Once again, The Onion predicts the future.
The Onion 10 years ago, and AP today
Ten. Fucking. Years. pic.twitter.com/ykEkrRXUbs
— PanickedJanet (@SIGSYS) July 6, 2021
I am pretty sure that if we broke into their offices, we would find a REMARKABLY spacious blue police call box that looked rocking it like it’s 1963.
Truely this is America’s Finest News Source.
This is the first Juneteenth that is an official Federal holiday, thanks to the legislation recently passed by Congress and signed into law.
Juneteenth celebrates the arrival of Union troops in Galveston, freeing the slaves in Texas.
Most of the mainstream media describe as something to the effect of, “Informed the slaves of their freedom,” but this is not true.
The slaves knew that they had been freed for years, their owners however, continued to use terrorist tactics to keep them enslaved, and the Union troops enforced the newly freed slaves freedom at the point of a bayonet pointed at the heart of their white former owners.
Even after losing the war, Southern slave holders tried to keep blacks as property, and had to be disabused of that notion by the threat of lethal force: (H/T Bear who Swims for the link)
………
My change in emotion comes after learning from historian friends that the oft-repeated tale of Union soldiers arriving in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865 to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free is pure fiction. Not because they weren’t legally freed 2-½ months earlier when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Or technically freed 2-1/2 years before when President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slavery null and void in areas under rebellion, very much including Texas.
Rather, I now know, the big lie is the incessantly repeated canard that Galveston’s po’ ignant Black folks didn’t know they was free, and that U.S. Major Gen. Gordon Granger had to read a proclamation to spell it out for them.
In fact, they most certainly did know.
………
If Galveston’s Blacks already knew they were free, obviously so too did their slaveholders, who nonetheless kept them in bondage — not by cunning or deceit or ignorance, but by the brute force and tactics of dehumanizing torture they had been using for 200 years.
Gen. Granger didn’t bring liberation by words on a scroll but by troops with fixed bayonets.
………
On the outside chance that Down’s 2015 essay may have been superseded by new historical research, I spoke with him this week. It hasn’t been, he said, reiterating; “It’s not that Gen. Granger was giving information to the enslaved people. He was giving it to the masters” — at the barrel of a gun.
………
None of this is to say that African Americans, or all Americans, shouldn’t celebrate the well-intentioned holiday to Black freedom just created. But if you’re still clutching to any vestige of the popular myth, consider that well before Lee’s surrender, with the Confederacy clearly losing the war, slaveholders from throughout the South relocated their human property to Texas in advance of Union troops to preserve slavery for as long as they could.
………
For them, I’ll explain: It’s called teaching what actually happened, and what didn’t. And what happened in Galveston on June 19, 1865, is that Gen. Granger arrived to forcibly liberate Black people from intransigent slaveholders who everyone knew were free.
That’s the true history of Juneteenth — along with a message that somehow has eluded the South and their white supremacist inheritors today:
You lost the damned war. Surrender already.
You lost. Get over it.
Even after surrendering, the South needed to be forced not to be evil at the barrel of a gun.
This lesson should be remembered, and perhaps emulated.
Also, in this case, (for once) I agree with John Roberts: Remedial measures should not be limited to the former states of the Confederacy, but instead should be extended nation wide.
It’s time to pry their guns from their cold, dead hands.
A series of studies have revealed that mammals can breath through the butt-holes.
Brought a bit of family lore, about turtles farting, to my mind:
When pressed for oxygen, some fish and sea cucumbers will use their lower intestines to get a little extra out of their environment. Now, a team of Japanese researchers say that mammals are also capable of respirating through their rectal cavity, at least in a lab setting.
The team’s research is published today in the journal Med and describes the capacity for mice, rats, and pigs to survive longer and have more strength in low-oxygen circumstances when given oxygen gas or an oxygen-rich liquid through their rectums, in a process similar to an enema. While fish like loaches and catfish use a similar method to gain additional oxygen in the natural world, this doesn’t appear to be an evolutionary adaptation for mammals. In other words, mammalian bodies can’t naturally do this, but with a little push from modern science, it becomes possible. Previous research has seen oxygen injected directly into mammalian bloodstreams, prolonging the lives of rabbits, but the rectal approach to the low-oxygen problem is novel.
