A vicious, extremist nut is a vicious, extremist nut whether disguised as a Christian, Moslem or Jew. It would be nice to think that a just God exists, able to consign the whole lot of them to hell. It is particularly sad to see this sort of swine slowly taking over Israel, a nation born of such bright dreams.

From McClatchy:

The Israeli public has been rocked by a series of recent reports about the behavior of extremist Jewish groups, which has included forcing women to sit at the back of public buses, erecting signs calling for the separation of the sexes on sidewalks and even the physical assaults of schoolgirls by ultra-Orthodox men who found their school uniforms immodest.

Naama Margolese, an 8-year-old American immigrant who attends the Orot school in Beit Shemesh, became a focal point of the outcry after an Israeli news station filmed her facing daily abuses from extremists. TV news footage showed the shy, bespectacled second-grader shaking and brushing tears from her eyes as she described men who spat at her and called her “prostitute” for attending the school.

A group of extremists has taken issue with the Orot school’s location, near a hard-line religious school for men. Though the Orot school was exclusively for Orthodox girls — nearly all of whom dress in long skirts and long-sleeved shirts — in August a group of men began gathering every week to curse and threaten the students.

“My stomach hurts every time I need to walk to and from the school and I know those men will be there,” Naama said. “They are scary.”

From the Associated Press:

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — The annual cleaning of one of Christianity's holiest churches deteriorated into a brawl between rival clergy Wednesday, as dozens of monks feuding over sacred space at the Church of the Nativity battled each other with brooms until police intervened…

I think you should all watch this holiday beauty:

This is a commercial for the egg cracker we got for Christmas:

And these are the results obtained in our own test kitchens:

From McClatchy News:

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani's case drew international attention after she was sentenced to die by stoning for adultery.

“This lady is accused of two crimes,” Hojatoleslam Sharifi, the judiciary chief of Eastern Azarbaijan province, told reporters at a news conference on Monday, the semi-official Iran Student’s News Agency reported. “One is adultery which is punishable by stoning to death, and the other is assisting in her husband’s murder. She is currently serving 10 years for helping to kill her husband.”

He said “we did not have the needed facility for stoning…

Click image to enlarge

Here, via Naked Capitalism, is Handel’s Messiah remastered for Occupy Wall Street:

Bethany Doolittle sinks another last night as Iowa Hawkeyes roll over Drake, 71-46.

I can’t let this one slide. Here’s Thomas Friedman — sort of, kind of — calling Baby Bush the father of the Arab Spring. Even putting Shock and Awe into the same paragraph with Tahrir Square is an obscenity.

So no matter the original reasons for the war, in the end, it came down to this: Were America and its Iraqi allies going to defeat Al Qaeda and its allies in the heart of the Arab world or were Al Qaeda and its allies going to defeat them? Thanks to the Sunni Awakening movement in Iraq, and the surge, America and its allies defeated them and laid the groundwork for the most important product of the Iraq war: the first ever voluntary social contract between Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites for how to share power and resources in an Arab country and to govern themselves in a democratic fashion. America helped to midwife that contract in Iraq, and now every other Arab democracy movement is trying to replicate it — without an American midwife. You see how hard it is.

God know what he was telling Freddie Mac, but here's a summary of the clueless Newtster’s most recent attempt on history:

Gingrich, who explained that he was outraged by activist liberal elitist judges imposing their secular values on America (and more generally by “lawyers” who have come “to think that they can dictate to the rest of us”), declared that as president he would simply ignore Supreme Court decisions he didn’t like, abolish Federal appeals courts whose “anti-American” judges ruled in ways he didn’t like, and encourage Congress to subpoena judges to explain their decisions.

He claimed that Lincoln had similarly “just ignored” the Dred Scott decision, when he issued his Emancipation Proclamation; he said that Jefferson had similarly abolished Federal circuit courts whose judges he opposed; and he asserted that Jackson and FDR had also taken stances against what he declared to be the spurious doctrine of “judicial supremacy”— that the courts can pass judgment on the constitutionality of presidential actions or acts of Congress.

He insisted that the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision on detainees at Guantanamo could be declared “null and void” by the president “because it infringes on my duties as commander in chief to protect the country.”

