#how the justice system is inadequate regarding them

[chaoticjuless]

there's something both reassuring and terrifying that throughout history people don't really change

[jameskaramanis]

Scammer Exposed: James Karamanis Founder Barney & Karamanis LLP

James Karamanis, the founder of the law firm Barney & Karamanis LLP, has long been regarded as an experienced attorney specializing in medical malpractice and personal injury cases. He has built a public persona based on trust, competence, and legal expertise. However, beneath the polished surface lies a different and far more troubling reality. While his reputation suggests that he fights relentlessly for his clients, the truth is that many of those who have sought his help have found themselves on the losing end—financially, emotionally, and legally.

For years, James Karamanis has presented himself as a champion for the underdog, claiming to provide dedicated representation for individuals who have suffered medical malpractice or personal injury. Yet, a growing number of clients have stepped forward to expose a pattern of unethical behavior that contradicts the image he projects. Numerous victims have described how Karamanis took advantage of their vulnerable situations, offering promises of winning large settlements or favorable verdicts, only to fall short when it mattered most. These individuals were left not only with diminished finances but also with the emotional toll of broken promises and unresolved legal matters.

Clients have reported that Karamanis often fails to deliver on his lofty assurances, instead offering inadequate legal representation that leaves them worse off than before they engaged his services. In many instances, these individuals have already been enduring significant physical or emotional pain due to their personal injury or medical malpractice experiences. Seeking justice, they turned to Karamanis in hopes of finding a resolution, only to find themselves trapped in an even deeper cycle of distress and disappointment.

The manipulation tactics employed by Karamanis often begin early in the attorney-client relationship. He allegedly preys on clients who are desperate for answers and eager for justice, offering them false hope and overestimating the potential outcomes of their cases. Many clients have described how, initially, Karamanis appears attentive, empathetic, and fully committed to their case. However, once they have signed on with his firm, the communication begins to dwindle. As the legal process drags on, clients report that Karamanis becomes increasingly difficult to reach, leaving them feeling abandoned and unsure of the status of their case.

For those considering seeking legal assistance from Karamanis or similar attorneys, it is crucial to do thorough research before committing to any legal representation. Don’t be swayed by flashy marketing tactics or overly optimistic promises. Instead, look for verifiable client testimonials, research the attorney’s track record, and seek second opinions before making a decision. While the legal system can be complex and daunting, it’s essential to choose a lawyer who will genuinely have your best interests at heart and who is committed to fighting for the justice you deserve.

To avoid falling into the traps that have ensnared so many others, individuals are advised to be cautious when dealing with attorneys like James Karamanis. Being aware of the red flags—such as a lawyer making overly optimistic guarantees, charging exorbitant fees without clear results, or becoming difficult to contact during the process—can save potential clients from the financial and emotional damage that others have experienced.

By staying informed, doing your due diligence, and seeking legal counsel that is transparent and trustworthy, you can avoid the pitfalls that have left so many clients disillusioned and damaged in their pursuit of justice.

Stop James Karamanis ⤵️

➡️ https://cutt.ly/EeEMMHGA

➡️ https://cutt.ly/YeEM0fKj

[jcmarchi]

Stop out-of-control AI and focus on people - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/stop-out-of-control-ai-and-focus-on-people-technology-org/

Stop out-of-control AI and focus on people - Technology Org

Companies need to stop designing new artificial intelligence technology just because they can, and people need to stop adapting their practices, habits and laws to fit the new technology. Instead, AI should be designed to fit exactly what people actually need.

That’s the view of 50 global experts who’ve contributed research papers to Human-Centred AI, a new book co-edited by two Université de Montréal experts that explores the risks — and missed opportunities — of the status quo and how it can be made better.

One important way would be through legal mechanisms, now woefully inadequate to the task, said contributor Pierre Larouche, an UdeM law professor and faculty vice-dean who specializes in competition law.

Treating AI as “a standalone object of law and regulation” and assuming that there is “no law currently applicable to AI” has left some policymakers feeling inadequate to an insurmountable task, said Larouche.

“Despite the scarcity – if not outright absence – of specific rules concerning AI as such, there is no shortage of laws that can be applied to AI, because of its embeddedness in social and economic relationships,” he said.

The challenge is not to create new legislation but to extend and apply existing laws to AI, he argued. That way, policymakers won’t fall into the trap of “delaying tactics designed to extend discussion indefinitely, while the technology continues to progress at a fast pace.”

Montreal lawyer Benjamin Prud’homme, vice-president of policy, society and global affairs at the UdeM-affiliated Mila (Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute), one of the largest academic communities dedicated to AI, agrees.

He urges policymakers to “start moving away from the dichotomy between innovation and regulation (and) that we acknowledge it might be okay to stifle innovation if that innovation is irresponsible.”

Prud’homme cited the European Union as an example of being proactive in this regard via its “very ambitious AI Act, the first systemic law on AI, (which) should be definitively approved in the next few months.”

Co-edited by UdeM professor and health law expert Catherine Régis and UdeM public-health expert Jean-Louis Denis, along with the University of Cambridge��s Maria Luciana Axente and Osaka University’s Atsuo Kishimoto, Human-Centred AI brings together specialists in disciplines ranging from education to management to political science.

The book examines AI technologies in a number of contexts – including agriculture, workplace environments, healthcare, criminal justice and higher education – and offers people-focused approaches to regulation and interdisciplinary ways of working together to make AI less exclusive of human needs.

University of Edinburgh philosophy professor Shannon Vallor points to increasingly popular generative AI as an example of technology which is not human-centred. She argues the technology was created by organizations simply wanting to see how powerful they can make a system, rather than making “something designed by us, for us, and to benefit us.”

Other contributors to the new book look at how AI is impacting human behaviour (via Google, Facebook and other platforms), how AI lacks data on minorities and hence helps marginalize them, and how AI undermines privacy as people ignore how their information is collected and stored.

Source: University of Montreal

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.

[bpd00m]

ableism in the "justice" system: the institutional killing of disabled individuals

we need to have a conversation about the state of georgia's "justice" system, disabled individuals, and the death penalty.

first off, how does intellectual disability determination work in georgia? the georgia department of education defines intellectual disability as:

significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning (approximately 70 or below as measured by a qualified psychological examiner)

existing concurrently with deficits in adaptive behavior that adversely affects educational performance

originates before age 18

(continued) intellectual disability does not include conditions primarily due to sensory or physical impairment, traumatic brain injury, autism spectrum disorders, severe multiple impairments, cultural influences, or a history of inconsistent and/or inadequate educational programming.

the above criteria was directly copied & pasted from the georgia department of education's eligibility determination and categories of eligibility guide.

georgia is the only state in the country that requires defendants to prove intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt. oddly enough, the state hasn't had a single finding of intellectual disability at a trial regarding capital murder in approximately three decades- coincidentally the same time the law was passed.

this requirement is beyond ableist, cruel, and ultimately unattainable. this law ensures and seals the execution of intellectually disabled individuals.

the US supreme court ruled that intellectually disabled individuals should be exempt from execution as it would infringe upon their eighth amendment rights. the eight amendment prohibits the use of cruel and unusual punishment.

surprisingly, georgia became the first state to ban the execution of intellectually disabled individuals in 1988. even though that may seem progressive, the state has proven time after time that it is anything but.

the following is a list of some of the disabled individuals the state of georgia has executed.

jerome bowden: accused of robbing and murdering a 55yo woman and beating her bedridden mother at 24 years old. a 16yo boy told local authorities bowden played a part in the crime. when bowden heard from his sister, josephine, that the police had come looking for him, he went to them so he could try and help. they confronted him & he denied having anything to do with it. eventually, he broke down and confessed and signed a written statement. there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime- but there was evidence that incriminated the 16yo boy. he struggled to find an answer when later asked why he signed the confession. he was also asked if he read his confession, to which he replied "i tried." he was given an IQ test and scored 65. he was reportedly proud of his score and told his lawyers he tried the best he could. according to his lawyers, he did not fully grasp the concept of death but told them he was scared he was "going off to live on a little cloud." he was executed by electric chair june 24, 1986 at just 34 years old. in his last words, he thanked the people at the institution for taking care of him.

rodney young: in 2008, he drove from new jersey to atlanta and killed the 28yo son of his former girlfriend. young was a high school football star but struggled academically. he reportedly scored a 440 out of 1600 on the SAT. when he took the test, students got 200 points for filling their names out on each section. his lawyers fought hard and found several of young's teachers from high school to testify his disability emerged before he turned 18. one of his teachers testified that he underwent regular testing and assessment while in the school's special education program- as well as being assigned a psychologist, learning disabilities councillor, and social worker that met with his teachers every year to discuss his qualifications. the prosecution, led by layla zon, based their entire argument on how young could read and write, watch crime tv shows, and work at a factory by putting labels on cans- which, according to her, proved that he was of average intelligence. he was convicted on all charges and sentenced to death in 2012. his team petitioned the US supreme court to review the rule. i believe on february 28 2022 the court denied.

warren lee hill: in 1990 he was serving a life sentence for the fatal shooting of a former girlfriend when he killed a fellow inmate and was tried in 1991- but his lawyers failed to mention intellectual disability. this subject was raised in state habeas and seven experts testified at the evidentiary hearing. hill's four testified that he met the criteria while the state's three did not. the court sentenced him to death in 2002. less than a month later the US supreme court ruled that the execution of intellectually disabled individuals is a violation of the eighth amendment (atkins v virginia). he requested reconsideration once more & the habeas court agreed. the court found that he was intellectually disabled and granted him relief. the georgia supreme court reversed the decision on appeal and decided that atkins v virginia did not change the original finding. he was sentenced to death again. the state's three experts that decided hill did not meet the criteria changed their minds, meaning all seven experts agreed hill met the criteria and should thus be exempt. but the court decided that the new evidence was too late in 2013. he was executed via lethal injection on the 27th of january, 2015.

robert wayne holsey: convicted and sentenced to death in 1997 for the armed robbery of a convenience store and the death of a county sheriff's deputy. his lawyer, andy prince, chose not to present defence based on his disability, never presented evidence from a retained psychologist, drank a quart of vodka each night of holsey's trial, brought in an inexperienced attorney to handle mitigation the night before the penalty phase, was given $3,500 USD by the state to hire a mitigation specialist but decided not to. prince had also stolen $100,000 from a client & was arrested after threatening to shoot his neighbours yet he was still personally chosen by a judge to represent holsey. prince was later disbarred, sentenced to 10 years, and testified he shouldn't have represented holsey to begin with. holsey was executed by lethal injection on the 9th of december, 2014.

all four of these men were disabled and black (which is not a coincidence, disabled individuals executed in ga have been predominantly black). all four of these men were executed because of some backwards loophole that ensured their death- and will ensure more in the future. unless something is done, the state of georgia will only continue the capital killing of disabled individuals. this is just a ripple in an ocean of injustices that have and continue to occur in this state.