The experiment, while disturbing, was designed to find new ways to save the lives of people whose lungs are failing.
It’s a valuable study, but all I can think about turtles farting.
It appears that there has been an outbreak of extreme naivete at The Nation, where they expect Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to to confront The Ukraine over their embrace of Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, and revisionist history.
This will never happen.
Blinken, and Biden, are a part of a foreign policy establishment who never ended the Cold War, and simply changed the name from “USSR” to “Russia” on their to-do lists.
Fighting Nazis is simply too inconvenient for these folks:
From the moment he was nominated for secretary of state, the media has made much over the Holocaust’s impact on Antony Blinken. Blinken’s stepfather was a famous survivor; his upbringing made the Holocaust an indelible part of Blinken’s identity. Indeed, last month Blinken lambasted America’s callousness during the genocide, going so far as denouncing a World War II–era State Department official for refusing to aid Jews fleeing Europe.
The speech was hailed as a righteous reckoning—and it was. But condemning long-dead officials is one thing. Today, Blinken will have a chance to stand up for Holocaust victims in a far less comfortable environment. He will visit Kyiv, a city where, merely a week ago, hundreds marched in honor of a Nazi SS division. The march was denounced by Germany and Israel, but not the United States.
Blinken’s visit becomes a crucial test, considering that Ukraine is a key US ally: Addressing Kyiv’s blatant glorification of Nazi collaborators would be an opportunity to rise above the failures of his predecessors, placing the Holocaust above geopolitics.
Last Wednesday’s march was in honor of SS Galichina, a Ukrainian volunteer division in the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party’s military arm responsible for the Holocaust. In 1944, SS Galichina was personally inspected by Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s second in command and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust. The division’s record of war crimes includes the Huta Pieniacka massacre, when an SS Galichina subunit exterminated around a thousand Polish villagers, chiefly by burning them alive.
………
The US embassy in Kyiv did not respond to a request for comment, while a State Department spokesperson replied, on background, “We welcome President Zelenskiy’s strong statement condemning the march,” and that the department “continues to monitor and systematically refute a longstanding Russian disinformation campaign that conflates support for Ukrainian sovereignty with support for neo-Nazi and fascist ideals.”
The comment did not explain what, if any, connection Kyiv’s SS march has with Russia or disinformation.
But the truly surprising thing is that Kyiv’s SS march made headlines at all. The reality is that glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators isn’t a glitch but a feature of today’s Ukraine.
One aided and abetted by the US state security apparatus, as evidenced by the strong support given by the US government during the Maidan protests. (Victoria Nuland literally brought them cookies)
Shortly after the Maidan uprising of 2013 to ’14 brought in a new government, Ukraine began whitewashing Nazi collaborators on a statewide level. In 2015, Kyiv passed legislation declaring two WWII-era paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes and freedom fighters and threatening legal action against anyone denying their status. The OUN was allied with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust; the UPA murdered thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles on their own accord.
………
The typical reaction to this in the West is that Ukraine can’t be celebrating Nazi collaborators because it elected Zelenskiy, a Jewish president. Zelenskiy, however, has alternated between appeasing and ignoring the whitewashing: In 2018, he stated, “To some Ukrainians, [Nazi collaborator] Bandera is a hero, and that’s cool!”
Zelinskiy is a Kapo, and we should not be supporting what is going on in the Ukraine. (Same goes to a lesser degree in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland)
If American foreign policy in the 21st century stands for anything beyond corporate profits, we need to be firmly anti-Nazi.
Glorification of Nazis leads to the creation of nativist political movements that eventually corrupt the politics, and lead to the implementation of Fascist policies.
There is a story, I’m not sure if it is urban legend, that Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins said this when discussing what Neil Armstrong should say when he set foot on the moon.
I hope that the story is True.
Michael Collins died today. He was 90 years old.
I’ve been talking about how excess deaths is the best measure of Covid-19 mortality, (see here and here) and now the New York Times has discovered the statistical measure.
It only took them a year, though the graph surprised me.
It turns out that Covid is worse than the Spanish Influenza epidemic:
A surge in deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic created the largest gap between the actual and expected death rate in 2020 — what epidemiologists call “excess deaths,” or deaths above normal.