He wrapped up his case by invoking those infallible and all-seeing guides, the Founding Fathers, who he said “were very distrustful of judges, saw them as an elite instrument of government designed to oppress people. And, as a result, consciously made the judicial branch the third branch and the weakest branch.”

You knew instinctively, of course, that all this was just more waste product from the GOP’s current White Hope (its Black Hope having self-destructed). But you probably didn’t have the time or inclination to do exploratory surgery. However The Liberal Curmudgeon (from which the above excerpt comes) has done a thorough dissection for you; sadly, the patient did not survive.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker writes:

Finally, the nuclear peace theory cannot explain why the wars that did take place often had a nonnuclear force provoking (or failing to surrender to) a nuclear one — exactly the matchup that the nuclear threat ought to have deterred. North Korea, North Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Panama and Yugoslavia defied the United States; Afghan and Chechen insurgents defied the Soviet Union; Egypt defied Britain and France; Egypt and Syria defied Israel; Vietnam defied China; and Argentina defied the United Kingdom. For that matter the Soviet Union established its stranglehold on Eastern Europe during just those years (1945-490) when the United States had nuclear weapons and it did not. They correctly anticipated that for anything but an existential danger, the implicit threat of a nuclear response was a bluff. The Argentinian junta ordered the invasion of the Falkland Islands in full confidence that Britain would not retaliate by reducing Buenos Aires to a radioactive crater. Nor could Israel have creditably threatened the amassed Egyptian armies in 1967 or 1973, to say nothing of Cairo.

Pinker’s argument here is a powerful one, and should be taken into account by the dangerous fools who are now trying to lie us into another war, this time to save ourselves from atomic annihilation at the hands of Iran. But that country’s so far imaginary nuclear bomb would not be aimed at us. The Iranians would see it as comforting (although unusable) insurance against Israel’s equally nonthreatening nuclear capability. That capability, we should not forget, was at best unopposed by the United States back in the 60s. At worst, it was encouraged, even facilitated, by Washington.

We knew it happened. We knew it always happens, on all sides in all wars. The problem is not the warriors, but the wars. Nor are the wars the problem. The politicians who start the wars are the problem. But neither are the politicians the problem. We put them in power. We are the problem.

Read all of the extraordinary New York Times story from which the following is excerpted:

General Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar Province, said he did not feel compelled to go back and examine the events because they were part of a continuing pattern of civilian deaths.

“It happened all the time, not necessarily in MNF-West all the time, but throughout the whole country,” General Johnson testified, using a military abbreviation for allied forces in western Iraq.

“So, you know, maybe — I guess maybe if I was sitting here at Quantico and heard that 15 civilians were killed I would have been surprised and shocked and gone — done more to look into it,” he testified, referring to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. “But at that point in time, I felt that was — had been, for whatever reason, part of that engagement and felt that it was just a cost of doing business on that particular engagement.”

…or at least less pain (h/t to Brad Plumer). Turns out I’ve been self-medicating all these years, particularly when repairing stuff around the house:

Previously we showed that swearing produces a pain lessening (hypoalgesic) effect for many people… Swearing increased pain tolerance and heart rate compared with not swearing… This article presents further evidence that, for many people, swearing (cursing) provides readily available and effective relief from pain. However, overuse of swearing in everyday situations lessens its effectiveness as a short-term intervention to reduce pain.

I belong to an online forum called Vietnam Old Hacks, made up of correspondents and other observers of our murderous Southeast Asian follies. Lately there has been a discussion of whether a forum member should have flat-out called Henry Kissinger a war criminal.

We Americans learn nothing, absolutely nothing, ever, from our stupidities of even the very recent past. And our Vietnam idiocy, given the shortness of our national memory, now seems even more remote and irrelevant than Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Still, what’s an Old Hack to do? He’s got to try. So here’s Andrew Pearson, who was a television cameraman, correspondent and producer in Vietnam back in the day:

In 1970, Telford Taylor’s book was published: Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy. The subtitle: Is the US guilty of war crimes in Vietnam? He was America’s chief counsel for the prosecution at the Nazi war-crimes trials at Nuremberg in 1946. When I saw the cover of the book some forty years ago, I wasn’t ready to absorb the argument though by then I had witnessed in South Vietnam what various Geneva Conventions would say were crimes of war.

