Propaganda

Alice Roberts (Pandora's Box)—I dunno if she was a star per se but she did this groundbreaking lesbian role in a very groundbreaking 1920 movie and she won my heart while doing so. And his 1920's butch style is on pointtt

Lillian Gish (The Wind, Broken Blossoms)—Known as "The First Lady of American Cinema," Lillian Gish was an Academy Award nominated actress that actually began her career as a child actor onstage in theater plays. She was a prominent actress during the silent film era and her ethereal beauty made her one of the most popular actresses of the time/ She was a favorite leading lady of famous director D.W. Griffith, starring in several of his films, including the controversial Birth of a Nation. She was known to go to extremes in preparing for roles, such as sustaining permanent nerve damage in her fingers on one hand after filming a scene in Way Down East where she fainted on an ice floe and kept her hand partially submerged in the frigid water. Her screams during the famous closet scene of Broken Blossoms were supposedly so realistic and horrific that tale has it that bystanders outside the studio had to be stopped from rushing in to help. She is listed on AFI's list of the greatest female stars of classic American Cinema and was awarded several honors during her career.

This is round 1 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

3/3/2024 EDIT: there has been a lot of discussion on this poll that I'm currently examining. Please read the propaganda carefully and weigh your options before voting.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]

Lillian Gish propaganda:

"I love her just. So so much."

"Was in (arguably) the first movie ever and yeah it was a crap movie but still. Also watch her in Broken Blossoms, man can she ACT (and if an actress is good at her craft it does in fact make me more horny for her)"

"she's literally everything to me i'm not even kidding. quite LITERALLY called the First Lady of American Cinema, she was a damn pioneer of silent movies and acting. she wrote! she directed! she is exactly what i think a fairy would look like actually. she slayed in The Wind. i mean. look at Her"

Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan, one of the world’s most pre-eminent and prolific scholars of African history, passed away early yesterday morning in New York City at the stunning age of 97.

It was only fitting that one of the most courageous and inspiring scholars of our time would live for nearly a century, paying personal witness to dramatic transformations in the lives of Black people across the globe. But more than anyone, Dr. Ben—as he was affectionally called by generations of his devoted followers—knew that a world transformed was not a world complete. Black people might have lifted themselves from widespread subjugation, but they still suffered and were far from the glorious civilizations in Africa about which Dr. Ben taught millions of eager charges.

One of his many specialties was the ancient civilization of Kemet in Egypt. He was one of the first true Egyptologists, before that title had even come into vogue. Dr. Ben was always a controversial figure because he had no interest in trying to placate white scholars or writers who were threatened by his claims about Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

Because generations of white orthodoxy had moved the Western world to accept as fact questionable scholarship about the preeminence of European rulers and thinkers, Dr. Ben was always willing to take down these Western myths, one by one.

Dr. Ben turned 97 on New Year’s Eve and had plans to celebrate many more. But his friends took note of his diminishing appetite—though close colleagues like Dr. Leonard Jeffries and Prof. James Small were forced to go onto the Internet earlier this month to debunk rumors that he had already passed. At 3:30 am on Thursday morning, he bid his farewell.

“He was one of last great race men of his era,” Nayaba Arinde, Amsterdam News Editor, said on the Amsterdam News website. “He was a master teacher who just wanted to share our amazing African history. He was a man of the people. He was always amongst us, educating, and sharing. Sitting with him was a gift of tremendous proportions. He was loved, and he loved his people.”

He was like a library of African history onto himself, as if a wing of one of the world’s great research institutions had been poured into one brain and become ambulatory.

For those in the New York tri-state area in the 1970s and 1980s, he was a familiar presence and voice from his frequent appearances on Gil Noble’s weekly Black-focused television show “Like It Is” and on the Afrocentric radio station WLIB. It was an important time for him to spread his teachings about the glory of ancient African civilizations—coming out of the tumult of the Civil Rights Movement and the uplifting of the Black Power Movement, young Black people were eager to soak up his words, to extend their communion with their past far beyond the enraging lessons of slavery.

He often worked together with another legendary scholar, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, who died in 1998.

During his immense life, Dr. Ben journeyed from his birth in Ethiopia, to a Puerto Rican mother and an Ethiopian father, studying in institutions ranging from Puerto Rico to Cuba to Brazil to Spain. After earning a B.S. in Civil Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, he went on to earn a Master’s degree in Architectural Engineering from the University of Havana, Cuba and then doctoral degrees in Cultural Anthropology and Moorish History from the University of Havana and the University of Barcelona, Spain.

He taught many years at such institutions as City College in New York City and Cornell University.

His authorship extended to 49 books, many focusing on Egypt and the civilizations of the Nile Valley.

In 2002, Dr. Ben—who lived in Harlem his later years—donated to the Nation of Islam his personal library of more than 35,000 volumes, manuscripts and ancient scrolls.

“Of all our greats, Dr. Ben physically took tens of thousands of scholars, activists, students and associations to the Nile Valley to make the pages of his book more authentic,” said his colleague, Reggie Mabry. “We saw our own experiences of what he wrote… For that the Black world is indebted to this Black man of the Nile and his family.”

The Sex Education Pamphlet That Sparked a Landmark Censorship Case

https://sciencespies.com/history/the-sex-education-pamphlet-that-sparked-a-landmark-censorship-case/

The Sex Education Pamphlet That Sparked a Landmark Censorship Case

Mary Ware Dennett wrote The Sex Side of Life in 1915 as a teaching tool for her teenage sons. Photo illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos courtesy of Sharon Spaulding and Newspapers.com

It only took 42 minutes for an all-male jury to convict Mary Ware Dennett. Her crime? Sending a sex education pamphlet through the mail.

Charged with violating the Comstock Act of 1873—one of a series of so-called chastity laws—Dennett, a reproductive rights activist, had written and illustrated the booklet in question for her own teenage sons, as well as for parents around the country looking for a new way to teach their children about sex.

Lawyer Morris Ernst filed an appeal, setting in motion a federal court case that signaled the beginning of the end of the country’s obscenity laws. The pair’s victory marked the zenith of Dennett’s life work, building on her previous efforts to publicize and increase access to contraception and sex education. (Prior to the trial, she was best known as the more conservative rival of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.) Today, however, United States v. Dennett and its defendant are relatively unknown.

“One of the reasons the Dennett case hasn’t gotten the attention that it deserves is simply because it was an incremental victory, but one that took the crucial first step,” says Laura Weinrib, a constitutional historian and law scholar at Harvard University. “First steps are often overlooked. We tend to look at the culmination and miss the progression that got us there.”

Dennett wrote the offending pamphlet (in blue) for her two sons.  

Sharon Spaulding / Dennett Family Archive

Dennett wrote the pamphlet in question, The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People, in 1915. Illustrated with anatomically correct drawings, it provided factual information, offered a discussion of human physiology and celebrated sex as a natural human act.

“[G]ive them the facts,” noted Dennett in the text, “… but also give them some conception of sex life as a vivifying joy, as a vital art, as a thing to be studied and developed with reverence for its big meaning, with understanding of its far-reaching reactions, psychologically and spiritually.”

After Dennett’s 14-year-old son approved the booklet, she circulated it among friends who, in turn, shared it with others. Eventually, The Sex Side of Life landed on the desk of editor Victor Robinson, who published it in his Medical Review of Reviewsin 1918. Calling the pamphlet “a splendid contribution,” Robinson added, “We know nothing that equals Mrs. Dennett’s brochure.” Dennett, for her part, received so many requests for copies that she had the booklet reprinted and began selling it for a quarter to anyone who wrote to her asking for one.

These transactions flew in the face of the Comstock Laws, federal and local anti-obscenity legislation that equated birth control with pornography and rendered all devices and information for the prevention of conception illegal. Doctors couldn’t discuss contraception with their patients, nor could parents discuss it with their children.

Dennett as a young woman

Sharon Spaulding / Dennett Family Archive

The Sex Side of Life offered no actionable advice regarding birth control. As Dennett acknowledged in the brochure, “At present, unfortunately, it is against the law to give people information as to how to manage their sex relations so that no baby will be created.” But the Comstock Act also stated that any printed material deemed “obscene, lewd or lascivious”—labels that could be applied to the illustrated pamphlet—was “non-mailable.” First-time offenders faced up to five years in prison or a maximum fine of $5,000.

In the same year that Dennett first wrote the brochure, she co-founded the National Birth Control League (NBCL), the first organization of its kind. The group’s goal was to change obscenity laws at a state level and unshackle the subject of sex from Victorian morality and misinformation.

By 1919, Dennett had adopted a new approach to the fight for women’s rights. A former secretary for state and national suffrage associations, she borrowed a page from the suffrage movement, tackling the issue on the federal level rather than state-by-state. She resigned from the NBCL and founded the Voluntary Parenthood League, whose mission was to pass legislation in Congress that would remove the words “preventing conception” from federal statutes, thereby uncoupling birth control from pornography.