[warninggraphiccontent]

16 July 2021

Food for thought

At last week's Data Bites, I noted how 'Wales' is a standard unit of area. This week, along comes a map which shows that all the built-up land in the UK is equivalent to one Wales:

The map is from the National Food Strategy, published yesterday (and the man has a point).

It has divided opinion, judging by the responses to this tweet. I understand where the sceptics are coming from - at first glance, it may be confusing, given Wales isn't actually entirely built up, Cornwall made of peat, or Shetland that close to the mainland (or home to all the UK's golf courses). And I'm often critical of people using maps just because the data is geographical in some way, when a different, non-map visualisation would be better.

But I actually think this one works. Using a familiar geography to represent areas given over to particular land use might help us grasp it more readily (urban areas = size of Wales, beef and lamb pastures = more of the country than anything else). It's also clear that a huge amount of overseas land is needed to feed the UK, too.

The map has grabbed people's attention and got them talking, which is no bad thing. And it tells the main stories I suspect its creators wanted to. In other words, it's made those messages... land.

Trash talk

Happy Take Out The Trash Day!

Yesterday saw A LOT of things published by Cabinet Office - data on special advisers, correspondence with parliamentarians, public bodies and major projects to name but a few, and the small matter of the new plans outlining departmental priorities and how their performance will be measured.

It's great that government is publishing this stuff. It's less great that too much of it still involves data being published in PDFs not spreadsheets. And it's even less great that the ignoble tradition of Take Out The Trash Day continues, for all the reasons here (written yesterday) and here (written in 2017).

I know this isn't (necessarily) deliberate, and it's a lot of good people working very hard to get things finished before the summer (as my 2017 piece acknowledges). And it's good to see government being transparent.

But it's 2021, for crying out loud. The data collection should be easier. The use of this data in government should be more widespread to begin with.

We should expect better.

In other news:

I was really pleased to have helped the excellent team at Transparency International UK (by way of some comments on a draft) with their new report exploring access and influence in UK housing policy, House of Cards. Read it here.

One of our recent Data Bites speakers, Doug Gurr, is apparently in the running to run the NHS. More here.

Any excuse to plug my Audrey Tang interview.

The good folk at ODI Leeds/The Data City/the ODI have picked up and run with my (and others') attempt to map the UK government data ecosystem. Do help them out.

Five years ago this week...

Regarding last week's headline of Three Lines on a Chart: obviously I was going to.

Have a great weekend

Gavin

Enjoying Warning: Graphic Content?

Tell your friends - forward this email, and they can:

Subscribe via email

Follow on Twitter

Follow on Tumblr

Or:

Buy me a coffee (thank you!)

Follow me, Gavin Freeguard, on Twitter

Visit my website (I'm available for work!)

Today's links:

Graphic content

Vax populi

Why vaccine-shy French are suddenly rushing to get jabbed* (The Economist)

Morning update on Macron demolishing French anti-vax feeling (or at least vax-hesitant) (Sophie Pedder via Nicolas Berrod)

How Emmanuel Macron’s “health passes” have led to a surge in vaccine bookings in France* (New Statesman)

How effective are coronavirus vaccines against the Delta variant?* (FT)

England faces the sternest test of its vaccination strategy* (The Economist)

Where Are The Newest COVID Hot Spots? Mostly Places With Low Vaccination Rates (NPR)

There's A Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes To States' Vaccination Rates (NPR)

All talk, no jabs: the reality of global vaccine diplomacy* (Telegraph)

Vaccination burnout? (Reuters)

Viral content

COVID-19: Will the data allow the government to lift restrictions on 19 July? (Sky News)

UK Covid-19 rates are the highest of any European country after Cyprus* (New Statesman)

COVID-19: Cautionary tale from the Netherlands' coronavirus unlocking - what lessons can the UK learn? (Sky News)

‘Inadequate’: Covid breaches on the rise in Australia’s hotel quarantine (The Guardian)

Side effects

COVID-19: Why is there a surge in winter viruses at the moment? (Sky News)

London Beats New York Back to Office, by a Latte* (Bloomberg)

Outdoor dining reopened restaurants for all — but added to barriers for disabled* (Washington Post)

NYC Needs the Commuting Crowds That Have Yet to Fully Return* (Bloomberg)

Politics and government

Who will succeed Angela Merkel?* (The Economist)

Special advisers in government (Tim for IfG)

How stingy are the UK’s benefits? (Jamie Thunder)

A decade of change for children's services funding (Pro Bono Economics)

National Food Strategy (independent review for UK Government)

National Food Strategy: Tax sugar and salt and prescribe veg, report says (BBC News)

Air, space

Can Wizz challenge Ryanair as king of Europe’s skies?* (FT)

Air passengers have become much more confrontational during the pandemic* (The Economist)

Branson and Bezos in space: how their rocket ships compare* (FT)

Sport

Euro 2020: England expects — the long road back to a Wembley final* (FT)

Most football fans – and most voters – support the England team taking the knee* (New Statesman)

Domestic violence surges after a football match ends* (The Economist)

The Most Valuable Soccer Player In America Is A Goalkeeper (FiveThirtyEight)

Sport is still rife with doping* (The Economist)

Wimbledon wild card success does not disguise financial challenge* (FT)

Can The U.S. Women’s Swim Team Make A Gold Medal Sweep? (FiveThirtyEight)

Everything else

Smoking: How large of a global problem is it? And how can we make progress against it? (Our World in Data)

Record June heat in North America and Europe linked to climate change* (FT)

Here’s a list of open, non-code tools that I use for #dataviz, #dataforgood, charity data, maps, infographics... (Lisa Hornung)

Meta data

Identity crisis

A single sign-on and digital identity solution for government (GDS)

UK government set to unveil next steps in digital identity market plan (Computer Weekly)

BCS calls for social media platforms to verify users to curb abuse (IT Pro)

ID verification for social media as a solution to online abuse is a terrible idea (diginomica)

Who is behind the online abuse of black England players and how can we stop it?* (New Statesman)

Euro 2020: Why abuse remains rife on social media (BBC News)

UK government

Online Media Literacy Strategy (DCMS)

Privacy enhancing technologies: Adoption guide (CDEI)

The Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset is now available in the ONS Secure Research Service (ADR UK)

Our Home Office 2024 DDaT Strategy is published (Home Office)

The UK’s Digital Regulation Plan makes few concrete commitments (Tech Monitor)

OSR statement on data transparency and the role of Heads of Profession for Statistics (Office for Statistics Regulation)

Good data from any source can help us report on the global goals to the UN (ONS)

The state of the UK’s statistical system 2020/21 (Office for Statistics Regulation)

Far from average: How COVID-19 has impacted the Average Weekly Earnings data (ONS)

Health

Shock treatment: can the pandemic turn the NHS digital? (E&T)

Can Vaccine Passports Actually Work? (Slate)

UK supercomputer Cambridge-1 to hunt for medical breakthroughs (The Guardian)

AI got 'rithm

An Applied Research Agenda for Data Governance for AI (GPAI)

Taoiseach and Minister Troy launch Government Roadmap for AI in Ireland (Irish Government)

Tech

“I Don’t Think I’ll Ever Go Back”: Return-to-Office Agita Is Sweeping Silicon Valley (Vanity Fair)

Google boss Sundar Pichai warns of threats to internet freedom (BBC News)

The class of 2021: Welcome to POLITICO’s annual ranking of the 28 power players behind Europe’s tech revolution (Politico)

Inside Facebook’s Data Wars* (New York Times)

Concern trolls and power grabs: Inside Big Tech’s angry, geeky, often petty war for your privacy (Protocol)

Exclusive extract: how Facebook's engineers spied on women* (Telegraph)

Face off

Can facial analysis technology create a child-safe internet? (The Observer)

#Identity, #OnlineSafety & #AgeVerification – notes on “Can facial analysis technology create a child-safe internet?” (Alec Muffett)

Europe makes the case to ban biometric surveillance* (Wired)

Open government

From open data to joined-up government: driving efficiency with BA Obras (Open Contracting Partnership)

AVAILABLE NOW! DEMOCRACY IN A PANDEMIC: PARTICIPATION IN RESPONSE TO CRISIS (Involve)

Designing digital services for equitable access (Brookings)

Data

Trusting the Data: How do we reach a public settlement on the future of tech? (Demos)

"Why do we use R rather than Excel?" (Terence Eden)

Everything else

The world’s biggest ransomware gang just disappeared from the internet (MIT Technology Review)

Our Statistical Excellence Awards Ceremony has just kicked off! (Royal Statistical Society)

Pin resets wipe all data from over 100 Treasury mobile phones (The Guardian)

Data officers raid two properties over Matt Hancock CCTV footage leak (The Guardian)

How did my phone number end up for sale on a US database? (BBC News)

Gendered disinformation: 6 reasons why liberal democracies need to respond to this threat (Demos, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung)

Opportunities

EVENT: Justice data in the digital age: Balancing risks and opportunities (The LEF)

JOBS: Senior Data Strategy - Data Innovation & Business Analysis Hub (MoJ)

JOB: Director of Evidence and Analytics (Natural England)

JOB: Policy and Research Associate (Open Ownership)

JOB: Research Officer in Data Science (LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science)

JOB: Chief operating officer (Democracy Club, via Jukesie)

And finally...

me: can’t believe we didn’t date sooner... (@MNateShyamalan)

Are you closer to Georgia, or to Georgia? (@incunabula)

A masterpiece in FOIA (Chris Cook)

How K-Pop conquered the universe* (Washington Post)

Does everything really cost more? Find out with our inflation quiz.* (Washington Post)

[starkey]

If you, like me, are a British person who wants to do something useful in aid of the BLM movement can I suggest writing to your MP?

The website WriteToThem allows you to easily input your post code, find your representative, and send them a letter without ever leaving the site.

I’ve pasted my letter underneath incase people are uncertain about how to word something like this. I’d recommend not blindly copy-pasting my letter into the box because, primarily, I identify myself as a doctor and it might be awkward if you’re asked to produce a degree—but feel free to use it as a rough template. My MP is a member of the SNP, so my letter is essentially just asking them to put these points to the government, but if your MP is a Tory, by all means, let them fucking have it.