On page 206, Taylor writes, “... when the nature, scale and effect of intervention changed so drastically in 1965, it is more than “puzzling” (as the Senate Refugee Subcommittee put it) that virtually no one in high authority had the capacity and inclination to perceive and articulate the inevitable consequences. How could it ever have been thought that air strikes, free-fire zones and a mass uprooting and removal of the rural population were the way to win ‘the allegiance of the South Vietnamese’? By what mad cerebrations could a ratio of 28 to 1 between our investments in bombing, and in relief for those we had wounded and made homeless, have even been contemplated, let alone adopted as the operational pattern? One may well echo the acrid French epigram, and say that all this ‘is worse than a crime, it is a blunder’— the most costly and tragic national blunder in American history.... Somehow we failed ourselves to learn the lessons we undertook to teach at Nuremberg, and that failure is today’s American tragedy.”

Forty years after having read Taylor’s book, I really don’t mind at all when those of us call the old “leaders” war criminals. It’s apt. Reagan tried to get everybody to get over it with his invocation that it was a “noble cause.” Not even a blunder. Where does responsibility lie? Do we excuse our decision makers because, looking back, they didn’t know anything about the history of the place — didn’t think they needed to know anything about it. But the trouble with wars is that a lot of people can’t “get over it” for a variety of reasons. The older they get the closer the old memories cling. Truth seems to mature with age and language becomes more blunt.

The following is Joseph Galloway’s reply to the Vietnam Old Hacks post (above) by Andrew Pearson:

Telford Taylor was right. You are right in your explanation of why we, in a profession that once prided itself as keepers of the truth, who were witnesses, cannot simply leave hard and harsh judgments to the historians long after we are dead. Why we hold the truth closer and more dear and speak more harshly as we grow old.

Vietnam and the pardoning of Richard Nixon and a national willingness to just slide by the truth and not hold up the war criminals to public scrutiny and justice set our feet on a path that led us straight into the fucking mess we find ourselves in as a nation right now. It led us straight into Bush Junior’s administration and two unnecessary wars — one only now ending after over eight years duration, 5,000 dead American men and women, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, three million Iraqis turned into refugees inside and outside their homeland; the other expected to drag on till 2014 and sputter to as uncertain a conclusion as the one in Iraq.

The Bush policymakers governed on fear and drove the public into acceptance of a foul and stinking trade-off — our freedoms in exchange for security against the evil arrayed against us. It drove us into acceptance of a loss of Constitutional guarantees underpinning the rights that made us unique among nations. From there it becomes easy to gain acceptance of the use of methods of interrogation, torture really, that heretofore were not only unthinkable but were, in fact, illegal under both our own laws and the international conventions that govern conduct in war that we signed and pledged to uphold.

Bush hired lawyers who opined that “The law is what we say it is, what YOU Mr. President says it is.” There are now bills working their way through our Congress that authorize the arrest and detention of Americans on American soil without any due process whatsoever, and their detention shall be by our military and totally outside the purview of the criminal justice system. We have chosen to combat an evil by embracing some of the very methods and crimes that we have used to define them as evil. We have chosen to trade precious freedom for security — and in the end we shall have neither freedom nor security.

When that odious administration staggered to an end and the people elected a man President who vowed he would change things in Washington, make things right, restore that which had been tarnished and blackened, he did none of those things. Rather than investigate and hold up to the light those who had stolen for the executive powers never granted under the Constitution, rather than restore the rights and guarantees of a people born free, rather than fix what had been broken, that man announced in his first weeks in office that he would do none of that; that his choice was “to look forward, not back.”

He would continue to prosecute the wars begun by his predecessors for years more. He would trample on the principle of equality under the law. He would neither investigate nor prosecute his predecessor and his co-conspirators, thus ensuring that now we would have two standards of justice: one for ordinary citizens and another, without punishment, for the power-brokers and the power-wielders. And nothing changed.