Dennett soon found that the topic of sex education and contraception was too controversial for elected officials. Her lobbying efforts proved unsuccessful, so in 1921, she again changed tactics. Though the Comstock Laws prohibited the dissemination of obscene materials through the mail, they granted the postmaster general the power to determine what constituted obscenity. Dennett reasoned that if the Post Office lifted its ban on birth control materials, activists would win a partial victory and be able to offer widespread access to information.

Postmaster General William Hays, who had publicly stated that the Post Office should not function as a censorship organization, emerged as a potential ally. But Hays resigned his post in January 1922 without taking action. (Ironically, Hays later established what became known as the Hays Code, a set of self-imposed restrictions on profanity, sex and morality in the motion picture industry.) Dennett had hoped that the incoming postmaster general, Hubert Work, would fulfill his predecessor’s commitments. Instead, one of Work’s first official actions was to order copies of the Comstock Laws prominently displayed in every post office across America. He then declared The Sex Side of Life “unmailable” and “indecent.”

Mary Ware Dennett, pictured in the 1940s

Dennett Family Archive

Undaunted, Dennett redoubled her lobbying efforts in Congress and began pushing to have the postal ban on her booklet removed. She wrote to Work, pressing him to identify which section was obscene, but no response ever arrived. Dennett also asked Arthur Hays, chief counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), to challenge the ban in court. In letters preserved at Radcliffe College’s Schlesinger Library, Dennett argued that her booklet provided scientific and factual information. Though sympathetic, Hays declined, believing that the ACLU couldn’t win the case.

By 1925, Dennett—discouraged, broke and in poor health—had conceded defeat regarding her legislative efforts and semi-retired. But she couldn’t let the issue go entirely. She continued to mail The Sex Side of Life to those who requested copies and, in 1926, published a book titled Birth Control Laws: Shall We Keep Them, Change Them, or Abolish Them?

Publicly, Dennett’s mission was to make information about birth control legal; privately, however, her motivation was to protect other women from the physical and emotional suffering she had endured.

The activist wed in 1900 and gave birth to three children, two of whom survived, within five years. Although the specifics of her medical condition are unknown, she likely suffered from lacerations of the uterus or fistulas, which are sometimes caused by childbirth and can be life-threatening if one becomes pregnant again.

Without access to contraceptives, Dennett faced a terrible choice: refrain from sexual intercourse or risk death if she conceived. Within two years, her husband had left her for another woman.

Dennett obtained custody of her children, but her abandonment and lack of access to birth control continued to haunt her. Eventually, these experiences led her to conclude that winning the vote was only one step on the path to equality. Women, she believed, deserved more.

In 1928, Dennett again reached out to the ACLU, this time to lawyer Ernst, who agreed to challenge the postal ban on the Sex Side of Life in court. Dennett understood the risks and possible consequences to her reputation and privacy, but she declared herself ready to “take the gamble and be game.” As she knew from press coverage of her separation and divorce, newspaper headlines and stories could be sensational, even salacious. (The story was considered scandalous because Dennett’s husband wanted to leave her to form a commune with another family.)

Dennett cofounded the National Birth Control League, the first organization of its kind in the U.S., in 1915. Three years later, she launched the Voluntary Parenthood League, which lobbied Congress to change federal obscenity laws.

Sharon Spaulding / Dennett Family Archive

“Dennett believed that anyone who needed contraception should get it without undue burden or expense, without moralizing or gatekeeping by the medical establishment,” says Stephanie Gorton, author of Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell and the Magazine That Rewrote America. “Though she wasn’t fond of publicity, she was willing to endure a federal obscenity trial so the next generation could have accurate sex education—and learn the facts of life without connecting them with shame or disgust.”

In January 1929, before Ernst had finalized his legal strategy, Dennett was indicted by the government. Almost overnight, the trial became national news, buoyed by The Sex Side of Life’s earlier endorsement by medical organizations, parents’ groups, colleges and churches. The case accomplished a significant piece of what Dennett had worked 15 years to achieve: Sex, censorship and reproductive rights were being debated across America.

During the trial, assistant U.S. attorney James E. Wilkinson called the Sex Side of Life “pure and simple smut.” Pointing at Dennett, he warned that she would “lead our children not only into the gutter, but below the gutter and into the sewer.”

None of Dennett’s expert witnesses were allowed to testify. The all-male jury took just 45 minutes to convict. Ernst filed an appeal.

In May, following Dennett’s conviction but prior to the appellate court’s ruling, an investigative reporter for the New York Telegram uncovered the source of the indictment. A postal inspector named C.E. Dunbar had been “ordered” to investigate a complaint about the pamphlet filed by an official with the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). Using the pseudonym Mrs. Carl Miles, Dunbar sent a decoy letter to Dennett requesting a copy of the pamphlet. Unsuspecting, Dennett mailed the copy, thereby setting in motion her indictment, arrest and trial. (Writing about the trial later, Dennett noted that the DAR official who allegedly made the complaint was never called as a witness or identified. The activist speculated, “Is she, perhaps, as mythical as Mrs. Miles?”)

Dennett’s is a name that deserves to be known.

When news of the undercover operation broke, Dennett wrote to her family that “support for the case is rolling up till it looks like a mountain range.” Leaders from the academic, religious, social and political sectors formed a national committee to raise money and awareness in support of Dennett; her name became synonymous with free speech and sex education.

In March 1930, an appellate court reversed Dennett’s conviction, setting a landmark precedent. It wasn’t the full victory Dennett had devoted much of her life to achieving, but it cracked the legal armor of censorship.

“Even though Mary Ware Dennett wasn’t a lawyer, she became an expert in obscenity law,” says constitutional historian Weinrib. “U.S. v. Dennett was influential in that it generated both public enthusiasm and money for the anti-censorship movement. It also had a tangible effect on the ACLU’s organizational policies, and it led the ACLU to enter the fight against all forms of what we call morality-based censorship.”

Ernst was back in court the following year. Citing U.S. v. Dennett, he won two lawsuits on behalf of British sex educator Marie Stopes and her previously banned books, Married Love and Contraception. Then, in 1933, Ernst expanded on arguments made in the Dennett case to encompass literature and the arts. He challenged the government’s ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses and won, in part because of the precedent set by Dennett’s case. Other important legal victories followed, each successively loosening the legal definition of obscenity. But it was only in 1970 that the Comstock Laws were fully struck down.

Ninety-two years after Dennett’s arrest, titles dealing with sex continue to top the list of the American Library Association’s most frequently challenged books. Sex education hasn’t fared much better. As of September 2021, only 18 states require sex education to be medically accurate, and only 30 states mandate sex education at all. The U.S. has one of the highestteen pregnancy rates of all developed nations.

What might Dennett think or do if she were alive today? Lauren MacIvor Thompson, a historian of early 20th-century women’s rights and public health at Kennesaw State University, takes the long view:

While it’s disheartening that we are fighting the same battles over sex and sex education today, I think that if Dennett were still alive, she’d be fighting with school boards to include medically and scientifically accurate, inclusive, and appropriate information in schools. … She’d [also] be fighting to ensure fair contraceptive and abortion access, knowing that the three pillars of education, access and necessary medical care all go hand in hand.

At the time of Dennett’s death in 1947, The Sex Side of Life had been translated into 15 languages and printed in 23 editions. Until 1964, the activist’s family continued to mail the pamphlet to anyone who requested a copy.

 “As a lodestar in the history of marginalized Americans claiming bodily autonomy and exercising their right to free speech in a cultural moment hostile to both principles,” says Gorton, “Dennett’s is a name that deserves to be known.”

Activism

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#History

Xiao Zhan: It’s Your Turn

Translator’s Note: This article comes from VogueMe Magazine 2020 Feb Issue.

Currently, the trend in the entertainment business is to get famous overnight, the statistics dictate everything – a drama, a variety show, a song… all of which could give birth to a super idol, fame, commercial value and opportunities that come along with it. In 2019, the drama “The Untamed”, adapted from an internet novel, became this window of opportunity. This is the story of a young man who received the opportunity. And like other idols created by their era, his fanbase grew immensely, radiating throughout the youth, his name etched in time. All of these simply points to this – it’s now Xiao Zhan’s turn.

1

The summer of 2015, Xiao Zhan had not yet realized that he was going to job switch from the design firm opened by his teacher. The teacher did not feel so as well – as Xiao Zhan left for the talent search variety show, he told him, “Go play, come back to work once you’ve been eliminated.”

The show was called “X-FIRE”, and positions itself as a large scaled youth talent development inspirational show. During broadcast, the description says “16 secretly trained youths painstakingly selected from a few thousand 16-24 year olds”. At that time, Xiao Zhan was 23 years old – nearing the upper age limit.