Dear [Your MP],

I'm writing to you to express my disappointment in the British  government's silence with regards to the actions of the United States  government, particularly President Trump's use of violence against his  own citizens, his support of police brutality and white supremist  actions, and his claims that he is going to have anti-fascist ideologies  brought under the banner of 'domestic terrorism'.  These actions are  not in keeping with the priciples of justice or democracy, and it is  imperative that the UK codemn them.

Given the shocking images currently in circulation of the US police and  national guard exercising excessive force against Black Lives Matter  protesters, I was dissapointed to learn that we are still providing  small arms and security equipment such as teargas, rubber bullets and  riot shields to the United States. I would like to reiterate Amnesty  International UK's appeal that the UK government immediately freeze all  policing and security equipment export licences to the US, as there is a  clear risk of ruther misuse. The UK has a legal responsibilty under the  consolidated criteria risk assessment framework to not turn a blind eye  to such a flagrant misuse of UK arms and security equipment. Banning  international sales of small arms to the US would also not be a move  without precedent—for the past decade the UK and EU have banned the  export of drugs used in lethal injections to the United States, which  has helped mitigate some of the excesses of the American capital  punishment system.

In a seperate but related issue, I would like to express my deepest  concerns regarding the newly-released report into BAME Covid deaths in  the United Kingdom. It appears that, with all other factors controlled  for, Covid patients who are BAME have a 10-50% increased risk of death,  with people of Bangladeshi ethnicity being twice as likely to die from  the disease as white british people. It is, frankly, reprehensible that  the British government has failed so thoroughly in protecting vulnerable  minority communities from this virus. As an NHS doctor myself, I have  been horrified by how little the British government has done to protect  the NHS staff on the frontlines—from inadequate PPE and PPE shortages to  unsafe working environments, the government has reiterated its disdain  for the medical professionals in this country again and again, through  its actions and words. BAME medical staff comprise a significant  percentage of NHS staff and they have been repayed for their  contribution to this medical instition by being pressured to work in  unsafe environments and having the highest death rates of any NHS staff  population. I would like to echo the British Medical Association is  their pleas that this devastating disparity in our health sector be  redressed to ensure that our BAME colleagues are protected.

Yours Sincerely,

[Your Name]

[thebeautifulcatholicfaith]

The FBI warned for years that police are cozy with the far right. Is no one listening?

Mike German

I was an FBI agent who infiltrated white supremacists. Too many local police don’t take the far right seriously – or actively sympathize

Fri 28 Aug 2020 22.47

For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has routinely warned its agents that the white supremacist and far-right militant groups it investigates often have links to law enforcement. Yet the justice department has no national strategy designed to protect the communities policed by these dangerously compromised law enforcers. As our nation grapples with how to reimagine public safety in the wake of the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, it is time to confront and resolve the persistent problem of explicit racism in law enforcement.

I know about these routine warnings because I received them as a young FBI agent preparing to accept an undercover assignment against neo-Nazi groups in Los Angeles, California, in 1992. But you don’t have to take my word for it. A redacted version of a 2006 FBI intelligence assessment, White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement, alerted agents to “both strategic infiltration by organized groups and self-initiated infiltration by law enforcement personnel sympathetic to white supremacist causes”.

A leaked 2015 counter-terrorism policy guide made the case more directly, warning agents that FBI “domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers”.

If the government knew that al-Qaida or Isis had infiltrated American law enforcement agencies, it would undoubtedly initiate a nationwide effort to identify them and neutralize the threat they posed. Yet white supremacists and far-right militants have committed far more attacks and killed more people in the US over the last 10 years than any foreign terrorist movement. The FBI regards them as the most lethal domestic terror threat. The need for national action is even more critical.

In recent years, white supremacists have engaged in deadly rampages in Charleston, South Carolina, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and El Paso, Texas. More ominously, neo-Nazis obtained radiological materials to manufacture “dirty” bombs in separate cases in Maine in 2009 and Florida in 2017, which were only avoided through chance.

But in June 2019, when Congressman William Lacy Clay asked the FBI counter-terrorism chief, Michael McGarrity, whether the bureau remained concerned about white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement since the publication of its 2006 assessment, McGarrity indicated he had not read it. Asked more generally about this infiltration, McGarrity said he would be “suspect” of white supremacist police officers, but that their ideology was a first amendment–protected right.

The 2006 assessment addresses this concern, however, by summarizing supreme court precedent on the issue: “Although the First Amendment’s freedom of association provision protects an individual’s right to join white supremacist groups for the purposes of lawful activity, the government can limit the employment opportunities of group members who hold sensitive public sector jobs, including jobs within law enforcement, when their memberships would interfere with their duties.”

More importantly, the FBI’s 2015 counter-terrorism policy, which McGarrity was responsible for executing, indicates not just that members of law enforcement might hold white supremacist views, but that FBI domestic terrorism investigations have often identified “active links” between the subjects of these investigations and law enforcement officials. But its proposed remedy is stunningly inadequate. It simply instructs agents to protect their investigations by using the “silent hit” feature of the Terrorist Screening Center watchlist, so that police officers searching for themselves or their white supremacist associates could not ascertain whether they were under FBI scrutiny.

Of course, one doesn’t need access to secret FBI terrorism investigations to find evidence of explicit racism within law enforcement. Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, among other states. Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist and sexist social media activity, which demonstrates that overt bias is far too common.

Law enforcement officials actively affiliating with white supremacist and far-right militant groups pose a serious threat to people of color, religious minorities, LGBTQ people and anti-racist activists. But the police response to nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, includes a number of law enforcement officers across the country flaunting their affiliation with far-right militant groups.

A veteran sheriff’s deputy monitoring a Black Lives Matter protest in Orange county, California, wore patches with logos of the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers – far-right militant groups that often challenge the federal government’s authority – affixed to his bullet-proof vest.

A 13-year veteran of the Chicago police department with a long history of misconduct complaints was investigated for wearing a face covering with a Three Percenters’ logo while on duty at a recent protest. A supervisor pictured with him at the scene apparently did not order him to remove it.

In Philadelphia, police officers failed to intervene when mostly white mobs armed with bats, clubs and long guns attacked journalists and protesters. The district attorney has vowed to investigate the matter. The following month, however, Philadelphia police officers openly socialized with several men wearing Proud Boys regalia and carrying the group’s flag at a “Back the Blue” party at the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge.

Police officers casually fraternizing with armed far-right militia groups at protests is confounding because many states, including California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, have laws barring unregulated paramilitary activities and far-right militants have often killed police officers. The overlap between militia members and the Boogaloo movement – whose adherents have been arrested for inciting a riot in South Carolina, and shooting, bombing and killing police officers in California – highlights the threat that police engagement with these groups poses to their law enforcement partners.

Law enforcement agencies must do more to strengthen their anti-discrimination policies, improve applicant and employee screening, establish reporting mechanisms, and protect and reward officers who report their colleagues’ racist misconduct.

Prosecutors also have an important role in protecting the integrity of the criminal justice system from the potential misconduct of explicitly racist officers. Prosecutors keep a register of law enforcement officers whose previous misconduct could reasonably undermine the reliability of their testimony and need to be disclosed to defense attorneys. This register is often referred to as a “Brady list”.

The Georgetown law professor Vida B Johnson has argued that evidence of a law enforcement officer’s explicitly racist behavior could reasonably be expected to impeach his or her testimony. Prosecutors should be required to include these officers on Brady lists to ensure defendants they testify against have access to the potentially exculpating evidence of their explicitly racist behavior.

My 1992 undercover investigation didn’t reveal any connections between the neo-Nazi bombmakers and weapons traffickers and law enforcement. In fact, the local law enforcement officers that worked with me on the investigation were consummate professionals who I literally trusted with my life. There are many more just like them.

But, however small, the presence of active white supremacists in law enforcement must be treated as a matter of urgent concern. As Professor Johnson has argued, the criminal justice system “can never achieve its purported goal of fairness while white supremacists continue to hide within police departments”.

[loughtonbaithead]

Car Accident Lawyers Savannah

Savannah Wrongful Death Attorney – Settling an agonizing Issue

Wrongful death is one of the most diverse and complicated branches of injury law. It is additionally an especially troubling matter that may leave surviving family members and relatives in dire straits. Wrongful death can occur in some of the most unexpected locations also. From workplace accidents for the very hospitals and nursing facilities we depend on for health, untimely death is very rarely just a car accident.

Kenneth S. Nugent is definitely an attorney who concentrates on consolidating justice for that surviving relatives of such wrongful deaths.

Personal Injury Law Firm in Savannah Georgia

When someone close dies, expenses can suddenly develop into a major reason for concern. A deceased relative seemed to be the only supporter of your family. Because of their untimely absence, a mom of three should take on more work just to keep everyone fed and healthy.

Foreclosures, backed up bills and hungry mouths can ensure and this can be an especially awful condition for any grieving family. This is when we apply our skills and extensive experience. We certainly have managed to get our business to make sense of this minor catastrophe.

Funeral expenses in themselves could be a financial burden that few can undertake. A funeral could cost over $12,000 and also the arrangements and details will demand mental acuity that is often lacking in this especially confusing time.  An added weight of your uncertain financial outlook can make the matter especially bleak.

Overall, a further weight in the financial disaster is just not yours to bear every time a death is due to another party. Call the law offices of Kenneth S. Nugent for any free consultation and tips on getting compensation to manage the down sides of your wrongful death.

Medical Negligence

It can be especially disturbing to believe that right after the trust placed physicians a lot of deaths may appear from malpractice.  One of several primary causes just for this egregious situation is sloppy medical work from pressured doctors with greater priorities compared to the patient’s safety and good health. Physicians looking to consider caseloads that are way too high on their behalf are susceptible to making mistakes and also this could cost lives.

One common method that this occurs occurs when a physician adopts a “wait and see” prepare for treatment and recovery. This may lead to a misdiagnosis of your very serious condition because proper tests are certainly not being run. This really is a critical problem in the area of psychiatric medication. Patients are often put on a wait and see list as the results of medication can take some time to take full effect. This has triggered people with depressive conditions committing suicide as his or her desperation to finish their mental torment could become unbearable.

