WASHINGTON (AP) -- A draft version of a Senate bill would effectively prohibit unbreakable encryption and require companies to help the government access data on a computer or mobile device with a warrant. The draft is being finalized by the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and the top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. Their goal, they said in a statement, is to ensure adherence to any court order that requires helping law enforcement or providing decrypted information. "No individual or company is above the law." It was not immediately clear when they would introduce the bill. The draft language ran into opposition from another committee member, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who said the proposal would require "American companies to build a backdoor" into devices. "They would be required by federal law per this statute to decide how to weaken their products to make Americans less safe," he said. Wyden pledged to do "everything in my power" to prevent the plan from passing. The emerging measure follows the Justice Department's battle with Apple Inc. over access to an encrypted and locked iPhone - a fight pitting digital privacy rights against national security concerns. The Justice Department dropped its legal effort to compel Apple to provide it with specialized software that would allow the FBI to hack into an iPhone that was issued to San Bernardino County, California, health inspector Syed Farook. Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people in December. The couple died in a shootout with authorities. The iPhone was found in a vehicle the day after the shooting. Two personal phones were found destroyed so completely the FBI could not recover information from them. U.S. Magistrate Sheri Pym had ordered Apple to provide the FBI with software to help it hack into Farook's work-issued iPhone after the government said only Apple could help authorities access the encrypted and locked iPhone. But days before a hearing in the case an outside party showed the FBI an ultimately workable situation to hack the phone. The government ultimately purchased that solution - which FBI Director James Comey said only works on an iPhone 5C running version 9 of the Apple operating system - and is keeping it secret for now. Comey and Apple CEO Tim Cook have said that Congress, not the courts, should address issues raised in the case. But the senators' draft bill was roundly criticized by technology groups and civil libertarians, many of who also backed Apple against the government. Kevin Bankston, director of the Washington-based New America's Open Technology Institute, said in a statement that the bill would undermine American cybersecurity and technology products, give foreign competitors an economic edge and allow adversaries to obtain encrypted communications. ACLU legislative counsel Neema Singh Guliani said the draft plan amounted to a "clear threat to everyone's privacy and security" and senators should "abandon their efforts to create a government backdoor." http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CONGRESS_ENCRYPTION?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-04-08-14-11-09 |
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A German comedian could face prosecution in his own country for "insulting" Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Jan Böhmermann, a satirical comedian, is being investigated by German authorities under defamation laws for a poem in which he calls the Turkish premier a "goat f*****" and other insults. He could face up to five years in prison if Turkey's foreign ministers, who were reportedly angered by the programme, decide to press charges and he is convicted, according to Der Tagesspiegel. "Erdogan is definitely a president with a small tail," says the comedian, in a line where "tail" is understood in German to refer to another part of the male anatomy. Recep Tayyip Erdogan's craziest quotes The popular young comedian was reportedly trying to outdo the offensiveness of an earlier song insulting Erdogan, which Ankara officially complained about in March. "What I'm about to read is not allowed. If it were to be read in public - that would be forbidden in Germany," said Mr Böhmermann before going on to read his "smear poem" on public broadcaster ZDF, according to The Local. He also said Mr Erdogan "watches child porn while kicking Kurds", in reference to accusations against the Turkish president that he is persecuting the Kurdish minority in the country. To avert diplomatic tensions, Angela Merkel personally called Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu and agreed the poem was a "deliberate insult". She has recently helped broker a deal with Mr Erdogan that for every refugee returned from Greece back to Turkey, one will be admitted into the EU from Turkey's refugee camps. ZDF removed the programme from its website. Under paragraph 103 of the German Criminal Code, insulting a foreign head of state can result in a three-year jail term, while an intended slander can stretch to five years.Such "insult laws" still exist in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden, according to a report from Pen International, which campaigns on behalf of imprisoned writers. Mr Erdogan said at the start of April that he welcomed criticism but would "file a lawsuit" against anyone who insulted him. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/german-comedian-jan-b-hmermann-could-face-prison-for-insulting-smear-poem-against-turkish-president-a6972356.html----------------------------------------------------------- I wonder if W Bush or TRUMP was ever insulted in this anti free speech country... |