Xiao Zhan just wanted to “play around a bit”. He felt that he would be just touring for a round, and he would be back after a week. As the former class Cultural Committee Member in his university, Xiao Zhan loved singing, won quite a few inter-school cultural activities awards, but never trained in dance-singing. Xiao Zhan, who graduated in graphic design, learnt drawing since young, but never thought of becoming an artist, because “it is hard to survive as an artist, you still need to earn a living”. He was willing to lead a simple life and go to work everyday, with a direct and clear life plan – as a graphic designer, do his work well, then open his own firm.

The summer 4 years later, the name “Xiao Zhan” meant a lot of different things – a member of a pop group, the lead actor of one of the most popular drama, the owner of a Weibo account with more than 22million followers, or as what Chinese entertainment business puts it – a “top traffic”. The topics and imagery surrounding him includes – Xiao Zhan’s looks, Xiao Zhan’s design talent, Xiao Zhan’s professionalism, Xiao Zhan’s role as Wei Wuxian…

And like the other idols who broke out in this era, he has his own set of records – moderators of Bilibili (a video hosting site in China) nagged that his drama fans uploaded so much of his videos that they “almost see him 800 times a day”, Xiao Zhan was jokingly proclaimed as “The Man who caused the Bloodbath of Bilibili”; he became the cover person of a magazine, and the two mobile sales platform app broke down consecutively on the day of the sales; his popularity in 2020 only got higher – on 9 Jan, according to Tian Mao statistics (TN: Taobao eShopping Mall), the Portrait magazine, where he was the cover person, sold out 100,000 copies in 3 seconds, overall sales exceeding 13million Chinese yuan, a poster was spread all around the internet with the accompanying text “a fandom that brought paper media back from its grave” – this is the Xiao Zhan statistics.

But different from the breakout idols, Xiao Zhan did not encounter major controversies (TN: This was published early Feb), and his career did not seem to go through much fluctuations. He never thought that he would be at this point – “Sometimes you’re not ready, but life has already pushed you to ahead. What you can do is to quickly keep up with the pace.” He is now at the stage where any of his actions are “studied under a magnifying glass”, but he feels that his stress levels are not as high as his previous few years, “the past few years, I had the drive but nowhere to use that, now I know how to work hard.”

2

During the initial auditions, Xiao Zhan still continued to work as per normal, go onstage – sing – leave, which was quite fun. After the selection down to 32 persons, he did not think much of it, and left his work to go to Beijing to practice the dance for the variety show. After the selection down to 16 persons, he practiced everything – dancing, vocals and flexibility training.

He did not think much of what would happen later. The winter in Beijing was especially cold, after the show recording, it would be around 3am or 4am, and there would be fans waiting for him outside of the studio – Xiao Zhan felt quite sorry for them, “All are young girls, it’s so cold and so dark.” He felt surreal having fans. When the 16 of them went to Zhejiang TV “Running 2016” New Year Eve performance, he saw the stage and felt that it was especially big and he was especially happy, and kept making sure he remembered the moves so as not to make any mistakes. After the final battle, Xiao Zhan’s team lost, but he and a few of his teammates were rescued by fan votes.

In 2016, Xiao Zhan debuted as part of X-Nine. During the signing of the contract, Xiao Zhan finally realized that he was going to make a career switch. “When you look at it now, 23 year old is also still a child, but no one took me as a child then.” – Xiao Zhan was the oldest in the group, he made his own decision to sign the contract, he thought that if it did not work out, he could go back to work, there was no need for him to paint himself into a corner.

3½ years after his debut, Artist Xiao Zhan still had to explain to interviewers his obsession with going to work. That day, he had a pimple on the left side of his face, and the makeup artist was applying essences on his face. The makeup room was simply a curtained area in the basement of the Art Gallery, full of passing staff, the editor was discussing the shooting schedule with his manager, the stylist was here delivering clothes, and he sat there with his eyes closed, allowing others to apply whatever it is on his face.

Xiao Zhan’s eyes are long, and also wide, he is very fair and his side profile is graceful and beautiful. With his looks, one would imagine that his personality would be cooler, more introvert, with mild melancholy, like those prince-like male leads in romantic dramas. But his personality does not really match his looks – he is serious, disciplined, he does not talk much initially, but overall he is a relaxed person, and quite funny occasionally.

“A lot of art students do not want to go to work,” the interviewer said. Xiao Zhan learnt drawing since young, some of his happiest moments in his childhood would be to win drawing awards or to have his works praised by his teachers, other unimportant happy moments includes had a good lunch, went to an amusement park, or had a liking for a girl in high school.

“They never went through the society school of hard knocks,” Xiao Zhan said. He described himself as someone who went through “quite a fair bit of knocking”. Since young, his father thought him to be independent, taught him budgeting, and told him stories about Bill Gates’s children… “I wanted to say, god, you’re not Bill Gates.” Despite all these, Xiao Zhan stopped using his parents’ money ever since his university graduation.

Xiao Zhan not only learnt drawing, he also learnt violin, go and Chinese calligraphy… pushed him to study in “National Key” middle school, “National Key” high school (TN: National Key refers to the top range of schools in China). He was an obedient child, but as a standard art student, Xiao Zhan was better in humanity subjects, and his math was not good, hence all the while he had always been the mid-bottom of the pack, which worried his family of 3 quite a fair bit.

Studying graphic design in university, Xiao Zhan felt that his university life was quite comfortable – everyday before class he would adjust himself a bit, although in the end it seemed like it did not work well after all, but at least his results were decent. Xiao Zhan emphasized that he was “definitely not the school hottie”. He was a good student. After he had learnt what the teachers taught, he started a studio on the side. The design studio would take on poster and logo design work; the photography studio only have 3 persons, Xiao Zhan did the photo taking, the other 2 did lighting. Before graduation he went to intern in a design firm, hence it was easy for him to find a job. Within a year of working, his monthly salary was around 4,000 to 5,000 Chinese Yuan, which would quite alright for Chongqing at that point in time.

Being part of a boy group releasing albums, shooting web dramas. The way to do things right was quite different from his previous job – his characterization in the group is a warm guy, although Xiao Zhan did not like characterization, he seriously fulfilled his role, and he was obedient. When someone in the variety show suggested that he lose some weight, he replied “I’m quite thin already I still have to lose weight”. As a commoner, Xiao Zhan was 183cm and 150lbs, his mother would always say he was too thin, and he felt so himself as well. That person showed him the film, “the camera lens is a really scary thing, I literally looked like a ball”. It was not easy for Xiao Zhan to lose weight, so he did it brutally. He was so hungry that he dreamed that he was eating. Xiao Zhan is now 127lbs, but this was not his thinnest.

“How was it like after debut?” “Unoccupied.” (TN: Xiao Zhan used the Chinese phrase “picking at his feet” to describe the state of emptiness.) Xiao Zhan’s words were paced and gentle, most were caught unawares by the sudden switch to casual humor, he might not be laughing, after others laughed he would continue his conversation seriously.

After his debut, he felt that he was freer than the times when he was still an intern. But he did not allow himself to stay free, he took vocal and dancing lessons, making sure that he could do sing-dancing to the best of his abilities. But he was still a bit lost – when he was still a designer, his future was clear and straight, but after his debut he had no clue where his future led to.

3

“I could count the number of dramas I’ve acted in with my fingers,” Xiao Zhan said. After which, he started counting them – “Battle through the Heavens”, “The Wolf”, “Oh! My Emperor”, “The Untamed”, “Joy of Life”, “Jade Dynasty”, “The Oath of Love”… the earliest work “Super Star Academy” was not counted – It was shot with his boy group, he was still fat, and he had no clue what he was doing.

Acting was his own idea. When he started auditioning he had not even attended any performance classes, he saw the director, took a piece of paper that indicated the scene and lines, and just went for it. Xiao Zhan did not feel that it was awkward, it was something he wanted to do, so he would do so without any inhibitions, and grasp every opportunity to do so. Singing was something that he always liked, his first single after debut was a song voted by his fans. With the stage and his fans, with attention, he would always want to do it better. Acting was something totally foreign to him.

The first turning point was “The Wolf”. When auditioning, within 2 hours, Xiao Zhan had tried many roles – the bounty hunter who was threatening someone, the prince whose brother was about to be executed… Xiao Zhan won the role of the bounty hunter – the 4th character on the character roll, Ji Chong. During the pre-shoot training he was still acting in “Battle through the Heavens”, daytime he would be shooting, nighttime he would be having performance classes. He did not feel it was tough then, as long as he had time to sleep. “Work is something I am willing to do, I will only feel very motivated, tomorrow must be done better than today.” Xiao Zhan liked Wei Wuxian, felt that he was vivid. When acting, during the first month he would be second guessing himself everyday, is the portrayal accurate? Would the audience accept it? Xiao Zhan checked with the director everyday. After a month, he stopped asking, he felt that he was Wei Wuxian. Dramas adapted from web novels are rarely positively received, his hopes for Wei Wuxian was that “I hope people would not dislike the character because of my acting”.