Surgeons can also make some mistakes about the operating table most often due to pressures of time. Booking a surgery is not easy as there are limited doctors and a great need. While many people will believe that accidents caused in surgery occur when situations are left in the body, it is often when something is snipped or sliced accidentally.

An Elderly Care Facility Abuse

Our law firm also handles some cases that are especially tragic. Several of these involve the death due to abuse of victims too weak and defenseless to combat back. The majority of us like to think that elderly care facility staff are kind-hearted and caring individuals who have the well-being of the elderly family members at heart. Even though this is certainly the way it is in many situations, nursing facilities have been discovered to result in harm in a number of ways.

-Medical Errors

-Slips And Falls

-Physical Abuse

-Improper or Unnecessary Restraint

-Bed Sores

Workplace Accidents

Workplace accidents can occur anywhere and may often lead to deaths. This is often the way it is in especially dangerous professions like police force, electrical work and the like. But, terrible accidents can occur anywhere. In our type of work, we can easily help navigate problems of dealing with insurance providers that may do just about anything in order to avoid the compensation due.

When an insurance firm decides they are going to not payout or are stalling for time, you and your loved one can experience pressed to return to work prematurely. This will cause an injury to be more severe and this may lead to pain and suffering. We are going to fight for the cause and ensure that you are compensated for the injury and may love a full recovery before going back to the task scene.

Lost pay are certainly not always due to the full respect they are due and also this can mean receiving considerably reduced income. Employees must provide worker’s compensation by law. Many individuals will stay away from accomplishing this and that is why you should call legislation offices of Kenneth S. Nugent when seeking compensation for workplace accidents.

A technique the insurance coverage providers will attempt to avoid paying worker’s compensation is actually by stating that the worker was at fault for his or her injuries. But, there are many techniques that the business was to blame for the injuries, read about a number of:

-Ladder Falls

-Improper Sanitation

-Inadequate Training

-Repetitive Computer Use

-Damaged Equipment

Faulty Security

We expect our kids is going to be secure and safe after they leave the nest and head off and away to college. It is usually hard for them to leave the protection of home but we will hope their safety at college is going to be assured. Dorms are supposed to feature security and guards to ensure that these adolescents is going to be safe when they are beginning their new life. Forever reason, only those students with proper ID are allowed to enter into the building and get past the security guard.

But, the reality is that security is frequently lower than necessary and also the safety of your respective child are at risk. There are numerous cases each year when unauthorized visitors make do college security and enter student housing facilities. This will expose young people for the dangers of drugs, thieves and sexual abusers. Our specialized services work to give you justice when your loved ones have come across harm due to lax college dorm security.

Video surveillance plays an especially important role when this happens. This will provide you with the valuable details needed to determine the nature of your case. Those working at convenience stores are some of the most common victims of violent crimes in burglaries and robberies.

Usually the security installed by a professional security company could have flaws within the system that may lessen the efficacy in the security you might be provided. Everybody wants to feel safe in the home and then we depend on these security companies to provide defense against burglars and also other intruders. While death is not always the consequence of a burglary, it may happen. It is usually a critical tragedy for someone close to get struck down within the safety of their own home.

Our experienced lawyers will complete a full investigation into who accounts for the damages caused when proper protection is just not provided. When the proper protection ended up being applied, there is certainly reason to believe the injuries and injustice would not have happened.

How Do Our Law Practice Help When Heinous Negligence Occurs?

It will take a professional in all things medical to prove malpractice in courts as well as for this you might need a special sort of injury lawyer. We certainly have the best malpractice attorneys at work to offer your case for the courts. Everyone involved is going to be thoroughly interviewed as the eye witnesses, nursing staff and also other hospital employees may be key witnesses with what happened.

The paperwork linked to properly calculating the extent in the damages and just how much compensation is really owed can be another important factor. It can be nice to have a knowledgeable legal professional at your side in this particular time of should protect you making mistakes you could later regret. Some of the red tape will include:

-SSRI

-SSD

- Filing a Lawsuit

-Worker's Compensation

-Military Benefits

-Insurance Claims

-Pensions

Our Attorneys Enable You To Access Insurance Coverage Advantages of your Deceased Family Members

It is a common practice for life insurance providers to try to pay the lowest possible payout for the grieving families. They could even try and pay you far lower than you truly deserve as well as nothing at all when they can help it.

-Suicide

With regards to suicide, insurance providers may argue that they are no obligated to pay once the tragedy was committed from the insured party. But, this is not always a specific assessment as it could be argued the person was not thinking about their insurance coverage policy after they took their life. Many insurers provide a secondary benefit for these cases that may be applied to someone considering committing suicide. But, this is not always plausible and frequently a lawsuit is the best way to fight for the rights.

-Delays

Another popular ploy of the insurer is to make as numerous reasons because they can to delay building a payout for the claim. Several of these will sound reasonable enough too, as an example, with no certificate of death, they are going to not be able to confirm the insured party has actually deceased. But, they also have more ploys and ways to delay making claims up until the last possible moment. But, you needed that cash for a time therefore we will fight to get it for you.

Our Attorneys May Reach An Agreement Instead Of Likely To Court

Each side are often very likely to work through the disagreement through negotiations resulting in an agreement, as an alternative to using the matter to courts. Courts are expensive and time-consuming and produce added stress if you must stand trial.

We are going to typically locate a way of preventing a courtroom confrontation and get seasoned lawyers able to litigate using the lawyers in the opposing party.

About Kenneth S. Nugget

Kenneth S. Nugent has over three decades of law practice by which he has found justice and compensation for families of all different backgrounds and financial statuses. Wrongful deaths should never be taken lightly which is challenging to picture the devastating effects a situation like this may have on a surviving family. Our law firm has lived as much as this important tenet therefore we provide superior legal services to people who may otherwise not afford it.

Get Your Case Evaluation Today

In order to advise you about the best steps to take once you have suffered damages or wrongful death from another party we should come up with a full evaluation of your respective case. We are going to provide this initial consultation totally free. But, it is essential that you act soon. These cases generally have a better chance of success when filed early.

A Savannah Office

Kenneth S. Nugent Law Offices will have locations in 8 cities in Georgia. We proudly serve residents in the Savannah area and those in seven other areas within the state. In terms of choosing the best lawyer the secret to success is always to choose one from your neighborhood. This way you can be certain they are going to possess the local knowledge they should get a ruling in your favor.

It's Time And Energy To Contact Kenneth S. Nugent

Should you or someone in your family has been the victim of your injury or wrongful death, we completely grasp the dilemma. It is an portion of the law by which we have now great experience. Other cases which we have now handled with unparalleled success include defective products, dangerous drugs and vehicular accidents.

If you were to look into the views and perspectives of the clients you will realize an improved sample of the kind of results we have now and continue to accomplish for your valued clients. In case you are unclear regarding how this process is perfect for you, phone us up at this number: 912)-447-5984. We also have a live chat open to ensure a speedy response irrespective of what time or night it really is.

Why wait anymore to start your quest for justice if this could mean losing a case. Getting a lawyer in your corner at the earliest opportunity greatly increases your chances of a good resolution. Don’t wait any further, call today for the free consultation.

We wait to obtain your compensation or justice when performing so could mean a lost case? Getting a lawyer in your corner immediately greatly improves your chances of reaching a good resolution in relation to your case. Some types of cases cannot be filed within one or two years. Buy your evaluation now!

[madduhhline]

Quarantine Life: A Reading List

Here is a booklist for 4th of July that we White people need to read instead of just blindly celebrating 4th of July. Special thanks to Bookstgram Represent for additional resources on bookstore and additional readings. They’ve answered so many questions and helped me make sure that this list focuses on Black writers. Only one book on this list has a white author but it came as a suggestion from a group I was in from a Black teacher so it is included. This isn’t a complete list but over the last few weeks these are what I’ve started my readings with. So, let’s get started.

This post does contain affiliate links to Bookshop.org

Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla F. Saad

This eye-opening book challenges you to do the essential work of unpacking your biases, and helps white people take action and dismantle the privilege within themselves so that you can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.

Diversify by June Sarpong

Putting the spotlight on groups who are often marginalised in our society, including women, ethnic minorities, those living with disabilities, and the LGBTQ+ community, Diversify uncovers the hidden cost of exclusion and shows how a new approach to how we learn, live and do business can solve some of the most stubborn challenges we face.

With unshakeable case studies, brand-new research from Oxford University, and six revolutionary steps to help you overcome unconscious bias, this book will help you become part of a better society.

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness: Austin Channing Brown

Austin Channing Brown's first encounter with a racialized America came at age 7, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, Austin writes, "I had to learn what it means to love blackness," a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America's racial divide as a writer, speaker and expert who helps organizations practice genuine inclusion.In a time when nearly all institutions (schools, churches, universities, businesses) claim to value "diversity" in their mission statements, I'm Still Here is a powerful account of how and why our actions so often fall short of our words. Austin writes in breathtaking detail about her journey to self-worth and the pitfalls that kill our attempts at racial justice, in stories that bear witness to the complexity of America's social fabric--from Black Cleveland neighborhoods to private schools in the middle-class suburbs, from prison walls to the boardrooms at majority-white organizations.

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique W. Morris

In a work that Lisa Delpit calls "imperative reading," Monique W. Morris (Black Stats, Too Beautiful for Words) chronicles the experiences of Black girls across the country whose intricate lives are misunderstood, highly judged--by teachers, administrators, and the justice system--and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish. Called "compelling" and "thought-provoking" by Kirkus Reviews, Pushout exposes a world of confined potential and supports the rising movement to challenge the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures.

Called a book "for everyone who cares about children" by the Washington Post, Morris's illumination of these critical issues is "timely and important" (Booklist) at a moment when Black girls are the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system. Praised by voices as wide-ranging as Gloria Steinem and Roland Martin, and highlighted for the audiences of Elle and Jet right alongside those of EdWeek and the Leonard Lopate Show, Pushout is a book that "will stay with you long after you turn the final page" (Bookish).

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen

Since its first publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has become one of the most important--and successful--history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book also won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship and was heralded on the front page of the New York Times.

For this new edition, Loewen has added a new preface that shows how inadequate history courses in high school help produce adult Americans who think Donald Trump can solve their problems, and calls out academic historians for abandoning the concept of truth in a misguided effort to be "objective."

What started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks has ended up being what the San Francisco Chronicle calls "an extremely convincing plea for truth in education." In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen brings history alive in all its complexity and ambiguity. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen offers an eye-opening critique of existing textbooks, and a wonderful retelling of American history as it should--and could--be taught to American students.