Aside from fatalities directly attributed to Covid-19, some excess deaths last year were most likely undercounts of the virus or misdiagnoses, or indirectly related to the pandemic otherwise. Preliminary federal data show that overdose deaths have also surged during the pandemic.
………
In 2020, however, the United States saw the largest single-year surge in the death rate since federal statistics became available. The rate increased 16 percent from 2019, even more than the 12 percent jump during the 1918 flu pandemic.
These numbers are really f%$#ing scary.
President Biden has formally declared the Armenian Genocide by Turkey a genocide, the first US President to do so.
The fact that this has taken over 100 years is an mark of shame and cowardice:
President Biden on Saturday recognized the mass killings of Armenians more than a century ago as genocide, signaling a willingness to test an increasingly frayed relationship with Turkey, long a key regional ally and an important partner within NATO.
“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” Mr. Biden said in a statement issued on the 106th anniversary of the beginning of a brutal campaign by the former Ottoman Empire that killed 1.5 million people. “And we remember so that we remain ever vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”
The declaration by Mr. Biden reflected his administration’s commitment to human rights, a pillar of its foreign policy. It is also a break from Mr. Biden’s predecessors, who were reluctant to anger a country of strategic importance and were wary of driving its leadership toward American adversaries like Russia or Iran.
………
But in a call on Friday, Mr. Biden told Mr. Erdogan directly that he would be declaring the massacre an act of genocide, according to a person familiar with the discussion who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose details of the conversation.
As to the feelings of the Turks in general, and of Erdogan in particular, those delicate snowflakes can go f%$# themselves.
Their ancestors committed genocide, and have denied it for a century, and there needs to be an accounting for that.
Former Senator and Vice President Walter Mondale died last night, and every single obituary downplays his role in passing the fair housing act.
He sponsored the bill, and got it through the senate after years of effort.
The above link does not even mention the Fair Housing Act, relegating it to the throw away line describing him as a, “Champion of such liberal causes as open housing and anti-poverty programs.”
And his whole life is reduced to, “The guy wot got destroyed in the 1984 Presidential election.”
This is a disgrace.
I did read Plato in high school, and tagged the Greek philosopher as a proto-Fascist, and read a fair amount more modern philosophy, and mave made an effort to understand the basic concepts at the heart of what is generally called, “Western Thought,” but it’s never been a huge part of my life or my, “Thinking.”
So I am not one of those people completely losing their sh%$ over Howard University abandoning the classics in its curriculum.
What I am surprised by is that one of the people who wrote this OP/ED in the Post is the luminaries of African American academe, Cornell West.
I should not be surprised, if you look at his background, it is clear that he spent much of his formative years in the study of philosophers and philosophies from across the world, including those who are lumped under the sobriquet of, “The Classics.”
One of the best things about the article is that it is so much more thoughtful and well written that we can expect to hear from Fox News in the next few days:
Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.
Long after Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian — he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”
Yet today, one of America’s greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Amid a move for educational “prioritization,” Howard University is dissolving its classics department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department.
Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.
It is a glorious expression of intellectual fury.
In 1954, a TV station aired a film distributed by the USN titled "This Is Your Navy". Unfortunately, the film had been mislabeled and was actually the extremely graphic hygiene film "USS VD: Ship of Shame". One shocked viewer said she would never watch TV again. #FunFactFriday pic.twitter.com/94QYk7qHpk
— U.S. Naval Institute (@NavalInstitute) April 16, 2021
Film librarians are very imprtant.
holy shit I’ve rarely seen a footnote used to such devastating effect. https://t.co/FjHRNcZYzE pic.twitter.com/sk597elmBR
— Jathan Sadowski (@jathansadowski) April 13, 2021
The Tweet that led me to the footnote
A while ago, (correctly) I called Bill Gates a mass murderer for his efforts to prevent open source vaccines from being released, with his insistence that any vaccine be licensed exclusively to one for-profit entity.
I still say that and now The New Republic says the same thing, complete with a ghastly portrait of Gates with horns.
They go through the history of IP absolutism and how it has harmed people, and refer us to the case of South Africa and AIDS drugs where Big Pharma and their evil minions in government and the media suggested that compulsory licensing and generics would lead to the spread of drug resistant variants of HIV, because Africans are lazy and disorganized people who won’t take their pills regularly. (In reality, Africans took their pills more reliably than their privileged brothers in the rest.