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Amy and Esther Juárez were edgy with excitement as they boarded the bus full of seasonal workers heading for a farm at the other end of Mexico from their home in the poverty-stricken southern state of Chiapas. Although their brother Alberto,18, had made the same journey the previous year, it was the first time Amy, 24, and Esther, 15, had left the tiny indigenous community where they had grown up. But about half-way there, immigration agents boarded the bus, and after checking all the passengers’ papers, ordered the three siblings to get off. The officials accused them of carrying false documents and lying about their nationality. Then they told the youngsters that they would be deported to Guatemala, a country none would have been able to place on a map. The baffled youngsters – who speak the Mayan language Tzeltal but very little Spanish – were transferred to an immigration holding centre in Queretero CITY. Alberto, 18, was taken into a separate room by four agents who told him that unless he signed documents admitting he was Guatemalan, would die there. “One pushed me, another was kicking my leg, and a third who was very fat gave me an electric shock here, on the back of my right hand,” Alberto told the Guardian through a translator. “I really thought I was going to die.” The three siblings were held for eight days before a lawyer from an activist group filed a legal complaint and eventually secured their release. A growing number of indigenous Mexicans are being detained and threatened with expulsion by immigration agents looking for undocumented Central American migrants. The trend comes amid a crackdown on migrants driven in part by political pressure and financial aid from the US. Deportations have already risen exponentially since summer 2014 when Barack Obama declared the surge in Central American child migrants a humanitarian crisis. Campaigners say that Mexico migration officials are running a secret quota system to increase the number of expulsions. Activists say that Mexico’s National Immigration Institute is increasingly operating like an unchecked police force – and say that that like the country’s security forces, it appears to be systematically using torture against detainees. “The order appears to be to detain Central Americans at any cost, even if that means violating the constitution, picking up people based on racist criteria and detaining and deporting Mexican indigenous youth along the way,” said Gretchen Kuhener, director of the Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI), which launched legal action to secure the siblings’ release. Kuhener added: “This case demonstrates the power and impunity of the National Migration Institute. They can get away with it because it impacts highly vulnerable populations who may not speak Spanish, don’t know their rights, and are unlikely to complain.” The Juárez family live amid the picturesque rolling hills in eastern Chiapas, where all seven children – aged six to 24 – help their parents eke out a living from a few plots of land. Food is plentiful, but money is scarce, and to top up their incomes, thousands of people, many of them indigenous, travel by bus from Chiapas and other southern states to work on farms in northern Mexico. In Chiapas, casual farmhands earn 60 to 80 pesos (£2.40 to £3.20) a day cutting coffee, whereas last season Alberto earned 200 pesos (£8 ) a day harvesting squash, watermelons and tomatoes in the northern state of Sonora. Gently swinging in a hammock, Alberto said his first time away from home was thrilling. “We worked hard, but went out every evening. I tried hamburgers for the first time, and there was electricity where we lived. When I came home after seven months, I bought a horse with the money I’d saved. This year I wanted to buy motorbike.” Encouraged by Alberto’s stories, his sisters and Esther’s boyfriend Fernando, 27, also signed up when the contractors returned looking for workers. All four asked not to be identified by their real names, for fear of reprisals from the Mexican authorities. “I just wanted to have my own money so I could buy my own clothes at the market, maybe some earrings,” said Amy, 24. “But even as we got on the bus, I had a bad feeling.” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/04/mexico-torture-migrants-citizens-central-america |
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Our concern over the size of government goes deeper than tax policy or the federal budget deficit. . Size flows from the problems with representation: representatives have an incentive to grow government because it enlarges the realm of their own power and gives them more resources from which to reward supporters. Ironically, Madison explicitly lobbied for largeness of population and landmass because he believed that largeness would protect America against the dangers of democracy. With hindsight, we can see America’s largeness would call forth a large and powerful government to govern it. Additionally, because of the disconnect between citizens and their government, it is easier to see that bigness is itself a more basic threat to self-government than any specific policy or tool. The growth of government is a danger to self-government not because the state is on the verge of abrogating the constitution and installing a socialist junta, but because the raw size of the government crowds out private initiative and supplants opportunities for individual participation–and once individuals stop taking initiative, they will actually need a larger government to shore up an increasingly brittle civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville described this reciprocal cause-and-effect with remarkable and prophetic insight. “The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help. That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.” Tocqueville believed the growth of government, even if for benign purposes, was threatening to liberty because it subtly undermined the cultural underpinnings of a healthy democracy. “The morals and intelligence of a democratic people would be in as much danger as its commerce and industry if ever a government wholly usurped the place of private associations.” Taking over retirement insurance, health care, the banking system or the auto industry isn’t just bad economics: it teaches people an unhealthy dependence on the public doll, which may then force the government to continue running private industry as people forget the skill of doing it themselves. But government cannot recreate by fiat the culture of democracy that its own programs undermine. “A government, by itself, is equally incapable of refreshing the circulation of feelings and ideas among a great people, as it is of controlling every industrial undertaking.” The effort itself takes government beyond its rightful sphere. “Once it leaves the sphere of politics to launch out on this new track, it will, even without intending this, exercise an intolerable tyranny. For a