*Specifically the chapters regarding slavery. This was a suggestion from a Black womxn in my Womxn for Tri for Justice. She said that Chapter’s 5 & 6 should start as required reading about slavery and then reading the whole book. The edition pictured above does not include the new preface. 

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

[piccolina-mina]

Y'all The White Privilege/Victimhood on Good Girls Jumped Out!!

Season 2 Finale Spoilers below.

Good Girls is my show, and I enjoy the heck out of and always will, but I'm about to get Peak Tumblr analyzing this finale... so let's just go over this. I'm trying to process how this played out because ...

Dean was a serial cheater who cheated on his wife even when she was struggling with post-Partum depression. Beth didn't even find out the full-extent of his cheating because he only copped to his secretary AFTER Beth found out about it on her own. And that same secretary told Beth about all the other women this season because Dean never told her the truth. Plus he faked cancer to manipulate Beth and that was not addressed once all season.

Instead Dean got a soft edit where he became the rational, responsible adult and doting, dedicated father. He was the one to show Beth all the ways in which she erred with her criminal activities and putting them at risk. His infidelity was softened by adding backstory about how Beth closed herself off when she was battling post partum depression and beyond and he felt his emotional needs weren't being met and he felt inadequate because of how she treated him.

He took her kids as if to imply she was a terrible mother despite her being the primary caretaking parent to all four of their children since they were born up until she chose to take on the dealership. He took her kids away from her. But he never really suffered any consequences for how terrible he was and he ended the season in a comfortable friendship with Beth despite all the ways he wronged her as if he's the ideal, supportive husband. And he got redemption without earning it or acknowledging the extent of his shortcomings.

Boomer is the trashiest most despicable character of them all. He knew about the money laundering and had other illegal activities going on at the store. He attempted to rape Annie and did rape and emotionally abuse and manipulate Mary Pat. And Turner KNEW all of this but didn't care if it meant he could leverage Boomer to get to Beth. No charges for anything since he helped. And that's disturbing AF.

Boomer stole money from his grandmother constantly and blackmailed everyone. He was forcing Mary Pat to marry him. Then he bolted after he was presumed dead and was willing to let the girls go to prison for his murder. But despite everything he has done, the rape, the abuse, all the illegal crap he would've gotten off Scott free if not for Nana forcing him to take responsibility. He's still facing NO repercussions. What?

Mary Pat had ample time to get out of the business or turn the girls in, but she chose to blackmail them for more money instead even though it clearly isn't what Jesus would do.

She chopped up her husband's body and put him in the freezer so she could keep collecting his veteran benefits. She enlisted the girls to take Boomer out for her, but then ran Boomer over with her car, wrapped his body up in tarp and planned to dispose of him too. But when she found out he was alive and gone, she didn't tell the FBI or the girls. Instead she had them dispose of her husband's body thinking it was Boomer's.

Her part in the operation was dismissed by Turner as long as he could use her to take down Beth. So Mary Pat did all of that and got off Scott damn free. Because she was cast as victim. She was a victim long before she actually was one (regarding her abuse by Boomer). And nothing came from any of her actions. Victim or not there are still consequences, right? Apparently not.

Noah tampered with evidence and botched his own investigation based on his relationship with Annie. He jeopardized the entire case more than once. He slept with his mark and caught feelings. He openly lied and deceived both the agency and Annie and ... nothing comes from it? No consequences at all, huh? He gets to relocate to Arizona to be with his kid.

These are all characters have done varying degrees of bad to despicable things that should have resulted in some form of repercussions and yet they face none. Why?

Turner's obsessive focus on Beth in part has to do with his disgust over her pretending to be the white suburban mom and stepford wife entangled in all of this. He recognizes that she is the sort to get away with things because of who and what she is and the image she projects.

But then he also caters to this pervasive white (woman) victimhood issue that happens a lot. He never viewed Mary Pat as anything but a desperate single mom who is a victim no matter what she did, and he absolved her of her wrong doing and slapped her on the wrist just to get to Beth which counters everything he's intending to do with Beth. Hold her accountable image be damned.

Then there is Annie who is also a single mom who gets the sympathetic play to potentially turn on her own sister. She gets the doting boyfriend and companionship to make her consider it or to get information out of her. She gets the soft play. Like she doesn't have agency in her criminal plots with her sister and Ruby. Like she too is a victim of Beth's or whomever and warrants sympathy and the benefit of the doubt.

Contrast that with what Ruby gets. Ruby got harassed for months to the point of her having case to file a complaint. She got Turner putting the squeeze on her and her husband and family repeatedly and consistently.

And worse yet, Turner did this under the guise of "doing them a solid because he didn't want them to go down for this white woman" so to speak, but he still was willing to ruin them for her anyway.

Stan is the only one who got arrested and humiliated in front of his colleagues. He's the only one who went to jail. STAN whose connection to this is flimsy. The sole black man on their side of things got hauled into jail.

And then Ruby with the sick daughter who needs meds and the husband who was hauled away is treated like a demon by Beth for considering turning on her when Ruby was the only one facing any fire or harassment.

Ruby and Stan the most wholesome and logical and least problematic had their entire world upended and ruined and faced the brunt of the repercussions. Ruby and Stan were both facing charges and jail time while Beth faced nothing while they worked to build a case against her and Annie never was considered as a threat.

If Ruby didn't turn on Beth she and Stan could be sitting in prison while everyone else roamed free. Like, YIKES!

And the way Turner is both the guy who wants to take down this white woman who would likely catch a break in the system but also the means by which he does it by his abhorrent treatment of POC is disturbing.

The first season established that Rio was basically untouchable. The second season confirmed it when Rio was literally playing tennis with an attorney filling him on things and he has connections in the FBI.

So Turner never wants to go after Rio specifically because of this even though he knows Rio is Beth's boss and the bigger fish. No, he wants to take down Beth.

So that brings me to the final Rio scene that was the most disturbing of all. Turner has played fast and loose with the rules but still tried to come across as an earnest lawman wanting to do his job.

But Turner watches Beth shoot Rio multiple times because "Rio is her problem" and to save Turner.

And if it was really about doing what was right, he could have had her arrested right then and there. He heard their conversations. Knew about their connection. All of it.

But instead he sends her home. He keeps the gun with her prints on it as something else to hold over her I'm sure, but for what?

And then he kneels down, as a law enforcement person whose sole job is to protect and serve, justice and equality, fairness ... and he taunted a dying brown man instead of calling 911. We got a brown man gurgling, his life at the mercy of the law (made all the worse with it being an agent of color), and he toys with him, toys with the idea of whether or not he should call the ambulance and phone it in... assist him before he dies. He wants something out of Rio first before he can help.

Hella more Yikes. And what a brutal takedown of Rio. The potential death of a brown man at the hands of a white woman convinced she was victimized by him or the exploited potential death of a brown man by a cop. Yikes!

Then there is Beth who somehow throughout all of this walked away convinced that she was Rio's victim when she kept going back to HIM. They made their amends and made up for taking his money, and he said they were good. BETH was the one who went to him and left a string of pearls. She's the one who wanted more work and opportunities.

She was the one who wanted the keys to the kingdom. She's the one who wanted more work. She's the one who wanted a bigger role. She sought him out repeatedly.

She's the one who initiated their sexual relationship both times. She is who broke things off, but she is also who came back looking for more. She's the one who convinced herself she was his equal and his partner, but then shied away whenever he told her to prove it. She played hot and cold this whole time, and he went along with it anyway.

She claimed he never helped her when he did. He doesn't owe her anything at all but still did more than she ever gave him credit for. When she botched that situation with those druggies and thought they kidnapped her daughter, Rio did look into it. He even got her daughter's toy back for her.

Beth's biggest issue with Rio is she mistook Rio's silence for inaction.

She assumed because he wasn't giving her play by plays that he wasn't helping her, but that was the thing to, why did he need to help her?

She wanted to be Queen but didn't want the hard work. He recognized that she wanted this and he fostered it. He told her to take care of her rotten eggs. He encouraged her to fix her own problems. He held her accountable for her own actions.

And in turn, the man who actually listened to her. The one who actually treated her as an equal and respected her is who she shot because she claimed she was his victim.

He told her this shit is medieval. He told her if she wanted to be the king she had to kill the king. But a real queen would at least own her shit instead of pretending to be a victim.

She wanted a kingdom HE built without any of the dirty work and effort. She felt entitled to it.

And then she shot him hoping she killed him and Christopher Columbus appropriated his empire.

Is this your Queen?

That finale highlighted just how interesting this season has been. So in the end, Rio is the only who didn't "win" but too many of these other terrible characters get passes? Hm.

[phroyd]

I don’t really have heroes, but if I did, Noam Chomsky would be at the top of my list. Who else has achieved such lofty scientific and moral standing? Linus Pauling, perhaps, and Einstein. Chomsky’s arguments about the roots of language, which he first set forth in the late 1950s, triggered a revolution in our modern understanding of the mind. Since the 1960s, when he protested the Vietnam War, Chomsky has also been a ferocious political critic, denouncing abuses of power wherever he sees them. Chomsky, who turns 90 on December 7, remains busy. He spent last month in Brazil speaking out against far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro, and he recently discussed the migrant caravan on the radio show “Democracy Now.” Chomsky, whom I first interviewed in 1990 (see my profile here), has had an enormous influence on my scientific and political views. His statement that we may always "learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology” could serve as an epigraph for my most recent book, Mind-Body Problems. Below he responds to my emailed questions with characteristic clarity and force. -- John Horgan

Do you ever chill out?

Would rather skip personal matters.

Your ideas about language have evolved over the decades. In what ways, if any, have they remained the same?

Some of the earliest assumptions, then tentative and only partially formed, have proven quite robust, among them that the human language capacity is a species property in a double sense: virtually uniform among humans apart from serious pathology, and unique to humans in its essential properties.  The most basic property of the language faculty is that each internal language generates an unbounded array of structured expressions, each of which yields an interpretation at the interface with other cognitive systems (basically a linguistically-articulated thought) and can be externalized in some sensorimotor system, usually speech, in ways that allow others to access our thoughts – a property of language that Galileo and his contemporaries rightly regarded with awe and wonder.  Basic ideas about the mechanisms that have these remarkable properties have also proven fairly stable, though there has been great progress in refining them and reducing them to principles simple enough to provide sound explanations for many surprising aspects of language and to suggest a plausible evolutionary scenario.  From the outset, 65 years ago, the languages investigated closely were typologically varied, and in tandem with theoretical advances inquiry has proceeded to unprecedented typological range and depth.

