March Against Monsanto event on Saturday, October 12 around the world. The information is now on Facebook, after previously having been removed.

Some other links:
14-year-old girl stands up to Monsanto shill
The list of Monsanto-owned companies you may have seen on the Internet is probably wrong, such as this one, though it may be a fair reflection of companies using Monsanto products and techniques. Conversely, this list I believe to be correct.
Five GMO myths busted.
Leigh Erin Connealy, M.D. of Newport Natural Health – GMOs: Are Your Cupboards Filled with Frankenfoods?
Occupy Monsanto website.

ABC Wednesday – Round 13

Constitutional allies

2013 marks the 100th anniversaries of 16th and 17th Amendments.

It’s Constitution Day!

Earlier in the year, I was inclined to agree with Jon Stewart of The Daily Show that most of the Constitution seems to be under attack, except that the Second Amendment right to bear arms seemed to be sacrosanct. For instance, the Supreme Court has chipped away at the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

Worse, it felt that only a relative handful of people were concerned. That has visibly changed, and the opposition to governmental overreach is bipartisan.

Item from Newsmax:

“The American Civil Liberties Union is joining tea party activists in opposing the use of armed drones and other counterterrorism operations to kill suspected terrorists, even American citizens.

“A recently surfaced Justice Department memo revealed that drones can strike against a wider range of threats, with less evidence, than previously believed.

“Both the ACLU and tea party groups cite the Fifth Amendment, which says that Americans are guaranteed due process of law under the Constitution and that the classified program circumvents that right.

Item from Newsmax:

“Stopwatching.us has gathered more than a quarter of a million signatures, including the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute and the conservative FreedomWorks and Restore America’s Voice.
Most of the selected signatories on the page are from more liberal groups, such as the Daily Kos, MoveOn.org, Green Peace, and Occupy Wall Street NYC.”

Now President Obama has decided to get Congress’s input in our Syria policy, consistent with the legislative body’s Constitutional war making authority. The Tonight Show’s Jay Leno recently quipped: “And if that works there’s talk of bringing back the REST of the Constitution!”

The Constitution is not “left” or “right”, people have started to have figured out.

In a book review, Jaquandor pondered: “Do I believe in the Constitution? I suppose so, in that I believe that we have a government that is structured according to the provisions contained within the Constitution’s pages. And that’s about all that I believe about it. I don’t believe that there is anything especially sacred about the Constitution, and I don’t believe that the Constitution represents some kind of moment when we rose to greatness. In truth, the Constitution is a muddled mess of a document, and the government it creates isn’t so much a brilliantly constructed Machine of Democracy as a hodge-podge, ramshackle mess of compromises with difficulties exacerbated by some really poor writing.”

2013 marks the 100th anniversaries of the 16th and 17th Amendments. The 16th, which allowed for a federal income tax, is almost universally despised, not just because it levies taxes, but because the tax code has become so cumbersome that one needs accountants and lawyers to fully exploit the loopholes that other accountants and lawyers have inserted into it.

The 17th Amendment calls for the direct election of US Senators, which previously had been selected by state legislatures. Seems like a no-brainer, but there is a cadre that continues to call for its repeal. Here’s why.

March on Washington, a half century later

When Jackie Robinson joined major league baseball in 1947, that did not mark the end of racism and segregation.

It’s likely you’ll see a LOT of stories about the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Every single one will marvel at how much progress has been made in America in the area of race, since 1963. Almost all will point to a black President, the current Attorney General, and two recent Secretaries of State as examples. The divergence in opinions come on this point: some will claim that we have “reached the promised land,” making sure to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr. from that day a half-century ago – as though he were the only speaker there – while others will suggest that we haven’t quite gotten there yet.

When President Obama suggested that we look at race again in light of the Trayvon Martin case, that Obama could have been Trayvon 35 years ago, some, such as Touré at TIME, thought it was a brave personal observation. He wrote: “The assertion that blacks are hallucinating or excuse-making or lying when we talk about the many very real ways white privilege and racial bias and the lingering impact of history impact our lives is painful. It adds insult to injury to attack all assertions of racism and deny its continued impact or existence.”

Others labeled Obama “racist-in-chief”, playing the “race card” and worse. When Former Florida GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough lit into Fox News talk-show host Sean Hannity last month for suggesting that Martin was a messed up teenager who “had it coming” when he was killed by George Zimmerman in their February 2012 confrontation, the bile cast on the Morning Joe host, Martin, his parents, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, among others, by a website I follow was toxic. The always dreadful Ted Nugent said that Martin had been ‘Emboldened’ By Obama, “the first black president as a ‘Black Panther’ running a ‘gangster’ government.”

Here are four charts suggesting Obama’s right about being black in America. Being profiled is, more than anything, disheartening, I can tell you. After George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon, Lavar Burton, the original Kunte Kinte of Roots fame, noted how he had taught his sons to keep their hands open and out of the car. Meanwhile, a white guy on the same show noted that he had once locked his keys in the car, so he tried to break in; a New Orleans police officer stopped him, saying, “No, you’re not doing it right.”

There’s this show on ABC called What Would You Do? It’s a hidden camera show that looks at human psychology. I don’t watch it, but I find it interesting that several of their experiments involve race. A most powerful one involved actors pretending to be bicycle thieves. From this story: When a white young man appeared to be taking a bike, most people didn’t question it. Yet when the African-American actor took his place, “the reactions were more pronounced. At one point, a crowd assembled around the purported thief and confronted him directly. One man pulled out a cellphone and said he was calling the police, which he was about to do until the cameramen filming the event stepped forward.”