The summer of 2019, the drama aired, and the real turning point arrived.

Billions of fans, frequent trending topics on Weibo, appearing on multiple magazine covers and even causing the sales platform app to crash…

He is one of the few artists in Weibo that sets his account as “only posts in the past 6 months are viewable”, but it did not affect his popularity. His interaction with his fans are witty, the statistics are more than enough to attract attention. Last year on the Chinese Valentine’s Day (TN: 7th of the 7th Lunar month), he posted a photo informing his fans that he had put on weight, his pants folded up, legs in the swimming pool. One of his fans replied, “Fine, good to know that your leg hairs are doing fine.” This reply was boosted to the top with 190,000 likes.

“After watching ‘The Untamed’ and ‘Joy of Life’ and then meeting you, I feel like you are very similar to your performance method, calm. You are like an AI, whatever you do you’re especially precise.” “You’re highly professional.” The interviewer concluded.

At the start of the conversation, Xiao Zhan just finished an exterior photo shoot, we were both seated, leaning forward and warming hands above the radiator. He said, “Artist is just a job, I don’t like artists to place themselves on a pedestal, just like today you are the reporter who is interviewing me, today I am someone being interviewed. Cooperation, is just so that we can complete our jobs, coming in for the photo shoot is my job today, every single staff is also executing this job, it’s just the role is different.” Because he went through the society “school of hard knocks”, he respected and understood the truth behind teamwork.

As someone who once had to face clients, he knew how it felt as someone at the receiving end of endless unreasonable requests, and therefore he did not want to be someone like that. His standards for work is consistent – high efficiency, good results, everyone is happy, no one has to serve another person. Also “once I am done I will knock off, after I knock off no one should come find me, let me be alone.”

“Everyone works to fulfill their needs, they have entertainment after they knock off, they have freedom and privacy. As a public figure, artist, the product is yourself, the works are also yourself. You have to output materials, contribute works, and then gain the opportunity to grow, for higher social status, value and better lifestyle. For some people, besides their career, they also included their dreams,” the interviewer said.

“The understanding is very thorough. You win some, you lose some, after becoming a public figure it meant that there are multiple pairs of eyes staring at you, anything you do would be judged. Whether it is positive or misguided. Truth and falsehoods, isn’t this circle just like this? Whether the rumors or the gossip is true or false, who knows?” Xiao Zhan said.

4

On 5 Jan 2020, Xiao Zhan was working in a sculpture garden in Shanghai Songjiang, shooting a series of photographs to be the cover of VogueMe. It was cold, the gallery’s doors were open, and the wind blew from the first floor to the basement. Everyone was wearing winter jackets.

In the morning, beside the metal sculpture on the first floor, Xiao Zhan and model Chen Yu faced the camera separately. As the shutters rolled, they did not exchange glances or touch each other. As the photographer requested the model to sit on the ground, Xiao Zhan said his only sentence to her, “Careful your head.” and used his hands to shield her head from the protruding portion of the sculpture.

That day’s Weibo opening advertisement was also Xiao Zhan. As per the photographer’s request, he tilted his head up slightly and gave a cold gaze, or side glancing a faraway place, but also at the same time, he was smiling sweetly on mobile phone screens, promoting a series of instant food products.

In the afternoon, the team went to the exterior, to a concrete sculpture beside the gallery entrance, where he and the model stood in front of, facing the camera. The arm was on the model’s shoulders, and the two of them looked at the camera – he was even thinner than the model. In yet another set, the staff erected a ladder to one of the rooftop grass patches on the gallery buildings. An ice cold rock slab was selected, which the assistant padded using a jacket, and tested the light levels. After which, it was Xiao Zhan’s turn. He was wearing a red jacket with blue shirt, wearing a baseball cap, lying on his side on the rock slab, supporting his head with his arm. In between shoots, the assisted would hand him a long wool top, with deep blue diamond checks, quite thin. The top was flipped over, he slipped his hands into the sleeves to protect the front of his body, his assistant handed over another water bottle that contained warm mineral water to warm his hands. Xiao Zhan basically did not speak, he placed the bottle on his neck to gain some warmth.

An artist’s job, the profession included losing weight, staying hungry, freezing and staying up overnight, wearing winter clothes in summer is the norm, not drinking water prior to any shoots to prevent water bloating on screen… people who do those well may become famous, if they look good or are lucky they may become even more famous. Now Xiao Zhan has an opportunity, and like his previous job, he chose to be down-to-earth and do it well.

In the evening, the green screens were setup in basement 2 of the gallery. 17:44, Xiao Zhan was in position, his manager reminded the stylist to take note of the clothes’ proportion – “The sweater is too long.” Hence, the sweater was folded up. After the camera assistant brought down the Apple machines, the cameraman adjusted his machines, and started shooting the video. Quite a few scenes were done in one take, in the middle there was a break, the manager and the camera crew were discussing camera positions. This was the 10th hour of the shoot, Xiao Zhan sat behind the table, laid his head on a prop gift box and waited quietly – we could not see if he was tired or not.

The shoot ended, and the sky was already dark. Xiao Zhan has not yet knocked off. The media had ended their work, the manager was darting around, arranging for Xiao Zhan to change out and get on his car, to rush to his rehearsal that night – they were already behind schedule. Both teams bid their farewell, Xiao Zhan warm and gentle, still unclear whether he was tired. After less than an hour’s journey, he would need to go onstage to sing, and thereafter, his work would be to complete the costume testing of 20 different sets of clothes.

The Initial Cold

The time set for the shoot was 9am, Xiao Zhan arrived at the rural set at 8.30am. His overnight flight arrived only the day before, meeting Xiao Zhan on the cold morning of a deep southern winter, his spirits looked great, his face having the same kindness as usual. The endless job schedules taught him how to conserve his energy – no casual conversation, not even to his staff; take every opportunity to eat or rest; absolutely no procrastination, ensure efficiency, do his best to accommodate and complete every job. He is a highly disciplined and professional artist.

In this shoot, the warm, gentle smiles have been replaced by cold, sharp glares, the metal and concrete sculptures gave him a few minutes of inner emotions and narrative, his scenes with the model was almost like he was acting in the set of “Last Year at Marienbad”. Xiao Zhan displayed emotions and charm very different from usual self – this is the power of an actor. The darker filters and monochrome imagery restored the caution that the youth of his age would have, it was the concealed feelings of a sunny boy. With such an idol, not only he can warm your hearts, there are still much to expect from him.

The Royal Fascinator Friday, May 01, 2020 Hello, royal watchers and all those intrigued by what’s going on inside the House of Windsor. This is your biweekly dose of royal news and analysis. Reading this online? Sign up here to get this delivered to your inbox. Janet Davison Janet Davison Royal Expert

Sophie: The royal who ‘just gets on with it

She has been packing groceries in recent days, volunteering at a kitchen and talking to paramedics. There hasn’t been much fanfare around her actions in support of those working in the battle against COVID-19 — but then again, when Sophie, Countess of Wessex, does her royal business, that’s the way it tends to be. “Sophie does everything very quietly, partly because the media don’t follow her obsessively as they do with William and Catherine and partly because the things she does aren’t necessarily very glamorous,” said Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine, via email. That’s exactly what the Royal Family needs, Seward suggests: “someone who just gets on with things regardless of the attention they receive.” Seward likens Sophie, who joined the Royal Family when she married the Queen’s youngest son, Prince Edward, in 1999, to her sister-in-law, Princess Anne. Seward said given that Anne is nearly 70, she thinks Sophie “will take over from her as being the hardest-working royal. [Sophie] approaches her role in an unfussy way and just gets on with it.” That low-key approach has not gone unnoticed by her mother-in-law. Sophie “goes about her duty diligently, quietly and without a great deal of fuss, and for that the Queen adores her,” said Vanity Fair’s royal correspondent, Katie Nicholl, via email. “They are very close and spend a lot of time together when they are in Windsor, and the Queen loves riding with her grandchildren James and Louise.” It’s a closeness observers say goes back years. Sophie’s arrival in the family came in the wake — and in some ways the shadow — of Diana, wife of Edward’s older brother Prince Charles. Some saw Sophie as a new Diana, Seward said, “which of course she wasn’t.” “She hated the comparison as she knew she never would or should try to live up to it.” Louise's birth in November 2003 was difficult, as Sophie almost died as a result of blood loss. “People saw how much the Queen cared about her, visiting her in hospital, which is unheard of,” Seward said. “Gradually and without being pushy, she became the Queen’s closest companion — they share a love of military history and a wicked sense of humour.” That’s not to say it’s all been smooth sailing for Sophie. After her marriage, she continued in her career, but quit as head of a public relations company in 2001 after embarrassing comments she made were secretly recorded by a tabloid reporter posing as an Arab sheik and published in the News of the World. Seward suggests the Queen remained supportive of her daughter-in-law, and ultimately decided it would be better if Sophie and Edward worked as full-time royals. “Ever since then, Sophie has appeared looking glamorous when needed and workmanlike when needed.” She has visited Canada several times, sometimes with Prince Edward, sometimes on her own. The last visit came last fall, with two low-profile days in Toronto. Much of the time was spent at Toronto Western and Toronto General hospitals. She talked with critically ill patients and showed a "great warmth" and a "real, genuine skill in listening," Kevin Smith, president and chief executive officer of the University Health Network, said at the time. With turmoil and uncertainty in the upper echeolons of the Royal Family these days —  Prince Harry and Meghan stepping back to seek their independence, Prince Andrew stepping back amid controversy over his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — questions have arisen over just how the House of Windsor will approach the future. Some suggest Sophie will find herself in a more prominent role. “We are already seeing Edward and Sophie doing more to support the royals and I think that’s going to be the case moving forward,” said Nicholl.