Your claims about the innateness of language helped inspire evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics, which attempt to trace human thought behavior to their biological roots. And yet you’ve been critical of these fields. Why?

Not so much of the fields, which are surely legitimate and important, but of some of the practices within them.

You once said we will probably “always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” Is that still your view?

Another thought that has proven robust.

John Ioannidis and other scholars have discovered that many peer-reviewed scientific claims cannot be replicated. Do you have an explanation, and possible cure, for the so-called replication crisis?

Nothing beyond the obvious.  Sometimes failure of replication has to do with complexity of what is being studied and with inadequate tools and ideas.  The intense pressure to publish and sometimes ugly competitiveness are other factors.  As compared with other domains, the scientific culture is quite admirable I think, though hardly without flaws that can and should be corrected.

Do you take seriously the Singularity, the idea that artificial intelligence and other fields will soon radically transform humanity?

One can certainly imagine how, in principle, systems that can detect patterns with massive data processing might find hitherto unknown ways of constructing theories that surpass those within the reach of human intelligence.  And that could have all sorts of effects.  But among the concerns we face, this doesn’t seem to me to rank high.  Even tasks mastered almost reflexively by infants are far beyond the capacities of contemporary AI.

In his recent book Enlightenment Now, your former MIT colleague Steven Pinker argues that life has gotten better and better, morally and materially, and he scolds other intellectuals for knocking western civilization. What's your view of his perspective?

I don’t find these broad-brush observations very helpful or informative.  The devil is in the details.

There is work on these matters that seems to me much more compelling.  In his very important study on the rise and fall of American growth, Robert Gordon observes that there was virtually no economic growth for millennia until 1770, slow growth for another century, and then a “special century” until 1970, dependent largely on specific inventions.  Since the 1970s the picture is much more mixed: in the US, with actual decline in real wages for non-supervisory workers over 40 years and even increased death rates in recent years.  These are among the features of the neoliberal era that have led to the rise of the kind of “morbid symptoms” that Gramsci warned about from Mussolini’s prison cell, as we see all too clearly in the western world today.  Elsewhere we find different patterns.  Thus Russia suffered severe economic decline and demographic collapse when market reforms were introduced in the ‘90s.  China has been different again.  As Amartya Sen has shown, Maoist China saved about 100 million people – not a small number – as compared with democratic capitalist India from independence to 1980, not from “enlightenment” in the usual sense, but from rural health programs and other reforms.  And since then it has undergone spectacular growth and provided the bulk of the reduction in global poverty, in a society that’s not a model of enlightened values.  Nazi Germany experienced very rapid growth in the ‘30s, not a triumph of enlightenment.  There are numerous other complexities that are of major significance, but that disappear in unanalyzed statistical tables.

As for “moral growth,” there are even greater complexities.  The American Revolution introduced the novel and important idea (put aside the fact) that “we the people” should take control of our fate –- and at the same time developed the most vicious system of slavery in human history, the foundation of much of US-British wealth and economic development.   Or take Germany again.  In the 1920s, it was at the peak of western civilization in the arts, the sciences and mathematics, and even political development, regarded as a model of democracy.  Ten years later it was descending to the depths of human savagery.  A decade later it was recovering what had been lost.

As for the Enlightenment and modern science, no serious analyst can question their major achievements – or overlook their role in the age of discovery that brought untold horrors to much of the world, devastating the Western Hemisphere and Africa, crushing the leading world centers of civilization in India and China.

With all that, a good case can be made I think that moral horizons are, overall, slowly widening, including recent years, when the activism of the ‘60s has had a considerable civilizing effect in many areas.

Pinker, Richard Wrangham and Edward Wilson have suggested that human males are innately warlike. Do you agree? Can humanity move past militarism once and for all?

Since humans (males and females) are sometimes warlike, it follows that their intrinsic nature permits this outcome under certain circumstances.  Under other circumstances they prefer peace – normally I think.  But it’s highly misleading to say that they are “innately warlike” or “innately peaceloving.” I don’t know of any argument showing that we cannot create circumstances under which warlike tendencies will be suppressed – as has often been the case in history.

Are you a pacifist? Is violence sometimes justified in pursuit of justice?

Not an absolute pacifist.  I didn’t object to entering World War II after Japan attacked military bases in two virtual colonies and Germany declared war, and in fact thought that the US should have intervened more forcefully before.  But it’s also worth bearing in mind that the Nazi plague could have been contained before it led to war.

Why did you recently call the Republican Party “the most dangerous organization in world history”?

Take its leader, who recently applied to the government of Ireland for a permit to build a huge wall to protect his golf course, appealing to the threat of global warming, while at the same time he withdrew from international efforts to address the grim threat and is using every means at his disposal to accelerate it.  Or take his colleagues, the participants in the 2016 Republican primaries.  Without exception, they either denied that what is happening is happening – though any ignorance is self-induced – or said maybe it is but we shouldn’t do anything about it.  The moral depths were reached by the respected “adult in the room,” Ohio governor John Kasich, who agreed that it is happening but added that “we are going to burn [coal] in Ohio and we are not going to apologize for it.” Or take a recent publication of Trump’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a detailed study recommending an end to regulations on emissions. It presented a rational argument: extrapolating current trends, by the end of the century we’ll be over the cliff and automotive emissions don’t contribute very much to the catastrophe – the assumption being that everyone is as criminally insane as we are and won’t try to avoid the crisis.  In brief, let’s rob while the planet burns, putting poor Nero in the shadows.

This surely qualifies as a contender for the most evil document in history.

There have been many monsters in the past, but it would be hard to find one who was dedicated to undermining the prospects for organized human society, not in the distant future -- in order to put a few more dollars in overstuffed pockets.

And it doesn’t end there. The same can be said about the major banks that are increasing investments in fossil fuels, knowing very well what they are doing.  Or, for that matter, the regular articles in the major media and business press reporting US success in rapidly increasing oil and gas production, with commentary on energy independence, sometimes local environmental effects, but regularly without a phrase on the impact on global warming – a truly existential threat.  Same in the election campaign.  Not a word about the issue that is merely the most crucial one in human history.

Hardly a day passes without new information about the severity of the threat.  As I’m writing, a new study appeared in Nature showing that retention of heat in the oceans has been greatly underestimated, meaning that the total carbon budget is much less than had been assumed in the recent, and sufficiently ominous, IPCC report. The study calculates that maximum emissions would have to be reduced by 25% to avoid warming of 2 degrees (C), well above the danger point.  At the same time polls show that -- doubtless influenced by their leaders who they trust more than the evil media -- half of Republicans deny that global warming is even taking place, and of the rest, almost half reject any human responsibility.  Words fail.

Wasn’t Richard Nixon worse than Donald Trump?

Nixon had a mixed record.  In some respects, he was the last liberal president: OSHA and EPA for example.  On the other hand, he committed terrible crimes.  Arguably the worst was the bombing of rural Cambodia, a proposed article of impeachment but voted down though it was incomparably more important than the others.  And the article was much too weak, focusing on the secrecy.  There has been little attention to the orders that Nixon delivered, relayed to the Pentagon by his faithful servant Henry Kissinger: “A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” It is not easy to find comparable orders for genocide in the archival record.  But all of Nixon’s crimes pale in comparison with the decision to race towards the precipice of environmental catastrophe.

Are the U.S. media doing their job?

It depends on what we think their job is.  They are businesses, so by accepted standards their job is profit.  By other standards, they have a duty to the public to provide “all the news that’s fit to print,” under a concept of “fitness” that is as free as possible from submission to power interests or other distorting factors.  About this there is a great deal to say – I’ve devoted many words to the topic elsewhere, as have many others.  But in today’s strange climate of Trumpian “alternative facts” and “false reality,” it is useful to recognize that with all their flaws, which are many, the mainstream media remain an indispensable source of information about the world.

Can incremental reforms transform the U.S. into a just, prosperous society, or are more drastic measures required? In other words, are you a reformer or a revolutionary?

Both.  Generalizations are misleading; too much depends on specific circumstances.  But some have a fair degree of validity, I think. One is that there is both justification and pressing need for radical changes in the socioeconomic and political orders.  We cannot know to what extent they can be achieved by incremental reforms, which are to be valued on their own.  But unless the great mass of the population comes to believe that needed change cannot be implemented within the existing system, resort to “drastic measures” is likely to be a recipe for disaster.

My students are pretty gloomy about the future. What can I tell them to cheer them up?

Apart from the truly existential threats of nuclear war and global warming – which can be averted – there have been far more difficult challenges in the past than those young people face today, and they have been overcome by dedicated effort and commitment.  The historical record of struggle and achievement gives ample reason to take to heart the slogan that Gramsci made famous: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

What’s your utopia?

I don’t have the talent to do more than to suggest what seem to me reasonable guidelines for a better future.  One might argue that Marx was too cautious in keeping to only a few general words about post-capitalist society, but he was right to recognize that it will have to be envisioned and developed by people who have liberated themselves from the bonds of illegitimate authority.

Phroyd

[solacekames]

Do immigrants in ICE detention centers have any human rights at all?

After Supreme Court rules that immigrants may be held indefinitely without bond, a dreadful situation gets worse

AZADEH SHAHSHAHANI - APRIL 24, 2018 11:59AM (UTC)

The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that detained immigrants, even those with lawful permanent resident status and asylum seekers, do not have the right to periodic bond hearings under statutory grounds. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, in a scathing dissent, that this was probably “the first time ever” that the court was holding that a federal law allowed long-term confinement of people on American soil with no opportunity for bond. Though the court sent the case back to lower courts to look further into the issue from a constitutional perspective, the ruling was shocking -- especially in light of its potential impact.

Many immigrants are held in detention for long periods of time -- on average, 13 months. This ruling is likely to lead to even greater overcrowding at detention centers, as well as the deterioration of medical and psychological care and other inhumane conditions at these facilities.

I wish the justices had visited with detained immigrants at one of the more than 200 immigration detention centers nationwide -- such as the notorious Stewart Detention Center, a private prison in Georgia operated by Corrections Corporation of America under an ICE contract -- to fully understand the implications of dooming immigrants to potentially indefinite imprisonment.

As Project South and the Penn State Law Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic found in a year-long investigation last year, Stewart is rife with human rights violations, including denial of adequate medical care, an exploitative labor program and inedible or inadequate food. If those in detention complain about the conditions, the facility is swift to place them in retaliatory solitary confinement. In cases where immigrants, having exhausted every other avenue of possible redress, put their bodies on the line and resort to hunger strikes, the government has sought court orders to force-feed them.