After mentioning this, there is an asterisk, and at the bottom of the page is a footnote about TNR‘s former editor-in-chief Andrew Sullivan:
*Among journalists echoing this argument was former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan. When The New York Times reported Sullivan was defending the companies’ lawsuit while taking undisclosed funding from PhRma, the industry trade association, Sullivan remained defiant in the face of evidence-based accusations that he was an unethical journalist. “It behooves me to say I see absolutely no problems with [drug industry sponsorship],” he told Salon. “In fact, I am extremely proud to get some support from a great industry.” It later turned out that Africans adhered more closely to the twice-daily pill regimens than patient populations in rich countries.
They just called their editor in the early 1990s, a racist hypocrite dirtbag. (Mark Ames has a rather good bill of particulars on his entire career).
I think that the publication is distance themseves the damage done by two profoundly toxic people, Sullivan, and former publisher Marty Peretz.
It’s a glorious take-down of a thoroughly contemptible human being.
Just so you know, his “storied career” at TNR included:
And that’s just the sh%$ that he did while he was at TNR.
H/T Atrios.
The only thing I would add to this is how defensive officials I talk to get when I say plainly that America lost the Afghanistan war. It’s instinctive, tribal and revealing, a glitch in the matrix of American Exceptionalism. https://t.co/vmHcgeab2M
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) April 2, 2021
Mixed emotions on this one, but just on the semantics. I don’t think that we LOST the war in Afghanistan, I think that the Afghans BEAT us.
The phrasing of “Lost” implies that the agency was all on the part of the us, but the American public lacked the will to continue. (It’s called the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics.)
This terminology allowed our military to learn nothing but how to lie to the American public in response to the Vietnam debacle.
In Afghanistan, much like in Vietnam, we were beaten, and once again, we will learn nothing from this.
To be honest, I have not heard the term, “Running Dog,” as used by elements of the Chinese foreign policy apparatus ever. I’ve merely heard about this, because its use pretty much ended when Nixon went to China, and I wasn’t even 10 years old then.
So I find it rather amusing that a Chinese diplomat has just used the sobriquet to describe Justin Trudeau.
I thought that the term had died when Mao Zedong did:
A Chinese diplomat has dismissed Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau as a “boy” in a social media attack marking a new low in the fractured relationship between the two countries.
China and Canada have clashed repeatedly in recent months, and last week the two countries imposed sanctions on each other in a growing row over Beijing’s treatment of its Uighur minority.
But on Sunday, Trudeau was singled out for insult by China’s consul general to Rio de Janeiro, Li Yang in a tweet blaming him for the diplomatic crisis.
“Boy, your greatest achievement is to have ruined the friendly relations between China and Canada, and have turned Canada into a running dog of the U.S,” he tweeted.
The demeaning term “running dog” , a relic of Maoist China, is often used to describe nations that are subservient to countries like the United States.
Honestly, I am stunned at the PR ineptitude of the elements of the Chinese state on this one.
Maybe they should hire some professionals who could do a better job, because even the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation would be an improvement.
After literally years of obstruction by Edward M (Ted) Kennedy, it looks like will finally be constructing a wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
He had objections to the project, because it was visible from the Kennedy compound.
I consider Kennedy’s legacy to be quite positive, but this piece of it I am very glad to see go:
The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has issued its long-awaited final environmental impact study (FEIS) for the Vineyard Wind project off Massachusetts, which will be the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in federal waters.
BOEM is leaning towards a preferred alternative that would combine several of the development options examined in the draft EIS. The preferred option would allow Vineyard Wind to build the desired 800 MW wind farm, but with 84 larger GE Haliade-X turbines instead of 100 smaller MHI Vestas turbines; no turbines in the northernmost portion of the lease site; and north-south / east-west row alignment with one nautical mile spacing between foundations. These terms broadly align with the parameters submitted by Vineyard Wind itself in its construction and operations plan (COP).
The study paves the way for a formal record of decision on Vineyard Wind’s EIS review, and it will almost certainly result in a permit approval matching BOEM’s preferred alternative option. As such, it represents a landmark victory for the developer and for the U.S. offshore wind industry, which has been closely watching the permitting process for this pace-setting development.
About damn time.
