Home » Open thread 9/19/22

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Open thread 9/19/22 — 39 Comments

  1. https://lawliberty.org/book-review/a-woke-catechism-for-legal-academia/

    Something that has baffled me since my law school days over 40 years ago. How can lawyers and law professors think that Calvin Ball is a workable legal structure for the rule of law?

    We have noted that lefties seem to be utterly incapable of imagining more than one move ahead on the chess board. “And then what happens?” apparently is beyond their ability to contemplate. [note — I suspect that one reason that they never foresee a time when conservatives might use their tactics against them is because they have confidence in the integrity of their opponents. Or maybe it’s just disdain. In any event, they are confident that conservatives would never screw them the way they screw us.]

    Originalism is nothing more than the concept that people/states made an agreement and, like all contracts, that requires that the parties agreed to what the terms meant. If the agreement contains provisions for amendment, the provisions need to be followed. If courts can simply make s**t up, why even bother with a constitution at all?

    Mark Pulliam — “elite law professors openly advocate for “our ability to engage in the constant reinvention of our society under our own power, without the illusion that the past stands in the way.” In other words, mob rule. The left seeks to erase the Founding, inter the rule of law, and surrender control to the woke professoriate. This theme—that the Constitution, as written, doesn’t matter—is increasingly common among “progressive” constitutional theorists, often citing the same chorus of shrill nihilists. “

  2. Stan – I can think of a number of theories. I wonder how many of the progressive legal elite are ideologically capable of recognizing that they are playing Calvin Ball. I also wonder how many of them see the law as nothing more than a tool for achieving progressive ends. (So who cares if the legal positions are consistent or even coherent – the real issue is whether a legal position can achieve progressive results.) Or, mixing the two, perhaps they believe that progressive ends are true and correct and, therefore, properly construed law points towards them.

    To your point, I don’t think that many of them have the slightest idea that they are destroying the legal system. But are they? They’ve largely driven non-lefty lawyers out of the academy. They are either purging or silencing non-lefty lawyers in the big firms. We’re fast approaching a state where the only vocally non-lefty lawyers will be gadflies with nothing to lose. (Where will we find are the next wave of Federalist judges when that happens?) When the voice from the legal elites becomes monolithically progressive, is anyone really going to care when the plebs cry foul?

  3. KEN BURNS is wrong in his documentary, TV show, “The US and the Holocaust”.

    As I understand it-

    Burns claims that the US government was unique, when it turned away thousands of Jewish immigrants during WW2. When actually, almost every country in the world, was not letting these Jewish immigrants in, during WW2.

    [ I wish these nations had let these people in, but history shows that they did not. The US government was not unique when it did this action. Lots of other nations did this action, as well.]

  4. How can lawyers and law professors think that Calvin Ball is a workable legal structure for the rule of law?

    Because the 8,000 people employed as law professors in the United States are familiar with the mind games they play with each other (and, on occasion, the court), but don’t have even a rough-and-ready sense of how social organisms work.

    If the author is rendering Chemerinsky’s viewpoint faithfully, his book is actually a piece of evidence in the file making the case that law schools should be shut down and lawyers trained in office apprenticeships. A more circumspect alternative would be to close extant law schools and open new ones staffed only with clinical faculty who have actual cases and clients.

  5. At least Biden didn’t embarrass us in any major way while at the royal funeral. He saved the embarrassment for a recorded 60 Minutes interview.

    A conservative Australian commentator pointed out that with this funeral perhaps as many as four billion people saw or heard a traditional Christian burial service in honor of the Queen, who was a traditional Christian believer.

  6. The instant she lifted her hands to the keys, I knew I was about to witness a progidy. Her playing simply confirms it. Such grace and delicacy of touch is rare and at her age… reportedly Mozart astonished at that age as well.

  7. I am glad that I am old enough to have been fortunate to have my mind trained by true legal educators, including one young Antonin Scalia. This was during the turbulent 60’s where professors only shared their political opinions outside of the classroom.