government can only dictate precise rules. It imposes the sentiments and ideas which it favors, and it is never easy to tell the difference between its advice and its commands.”Once the government arrogates to itself the responsibility to nudge citizens into good behavior and foster good habits, it is acting less like a democratic government and more like a church—a church with armed police, tax collectors, and an army. This is, Tocqueville believed, a new kind of oppression, different from the cruel tyrants of the ancient world. Despotism in America “would be more widespread and milder; it would degrade men rather than torment them.” American tyranny will not rob and kill people. It would be “absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle.” It appears benign, but has the subtly dangerous effect of engendering a culture of dependency. “It would resemble parental authority if, father-like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tried to keep them in perpetual childhood.” It grows so large and powerful that it does not just push out the private sector; it pushes out individual agency. “It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living? Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties.” It does not kill men, but it does kill their spirits. The all-powerful nanny state does not stop at engendering a culture of dependency among individuals. It seeks complete control over society through “administrative despotism.” The all-powerful nanny state does not stop at engendering a culture of dependency among individuals. It seeks complete control over society through “administrative despotism.” Tocqueville feared the potential of the regulatory state to smother innovation and energy. “It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s wills, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.” Big government undermines public-mindedness. “Administrative centralization only serves to enervate the peoples that submit to it, because it constantly tends to diminish their civic spirit,” as Tocqueville put it. [...] http://thefederalist.com/2014/02/21/how-tocqueville-anticipated-our-culture-of-dependency/ |
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North Korea instructed the country Monday to brace itself for possible famine and severe economic hardship — but not to despair, because “the road to revolution is long and arduous,” according to an editorial in the state-run newspaper. The article, published in Rodong Sinmun — the print mouthpiece of the North Korean government — comes less than a month after the U.N. Security Council voted in favor of slapping the Hermit Kingdom with tougher sanctions, after the country teased its potential nuclear and military capabilities earlier this year. The editorial stated that hardships to come might evoke another “arduous march” — the term assigned to the famine that struck the country in the mid-1990s, killing as many as 3 million people, reports the Telegraph, a British newspaper. “We may have to go on an arduous march, during which we will have to chew the roots of plants once again,” the editorial piece read. Rodong Sinmun called for a “70-day campaign of loyalty” and reportedly demanded that the North Korean people demonstrate their allegiance to Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. To that end, the country is requiring all residents of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital city, to deliver about 2 lb. of rice to state warehouses each month. The Telegraph reports that the country has also requested nearly half a million tons of food aid from other countries. As of last month, however, only 17,600 tons had arrived. http://time.com/4274666/arduous-march-north-korea-famine/ |
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To all the bitcointalk.org community.  |
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The American College of Pediatricians released a statement this week declaring that gender reclassification of children, also known as transgenderism, constitutes child abuse. “The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex,” the statement, entitled “Gender Ideology Harms Children,” began. “Facts – not ideology – determine reality.” The temporary statement, published Monday, March 21, with a full statement to follow in summer 2016, listed what the association ruled to be eight objective facts supporting their argument for why gender reclassification will now officially be classified as abuse: 1. Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and “XX” are genetic markers of health – not genetic markers of a disorder. 2. No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one. 3. A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. 4. Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous. Reversible or not, puberty-blocking hormones induce a state of disease – the absence of puberty – and inhibit growth and fertility in a previously biologically healthy child. 5. According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty. 6. Children who use puberty blockers to impersonate the opposite sex will require cross-sex hormones in late adolescence. Cross-sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen) are associated with dangerous health risks including but not limited to high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer. 7. Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBQT – affirming countries. 8. Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful as child abuse. The policy statement was authored by President of the American College of Pediatricians, Dr. Michelle A. Cretella, Vice President of the American College of Pediatricians, Dr. Quentin Van Meter and Johns Hopkins Medical School Psychology Professor Dr. Paul McHugh. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/03/26/transgenderism-of-children-is-child-abuse-american-college-of-pediatrics-rules/?utm_source=TheBlaze.com&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=story&utm_content=transgenderism-of-children-is-child-abuse-american-college-of-pediatrics-rules&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed------------------------------------- I thought that was obvious. |
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1985 interview with KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov. Enlightening excerpt.