The tragic deaths at Stewart speak for themselves. Nine years ago, a 39-year-old immigrant, Roberto Medina-Martinez, died of a treatable heart infection. Records obtained from the government showed that the sole physician at the facility did not review Medina-Martinez’s health records and also that this doctor systematically failed to do so for the entire prison population, thereby endangering the health of thousands of people.

In other words, Medina-Martinez died because of government neglect.

The tragedy did not stop there. You might have thought the government would have stepped up the quality of the health care at the facility after that death, but the exact opposite happened. After that physician left, Stewart was left without a physician for more than three years. This is all the more egregious in light of the fact that Stewart was, at the time, the largest facility in the country, with more than 1,750 detained individuals. (It reportedly still has the largest population, although at least one other facility has more capacity.)

More deaths ensued. On May 17, 2017, Jean-Carlos Jimenez-Joseph, a 27-year-old immigrant, committed suicide at Stewart after being held in solitary for 19 days. This was a preventable tragedy. The horrendous impact of solitary confinement on the mental health of imprisoned individuals, even after their release, has long been documented.

At Stewart, solitary has been used as the first resort for responding to mental and emotional difficulties experienced by individuals who have often fled persecution and torture in their home countries and are already in a fragile emotional state. The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General also found, in a report issued in December 2017, that solitary had been used at Stewart as punishment for minor infractions. In Jimenez-Joseph's case, investigations have shown that the facility did not provide him with the adequate dose of medication that he needed, which he had requested at least twice.

Another man detained at Stewart, 33-year-old Yulio Castro Garrido, died on Jan. 30, 2018 of pneumonia. ICE continued its shameful practice of including his alleged offense in the agency's press release regarding his death, as if what Castro Garrido had or had not done previously was in some way relevant to his death in a government facility.

In its original press statement, ICE actually sought to blame Castro Garrido for his own death, claiming that he had refused medical treatment. In other circumstances, blaming the dead man might have worked. But not this time. After intense media and public attention, ICE was forced to change its press statement and retract the falsehood, saying instead that Castro Garrido had not responded well to medical care.

His brother, Frank Suarez, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “It is just so unfair that he went there in full health, full of dreams, full of everything that an immigrant has to be better in this country and he just came out as a dead body.”

The same could be said of all 179 immigrants who have died in ICE’s detention centers since 2003 while awaiting deportation.

With President Trump’s deportation and detention machine now ramping up after Congress rubber-stamped a budget of nearly $7.1 billion for ICE -- an increase of $641 million from the previous fiscal year -- the tragedies are sure to continue.

To top that, the Department of Justice recently rolled out a quota system for immigration judges, basing its evaluations of such judges on how quickly they complete cases. In effect, this wipes out the independence of immigration judges and ensures further erosion of due process for detained immigrants. The DOJ has also suspended the Legal Orientation Program for detained immigrants, one of the only avenues for legal information available to them.

If Congress were exercising its constitutional oversight function, it would put the brakes on this travesty and hold the administration accountable instead of rewarding an abusive system with ever more funds.

In a November 2017 letter to the Georgia congressional delegation, 70 Georgia and national organizations requested an investigation of Stewart and another deplorable Georgia facility, the Irwin County Detention Center. We have yet to receive an adequate response.

[youngsoutheastasianleaders]

YSEALI Seeds: Femnimitr

About the Project

Femnimitr is a collection of young women activists from Thailand, who are bridging the gap between the lack of data on issues regarding women’s rights, specifically in sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and the need for an effective, user-friendly data platform in the country. The project will consolidate the scattered SGBV data across the country and visualize them in graphics, while incorporating storytelling techniques to communicate the data meaningfully. The ultimate goals of the project is to accelerate gender development and civic engagement for a solid push for policy change in Thailand.

Why do you care about this specific topic/issue?

We care about this issue because the reality is so severe, and we can’t look away. Thailand has a serious gender data problem. Gender data in Thailand is scattered across governmental agencies, and often in incomprehensible forms, while many simply don’t exist. Meanwhile, the NGOs and CSOs usually lack resources to focus on publicizing and systematizing their data.  If there’s no action in policy and budget allocation, gender projects would never be entirely effective.

Since gender data is very vast, our Seed project focuses on one of the most pressing issues in our community, gender-based violence. As young women, we experienced or at least we know someone who experienced a certain degree of gender-based violence and the survivors received little to no support. Too often the scenarios of a person walking into a police station,  trying to report sexual violence, results in getting laughed at or sent home. We realized the severe problem goes deep into our culture, education, awareness, arts, as well as justice and trials and there are so many things to work on.

Why did you decide to start this project?

We started this project because we recognized the problem and it resonated with our core  values and skills. We wanted to do something about it. Our team has always been actively  involved in tackling gender equality in our community, so the thought of doing this project came naturally. We were able to talk with many people who worked on the ground, and we spotted patterns of gender issues in the country. The ineffectiveness of budget allocation, inadequate policies, and lack of awareness and education for the public, all point back to the lack of gender data. We figured it would be impossible to communicate or change policymakers’ and public’s mind if there’s no data to back it up. The more we dug into it, the more we realized how necessary it is to have this data in place and how much work NGOs and CSOs have been gathering data. Some even had to manually browse through past local newspapers! Fortunately, each of our team members come from diverse backgrounds, have  resources, and skills that we ca utilize to make this a reality. So we formed an official team  and applied to YSEALI Seeds.

What are your goals for this project?

We have several goals for this project:

To collect, systemize and communicate gender data in meaningful ways.

To build a virtual platform that provides gender data that people can access and use  in some ways

How will YSEALI Seeds help you achieve your goals?

As a team, we have big goals that we are passionate about. We have this dream team and the  burning desire to work on the gender issue. We specifically are focused on gender-based  violence in our country, and want to make sure our brainchild is effective, scalable, and long lasting. We know what to do, we have on the ground networks from, and we thought that all  we had left was funding. YSEALI Seeds changed our minds. Apart from acting as a necessary pump-priming grant for  the project, YSEALI Seeds also help us to build capacity as a partner in the long run. YSEALI supported us in budget planning, communicating our ideas, assessing our project risks, reflecting on our process, and writing a report. YSEALI Seeds helped bring the idea to gather  YSEALI alumni and get stakeholders involved. Thanks to these skills, it cultivates our  confidence and increases our capacity to apply to other funding opportunities and to expand our project post-YSEALI Seeds.

What have you accomplished and implement so far?

So far, we reviewed more than 77 data sources on sexual-based violence in Thailand, two partners on-boarded and connected with seven stakeholders whom we plan to work with in the future! We are now selecting and finalizing the data sources, along with starting the data visualization process with our partner. There is still a long way to go, especially in terms of marketing and communications, but we seriously can’t wait to show you our website!

What are the most significant lessons learned you’ve experienced so far?

Cultivating resilience is extremely crucial, especially in light of COVID-19. Since April 2021, Thailand has been going through the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the country with no sufficient governmental response. In terms of the economy, all sectors are severely affected due to the full lockdown, curfews, and travel restrictions imposed. Although our work is completely virtual and we understood that there might be some disruption in our productivity, we would never imagine how traumatic the situation could be to our mental health. We have been seeing our stakeholders and our loved ones get infected, and some  passed away without having a chance to say goodbye.

The team’s productivity was also disrupted as travel restrictions, curfews, supplt shortages and full lock down significantly slow down our daily tasks (such as meeting up for discussions with our stakeholders, getting cash, buying food, etc. Additionally, we had to cancel many tasks last-minute due to fluctuating governmental COVID-19 restriction announcements, etc.). Moreover, many stakeholders, including some of our team members, currently are taking up other pressing tasks. They are volunteering to support the community caused by governmental neglect, giving them less time to work on other things. Our full-time  subcontractor also dropped out of the contract.

Our team adapted has to these changes by checking in on one another more often, as well as  hosting a meeting for other subcontractors to meet and share their problems and solutions  together. Moreover, instead of subcontracting full-time staff, the team shifted to subcontract  multiple part-time staff to lighten the workload. Although this solution would significantly  increase the administrative burden for the core members, it outweighs any unforeseen risks  in the future. In case any subcontractor is to drop out or if any abrupt change is to happen again, we would still have a group of part-time subcontractors who are willing to take on the remaining tasks.

Our lessons learned are:

Coping with a dynamic climate comes with risk management skills. This means the ability to foresee the risks, as well as the possible solutions.  

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Work with several partners, subcontractors, to ensure that if anything happens to one of them, the project would be able to keep going.

Developing a system of mental health support is important for any team. Lock down restrictions make people feel like they are going through many problems alone and it can be overwhelming. Fostering a safe environment where people can talk about their problems and check in on one another is crucial for any successful project.

What are the success stories you can share with others who would like to do the same type of activity and/or project like yours?

Our core staff reviewed more than 77 data sources on sexual-based violence in Thailand within less than one month. That’s fantastic progress considering that all of us have full-time jobs.

[didanawisgi]

Alexander Hamilton is often credited with being the most far-sighted of the founders, since he, more than anyone else, saw America’s potential to become a manufacturing and commercial powerhouse among the nations.

Not even a man of Hamilton’s vision, however, could have foreseen that he would one day be the subject of a hit stage musical—let alone one set to hip-hop music. Two centuries after his meteoric rise from poverty and obscurity to the highest levels of the founding generation’s leadership class, Hamilton is a star again—this time on Broadway.

What are conservatives to make of Hamilton’s newfound fame? Some—following Thomas Jefferson, who regarded Hamilton as a subverter of limited government—might be tempted to regret it.

In his own day, Hamilton was not so much known as a proponent of limited government as he was considered a proponent of energetic government. And Hamilton argued for a broad interpretation of the national government’s powers precisely with a view to enabling the energetic government he thought necessary to the infant republic’s security and flourishing.

The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>

Hamilton argued for a broad reading of the Necessary and Proper Clause in order to justify the constitutionality of the first national bank, which he thought a crucial support for the government’s ability to borrow money. He argued for a broad reading of the General Welfare Clause in order to justify the constitutionality of bounties (or subsidies) paid to manufacturers, which he thought essential to building an American manufacturing sector.

In all these efforts to get Congress to exercise its powers energetically, he was opposed vehemently by limited-government men like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. It would be understandable, then, if contemporary conservatives were to ask: “Why can’t we have a musical about Jefferson or Madison?”