  8. stan,

    Upon what basis do you imagine that leftists in today’s legal ‘profession” are, in the least bit interested in “a workable legal structure for the rule of law”?

    As Bauxite rightly points out, “the real issue is whether a legal position can achieve progressive results”, nothing else matters.

    Another Mike,

    When China invades Taiwan, the Biden Administration will not order the US Military to defend Taiwan. US Politicians are not about to risk a nuclear war with China. No doubt they’ll whine and complain in the U.N. Any sanctions imposed will be all show with no substance. China can wreck our economy far more than we can theirs.

    Snow on Pine,

    Asylum inmates harbor many delusions.

    TR,

    Ken Burns has long engaged in PBS funded agitprop, which he wraps in a facade of ‘documentaries’. He’s a political whore and just revealed it by jumping the shark in comparing De Santis to Hitler.

    Miguel cervantes,

    “Mark Esper says military recruitment is DYING because of obesity, drug use, health problems and the dwindling pool of Americans who want to serve their country”

    Mark Esper was one of Trump’s appointments who stabbed him in the back. Military recruitment is NOT dying because of obesity, drug use and health problems.

    Military recruitment is DYING because of woke-ism, which has resulted in young American men increasingly viewing military service as an exercise in self-flagellation.

    Democrats directing the military’s upper echelons to recruit the obese, drug users, those with health problems and those with mental disabilities is why our military is increasingly incapable of fulfilling it’s responsibilities.

  9. Speaking of musical prodigies – a young lady from Norway, Angelina Jordan, is the next superstar. She won the Norway’s Got Talent competition at the age of 7. Since then she has performed all over the world and published more than 150 songs on Youtube and other platforms. She is known as the angel with a thousand voices. She has covered Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Dinah Washington, Amy Winehouse, Adele, Whitney Houston, Nora Jones, Etta James, and others.

    However, she reminds me most of Julie London who a critic said “Some singers sing as though they are addressing a crowd; some sing as though they are in a bar with a lot of people—[London] sings as though she’s in one room, with you—and that’s the difference.”

    She is now 16 years old. The following video is her tribute to Elvis Presley and specifically a paean to the recent biopic “Elvis”.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTbKhkceR00

  10. Obesity, drug use, and general lack of fitness do have something to do with the military recruitment problems. I think the “woke” military leadership is even worse. According to what I read, and to some retired military people I know, military veterans are so unhappy with the current leadership that they are advising their children not to serve.

  11. The initial attempt to subvert the US armed forces began with Obama.
    Trump tried to turn it around (but MAGA is a dirty, filthy, disgusting concept).
    It’s no mystery that “Biden” has been trying to accelerate the subversion. HARD! Covid has certainly been a handy tool for that purpose!
    (It’s no mystery that “Biden” started, i.e., RESTARTED, this from the moment “he” was “inaugurated”.)

    And if one thinks that Afghanistan is “Biden”‘s crowning achievement (WRT to the military, that is) just wait a bit….

  12. Re: law school. A friend of mine went to Harvard law in 1970. He quit after the first semester because they weren’t interested in truth or justice, just how to win a case.

    Re: The Holocaust. Most of the killing was done in Poland and further east where the Allies couldn’t do anything about it. The USSR invaded Poland from the east 15 days after their allies, Nazi Germany, invaded on September 1, 1939. They participated in the pillaging and slaughter of Poland. Somehow they are never taken to task for doing nothing to stop the Holocaust even though they were in the neighborhood.

    Later, after Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, the Ukrainians were willing collaborators with the Nazis and murdered as many as 1.5 million Jews, a quarter of all the Holocaust victims.

    https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ukrainian-nationalists-and-the-holocaust/.

    For some unknown reason, that is never brought up these days, nor are they ever called to account, just like the USSR.

    USA bad, everyone else good.