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--------------------------------------------- Karma... |
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[...] After reviewing evidence from the rally in Fayetteville, N.C., the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office concluded that it “does not meet the requisites of the law” to “support a conviction” of inciting a riot following the event, at which an anti-Trump protester was sucker-punched as he was led out. “Accordingly, we will not be seeking a warrant or indictment against Mr. Trump or his campaign for these offenses,” the statement said. “While other aspects of our investigation are continuing, the investigation with regard to Mr. Trump and his campaign has been concluded, and no charges are anticipated.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/after-punching-incident-nc-sheriff-ponders-inciting-a-riot-charge-against-trump/2016/03/14/2f300ec6-ea13-11e5-bc08-3e03a5b41910_story.html-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Always double check the news from a leaderless berniebot on a kamikaze mission... |
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Guccifer, the infamous Romanian hacker who accessed emails of celebrities and top US officials, will be extradited to the United States, after losing a case in his home country’s top court. Reuters reports that Lehel will come to the US under an 18-month extradition order, following a request made by the US authorities. Details of the extradition have not been made public, however. Marcel Lehel, a 42-year-old hacker better known by his pseudonym “Guccifer,” achieved notoriety when he released an email with images of paintings by former President George W. Bush, including a self-portrait in a bathtub. He also hacked and published emails from celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio, Steve Martin and Mariel Hemingway. Also released were emails between former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Corina Cretu, a Romanian member of European Parliament, prompting Powell to deny that the two had had an affair. Perhaps most notably, Lehel was also the first source to uncover Hillary Clinton’s improper use of a private email account while she was Secretary of State, which the FBI is investigating as a potential danger to national security. https://www.rt.com/usa/334846-romanian-hacker-guccifer-extradition/------------------------------------------------- This is a waste. His prison time should have been converted into 20 years of community service at the NSA. He knows his stuff. |
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The term "kafkatrapping" describes a logical fallacy that is popular within gender feminism, racial politics and other ideologies of victimhood. It occurs when you are accused of a thought crime such as sexism, racism or homophobia. You respond with an honest denial, which is then used as further confirmation of your guilt. You are now trapped in a circular and unfalsifiable argument; no one who is accused can be innocent because the structure of kafkatrapping precludes that possibility. The term derives from Franz Kafka's novel The Trial in which a nondescript bank clerk named Josef K. is arrested; no charges are ever revealed to the character or to the reader. Josef is prosecuted by a bizarre and tyrannical court of unknown authority and he is doomed by impenetrable red tape. In the end, Josef is abducted by two strange men and inexplicably executed by being stabbed through the heart. The Trial is Kafka's comment on totalitarian governments, like the Soviet Union, in which justice is twisted into a bitter, horrifying parody of itself and serves only those in charge. Kafkatrapping twists reason and truth into self-parodies that serve victimhood ideologues who wish to avoid the evidence and reasoned arguments upon which truth rests. The term appears to have originated in a 2010 article written by author and open source software advocate Eric S. Raymond. He opens by acknowledging the worth of equality before the law and of treating others with respect. But, he notes, "[g]ood causes sometimes have bad consequences." One such consequence is that tactics used to raise consciousness can veer "into the creepy and pathological, borrowing the least sane features of religious evangelism." Raymond offers various models of how kafkatrapping operates. He calls the two most common ones A and C. More: http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/wendy-mcelroy-beware-of-kafkatrapping/ |
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Since 2007, astronomers have detected curious bright blasts of radio waves from the cosmos, each lasting no more than a few milliseconds. Now scientists have been able to pinpoint the source of one of these pulses: a galaxy 1.9 billion parsecs (6 billion light years) away. It probably came from two colliding neutron stars, says astronomer Evan Keane of the Jodrell Bank Observatory outside Manchester, UK, who led the team that reports the detection in Nature1. The discovery is the “measurement the field has been waiting for”, says astronomer Kiyoshi Masui of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. By finding more such fast radio bursts (FRBs) and measuring the distance to their source, astronomers hope to use the signals as beacons to shed light