Nor will it anywhere short of an uprising by the people demanding restoration of their rights to equal justice, to privacy and security in their homes and in their communications, and the restoration of a balanced system of government based on three equal seats of power: executive, legislative and judicial. So yes we speak out, exercising a now-shaky right to free speech, and, yes, at times we use harsh words because the country and government we see today is NOT the government and country we grew up in and learned about in the schoolbooks.

I am still shocked that on this forum for those who were witnesses and tellers of the truth, of all places, some would suggest that we let all this slide, sweep the war criminals and their crimes against other peoples and our own under the rug for some yet-unborn academic historians to paw through and judge a century or two down the road.

Posted by Jerome Doolittle at 1:00 PM | Permalink & Email Post | Comments (1)
America is Doomed | Civil Liberties | Historical Perspectives | Media

From The Liberal Curmudgeon:

I have been perplexed for some time why Newt Gingrich is routinely acknowledged even by his bitter enemies within the Republican Party as a “genius,” but the answer turns out to be simple: he acts exactly like one of those obnoxious elitist intellectual know-it-alls that the right-wing know-nothings think is the hallmark of an intellectual. He is constantly reminding us of his doctorate in history; he routinely claims he understands issues more deeply than anyone else; he has made a career of denouncing or (when he had the authority) eliminating professional expertise that might challenge his own certain pronouncements; and he is a veritable fount of crackpot “big” ideas (mining minerals on the moon, protecting the United States from sci-fi doomsday scenarios, and “fundamentally transforming” everything as a first step to doing anything.

Another useful rule of thumb: real geniuses, as opposed to simple egomaniacs, do not generally refer to themselves in the third person.

This went into effect Monday. I’ve waited a while to see whether the MSM would jump on the good news with its customary enthusiasm. Oddly, no.

On Friday, the federal government launched an element of the Affordable Care Act that is likely to have far-reaching consequences on the cost of health care in the United States in the form of new regulatory controls on how private health insurance companies spend the money they collect in premiums. Rick Ungar, a left-leaning specialist on health care policy who writes for the corporatist site, Forbes.com, explains:

That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80 percent of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect — 85 percent for large group insurers — on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time. Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare — but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ratio will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry.

From The Carter Center:

Half of the workforce of the artisanal mining sector in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is comprised of children. Children as young as two years. Without viable economic alternatives, most children must join their parents in rudimentary mining pits. Children as young as two years transport, wash, and crush minerals to earn half a dollar a day.

From The Gingrich Center:

These schools should get rid of unionized janitors, have one master janitor, pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work; they’d have cash; they’d have pride in the schools. They’d begin the process of rising…

Go out and talk to people who are really successful in one generation. They all started their first job at 9 to 14 years of age. They are selling newspapers, going door to door, washing cars. They were all making money at a very young age.

My nephew Jason sends this along. So watch it or die.

In August of 1910, former President Theodore Roosevelt delivered in Osawatomie, Kansas, a speech in which he laid out what he hoped would become the fundamental beliefs of the Republican Party.

Here is part of what he said:

The new Nationalism puts the National need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat National issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from over-division of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring National activities to a deadlock.

This new Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people…

The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows…

We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.

Here is all of what President Obama said earlier today in Osawatomie. I hope you will read it all, after the jump. The president has found his true voice at last. See if you agree. I have posted the remainder of his speech after the jump.

Good afternoon. I want to start by thanking a few of the folks who’ve joined us today. We’ve got the mayor of Osawatomie, Phil Dudley; your superintendent, Gary French; the principal of Osawatomie High, Doug Chisam. And I’ve brought your former governor, who’s now doing an outstanding job as our Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius……

…Read on

On Fox Business, Eric Bolling asks the question no one else dares to:

“ARE LIBERALS TRYING TO BRAINWASH YOUR KIDS AGAINST CAPITALISM?”

Two thoughts:

1) The Muppets are currently owned by the Walt Disney Company. It is extremely unlikely that a major corporation is attempting to brainwash kids against capitalism. Especially a major corporation that markets directly to your kids. (Full disclosure, if anyone is interested: Said major corporation currently employs me.)