When Jackie Robinson joined major league baseball in 1947, that did not mark the end of racism and segregation. It took over a decade before every team had at least one black player. It was 1987, when Al Campanis, general manager of the DODGERS, which was Jackie’s team, rationalized on national TV why there weren’t more blacks in baseball management; I watched it live, stunned. As a direct result, the sport was far more aggressive in making sure minority candidates at least got interviewed for a management position. They took an AFFIRMATIVE ACTION to rectify a system, not of overt racism, but merely cronyism, hiring the guys one already knows.

And speaking of which, the US Supreme Court seems destined to gut the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action, under the mistaken belief that everything is all better now. The economic inequities would otherwise. Almost 400 years have passed since blacks came to America, and that there is still work to be done does not negate the progress. Nor does the progress suggest that Martin, if he were still alive, and his colleagues, some of whom still alive, and their successors, would be resting on their laurels, satisfied that the work is done.
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Leonard Pitts: Living in a time of moral cowardice.

If you could somehow magically bring [Martin Luther King, Jr.] here, that tomorrow would likely seem miraculous to him, faced as he was with a time when segregation, police brutality, employment discrimination, and voter suppression were widely and openly practiced.

Here is tomorrow, after all, the president is black. The business mogul is black. The movie star is black. The sports icon is black. The reporter, the scholar, the lawyer, the teacher, the doctor, all of them are black. And King might think for a moment that he was wrong about tomorrow and its troubles.

It would not take long for him to see the grimy truth beneath the shiny surface, to learn that the perpetual suspect is also black. As are the indigent woman, the dropout, the fatherless child, the suppressed voter, and the boy lying dead in the grass with candy and iced tea in his pocket.

ARA: The way my mind works

The hardest Presidents to remember were Taylor, Fillmore and Pierce, which sounds like a law firm

CHRIS: Ooo, what does the infinity symbol symbolize?

Gee, I thought it was a sidewards eight.

Good on you with the presidents’ thing. The three presidents in one year has happened twice and three in two years but more than one year happened once (by my count using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States), none of which I knew before the discussion came up.

Three in one year was 1841 and 1881, that’s correct. Hadn’t thought about three in two years, but that would be 1849-1850, with Polk, Taylor and Fillmore.

Which brings me to my next question: how do you learn so many random things? Did you, for example, set out to memorize all the presidents and the years? Or does your brain do that “naturally”?

After minutes of self-psychoanalysis, this is what I’ve concluded

1) As a child, I had the foolish notion that should know all the knowable things in the universe.

2) To that end, I used to read encyclopedias – the Americana as a child – dictionaries, and especially the World Almanac, which I have received for Christmas almost every year since I was nine or ten.

3) Realizing at some point that “all the knowable things in the universe” a) was impossible to know and b) was not interesting to me, I tended to concentrate on things like sports (Willie Mays hit .211 in his last season, with the New York Mets), and American history and politics.

4) My specific interest in Presidents, and the Constitution, now that I think about it, probably came from the trauma of the assassination of JFK. “Oh, no, what happens now?” Oh, they have a contingency plan for that! (I’m not sure I could have told you we HAD a Vice-President on November 21, 1963, when I was 10 and a half, let alone that Lyndon Johnson was that guy.)

5) Even more specifically, when JFK was killed, there were all these coincidences with Lincoln that showed up in the newspaper – oh, I used to read the newspaper even then:
a) Lincoln was elected in 1860, JFK in 1960
b) both had Vice-Presidents named Johnson
c) Lincoln reportedly had a secretary named Kennedy, and Kennedy a secretary named Lincoln (I never confirmed that, BTW)

6) This got me thinking about all those previous “accidental Presidents,” starting with Tyler, then Fillmore, A. Johnson, Arthur, T. Roosevelt, Coolidge, and Truman. So it was a small step to get all their dates in order. The hardest ones to remember were Taylor, Fillmore and Pierce, which sounds like a law firm. My daughter tests me regularly with weird stuff like “Who’s the 27th President?” I don’t know, but I remember Cleveland was the 22nd AND the 24th, so I get to Taft soon enough.

7) It seemed a natural progression to start reading the Constitution. (Sidebar: I got to talk to another Chinese delegation at work on the 5th of July. I just happened to come across a box of booklets with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that I found while sorting things in the attic, so I gave them copies. I also gave a copy to a guy on the bus I know in the context of what the Supreme Court’s June decision on the Defense of Marriage Act did, and did not do.)

8) Of course, the interpretation of the Constitution came from the Supreme Court, and in the 1960s, the Court was dealing with a lot of significant issues involving freedom of the press, the rights of defendants in criminal trials, and civil rights. I could not have cited, e.g. New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) or Gideon v. Wainwright (1962) or Loving v. Virginia (1967), but I believe I was more aware of their implication than most of my classmates at the time. (Hey, speaking of Taft, which I did a couple of paragraphs back, did you know he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? Or that he’s the guy pictured?)

9) Conversely, there are plenty of things I DON’T know, starting with the makes and models of automobiles. I recognized a ’66 Ford Mustang recently, but in general, cars have two doors or four and are cars or those larger things (SUVs, minivans). All midsize silver-gray cars look the same to me.