Setting Up for Failure
Good luck with this latest grand jury decision.
I'll be out of the country for about two weeks. Let me know how it turns out.
I'll be out of the country for about two weeks. Let me know how it turns out.
Crimes Against Humanity
So the Pope got some good press today.
It's an interesting question, because St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine both found that prostitution -- though gravely immoral -- probably ought not to be illegal. I dissent from that particular point of argument, but it is a position supported by thinkers with significant authority.
Religious leaders from a half-dozen faiths have signed on to a new Vatican initiative to end modern-day slavery by 2020, declaring that human trafficking, forced labor and prostitution are crimes against humanity.I find the inclusion of prostitution very interesting. In both cases it's coupled with forced labor without an Oxford comma, so I'm not sure if the intent is to couple "forced prostitution" with "forced labor," or if it is prostitution per se that is being condemned as a crime against humanity. The Pope's actual remarks suggest it may only be forced prostitution, but it isn't clear there either.
Pope Francis and the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, were joined Tuesday by the Hindu guru Mata Amritanandamayi, known as Amma, as well as Buddhist, Jewish and Shiite and Sunni Muslim representatives for a signing ceremony of a joint declaration against modern slavery....
Francis has made eliminating human trafficking and modern-day slavery one of the key priorities of his pontificate, instructing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to focus on it in their academic conferences and studies... . "Here he came into contact with the drug situation, the situation of the excluded — and naturally the most dramatic form of exclusion is slavery, which is forced labor and prostitution," [Bishop] Sanchez Sorondo said in an interview ahead of the ceremony.
It's an interesting question, because St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine both found that prostitution -- though gravely immoral -- probably ought not to be illegal. I dissent from that particular point of argument, but it is a position supported by thinkers with significant authority.
Something must be wrong
Paterson, N.J., a city of about 150,000 people, had exactly 19 high school students this year who managed to break a 1500 score on the 2400-scale SAT (that's a score of 1000 on the old 1600 scale, for us codgers). The teacher-student ratio in the Paterson school district is about 13 to 1; annual spending per student is about $17,000. Alertly discovering that something was badly wrong, school district officials explained that the local school system has been plagued by numerous restructurings in recent years, leading to confusion and dysfunction. As a result, they've decided to take the obvious step and quit using the SAT to gauge performance.
Advent Continues
D29 writes to say that he likes this version of the chant more than the one I posted.
It does have a substantially different feeling! Sometimes I wonder why the Church no longer celebrates in this manner. It does require substantial effort and training, but surely not much more than the choral and musical performances we do encounter. Beauty and truth and virtue all align. Why should we not, then, align our performances-meant-to-be-beautiful with the truth and virtue they mean to uphold?
It does have a substantially different feeling! Sometimes I wonder why the Church no longer celebrates in this manner. It does require substantial effort and training, but surely not much more than the choral and musical performances we do encounter. Beauty and truth and virtue all align. Why should we not, then, align our performances-meant-to-be-beautiful with the truth and virtue they mean to uphold?
Stratosphere
The old world. The new world. Well, it was new two hundred years ago. At that time we thought it was going to disrupt these kinds of elite power structures, so that new men -- men like Andrew Jackson, to the tremendous upset of what turn out to have been his relatives -- could rise.
Well, we didn't get that, then or now. So what did we get?
Well, we didn't get that, then or now. So what did we get?
Spacetime for amateurs
I've been enjoying a Great Courses lecture in my car lately, a highly popularized explanation of special and general relativity with only the most moderate use of math. The lecturer stresses a popular misconception that the theory of relativity means that "everything is relative." It would be more accurate to say that the speed of light is absolute, with the consequence that space and time have to be squished to account for things like the fact that two light beams passing each other like trains in the night still have a relative speed of c, not twice-c. (That's not just a wild idea, by the way, but something than clever guys have proved experimentally.)
I grew up with science fiction stories that grappled with the speed of light, sometimes treating it as an inviolable barrier and sometimes as an inconvenience to be papered over in the interests of advancing the story. Viewed as a natural law, the inability to exceed the speed of light somehow comes across as a traffic ordinance that's begging to be violated. We know light can go slower, as it does through glass or water, for instance, so why not faster? Learning a little bit more about it as an amateur, I now gather it's more a question of light-speed as an inherent quality of a specific thing, like the length of a pencil, that only seems to have maximum and less-than-maximum manifestations because we're looking at it in more or less foreshortened perspectives, so to speak. So your pencil might look longer or shorter depending on your angle, but it's always as long as it is, and no longer.