on the evolution of the Universe. “The field is about to transition from being kind of a fringe, astrophysical-curiosity freak show to potentially a mainstream research area” Eyes on the skies All but one of the 16 previously reported FRBs were found long after the signals reached Earth, by trawling through archives of telescope data. But today, supercomputers can process these signals in real time and detect them as they arrive, says Keane. On 18 April 2015, the Parkes radio telescope in Australia detected a burst lasting less than 1 millisecond, one of the shortest yet. Parkes’ resolution isn’t fine enough to pinpoint the location of signals, but Keane, who saw the news when he checked emails buzzing into his phone, alerted a network of higher-resolution ground- and space-based telescopes. Two hours after the initial burst, the Australia Telescope Compact Array in New South Wales caught what appeared to be a fading radio afterglow in the same area. This narrowed the search field enough for the 8.2-metre Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to home in on a lone elliptical galaxy, which Keane and his team say is almost certainly the source of the burst. The galaxy is relatively old, and so makes new stars very rarely. Because of that, Keane’s team thinks that the burst came from two colliding neutron stars, which orbited each other in a death spiral until they merged. The brevity of the burst is consistent with the expected timescale for such an event, rather than a collision between larger objects such as white dwarves, or a massive supernova. (If the event was a neutron-star merger, it would also have emitted gravitational waves — the ripples in space-time that the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory reported detecting two weeks ago.) Not all FRBs fit the scenario for a neutron-star collision. Last December2, Masui and his colleagues reported a detection by the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia that seems to originate from a young neutron star with a strong magnetic field emitting intense flares. This suggests that there are multiple kinds of bursts, from different origins. “The implications for the origins of FRBs are still a bit unclear,” says Victoria Kaspi, an astronomer at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Imprints of the Universe As a radio pulse from an FRB ploughs through space, its staccato blast is smeared out by free-floating electrons in its path, so that radio telescopes detect the signal as more like a falling note. Now that Keane and his team know the distance to the new FRB, they can use the length of the signal to reveal how much material it passed through. This could solve a longstanding mystery: precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background — the afterglow of the Big Bang — suggest that around 4% of the observable Universe today should be composed of ordinary matter (not dark energy or dark matter). But after totting up what they can see, researchers say around half that matter remains unaccounted for. The amount of signal smearing from the team’s FRB indicates that the ‘missing’ matter is indeed there, Keane's team now report. Future bursts detected all around the sky could be used as probes to map that matter in detail. A similar approach could yield a map of the magnetic fields between galaxies, as they alter the bursts’ polarization signature in detectable ways. Three instruments that will be able to detect several FRBs per day are either ramping up or set to begin operations this year: the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment in British Columbia, the upgraded Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope near Canberra and the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope in Guizhou province, China. “The field is about to transition from being kind of a fringe, astrophysical-curiosity freak show to potentially a mainstream research area,” says astronomer Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University in Morgantown, who led the team that found the first FRB back in 20073, and wrote a News & Views4 to accompany the latest report. “We’ll have the potential to soon be overwhelmed by these things,” he says. http://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-radio-burst-pinpointed-in-distant-galaxy-1.19441 |
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An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey. The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the northern city of Gebze on Friday. She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people. Turkish police say they have detained a man in connection with the killing. Reports say the man led the police to the body. Autopsy Ms di Marineo was hitch-hiking from Milan to Israel and the Palestinian Territories with a fellow artist on their "Brides on Tour" project. They had separated in Istanbul, planning to reunite in Beirut. map Ms di Marineo was last seen on 31 March in Gebze. An Italian embassy official told the Associated Press news agency police tracked the man when he put a new SIM card into Ms di Marineo's mobile phone. Local media identified the suspect only by the initials MK and said he had a previous conviction for theft. Ms di Marineo's sister, who had gone to Turkey to look for her, identified the body. An autopsy is being conducted in Istanbul. "Her travels were for an artistic performance and to give a message of peace and of trust, but not everyone deserves trust," another sister, Maria, told the Italian news agency, Ansa. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7344381.stm--------------------------------------- Kamikaze peace mission... |