2) We don't need the Muppets to brainwash kids against capitalism. Our current version of scorched-earth capitalism is doing that very nicely all by itself.

How ’bout a little professional curtesy, Mr. Bolling? It is unseemly, to say the least, for one puppet to attack another...

From The Washington Independent:

…The study noted past research that suggests drivers under the influence of alcohol and marijuana both experience reduced skills and slower reaction times but that those driving under the influence of alcohol are unaware of their reduced skills and actually drive faster and more recklessly than when they are sober. Stoned drivers, on the other hand, seem to know they are stoned and they slow down, increase the distance between them and the car ahead of them and avoid risky maneuvers. The study noted that people who are stoned are also less likely to drive in the first place than people who are drunk…

From God is Not Great, by the hell-bent Christopher Hitchens:

Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason marked almost the first time that frank contempt for organized religion was openly expressed. I had a tremendous worldwide effect. His American friends and contemporaries, partly inspired by him to declare independence from the Hanoverian usurpers and their private Anglican church, meanwhile achieved an extraordinary and unprecedented thing: the writing of a democratic and republican constitution that made no mention of god and that mentioned religion only when guaranteeing that it would always be separated from the state. Almost all of the American founders died without an priest by their bedside, as also did Paine, who was much pestered in his last hours by religious hooligans who demanded that he accept Christ as his savior.

We need more rich persons like this:

…I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc.

Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it is like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around.

It is unquestionably true that without entrepreneurs and investors, you can’t have a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. But it’s equally true that without consumers, you can’t have entrepreneurs and investors. And the more we have happy customers with lots of disposable income, the better our businesses will do.

That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When the American middle class defends a tax system in which the lion’s share of benefits accrues to the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer…

I don’t know much about CIA Christmas parties. Never have. They just don’t cross my mind. There are many things in this world I simply don’t pay attention to, like NASCAR, Broadway musicals, the mating habits of the leopard slug or Bono’s opinions about anything, and I freely confess the CIA’s holiday festivities are also on that list. So sue me.

Then again, that’s probably how they want it, right? The CIA is duty bound to maintain a high level of secrecy, and hiding things about themselves is something they do very well. They won’t divulge how many employees they have, how big their budget is or they spend the money. Nor do we know, and probably never will, why the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attacks of 9/11 seemingly took them by surprise (or did they?).

We don’t really even know precisely what they do. We just assume they perform some function that is absolutely vital to our security and leave it at that. Without them, it seems to go, we’d become helpless prey to the ruthless hordes of evildoers who are constantly plotting our destruction — Russians, Chinese, Muslim terrorists, Somali pirates, mad dictators, shoe bombers, underwear bombers or any combination of the above, depending on the political needs of the moment. We’d fall into a period of terrible insecurity, such as that which existed between 1776 and 1947 when the CIA didn’t exist at all. Perish the thought. God only knows how we survived those precarious times.

But let’s not revisit bad memories. This is a post about Christmas parties, and apparently our last two CIA directors threw some doozies:

Under then-director Leon E. Panetta last year, the CIA brought in shipments of California wine, and served fried oysters, grilled shrimp and quesadillas. His predecessor, Michael V. Hayden, made sure there were musicians playing Irish music while stations set up inside the agency’s cavernous headquarters hallway served drinks and hors d’oeuvres.

And everybody who’s anybody was there. Cool kids only:

At the CIA and DNI, hundreds of guests filed through receiving lines to meet the agencies’ directors. Senior White House officials, lawmakers and journalists all mingled with officials from Washington’s clandestine world.

I could think of many colorful terms to describe Leon Panetta, but party animal wouldn’t be one of them. I figured he was just another revolving door ‘public servant,’ the kind who drifts from one prestigious government job to another as easily and naturally as an octopus gliding through a kelp bed. Turns out he’s something of an epicurean as well. Isn’t that nice? Stuff this one in the file labeled “Austerity for thee, but not for me,” or, for fiscal conservatives, “Wasteful government spending is evil, but some forms of wasteful government spending are less evil than others.”