My Great Courses lecturer used an analogy that leapt out at me. Drawn from an excellent 1965 popular textbook by Edwin Taylor and John Wheeler (Spacetime Physics, 1st ed., PDF link to 1st chapter here), the analogy is "the parable of the surveyors." The king asks his surveyors to figure out how far the smithy is from point "X." One uses a coordinate system based on true North, while the other uses magnetic North, so they get different recipes for "go so many feet East, then so many feet North."
No matter what N-S-E-W coordinates we choose to measure the distance from "X" to the smithy, the straight-line diagonal distance will be the same.
But the two vectors we add to get to the straight-line distance can be nearly anything, depending on how we rotate the frame of reference. The analogy is to space and time as the elements that make up the speed of light: from some points of view, the distance will be one thing and the time elapsed another, but those two elements can change. What will never change is the speed of light. It's not so much that light isn't "allowed" to go faster; it's more like the fact that the smithy is a certain distance from "X." Would it be allowed to be farther? Sure, but that's not where it happens to be.
The way the lecturer puts it is that space and time are aspects of the same thing, and the speed of light, c, is the conversion factor needed to switch back and forth between them. Similarly, mass and energy are aspects of the same thing, and the speed of light squared is the conversion factor needed to switch back and forth between them. Why is one just c and the other c-squared? No idea.
I grew up with science fiction stories that grappled with the speed of light, sometimes treating it as an inviolable barrier and sometimes as an inconvenience to be papered over in the interests of advancing the story. Viewed as a natural law, the inability to exceed the speed of light somehow comes across as a traffic ordinance that's begging to be violated. We know light can go slower, as it does through glass or water, for instance, so why not faster? Learning a little bit more about it as an amateur, I now gather it's more a question of light-speed as an inherent quality of a specific thing, like the length of a pencil, that only seems to have maximum and less-than-maximum manifestations because we're looking at it in more or less foreshortened perspectives, so to speak. So your pencil might look longer or shorter depending on your angle, but it's always as long as it is, and no longer.
My Great Courses lecturer used an analogy that leapt out at me. Drawn from an excellent 1965 popular textbook by Edwin Taylor and John Wheeler (Spacetime Physics, 1st ed., PDF link to 1st chapter here), the analogy is "the parable of the surveyors." The king asks his surveyors to figure out how far the smithy is from point "X." One uses a coordinate system based on true North, while the other uses magnetic North, so they get different recipes for "go so many feet East, then so many feet North."
But the two vectors we add to get to the straight-line distance can be nearly anything, depending on how we rotate the frame of reference. The analogy is to space and time as the elements that make up the speed of light: from some points of view, the distance will be one thing and the time elapsed another, but those two elements can change. What will never change is the speed of light. It's not so much that light isn't "allowed" to go faster; it's more like the fact that the smithy is a certain distance from "X." Would it be allowed to be farther? Sure, but that's not where it happens to be.
The way the lecturer puts it is that space and time are aspects of the same thing, and the speed of light, c, is the conversion factor needed to switch back and forth between them. Similarly, mass and energy are aspects of the same thing, and the speed of light squared is the conversion factor needed to switch back and forth between them. Why is one just c and the other c-squared? No idea.
The Deep South
I realize that for some the Deep South is eternally guilty as somehow the source of all racism, radiating it outwards perhaps by its poisonous presence. Nevertheless, Colbert I. King, neither of your stories happened in the Deep South. Neither Oklahoma nor Missouri is plausibly part of the Deep South, nor do they share much with the culture of that produced Sidney Lanier (of Georgia), William Faulkner (Mississippi), or Flannery O'Connor (born in Savannah, Georgia).
Let us atone for our own sins, which are surely serious enough in your eyes, without asking us to carry those of others.
UPDATE: Geingo (Gringo?) points out that my eyes have deceived me, and that the first story is not set in "Oklahoma" but in "Okolona," a town in Mississippi. Mississippi certainly is in the Deep South, though Missouri remains well outside of it.
Let us atone for our own sins, which are surely serious enough in your eyes, without asking us to carry those of others.
UPDATE: Geingo (Gringo?) points out that my eyes have deceived me, and that the first story is not set in "Oklahoma" but in "Okolona," a town in Mississippi. Mississippi certainly is in the Deep South, though Missouri remains well outside of it.
May both sides lose
As my husband says, time to sit back and watch both sides destroy each other. This is not a link about Sunnis vs. Shia, but about two arms of the Nanny State: employers want to use the ACA to nag their employers about smoking and diets, while the EEOC sues because medical testing of employees is prohibited.