Hamilton’s Conservatism

Conservatives who are tempted to think this way should take a closer look at Hamilton’s career.

As I argue at greater length in a new essay entitled “Alexander Hamilton and American Progressivism,” Hamilton was not a proto-progressive. Nor was he the progenitor, wittingly or unwittingly, of the kind of expansive central state that modern liberals support in their quest to achieve social justice.

He was instead a pragmatic conservative statesman, seeking to build a government and economy that would make America an independent, prosperous, and powerful nation.

Hamilton’s conservatism is evident, in the first place, in the way he argued for institutions like the national bank and bounties for America’s infant manufacturing sector.

Unlike a contemporary progressive, he favored these things not because they were new or innovative. On the contrary, he advocated them precisely on the conservative ground that they had been tried, and their usefulness proven, in other countries.

Successful commercial and manufacturing nations, he observed, had national banks and had taken some steps to encourage the development of their nascent domestic manufactures.

Hamilton and Modern Liberals

Hamilton’s conservatism is also evident in the ends he had in view in advocating such policies.

The primary driver of contemporary liberalism’s demand for expansive government authority is contemporary liberalism’s egalitarianism. This can be seen in the debate over the Affordable Care Act. Even though America in 2009 could boast a health care system among the best in the history of the entire world, it was not good enough for American liberals.

And why not? Because of inequality. Most Americans had adequate health insurance, but some didn’t.

This is not the kind of thinking that informed Alexander Hamilton’s statesmanship. Indeed, Hamilton was accused by his political enemies of being an aristocrat. Those charges were unjust, but they certainly could not have been made if he had dedicated his public efforts, like a contemporary liberal, to the pursuit of an ever greater equality of conditions.

The end Hamilton had in mind in advocating his policies was instead the prosperity, power and prestige of the nation—within which enterprising individuals and families could work effectively to better their condition.

A Government Can Be Both Limited and Energetic

Nor should contemporary conservatives reject Hamilton because of his call for an energetic national government. This call was consistent with the purposes of the American founding and not a betrayal of them. The Constitution was written and ratified, after all, because the government of the United States was too weak, unable to pay its bills and defend the country.

The aim of the Constitution, then, is to create a government that is both energetic and limited. And Hamilton’s career reminds us that this is what we should want: a government that energetically executes its proper functions but does not go beyond them.

It is true that Hamilton was accused by Jefferson and Madison of pushing the powers of the national government beyond their proper limits. His response to such charges showed a proper respect for the Constitution that is often lacking among contemporary progressives.

Hamilton replied to these accusations by arguing that his policies were in fact justified by a correct interpretation of the Constitution. He certainly did not respond by suggesting, as contemporary liberals sometimes do, that the Constitution could be ignored because it is supposedly inadequate to the needs of a dynamic and changing nation.

In sum, the debate between Hamilton and his opponents was a debate over how to understand the limits on government imposed by the Constitution, not a debate about whether those limits should be respected.

Hamilton and the Other Founders

Similarly, Hamilton stood with the rest of the founding generation in supporting separation of powers and federalism as principles that limited and moderated the exercise of the national power. He agreed with James Madison that separation of powers is essential to preventing the tyrannical exercise of government power.

And while he sought to shore up the national power because he thought this was what the infant republic needed to achieve stability, he admitted that the states were an essential part of America’s constitutional scheme and that they would serve as a salutary check on the power of the federal government.

The state legislatures, Hamilton argued in Federalist No. 26, would act as “not only vigilant but suspicious and jealous guardians of the rights of the citizens against encroachments from the federal government.”

Above all, Hamilton accepted and unswervingly defended the natural rights doctrine that informed the founding, a doctrine that contemporary conservatives are called upon to defend as well.

For Hamilton, as much as for Jefferson and Madison, governments were instituted to protect the rights of individuals, including their right to acquire property—even unequal amounts of property.

As the statesman charged with finding a way for America to pay its war debts, Hamilton made the right of private property one of the guiding principles of his plan to restore the public credit. He never suggested that the government could escape its debts by repudiating them, thus violating the property rights of the debt holders.

On the contrary, he insisted that “the established rules of morality and justice are applicable to nations as well as to individuals” and “that the former as well as the latter are bound to keep their promises, to fulfill their engagements,” and “to respect the rights of property.”

Hamilton’s Life

Broadway’s “Hamilton” is, of course, less about Hamilton’s political thought than it is about his remarkable life. Here, again, conservatives should rejoice at his new prominence in the public mind. Hamilton’s life is an amazing testimony to what can be accomplished by talent and hard work in a free and open society.

If anyone was born disadvantaged, it was young Alexander Hamilton. His childhood was marked by his illegitimacy, his father’s abandonment of the family, and his mother’s untimely death.

Hamilton responded to these setbacks not with despair or fatalism, but with a determination to make something of himself, to advance his position in the world. He certainly succeeded, becoming General Washington’s most trusted aide and organizer and the lead writer of The Federalist Papers, as well as the nation’s first and most consequential Secretary of the Treasury.

Hamilton, moreover, advanced himself not by the low arts of popularity, but instead by his willingness to master the details of the work that had to be done on behalf of the public.

Young Alexander Hamilton, while serving in the Continental Army, carried with him a copy of Malachy Postlewayte’s “Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce.” While serving his country, he used his spare time to prepare himself to serve it even better by mastering what he would need to know to manage its financial affairs.

Contemporary conservatives need not agree with everything Hamilton said or did. They can and should, however, admire his virtues and be grateful for his contribution to the creation of the America we have inherited. They can therefore rejoice to find his name in lights.

[subscriptlaw]

Trump v. New York (Argument November 30, 2020)

Argument: November 30, 2020

Decision: TBA

Petitioner Brief: Trump, et al.

Respondent Brief: New York, et al.

Respondent Brief: New York Immigrant Coalition, et al.

Opinion Below: Southern District of New York

 Can Trump Re-Tabulate The Census to Exclude Undocumented People From House Apportionment?

Every ten years the federal government counts the number of people living in the country, state by state. That’s the census. The government uses the census results to determine how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives.

The population count is used for a number of other purposes too, like for allocating federal grant money, drawing state political districts, and state and local planning purposes, among others.

Traditionally, the census count has included people regardless of immigration status. Thus, undocumented immigrants are counted. The Trump administration tried before to get information on citizenship through the official census count for 2020, but he lost that battle in the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs in that case alleged Trump’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the census was meant to discourage people in immigrant communities from responding to the census.

This case is about Trump’s work-around attempt to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count for House apportionment.

The Trump Memo

On July 21, 2020, President Trump issued an executive memo directing the Commerce Secretary to help him figure out how many undocumented immigrants were in each state. The President would then exclude that number from the count for House apportionment. The memo claims that federal law gives the President authority to edit the census number before tabulating House apportionment.

The Constitution does not specifically define which persons must be included in the apportionment base. Although the Constitution requires the “persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed,” to be enumerated in the census, that requirement has never been understood to include in the apportionment base every individual physically present within a State’s boundaries at the time of the census. Instead, the term “persons in each State” has been interpreted to mean that only the “inhabitants” of each State should be included . . . The discretion delegated to the executive branch to determine who qualifies as an “inhabitant” includes authority to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status.

The memo states a policy “to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status under the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended (8 U.S.C. 1101 et seq.), to the maximum extent feasible and consistent with the discretion delegated to the executive branch.”

Excluding these illegal aliens from the apportionment base is more consonant with the principles of representative democracy underpinning our system of Government. Affording congressional representation, and therefore formal political influence, to States on account of the presence within their borders of aliens who have not followed the steps to secure a lawful immigration status under our laws undermines those principles. Many of these aliens entered the country illegally in the first place. Increasing congressional representation based on the presence of aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status would also create perverse incentives encouraging violations of Federal law.

The Lawsuit

A group of states, individuals, and immigrants rights groups sued Trump, arguing that the July 2020 memo violated the law. The plaintiffs argued that the Constitution and two different statutory schemes restrict the President from altering the census tabulation before determining House apportionment.

The federal district court in New York agreed with the plaintiffs. The court did not reach the Constitutional question, but it ruled that the law governing House apportionment requires the Commerce Secretary to submit the census count to the President and that the President must use the census count to determine House apportionment.

Standing: A Preliminary Question

The federal court also addressed whether the plaintiffs had “standing” to sue. Standing is a constitutional requirement to bring a lawsuit. The plaintiffs must show that they have a stake in the outcome of the case, in other words, that they stand to be harmed by the course the defendants are taking. The plaintiffs must show they will face a “concrete and particularized injury.”

In this case, the plaintiffs are states and individual Americans who live in immigrant communities. The plaintiffs also include NGOs which advocate on behalf of immigrants. The plaintiffs argue two sets of harm: 1) that the memo will cause them to suffer inadequate representation in the House; and 2) that the memo will cause underreporting on the census and consequently harm them from receiving benefits allocated through census figures (i.e. federal grant money). The NGO plaintiffs have had to use resources on encouraging census participation rather than on other efforts, like fighting COVID-19.

The federal district court ruled the plaintiffs had presented adequate evidence of their potential injuries traceable to the Trump memo to have standing.

The Supreme Court Appeal 

The case falls among a rare set of cases heard by a three-judge district court panel which can be appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Thus Trump’s appeal went directly to the justices, and the Court accepted to hear arguments on November 30, 2020.

The Supreme Court will analyze the laws to determine whether Trump has the authority to re-tabulate the census for purposes of House apportionment.

Regarding House apportionment, the Constitution says, “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.”U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 2.

Then other federal laws dictate the details. Congress gave the responsibility of conducting the census to the Secretary of Commerce. Then the Secretary of Commerce must report“[t]he tabulation of total population by States” to the President.13 U.S.C. § 141(a)-(b). Then the President must transmit to Congress “a statement showing the whole number of persons in each State . . . as ascertained under the . . . decennial census of the population, and the number of Representatives to which each State would be entitled” using a mathematical formula “known as the method of equal proportions.” 2 U.S.C. § 2a(a).

The question is: Can the President edit the census count once he receives it from the Commerce Secretary, or must the President simply conduct the analysis of how many seats each state gets based on the actual census count?

Political Law Reports:

fromSubscript Law Blog | Subscript Lawhttps://https://ift.tt/3nWDkA5 Subscript Law 4 Curtis Terrace Montclair NJ 07042 (201) 840-8182 https://ift.tt/2oX7jPi