I found this on a web crawl. It is profoundly odd:
Too weird not to share.
Also, it shows that “Deep Fakes” might have a bright side.
Just to confirm, yes, this is the theme to Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Another reminder that the word ‘ultracrepidarian’ (19th century) describes someone who loves holding forth on matters they know absolutely nothing about.
— Susie Dent 💙 (@susie_dent) March 8, 2021
As my reader(s) have no doubt noticed, I rather like to use the archaic word, “Snollygoster,” to refer to dishonest people, particularly politicians.
I find the word wondrously evocative, and believe that it should enter general use again.
Well, I must thank Susie Dent for informing me about another wonderful word that has fallen out of use, “Ultracrepidarian,” which means someone who ……… Hell, it means almost every pundit on the planet earth with NY Times pundit Tom Friedman being the apogee (or perhaps nadir) of the form.
George Washington was a number of things, some good, he led the Revolutionary Army successfully against the British, some awful, he owned slaves, and one thing that was absolutely remarkable, he completely shut down any suggestion that he, or anyone, be king of the United States.
Even if you have a good king, the various retainers and hangers on are toxic, because it becomes a snake pit, as is shown by the recent interview between Harry Mountbatten-Windsor and Meghan Markle and Oprah Winfrey.
I’ve read some short reports of the interviews, and realized that beyond my immeasurable pleasure in NOT having a royal family in the United States, I really don’t care.
I am grateful to the choices made by George Washington, and the more I know of him, the more I admire him.
It’s rather evocative, in an Adolph and Eva kind of way:
That shape looks familiar ……… Oh, right, it’s the Odal Rune, with wings, (Serifs) which was specifically created for:
Yes, it was worn on the lapels of some SS units in the 2nd World War, and is different from the historical Odal rune (ᛟ), which has no wings.
Here it is as the flag of the Flag of the Volksdeutsche 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen, according to Wikipedia.
In recent years, actual NeoNazis have replaced the swastika with the winged Odal Rune in an attempt to mainstream their symboliam.
Also, I have some footage of the stage show at CPAC, and it’s a trip too:
Still, this is whole affair is a complete mind f%$#.
Former Carmen Ortiz is perhaps best known for knowingly prosecuting Aaron Swartz to death, but it turns out that she was a corrupt piece of sh%$ on a par with Trump’s worst appointments, though somehow she managed to stay in office throughout the entire Obama administration, probably due to her friendship with Eric “Place” Holder.
Among other things, she prosecuted Teamsters for picketing the show Top Chef for not using union drivers, and went after Mayor, now Labor Secretary, Marty Walsh for pressuring a concert promoter to hire experienced union workers as stage hands, claiming racketeering. (She also made no secret of wanting to be Mayor, and Walsh’s actions followed a spate of injuries and deaths resulting from sloppy stage work, including a fire in Rhode Island that killed over 100)
Particularly after her egregious behavior in the Shwartz case, there was a lot of pressure for Obama to fire her, but she stayed on through 2017.
It is that Marty Walsh has been picked by Biden as labor secretary is a sort of nail in the coffin for whatever shred of a political career she hoped to have.
It also might be a not so subtle way of throwing some (extremely mild) shade in Obama and Holder’s way:
The last time Joe Biden was in the White House, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh seemed an unlikely nominee for a future labor secretary. Carmen Ortiz, President Barack Obama’s U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, had Walsh in her crosshairs. One summer dawn in 2016 she sent FBI agents to arrest two of his staff under a federal racketeering indictment.
The Boston Globe, New England’s most powerful news outlet, known for its coverage of the Roman Catholic Church child abuse scandals, laid siege to the mayor’s office over his labor practices and union ties. The Globe had named Ortiz its 2011 “Bostonian of the Year.” Its reporters dug their foxholes wherever she pointed, and the paper cheered on her prosecution of Walsh’s staffers.
When “Top Chef” had filmed in Boston two years earlier, Walsh visited on set with the show’s host Padma Lakshmi. Outside, the Teamsters picketed for union jobs. Ortiz indicted them, also for racketeering extortion. And in a city obsessed with haute cuisine, Ortiz leveraged star power: At trial, Lakshmi would take the stand for the prosecution.