  13. That should read “ the Ukrainians were willing collaborators with the Nazis in the murder of as many as 1.5 million Jews”

  14. Bach’s “Minuet in G” is the only somewhat interesting keyboard piece I can play all the way through. Lovely the way her hands caress and dance with the keyboard.

    I’m still flogging the online MIT 1801 calculus course. I’m on integral trigonometric substitutions. I understood the idea decades ago, but it still takes me 45 minutes to do a single problem.

    You have to refactor the problem so it can be converted to trig, integrate it, then you have to convert it back to the original terms. A lot of tricky algebra and trig is involved. And Every Step Must Be Correct.

    My latest insight is that learning math is much like learning a musical instrument. It’s not just getting the idea. You have to run your brain over and over and over it until doing the Right Thing is automatic.

    How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

    Practice.

  15. Very young Lucy Thomas has an exceptionally beautiful and mature voice.

    Paul in Boston,

    “A friend of mine went to Harvard law in 1970. He quit after the first semester because they weren’t interested in truth or justice, just how to win a case.”

    When I was a teenager, my mother often said that I should
    become a lawyer. One day, when I was 17 she made that observation again and followed it up by asking if I had any interest in pursuing that as a career. Without hesitation I said no. Then explained in almost your exact words, “lawyers aren’t interested in the truth or justice, its all about winning the case”. I long ago learned of our adversarial justice system. It may well be the best we can do but I think not, it is too tolerant of intentional deceit by both sides.

  16. huxley,

    I suspect that prodigy’s can’t imagine how to do it the wrong way.

    There’s a story about Bach, reportedly he could play every instrument in the orchestra fluently. Questioned about how he managed such mastery, he perplexedly responded; “but it’s really quite simple, you just put the right finger, in the right place, at the right time…”

  17. Geoffrey Britain:

    I imagine that prodigies have been so well drilled they can’t do it the wrong way.

    Musicians, classical and otherwise, work incredibly hard. Likewise mathematicians. (Likewise programmers, my field.)

    They are not savoring strawberries and cream, then meditating upon the cosmos. They are working. They are doing it over and over and over until it looks like “it’s really quite simple…”

  18. @ huxley > “Musicians, classical and otherwise, work incredibly hard.”

    One source I read on practicing effectively pointed out that the highest-ranked musicians (prodigies or not) typically practiced 8 hours a day or more, to the 1 hour normally expended by most of us.
    Thus, they can reach the top of their field regardless of native talent.
    But being innately gifted probably helps fuel the desire to spend that much time practicing.
    Everything is a feedback loop.

  19. The facts, timing, and events about the “Pipe Bombs” allegedly planted near the Capital on J6th cal into question the Official Narrative.

    Will a GOP House get to the bottom of this? An alternative timeline and alternate motives are du used at American Thinker.

    Very provocative. Because there’s a lot going in to explain real perps and real motives. As of now, there’s little that’s definite except the first one discovered outside the RNC headquarters.

    The DNCs circumstances is a jumble as of now.
    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/january_6_pipe_bombs_get_curiouser_and_curiouser.html

  20. Related:
    “FBI whistleblower alleges Jan. 6 cases manipulated to create illusion of national crisis”—
    https://justthenews.com/accountability/jim-jordan-whistleblower-says-fbi-manipulating-jan-6-cases-create-illusion-national
    Opening graf:
    ‘ The top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee said Monday a whistleblower has come forward detailing how the FBI is manipulating cases related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to create “the illusion” that domestic violent extremism is a widespread problem in the United States….’

  21. Re Roy Lofquist drawing attention to Angelina Jordan. Thanks for your notice of her, here,

    Adele versus AJ? A voice coach explains (from last November)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2H0MlGmvyA

    She’d been on the periphery of my awareness, something to pay attention to later. And that later time has arrived for me.

    Her best works of the last year portends even more artistic peaks in the years to come — this next decade and after.

    A true master of classic jazz vocalists, including the latecomers Amy Winehouse and Adele.