If it was up to me, the CIA’s party favors would consist of fried SPAM and a keg of Old Milwaukee that’s been sitting in the sun all day, as well as a few boxes of chardonnay for those with more sophisticated palates. Maybe several hundred gift wrapped pink slips? An audit, perhaps? Then again, if it was up to me there wouldn’t be any such thing as the CIA, but I’m an idealist.

That that was then. This year they’re planning to scale it back:

But the CIA and DNI both acknowledged this week that the events this time around will be smaller, cheaper and off-limits to the press.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said the holiday austerity reflects the nation’s financial condition. “Scaling back our holiday celebrations is just another small example of our commitment to making sure that we continue to make wise fiscal decisions across the board,” Clapper said in a prepared statement.

Another admission: I didn’t know what the hell the DNI was until after reading this article [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]. I guess I’ve been too busy living life to notice that there was yet another superfluous intelligence agency protecting us from evil. What a bad citizen I am. It’s one more post-9/11 national security contraption that will be probably be with us until the sun explodes, like the U.S.A. Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security. At any rate, they typically blow about fifty grand on their annual Christmas bash, or “roughly the cost of a Hellfire missile,” we’re informed. Thankfully, in the spirit of fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice, they’re going to spend less than the cost of a Hellfire missile on this year’s office party. That’s mighty big of them, don’t you think?

From Edward O. Wilson’s On Human Nature:

I suggest that we will want to give [universal human rights] primary status not because it is a divine ordinance…or through obedience to an abstract principle of unknown extraneous origin, but because we are mammals. Our societies are based on the mammalian plan: the individual strives for personal reproductive success foremost and that of his immediate kin secondarily; further grudging cooperation represents a compromise struck in order to enjoy the benefits of group membership.

A rational ant — let us imagine for a moment that ants and other social insects had succeeded in evolving high intelligence — would find such an arrangement biologically unsound and the very concept of individual freedom intrinsically evil. We will accede to universal rights because power is too fluid in advanced technological societies to circumvent this mammalian imperative; the long-term consequences of inequity will always be visibly dangerous to its temporary beneficiaries. I suggest that this is the true reason for the universal rights movement and that an understanding of its raw biological causation will be more compelling in the end than any rationalization contrived by culture to reinforce and euphemize it.

Is Dr. Wilson right? “In the end,” who knows? At present, in the United States at any rate, the biological consequences of inequity are invisible to its temporary beneficiaries.

The entire legal structure, in an important sense, rests on irresponsibility. What is “precedent” but a passing of the buck? What is “originalism” but hiding behind the Founding Fathers?

Richard A. Posner, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a Reagan appointee, is nobody’s idea of a liberal. But he is everybody’s idea of a thinker, as you can discover by reading his book, Overcoming Law.

In a brilliant chapter called “Bork and Beethoven,” here’s what Judge Posner has to say about the childish and ahistorical theory of orginalism with which Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia rationalize their prejudices:

Originalism is not an analytic method; it is a rhetoric that can be used to support any result a judge wants to reach. The conservative libertarians whom Bork criticizes (Richard Epstein and Bernard Siegan) are originalists; his disagreement with them is not over method, but over result. The Dred Scott decision — to Bork, the very fount of modern judicial activism — is permeated by originalist rhetoric…

Some of the most activist judges, whether of the right or of the left, whether named Taney or Black, have been among the judges most drawn to the rhetoric of originalism. For it is a magnificent disguise. The judge can do the wildest things, all the while presenting himself as the passive agent of the sainted Founders — don’t argue with me, argue with Them.

Maybe this is something Barney Frank should consider as a farewell gesture.

The use of chemicals to control protests has received attention recently, but Tuesday may have been the first time that tear gas was used in a legislative session by a lawmaker.

A South Korean opposition member was trying to prevent a vote on a trade pact with the United States. The bill passed despite the noxious gas that filled the National Assembly chamber and the scuffle that erupted afterward, as my colleague Choe Sang-Hun reports. The Guardian identified the lawmaker as Kim Sun-dong.

Video images from Reuters showed at least one legislator covered in white powder and momentarily blinded as others vigorously waved their hands to dissipate the thick cloud of white smoke. As the session continued in the chamber, many could be seen wearing masks or clutching cloth over their noses and mouths…