In Boston, Ortiz was considered a rising star and was expected to run for mayor herself, a task made easier by softening Walsh up. Hey, this is Boston. If you want finesse, watch a Bruins game; if you want blood, watch a City Council race. She was regularly talked of as a top-tier statewide candidate. The only question was whether she was destined for attorney general, the Senate, the governor’s mansion, or beyond.
………
Between Kennedy’s funeral and Holder’s exile, Ortiz and her then-chief of cybercrime, Stephen Heymann, indicted internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz on 14 felony counts for allegedly downloading too many academic journal articles. Swartz had used a simple script to download academic journal articles from the platform JSTOR, which provided its articles free to anyone on the MIT network. It’s not clear Swartz even violated the company’s terms of service; finding a crime anywhere in what he did took an awfully creative prosecutor.
………
Looking to avoid a trial, Heymann compared Swartz to a rapist. By refusing to plead guilty, the line went, Swartz had “revictimized” MIT. Swartz fervently resisted, but Ortiz and Heymann had a trump card.
The Honorable Nathaniel M. Gorton is well known to the Massachusetts Bar, whose members whisper he rarely meets an indictment he doesn’t like. He’s noted as a hanging judge; prosecutors go out of their way to get high-profile cases assigned to him. A legacy admission from the Gorton’s Seafood family to Dartmouth and then Columbia Law School, he was appointed to the bench by President George H.W. Bush after Bush campaigned beside his brother Sen. Slade Gorton.
After Swartz drew Gorton, his defense lawyers told Heymann the pressure of the case had rendered Swartz suicidal, his attorney later said he told prosecutors.
“Fine, we’ll lock him up,” Heymann responded.
Swartz killed himself shortly thereafter, in January 2013.
Within days of Swartz’s death, over 61,000 people digitally signed a White House petition to fire Ortiz — a singular distinction for a U.S. attorney. The Senate and House judiciary committees pilloried her.
Ortiz told the media that she and Heymann hadn’t known Swartz was on the brink of suicide and that if they had known, things might’ve been different. (Heymann’s knowledge only surfaced much later, along with his “Fine, we’ll lock him up” response.)
Ultimately Obama refused to sack Ortiz. She in turn refused to sack Heymann, though she did pick a new chief of cybercrime. Obama thus allowed Ortiz to save face, but she never recovered politically. Try as she might, it all went downhill for her from there, eventually culminating with Biden nominating Walsh for labor secretary.
Refused to sack Ortiz, because as I have noted, Barack Obama was the worst Constitutional law professor ever. ™
Outside the Boston Globe and Ortiz’s few remaining allies, the racketeering charges against Walsh’s staff garnered Ortiz all the wrong attention.
Merriam-Webster defines a racketeer as “a person who obtains money by an illegal enterprise usually involving intimidation.”
But Ortiz never accused Walsh or his staff of pocketing anything for themselves, or for his campaign, or for his administration. The indictment instead alleged that Walsh’s staff required a producer to hire local union stagehands for an outdoor rock concert. That’s business as usual for many in the heavily unionized capital of America’s bluest state.
“Is this illegal now?” mused CBS Boston anchor Jon Keller.
Legality aside, requiring experienced stagehands familiar with the particular outdoor venue was arguably a prudent public safety measure. A few years earlier, an outdoor stage collapsed during a Sugarland show in Indiana, killing seven.
A much deadlier incident eight years before that hit closer to Boston. One hundred people perished in smoke and flames in nearby West Warwick, Rhode Island, when a nightclub named The Station burned to the ground; over 200 were injured. The blaze started when the manager of a rock band ignited indoor stage pyrotechnics.
Yet when Walsh’s office insisted on better-vetted stagehands, Ortiz tried to make a federal case out of it.
………
Those cases would continue for years after Ortiz left office. Ortiz, however, had more immediate concerns. She had to find a job outside government. The Senate was no longer in the cards.
At or near the top of Ortiz’s list was Harvard Kennedy School. Philip Heymann, Ortiz’s mentor and the father of her former cybercrime chief, was a longtime Harvard professor. And of course the school is named after the family of her late supporter, Theodore E. Kennedy. Harvard nonetheless rejected Ortiz.
You have to f%$# up pretty badly for the Kennedy School to reject a former US Attorney.