Royal birthdays — pandemic-style

T(The Duchess of Cambridge/Kensington Palace via AP)In any family, birthdays can come in bunches. For the Royal Family, there’s a real run of them in late April and early May. And this year, the pandemic has been reflected as some members of the family marked their annual milestones in recent days. Queen Elizabeth's 94th birthday was acknowledged more quietly than usual. The gun salutes that normally sound on April 21 were called off, with the Queen feeling they would not be appropriate at this time. Photos released to mark Prince Louis’s second birthday on April 23, taken by his mother, Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, showed the happy, colourful and messy aftermath of fingerpainting rainbows in support of the National Health Service. Other birthdays right around now include Louis’s sister Charlotte, who turns five on May 2, and their cousin, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, who will be one on May 6.

Harry and Meghan and the media —  again

Prince Harry and Meghan may be looking for a new life in Los Angeles, but some old issues appear to remain top of mind for them.The couple, who stepped back from the upper echelons of the Royal Family a month ago, caught observers somewhat off-guard the other day when they sent out a message saying they would no longer be co-operating with four British tabloid newspapers.It prompted some to wonder about the timing of the announcement, coming as it did during the pandemic, when such an issue might take a back seat to concerns over how to battle the coronavirus.Harry in particular has had a raucous relationship with the media, and the couple has also taken their battle into the courts.A few days ago, the first court hearing in a privacy case brought by Meghan against a tabloid for printing part of a letter to her father began at the High Court in London.Papers submitted in court included details of text messages Harry sent to Meghan’s father.The whole media swirl prompted Jonny Dymond, the BBC’s royal correspondent, to ask, “So will the real Duke and Duchess of Sussex please stand up?“There is the couple who provoke such sympathy in the court papers published today,” Dymond wrote recently. “And there's the couple who think now is the right time to exercise their quarrels with the bestselling papers of the nation that they have departed from.”

“Royally quotable“

As we approach World Immunization Week, I wanted to recognize the vital and urgent work being done by so many to tackle the pandemic; by those in the medical and scientific professions, at universities and research institutions, all united in working to protect us from COVID-19.”— 

The pandemic prompted Prince Philip to make a rare public statement on April 20. The 98-year-old Duke of Edinburgh, who has had a keen interest in science, has rarely been seen in public since he retired from public duties in the summer of 2017.

Royals in Canada

(Bill Croke/The Canadian Press)Princess Anne has been having something of a moment lately — or maybe several moments. One came late last fall, prompted by the feisty portrayal of her in Season 3 of the Netflix drama The Crown. And right now, the all-business, no-nonsense only daughter of the Queen and Prince Philip is the cover story for Vanity Fair.

But rewind 49 years, and Anne had her share of moments, too, some of them coming in Canada.

Much media attention was focused on the 20-year-old when she arrived with her parents to mark the 100th anniversary of British Columbia’s entry into Confederation.

As much as Anne was the focus of anticipation and attention during that trip in early May 1971, her royal duties were rather routine, even a bit mundane.

“Princess Anne made no official statement at the unveiling,” the Globe and Mail reported on May 5, after she officially opened Canada’s newest national park, Pacific Rim on Vancouver Island. “Her only function was to pull the cord that removed the flag from the rock face to unveil the plaque.”

Later, the Globe reported, Anne told the park superintendent “she was much impressed by the beauty and the picturesqueness of the park region.”

Our friends at CBC Archives have taken an in-depth look at the tour that took the royal visitors to Victoria, Vancouver, Kelowna, Vernon, Penticton, Williams Lake and Comox.

Royal reads 1.Prince Harry has told friends he misses his life in the Armed Forces. [Daily Telegraph]

2. Harry has also looked back on his time as a child, recording a special messageto celebrate the 75th anniversary of a book he and others loved in their younger years: Thomas the Tank Engine. [CBC

]3. King Henry VIII might not be the first person you think of as inspiration for how to live in self-isolation, but maybe he could offer some lessons on how to find comfort in quarantine. [The Guardian]Cheers!I’m always happy to hear from you. Send your ideas, comments, feedback and notes to [email protected]. Problems with the newsletter? Please let me know about any typos, errors or glitches.

Potential nominee profile: Amy Coney Barrett

Credit: University of Notre Dame

In November 2017, President Donald Trump released a revised list of potential Supreme Court nominees. The November 2017 list was an expanded version of two earlier lists, announced during the 2016 presidential campaign, from which then-candidate Trump pledged, if elected, to pick a successor to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died on February 13, 2016. First on the new list – because it was in alphabetical order – was Amy Coney Barrett, a Notre Dame law professor (and former Scalia clerk) who had recently been confirmed to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. Barrett’s confirmation hearings had received considerable attention after Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee – most notably, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California – grilled her on the role of her Catholic faith in judging. Feinstein’s criticism did not stop Barrett from being confirmed, and since then there has been speculation that it may have in fact strengthened her case to fill the seat that will be vacated by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy.

The 46-year-old Barrett grew up in Metrairie, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans, and attended St. Mary’s Dominican High School, a Catholic girls’ school in New Orleans. Barrett graduated magna cum laude from Rhodes College, a liberal arts college in Tennessee affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, in 1994. (Other high-profile alumni of the school include Abe Fortas, who served as a justice on the Supreme Court from 1965 to 1969 and Claudia Kennedy, the first woman to become a three-star general in the U.S. Army.) At Rhodes, she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and was also recognized as the most outstanding English major and for having the best senior thesis.

After graduating from Rhodes, Barrett went to law school at Notre Dame on a full-tuition scholarship. She excelled there as well: She graduated summa cum laude in 1997, received awards for having the best exams in 10 of her courses and served as executive editor of the school’s law review.

Barrett then held two high-profile conservative clerkships, first with Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, from 1997-1998 then with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, from 1998-1999. After leaving her Supreme Court clerkship, she spent a year practicing law at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, a prestigious Washington D.C. litigation boutique that also claims former U.S. solicitor general Seth Waxman, former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, and two regular contributors to this blog – John Elwood and editor Edith Roberts – as alums. Barrett went to Baker Botts, a Texas-based firm, after Miller Cassidy merged with the larger law firm, in 2000 and spent another year there before leaving for academia. To the chagrin of Democratic senators during her confirmation process, Barrett was only able to recall a few of the cases on which she had worked, and she indicated that she had not argued any appeals while in private practice.

Barrett spent a year as a law and economics fellow at George Washington University before heading to her alma mater, Notre Dame, in 2002 to teach federal courts, constitutional law and statutory interpretation. Barrett was named a professor of law at the school in 2010; four years later, she became the Diane and M.O. Research Chair of Law. Barrett twice received a “distinguished professor of the year” award, in 2010 and 2016.

While at Notre Dame, Barrett signed a 2012 “statement of protest” condemning the accommodation that the Obama administration created for religious employers who were subject to the ACA’s “birth control” mandate. The statement lamented that the accommodation “changes nothing of moral substance and fails to remove the assault on individual liberty and the rights of conscience which gave rise to the controversy.” Barrett was also a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, from 2005 to 2006 and then again from 2014 to 2017. In response to written questions from Democratic senators during her 7th Circuit confirmation process, Barrett indicated that she had rejoined the group because it gave her “the opportunity to speak to groups of interested, engaged students on topics of mutual interest,” but she added that she had never attended the group’s national convention.

The best insight into how Barrett might rule as a Supreme Court justice likely comes from her academic scholarship, an area in which she has been prolific. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that Trump wants a nominee with a “portfolio of solid academic writing,” and Barrett (perhaps more than any other nominee on the reported shortlist) fits that bill to a tee. Several of those articles, however, drew fire at Barrett’s 7th Circuit confirmation hearing, with Democratic senators suggesting that they indicate that Barrett would be influenced by her Catholic faith, particularly on the question of abortion.