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Here’s an interesting piece, by Charles Mudede. It seems that the death of Antonin Scalia brought to mind the cinema! These thoughts occurred to me the day after the death of the hyper-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. I first recalled, as I walked down Beacon Avenue South (the squirrels there have clearly been fattened by the warm winter), the strange thing that happens at the end of Ride with the Devil, an underappreciated Civil War epic by the Taiwanese American director Ang Lee (Eat Drink Man Woman, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and, most famously, Brokeback Mountain).Huh! I wonder why this called Scalia to mind? The film has a black man, Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), who is a member of a Southern-identified civilian militia called the Bushwhackers.Oh boy. This is about to go off the rails, isn’t it? Yes, this black man fights Union soldiers with white men who hate nothing more than people who look like him. How is this possible? Holt is very close to his master, a Southern gentleman named George Clyde (Simon Baker) who bought his right to freedom. …
Clyde is shot and killed in battle, and Holt is freed from his master’s love. At this moment, he leaves the shadows of silence and begins talking a lot. Near the end of Ride with the Devil, he has this important conversation with Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire), the film’s hero:
Holt: That day George Clyde died, it changed me. I felt something that day I ain’t never felt.
Roedel: You felt that loss, that hollow feeling.
Holt: No, what I felt was free.don’t do it don’t do it don’t do it Why was this scene on my mind yesterday? Because I couldn’t help thinking along these lines: Now that Scalia is dead, is there the possibility of Clarence Thomas having a Holt-like experience, a transformative experience?God. Dammit. That was Thomas in the past; will this also be Thomas in the future? Will he be haunted by and faithful to the ghost of the dead Justice? Or will he become erratic, like the instruments on a plane that’s entered the Bermuda Triangle? Or will he become a new man (a new black man)? [Emphasis mine.]There’s something endlessly fascinating about the left’s insistence that Clarence Thomas is not “authentically” black—that this descendant of slaves, this grandson of sharecroppers, this hardworking man who rose to the grandest heights of the legal profession, is a traitor to his race and his class. I don’t know what it is about Thomas that drives the left so nuts, but it’s there, and it’s very real. Could you imagine what would happen if someone on the right described a brilliant liberal African-American of being no more than a slave controlled by white devils? I hate to say this—the charge is offered all too often with far little in the way of support—but that shit is racist as hell. Leave aside the “More like Uncle Clarence Thomas, amirite?” sniggering. The suggestion that Clarence Thomas is just a mindless puppet whose strings were pulled by Antonin Scalia is racist and ignorant and wholly unsupported by anything resembling the facts. Jeffrey Toobin—no fan of Thomas, he!—has said as much in the storied pages of the New Yorker:
In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.
The conventional view of Thomas takes his lack of participation at oral argument as a kind of metaphor. The silent Justice is said to be an intellectual nonentity, a cipher for his similarly conservative colleague, Antonin Scalia. But those who follow the Court closely find this stereotype wrong in every particular. Thomas has long been a favorite of conservatives, but they admire the Justice for how he gives voice to their cause, not just because he votes their way. “Of the nine Justices presently on the Court, he is the one whose opinions I enjoy reading the most,” Steve Calabresi, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law and a co-founder of the Federalist Society, said. “They are very scholarly, with lots of historical sources, and his views are the most principled, even among the conservatives. He has staked out some bold positions, and then the Court has set out and moved in his direction.”Look, I don’t expect progressives to like Thomas. Or agree with him. But maybe they could show him a modicum of respect? Then again, who am I to judge. I mean, what does Thomas know compared to some twitpert with access to the Internet and some time on his hands? I bet those keyboard jockeys would ask SO MANY QUESTIONS at oral arguments, thus proving that they are smarter than the Yale-educated Supreme Court Justice. I guess now that his massa’s dead and gone, we’ll see if Thomas can truly “grow” in office, won’t we? And if he can’t? Well, some slaves just never let go of the past, do they? http://freebeacon.com/blog/why-are-liberals-so-racist-when-it-comes-to-clarence-thomas/ |
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If so why?  |
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