    Her parentage is practically globespanning: her father from Sweden, her Norwegian mother’s mother is Iranian, and AJs grandfather is Japanese.
    These ethnic and national ancestral mixes become more obvious in her early blooming womanhood and unique brand of beauty. Just enjoy these vids!

    “My Funny Valentine” from last February.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETGLbsGDAI0

    And just last July, “Suspicious Minds”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTbKhkceR00

    Such spectacular growth in range and refinement, arrangement and presentation in mere months suggests epic greatness is within reach for her. Stay alive — listen, watch, and believe.

    Stunning, astonishing, and joyful. As one George Sens quips on YT,
    “She doesn’t cover songs, she uncovers them and delivers their essence to the heart.”

    She’s lived in LA since 2018. And in the last video, performance and production involves a cousin on keyboards and a younger sister ciphering younger AJ, and grandma exec producing.

    Quite the family affaire! Trusted backing benefitting Angelina’s soonish launch from out of a corner of the world’s best kept artistic secret gift.

  22. AJ sings “Bang bang” done very purely to the famous standard, is on YT.
    Please indulge my sharing Angelina Jordan performing for her two original songs live, again in Norway (at a more typical sized outdoor concert), early August, with a bit of interview footage.

    “7th Heaven” and
    “A Million Miles”
    — very Amy Winehouse influenced in style.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKK66K5u1Fc

    CONCERTS. Seems like it’s been almost threee freakin’ years since….

  23. }}} China can wreck our economy far more than we can theirs.

    Doubtful. As with nukes, “MAD” is the most likely result, BUT we would recover far faster than they would, we are much more versatile and can make money in thousands of other ways than China can.

    You need to grasp, all those Potemkin Cities which China has built using their people’s earned income from “investing” are coming to roost, and there is a reason why capitalism works and Marxism does not. Capitalism has self-correcting mechanisms which stop it short of total collapse for the most part. China will collapse and collapse hard. The biggest concern there is that they will then get jingoistic to distract their people from the catastrophe.

    As the apocryphal Ancient Chinese Curse goes, “We live in interesting times”.

  24. }}} Geoffrey Britain: I imagine that prodigies have been so well drilled they can’t do it the wrong way.

    You don’t seem to Get the notion of “prodigy”.

    Prodigies are those for whom the Right Way of Doing Something is So Naturally Obvious To Them that it’s all easy.

    Re: Mozart, from the wiki:
    In the fourth year of his age his father, for a game as it were, began to teach him a few minuets and pieces at the clavier. … He could play it faultlessly and with the greatest delicacy, and keeping exactly in time. … At the age of five, he was already composing little pieces, which he played to his father who wrote them down.[7]

    I don’t claim a prodigy level grasp of math, but the way math works is inherent and obvious to me — given proper encouragement, I could almost certainly have been doing Calculus by the age of 12 — as it was, I taught myself Calculus @ 15 when my HS refused to allow me to enroll in it even though I had taken and passed the pre-requisites (I was technically a junior, but the age of a sophomore, as I completed HS in 11 years).

    So I went to the local public library and checked out a college text on it that had the answers in the back, so I could teach myself. It was remarkably easy for me.

    I later went on to take graduate level courses as an undergrad — 5000 levels as a sophomore, 6000 levels as a junior, and a 7000 as a senior. The biggest issue I had in all that time, with any course, was idiots obstructing me from learning as fast as I was able to.

    Their “argument” to that end was generally some form of “I wasn’t doing it the ‘right’ way…” aka “The slow plodding way” $%^$%^&$%&$%^*&%^*^&($%$# ASSHOLES. >:-(

    Prodigies take it a step further, and can make leaps I was unable to make, because, again, “It’s obvious how it works”.

    None of that suggests superiority, as there is often some other aspect of personality or skill lacking as a result. Many prodigies are arrogant and poster children for Dunning-Kruger, as are many overly bright individuals.

  25. Thanks to Geoffrey Britain, + to everyone else, who responded to or talked about- my comment + its subject.
    It’s great to hear your replies.

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