Barrett co-wrote her first law review article, Catholic Judges in Capital Cases, with Notre Dame law professor John Garvey (now the president of the Catholic University of America); the article was published in the Marquette Law Review in 1998, shortly after her graduation from Notre Dame. It explored the effect of the Catholic Church’s teachings on the death penalty on federal judges, but it also used the church’s teachings on abortion and euthanasia as a comparison point, describing the prohibitions on abortion and euthanasia as “absolute” because they “take away innocent life.” The article also noted that, when the late Justice William Brennan was asked about potential conflict between his Catholic faith and his duties as a justice, he responded that he would be governed by “the oath I took to support the Constitution and laws of the United States”; Barrett and Garvey observed that they did not “defend this position as the proper response for a Catholic judge to take with respect to abortion or the death penalty.”

When questioned about the article at her 7th Circuit confirmation hearing, Barrett stressed that she did not believe it was “lawful for a judge to impose  personal opinions, from whatever source they derive, upon the law,” and she pledged that her views on abortion “or any other question will have no bearing on the discharge of my duties as a judge.” She acknowledged that, if she were instead being nominated to serve as a federal trial judge, she “would not enter an order of execution,” but she assured senators that she did not intend “as a blanket matter to recuse myself in capital cases if I am confirmed” and added that she had “fully participated in advising Justice Scalia in capital cases as a law clerk.”

Barrett’s responses did not mollify Feinstein, who suggested that Barrett had a “long history of believing that religious beliefs should prevail.” In a widely reported exchange, Feinstein told Barrett that, when “you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you. And that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country.”

In another article, Stare Decisis and Due Process, published in the University of Colorado Law Review, Barrett discussed the concept of stare decisis – a legal doctrine that generally requires courts to follow existing precedent, even if they might believe that it is wrong. Barrett wrote that courts and commentators “have thought about the kinds of reliance interests that justify keeping an erroneous decision on the books”; in a footnote, she cited (among other things) Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision reaffirming Roe v. Wade. Barrett’s detractors characterized the statement as criticism of Roe v. Wade itself, while supporters such as conservative legal activist Ed Whelan countered that the statement did not reflect Barrett’s views on Roe itself, but instead was just an example of competing opinions on the reliance interests in Roe.

Despite the criticism from Democrats, Barrett garnered bipartisan support at her 2017 confirmation hearing. A group of 450 former students signed a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, telling senators that their support was “driven not by politics, but by the belief that Professor Barrett is supremely qualified.” And she had the unanimous support of her 49 Notre Dame colleagues, who wrote that they had a “wide range of political views” but were “united however in our judgment about Amy.”

After Barrett’s confirmation hearing but before the Senate voted on her nomination, The New York Times reported that Barrett was a member of a group called People of Praise.” Group members, the Times indicated, “swear a lifelong oath of loyalty to one another, and are assigned and accountable to a personal adviser.” Moreover, the Times added, the group “teaches that husbands are the heads of their wives and should take authority for their family.” And legal experts questioned whether such oaths “could raise legitimate questions about a judicial nominee’s independence and impartiality.”

Barrett declined the Times’ request for an interview about People of Praise, whose website describes the group as an “ecumenical, charismatic, covenant community” modeled on the “first Christian community.” “Freedom of conscience,” the website says, “is a key to our diversity.” Slate recently interviewed the group’s leader, a physics and engineering professor at Notre Dame, who explained that members of the group “often make an effort to live near one another” and agree to donate 5% of their income to the group.

Barrett was confirmed to the 7th Circuit by a vote of 55 to 43. Three Democratic senators – her home state senator, Joe Donnelly, Virginia’s Tim Kaine, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia – crossed party lines to vote for her, while two Democratic senators (Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Robert Menendez of New Jersey) did not vote.

Because Barrett has spent just eight months on the 7th Circuit, she has compiled a relatively small body of opinions, most of them fairly uncontroversial. One case that would almost certainly draw attention if she were nominated came shortly after she took the bench: EEOC v. AutoZone, in which the federal government asked the full court of appeals to reconsider a ruling against the EEOC in its lawsuit against AutoZone, an auto parts store. The EEOC had argued that the store violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bars employees from segregating or classifying employees based on race, when it used race as a determining factor in assigning employees to different stores – for example, sending African-American employees to stores in heavily African-American neighborhoods. A three-judge panel (that did not include Barrett) ruled for AutoZone; Barrett joined four of her colleagues in voting to deny rehearing by the full court of appeals.

Three judges – Chief Judge Diane Wood and Judges Ilana Diamond Rovner and David Hamilton – would have granted rehearing en banc. Those three also had strong words in the dissenting opinion that they filed. They alleged that, under “the panel’s reasoning, this separate-but-equal arrangement is permissible under Title VII as long as the ‘separate’ facilities really are ‘equal’” – a conclusion, they continued, that is “contrary to the position that the Supreme Court has taken in analogous equal protection cases as far back as Brown v. Board of Education.”

Another high-profile case before the 7th Circuit involves the battle over “sanctuary cities” – jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. In June, the full court granted the federal government’s petition to reconsider part of a three-judge panel’s ruling that left in place a nationwide injunction against the federal government’s policy of withholding law-enforcement grants from such jurisdictions. The announcement means that the federal government can enforce the policy only against the city of Chicago, the plaintiff in the case. There is no way to know how Barrett voted on the government’s request, as the court’s order indicated only that a “majority of the judges participating in the en banc rehearing of this case” had voted in favor of the stay that the government had sought.

Barrett was also part of a panel that tackled another contentious issue in environmental and property law, as developers and farmers (among others) have contended that the federal government has gone too far: What constitutes the “waters of the United States” for purposes of determining whether the federal Clean Water Act applies to wetlands? In June of this year, Barrett joined a ruling written by Judge Amy St. Eve, also a Trump appointee to the 7th Circuit, that sent the case of an Illinois developer back to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for reconsideration. The Corps had found that the wetlands at issue – which were approximately 11 miles away from the nearest navigable river – were “waters of the United States,” but the panel (expressing some frustration) concluded that the determination by the Corps was not backed by “substantial evidence in the record” even though the “dispute has consumed almost as many years as the Warmke wetlands have acres.”

Barrett joined another ruling by St. Eve in the case of Kishunda Jones, who had been designated by her mother, Linda, as the beneficiary of her pension. When Linda, who suffered from a recurring form of cancer, died three days before her pension was supposed to begin, the committee that oversaw Linda’s pension rejected Kishunda’s request to receive the pension. It explained that, when a participant dies before her pension begins, only surviving spouses can receive a benefit from the pension. The panel agreed with the district court that the “facts of this case are undoubtedly unfortunate,” but it nonetheless upheld the district court’s ruling in favor of the pension fund on the ground that its decision was neither arbitrary nor capricious – all that the law requires in such a scenario.

In Schmidt v. Foster, Barrett dissented from the panel’s ruling in favor of a Wisconsin man who admitted that he had shot his wife seven times, killing her in their driveway. Scott Schmidt argued that he had been provoked, which would make his crime second-degree, rather than first-degree, homicide; the trial judge reviewed that claim at a pretrial hearing that prosecutors did not attend, and at which Schmidt’s attorney was not allowed to speak. The judge rejected Schmidt’s claim of provocation, and Schmidt was convicted of first-degree homicide and sentenced to life in prison. When Schmidt sought to overturn his conviction in federal court, the panel agreed that Schmidt had been denied his 6th Amendment right to counsel, and the court of appeals sent the case back to the lower court.

Barrett disagreed with her colleagues, in a separate opinion that began by  emphasizing that the standard for federal postconviction relief is “intentionally difficult because federal habeas review of state convictions” interferes with the states’ efforts to enforce their own laws. In this case, she contended, the state court’s decision rejecting Schmidt’s 6th Amendment claim could not have been “contrary to” or “an unreasonable application of” clearly established federal law (the requirement for relief in federal court) because the Supreme Court has never addressed a claim that a defendant has a right to counsel in a pretrial hearing like the one at issue in this case. While acknowledging that “[p]erhaps the right to counsel should extend to a hearing like the one the judge conducted in Schmidt’s case,” she warned that federal law “precludes us from disturbing a state court’s judgment on the ground that a state court decided an open question differently than we would—or, for that matter, differently than we think the [Supreme] Court would.”

In Akin v. Berryhill, Barrett joined a per curiam (that is, unsigned) decision in favor of a woman whose application for Social Security disability benefits had been denied by an administrative law judge (ALJ). The panel agreed with the woman, Rebecca Akin, that the ALJ had incorrectly “played doctor” by interpreting her MRI results on his own, and it instructed the ALJ to take another look at his determination that Akin was not credible. The panel indicated that it was “troubled by the ALJ’s purported use of objective medical evidence to discredit Akin’s complaints of disabling pain,” noting that fibromyalgia (one of Akin’s ailments) “cannot be evaluated or ruled out by using objective tests”; it also added that, among other things, the ALJ should not have discredited Akin’s choice to go with a more conservative course of treatment when she explained that “she was afraid of needles and that she wanted to wait until her children finished school before trying more invasive treatment.”