………
A while later, Padma Lakshmi failed to fully convince a Boston jury. All four Teamsters tried were acquitted.
Because picketing people who hire non-union workers is not, or at least should not be a crime.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin at first threw out the separate case against Walsh’s staff. It required a trip to the U.S. Court of Appeals before it made it to trial. The second time around Sorokin deep-sixed it beyond any likely reinstatement. He ruled that the aides hadn’t received anything of benefit, so couldn’t be charged with anything.
Now Biden has driven the final nail into Ortiz’s political coffin by nominating Walsh for labor secretary despite Ortiz’s indictments — or perhaps to signal his loyalty to union organizers, he nominated Walsh because of her indictments. Either way, Ortiz is now the former prosecutor who is linked to the suicide of a once-in-a-generation talent and who fought Biden’s labor secretary nominee over his labor practices and lost. Not exactly where one wants to start a Democratic primary or confirmation hearing.
I do think that Joe Biden is sending a message with this, both about support of union activities and that he is less naive about the intersection of politics and prosecutions than was Barack Obama.
I’m sure that you all “know” how money started.
Societies were bartering, and it became too unwieldy, and so money was created as a proxy for value that reduced the friction in the transactions.
It’s an elegant theory. The only problem is that no one has ever found an example of this ever.
No examples in archeology, none in mythology, none.
Also, how does one develop a sufficient velocity to commerce to justify the creation of money?
You need money to create the levels of commerce that justify its creation.
It’s a chicken egg thing.
An alternate theory, and one that has some actual evidence behind it, is that money grew out of a system of debts and fines that were driven by the expansion of government.
This origin story actually works the way that human minds do:
Most of us have an idea of how money came to be. It goes something like this: People wanted to exchange goods for other goods, but it was difficult to coordinate. So they started exchanging goods for money, and money for goods. This tells us that money is a medium of exchange. It’s a nice and simple story. The problem is that it may not be true. We may be understanding money entirely wrong.
The above story assumes that first there was a market, and then people introduced money to make the market work better. But some people find this hard to believe. Those who subscribe to the Chartalist school [the belief that money originated with the states attempt to influence their own economy] of thought give a different history. Before money was used in markets, they say, it was used in primitive criminal justice systems. Money started as—and still is—is a record of debt. It is a way to keep track of what one person owes another. There’s anthropological evidence to back up this view. Work by Innes, and Wray suggest that the origins of money are more like this:In a pre-market, feudal society, there was usually a system to maintain justice in the community. If someone committed a crime, the authority, let’s call him the king, would decide that the criminal owed a fine to the victim. The fine could be a cow, a sheep, three chickens, depending on the crime. Until that cow was brought forward, the criminal was indebted to the victim. The king would record the criminal’s outstanding debt.
This system changed over time. Rather than paying fines to the victim, criminals were ordered to pay fines to the king. This way, resources were being moved to the king, who could coordinate their use for the benefit of the community as a whole. This was useful for the King, and for the development of the society. But the amount of resources coming from a criminal here and there was not impressive. The system had to be expanded to draw more resources to the kingdom.
To expand the system, the king created debt-records of his own. You can think of them as pieces of papers that say King-Owes-You. Next, he went to his citizens and demanded they give him the resources he wanted. If a citizen gave their cow to the king, the king would give the citizen some of his King-Owes-You papers. Now, a cow seems more useful than a piece of paper, so it seems silly that a citizen would agree to this. But the king had thought of a solution. To make sure everyone would want his King-Owes-You papers, he created a use for them.
He proclaimed that every so often, all citizens had to come forward to the kingdom. Each citizen would be in big trouble, unless they could provide little pieces of paper that showed the king still owed them. In that case, the king would let the citizen go, and not owe them any longer. The citizen would be free to go off and acquire more King-Owes-You papers, to make sure he would be safe the next time, too. This way, all the citizens needed King-Owes-You papers to stay out of trouble. That made King-Owes-You papers widely accepted, and consequently, also a useful medium of exchange. This lead to the rise of markets.
Not only does this better match the way humanity works, the creation of money is the other is a Kumbaya moment that really hasn’t ever occurred in the history of finance.
The author goes on to explain how we actually have relatively recent history to explain this: The Spanish conquest of the Americas, where the locals saw the need for money only when their oppressors started demanding taxes.