How Would They Know Where We're Going?
No holiday travel for me this year, thanks to... whatever you call "Scrooges" at Thanksgiving time. But at least I'll be able to watch my favorite Thanksgiving movie:
Hope you have a good day, all.
Hope you have a good day, all.
Thanks
Our neighbor's niece put together a playlist for her to drive home by last week, with a Thanksgiving theme. The first number: Danke schön:
Jim Gerraghty advises us today:
You’ll recall that last year Organizing for Action urged its members to talk up Obamacare at the dinner table. My assessment still stands:
Here’s a crazy idea: Treat your family members as people you love and appreciate — or at least tolerate — instead of targets for political conversion. You only get one or two families in this life — the one you’re born into, and the one you marry into. Maybe if you’re lucky, you become “like a son” or “like a sister” to another. There’s a lot to talk about in this world beyond politics, and chances are you’re not going to persuade disagreeing relatives, anyway.
The Media is Evil
When I saw the headline, I totally assumed they meant like the Gettysburg address. The only reason I clicked through was to see what he had to say about all this. Turns out...
Making things up
Our President has admonished us that "Communities of color aren’t just making these problems up." I never thought they were. On the other hand, police officers working in neighborhoods where apparently it's OK to rough up store clerks and get in cops' faces (not to mention loot and burn stores) aren't making up their problems, either. I don't think a police officer is ever obligated to let a furious 300-lb. guy--armed or unarmed--close on him without shooting to protect himself.
Good Speech
The prosecutor took a long time about getting to what he surely knew was the only thing anyone cared to hear him say. Much of that time was devoted to a lecture directed at the news media, at social media, and at the citizenry in general. It was a lecture on the importance of patience and the grand jury process.
Will it be as satisfying as an acquittal at trial, which this result strongly suggests would have occurred had the grand jury operated along more standard practices? I expect some will argue that the differential treatment constitutes an unjust preferential treatment for the officer (though if so it seems to me that the way to fix that injustice is to take more time to present a full and fair analysis of the facts at grand juries generally). On the other hand, if the facts are clear, the facts are clear and it is right not to put the public through another year or more of trauma over what was clearly going to be an acquittal.
In any case, the speech strongly conveyed a sense of a governmental authority figure taking pains to make sure that nothing was hidden, that everything was understood, and that the public could see that the system worked in a highly controversial case. Those qualities of competence and transparency we could use a lot more of from government.
UPDATE:
Apparently not everyone was persuaded.
It seemed to me that the very structure of these interviews fostered courtesy, a posture of respect, on the part of the person conducting the interrogation. Prosecutors need the cooperation of both witnesses and jurors. They also must do their work in a manner safe from legal challenge. So they are forced to cultivate patience: patience with procedure; patience with witnesses, many of whom are afraid or upset or inarticulate or barely audible; and patience with lay jurors operating on the basis of common sense and whatever bundle of attitudes and information they happen to bring with them into the jury room.This was apparently a highly unusual grand jury, one conducted with particular patience -- indeed, it sounded from his description almost as if he elected to run it as a second trial, one that would identify which of the witnesses were most credible and how their testimony fit with the physical evidence. That's unusual, although perhaps our system would work better if it were the standard practice.
Will it be as satisfying as an acquittal at trial, which this result strongly suggests would have occurred had the grand jury operated along more standard practices? I expect some will argue that the differential treatment constitutes an unjust preferential treatment for the officer (though if so it seems to me that the way to fix that injustice is to take more time to present a full and fair analysis of the facts at grand juries generally). On the other hand, if the facts are clear, the facts are clear and it is right not to put the public through another year or more of trauma over what was clearly going to be an acquittal.
In any case, the speech strongly conveyed a sense of a governmental authority figure taking pains to make sure that nothing was hidden, that everything was understood, and that the public could see that the system worked in a highly controversial case. Those qualities of competence and transparency we could use a lot more of from government.
UPDATE:
Apparently not everyone was persuaded.
My Guess Is This Means Utah is A Peaceful Paradise
Still, it's really surprising.
In the past five years, more Utahns have been killed by police than by gang members.Clearly, those numbers don't hold everywhere. But who thought they'd hold anywhere?
Or drug dealers. Or from child abuse.
And so far this year, deadly force by police has claimed more lives — 13, including a Saturday shooting in South Jordan — than has violence between spouses and dating partners.
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