Barrett has been married for over 18 years to Jesse Barrett, who serves as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana. They have seven children (only two fewer than her old boss, Scalia). At her confirmation hearing, Barrett introduced three of her daughters, who were sitting behind her. She told senators that one daughter, then-13-year-old Vivian, was adopted from Haiti at the age of 14 months, weighing just 11 pounds; she was so weak at the time that the Barretts were told she might never walk normally or talk. The Barretts adopted a second child, Jon Peter, from Haiti after the 2011 earthquake, and Barrett described their youngest child, Benjamin, as having special needs that “present unique challenges for all of us.” Since becoming a judge, Barrett has reportedly commuted from her home in South Bend to Chicago, roughly 100 miles away, a few days a week; if she is nominated, she would likely move her family to the Washington, D.C., area and trade that commute for a shorter one to One First Street, N.E.

The post Potential nominee profile: Amy Coney Barrett appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

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CNN Analysts Unleash Personal Attacks On RNC Speakers In Twitter Storm

We have previously discussed the case of former Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann who was repeatedly and falsely called a racist in an encounter with a Native American activist in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Various media organizations have apologized or settled cases with Sandmann for their unfair coverage, including CNN. However, when Sandmann spoke at the Republic National Convention, CNN’s political analyst Joe Lockhart again attacked him personally after he criticized how the media got the story wrong.  CNN’s Jeff Yang also attacked the teenager and even suggested that his speech proved that he was not innocent. Fellow CNN analyst Asha Rangappa attacked former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley as yielding to a racist America for not using what Rangappa suggested was her real name as opposed to “Nikki.” It turns out that Nikki is her lawful middle name and the Hill’s Saagar Enjeti noted it is “a Punjabi name.” That however is an appeal to reason not rage which seems to have little place in our national discourse or media coverage.

The personal attacks on speakers were beyond the pale, but hardly unprecedented.  What happened to Sandmann was a disgrace for the media and he had every right to speak publicly about his treatment by the media.

Sandmann is a pro-life kid who wanted to demonstrate against abortion.  He sought to play a meaningful role in his political system, which is what we all have encouraged.  Indeed, CNN has aired many such calls for young people to have their voices heard. He was in Washington as part of the annual “March for Life.” This is one of those voices.  Sandmann spoke about his horrific experience in being labeled the aggressor in the confrontation when all he did was stand there as an activist pounded a drum in his face. Sandmann said this morning in an interview that he only learned at 3 am in the morning on the bus home that he was being labeled a racist who attacked or harassed this activist.

In addition to Lockhart, CNN opinion writer Jeff Yang said that the speech confirmed to him that he was guilty all along.

“Hey @N1ckSandmann, I watched your speech tonight at the #RNCConvention2020 with an open mind, thinking I might hear something that would convince me of your position that you were an innocent victim of a cruel media. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to hear otherwise.”

So Yang now believes Sandmann was the aggressor or the one who was at fault?  Yang even criticized Sandmann for not extending a “branch of peace” to Nathan Phillip, the Native American elder in the confrontation. Sandmann did nothing wrong in front of Lincoln Memorial. He just stood there as Phillip pounded a drum in his face.  Yet, Yang now believes that the media was not wrong or Sandmann innocent.

Yang previously personally attacked Pete Buttigieg for calling for a “vision shaped by the American Heartland rather than the ineffective Washington Politics.” Yang again viewed Buttigieg’s political statement as a license for personal insults: “Okay, gloves off: This is the bullshittiest quote of many bullshitty quotes from this man, whose vision was shaped by Harvard, Oxford, McKinsey & Company and a keenly honed sense of ambition. Dude, your dad was a lit professor and you went to a private prep school. Quit fronting.”  Nothing on the content of Buttigieg’s point. Just a personal attack from the CNN commentator.

The Sandmann controversy arose because of the very bias that Yang reaffirmed this week.  For many, the mere fact that he was wearing a MAGA hat was enough to declare him a racist.  An example that we previously discussed is the interview of “Above the Law” writer Joe Patrice with Elie Mystal. In the interview, Mystal, the Executive Editor of “Above the Law”, attacked this 16 year old boy as a racist.  Patrice agreed with Mystal’s objections to Sandmann wearing his “racist [MAGA] hat.” They also objected to Sandmann doing interviews trying to defend himself with Mystal deriding how this “17-year-old kid makes the George Zimmerman defense for why he was allowed to deny access to a person of color.” It was entirely false that Sandmann was denying “access to a person of color.”  Yet, the interview is an example of the criticism (which continued with Lockhart) of Sandmann speaking publicly about his treatment. Mystal and Patrice compared this high school student to a man who was accused of murdering an unarmed African American kid and continued to slam him even after the true facts were disclosed.

After his remarks at the RNC (which is not an easy thing for most teenagers to do), Lockhart declared on Twitter “I’m watching tonight because it’s important. But i [sic] don’t have to watch this snot nose entitled kid from Kentucky.”

Why is this teenager “entitled”?  Because he is discussing his role in a national controversy or his abuse by the media, including CNN? CNN settled with Sandmann. When did that become “entitled”? The message from these media personalities seems to be that Sandman is expected to simply stay silent and such interviews make him either a George Zimmerman wannabe or a textbook case of entitlement. Of course, media figures like Lockhart can continue to slam Sandmann, but he is . . .  well . . . entitled to do so.

Nikki Haley gave one of the most polished speeches at the RNC.  There is clearly much in the speech that many do not accept about racism in America. However, Haley lashed out that it is

“now fashionable to say that America is racist. That is a lie. America is not a racist country. This is personal for me. I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. They came to America and settled in a small Southern town. My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari. I was a Brown girl in a Black and White world. We faced discrimination and hardship. But my parents never gave in to grievance and hate. My mom built a successful business. My dad taught 30 years at a historically black college. And the people of South Carolina chose me as their first minority and first female governor. America is a story that’s a work in progress. Now is the time to build on that progress, and make America even freer, fairer, and better for everyone.”

That speech led to an immediate personal attack from Rangappa that Haley bowed to racism by dropping her real name: “Right. Is that why you went from going by Nimrata to ‘Nikki’?” Rangappa asked.

  The problem is that Haley birth name is Nimrata Nikki Randhawa. She is not the first politician to use her middle name like Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who goes by Boris. Then there is Willard Mitt Romney.  Was Romney denying his roots by going with Mitt? Yet when a minority member uses her middle name, it is somehow evidence that she is a racist tool.

What is telling is that, rather than address the underlying argument on systemic racism in our society, analysts like Rangappa prefer to attack Haley personally and suggest that she is some type of shill for racism. Why? Rangappa teaches at Yale and in academia such ad hominem attacks are viewed as the very antithesis of reasoned debate.  Likewise, in journalism, such attacks were once viewed as anathema, particularly when they are based on false assumptions.

There is much in these conventions to debate. In truth, I have never liked political conventions and view them all as virtually contentless. Nevertheless, there have been parts of the RNC that I have criticized, including the appearance last night of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a departure from past traditions of keeping such cabinet members out of political convention roles.  Once again, such important lines of separation were obliterated by the Trump Administration.  I also found reformed former felon John Ponder’s remarks to be powerful, but I agree with critics that the incorporation of a pardon signing into the events at a political convention to be wrong. I have also previously criticized the use of the White House for the political convention, including for the First Lady’s speech (which I also thought was a good speech).

Those are issue worthy of debate and people of good faith can disagree on the merits. That is a lot more productive than attacking an 18-year-old kid because he had the audacity to criticize the media and support President Trump.  There is, of course, a troubling entitlement evident in these stories. It is the entitlement enjoyed by media figures who feel total license to personally attack anyone who challenges their narrative or supports Trump. It is not just permitted but popular. This is why Merriam-Webster defines “entitlement” as the “belief that one is deserving of or entitled to certain privileges.”

      CNN Analysts Unleash Personal Attacks On RNC Speakers In Twitter Storm published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

Op-Ed:

Could the racist past of Mt. Rushmore’s creator bring down the monument?

"Is there any monument in the United States that’s too big to fail a racial history test?" asks guest opinion writer Timothy D. Dwyer.

Mt. Rushmore honors, from left, President Washington and President Jefferson, both slaveholders, and the racist President Theodore Roosevelt. Imagine the conversation President Lincoln would be having with his mountain-mates today. (Associated Press)

— By Timothy D. Dwyer | JULY 3, 2020 | Los Angeles Times

Confederate President Jefferson Davis has been toppled from the most iconic street in Richmond, Va., and his neighbor, rebel Gen. Robert E. Lee, may soon follow. A U.S. vice president and ardent slavery defender, John C. Calhoun, was plucked from his 115-foot perch in the center of Charleston, S.C. And President Theodore Roosevelt may soon disappear from the steps of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History.

Is there any monument in the United States that’s too big to fail a racial history test? A piece of public art with a connection to our checkered past that is too important, too monumental, to be removed from the face of America? Could Mt. Rushmore be that ultimate test?

We could soon find out. President Trump is planning to spend Friday watching the fireworks — and, no doubt, lobbing a few verbal ones — in the Black Hills of South Dakota. His visit will likely remind Americans that Rushmore’s presidential problem is as plain as the nose on George Washington’s face. Washington (owner of 123 slaves) and Thomas Jefferson (who enslaved more than 600 humans throughout his life) are only the beginning. Roosevelt’s mixed legacy — the Smithsonian flat-out calls him a “racist” even while noting he invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House — adds another pockmark on those faces of history.

Yet Mt. Rushmore’s hold on history is threatened by elements that go beyond the question of whether its subjects merit memorializing. Even before the first chip of rock had been hewn from the mountainside, Native Americans objected that the carving was on land they considered both sacred and stolen. Less controversial at the time was the past of Rushmore’s creator, an enigmatic Danish American named Gutzon Borglum. By the early 1900s Borglum was a celebrated sculptor, especially of Lincoln statues. He was also an avowed racist.

In fact, he was a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan. His involvement with the Klan started in 1915, when he contrived to win the commission to build a monument to the Confederacy at Stone Mountain, Ga. The project was sponsored by the Daughters of the Confederacy, whose legacy of monuments to doomed Southern valor is currently the target of demonstrations across the country. Fired up by the infamous film “Birth of A Nation,” Klansmen had paraded to the top of Stone Mountain to stage a rally and burn a cross on Thanksgiving 1915.

Borglum quickly saw the Klan as a source of financial and moral support for his massive project. By 1923, Borglum was named to the Kloncilium, the highest national council of the Klan, and in 1924 he tried to engineer a presidential campaign for his favorite imperial wizard.

Although he mastered the art of mass-scale sculpting on the Stone Mountain cliffside, the moody, imperious Borglum was finally fired from the project after a tumultuous decade, and his work was ultimately blasted out of the stone. Borglum soon moved on to Mt. Rushmore, but he always hoped to return to complete Stone Mountain. When Henry Augustus Lukeman was commissioned to replace him at Stone Mountain, Borglum was irate. “Every able man in America refused it, and thank God, every Christian,” the Smithsonian reported Borglum saying at the time. “They got a Jew.”

Yes, Borglum wasn’t just a racist. He was also an anti-Semite. In an essay he wrote in the 1920s called “The Jewish Question,” he said, “Jews refuse to enter the mainstream of civilization, to become producing members of the world community. They do not share or create, but choose instead to clannishly hold onto their old ways and with mere money buy and sell the efforts of others.”

Oglala Sioux Tribe Pres. Julian Bear Runner says President Trump's planned fireworks display at Mount Rushmore before Independence Day is "not just a threat to my people, but it's a threat to the land and it's a threat to mankind," due to COVID-19.

Remarkably, Borglum sent a draft of his essay to Isidore Singer, a friend who was the editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia, to ask his opinion. Singer replied, with good humor: “Dear friend Gutzon, reading what you write someone would think you were an anti-Semite, when in reality you are a philo-Semite.” Borglum’s response: “If you were not a bigger man than you are a Jew, I would throw bricks at you.”And now, perhaps, comes America’s turn to throw bricks at Borglum and his greatest creation. While some of the statues banished in recent months have arguably been of dubious artistic merit, Mt. Rushmore is an undisputed artistic and engineering triumph. It also presents us with perhaps the ultimate challenge to public art — or any art.

What should be done with an accomplishment of global significance that features problematic men carved in a problematic location by a problematic sculptor? Perhaps Rushmore’s massive scale will prove to be a blessing during this tumultuous time. Too large to be pulled down overnight, it may force us to have a substantive public conversation on how and whom we choose to remember in American history.

Timothy D. Dwyer is researching his next book, a history of Mt. Rushmore and its creator, Gutzon Borglum.

Nancy MacLean responds to her critics

Neither Nancy MacLean, author of the controversial “Democracy in Chains,” nor her publisher has responded to my invitation to post a response to criticism of her book. MacLean has, however, responded to her critics in an email interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, which also covers the controversy in an accompanying story.

The interview is worth reading. Here are a few highlights.

First, the interview discusses the attacks on her book. MacLean confirms that she authored a Facebook message alleging the existence of a “coordinated” campaign against her book. The Chronicle then asked her about that allegation.

Do you have any evidence for your claim in that Facebook message that the attacks on your work are “coordinated”?

I’m not saying they called each other up and planned a series of critical responses to my book. What I’m saying is many of the critics come from similar backgrounds — they are libertarians who trained at or are employed by the very institutions I write about in my book.

And some of the rhetoric has been quite threatening. Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of National Review, said I should worry about the “the libertarian super-posse on my ass.”

So, according to MacLean, the only evidence of “coordination” behind the criticism of her book is, well, that many of us are libertarians who attended or teach at George Mason, and whom Jonah Goldberg referred to as a “super-posse.”

As for some of the substantive critiques of her book that have come from liberals, this is what MacLean has to say.

The left-wing historian Rick Perlstein wrote in a Facebook post, “The foundation of the entire book [Democracy in Chains] is a conspiracy theory that suggests that if you understand THIS ONE SECRET PLAN, you understand the rise of the right in America in its entirety. Which suggests you don’t need to understand any of a score of other important tributaries. �� That you don’t need to read anything else. Which is actively dangerous to historical understanding.” Perlstein was commenting on an article by Farrell and the political scientist Steven Teles. Its basic thrust was that your book caricatures its right-wing subjects in a way that does a disservice to political discussion and even misleads those on the left and center searching for a way forward. What’s your response to Perlstein, Farrell, and Teles?

As a scholar, I would never say “you don’t need to read anything else.” Of course there were other tributaries feeding the right; we have a huge body of scholarship now that explores them, much of which I cite in the 60 pages of endnotes that document the text. But my work draws attention to a missing piece of the puzzle that had been ignored, one that puts the current alarming state of our politics in an illuminating new light.

As for Farrell and Teles, I have to assume, based on what they wrote, that they did not give my book a close reading. My book is not a history of public choice (which I explained was broader than the Virginia variant on which I focused). The book traces the history of an idea — the idea of enchaining modern democratic government, as developed by James Buchanan. It shows how that idea came to appeal to an extremely wealthy and messianic individual, Charles Koch, who has harnessed it and organized other extremely wealthy donors to fund efforts, staffed by thousands of people, to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people and already seem to be producing an utterly unsustainable society in terms of social norms and governance.

So those who disagree with her, or who critique her work, simply didn’t read the book closely enough. Here, for the record, is an excerpt from the Farrell and Teles critique:

While some on the left have hailed the book, libertarians and conservatives have attacked it online. Several have argued that MacLean misleadingly truncates quotes, to make it seem as if Buchanan and other libertarians such as Tyler Cowen are anti-democratic. While they obviously have a great deal of skin in the game, their critiques of the book have landed a number of solid blows.

For instance, when MacLean claims that Cowen is providing “a handbook for how to conduct a fifth column assault on democracy,” she cites as evidence Cowen’s statement that “the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” Unfortunately, she declines to provide the reader with the second half of the sentence, which goes on to note that “it would also increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” Nor, as she has claimed in interview, is the title of Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution a signal to the illuminated that Cowen is undertaking a gradual revolution by stealth (it’s actually a well-known term for the birth of modern economics).

She accuses David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, of believing that “close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich” when he writes about a “parasite economy” of predators and prey. In fact, the predators Boaz is talking about are specific interests lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, quotas, or trade restrictions. While his claims can be contested, they are simply not what MacLean says they are.

Elsewhere in the interview, MacLean says that she and Farrell “have a different understanding of what would constitute adequate evidence” to support a claim” (in this case, the claim that a paper James Buchanan published in the Cato Journal was an important strategy document). As for close reading of sources and use of evidence to substantiate claims, this review by J. Morgan Kousser of MacLean’s 1994 book on the Ku Klux Klan appears somewhat prescient.

On the question of whether Buchanan’s work bears any relation to that of John Calhoun, MacLean writes:

The anger over my linking Buchanan with Calhoun at least brought me a moment of levity. George Mason’s Donald Boudreaux called it “astonishing” that I drew a parallel between Buchanan’s political economy and that of John C. Calhoun. Yet it was not I but Boudreaux’s own colleagues at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, who called the antebellum South Carolina senator’s thought “a precursor of modern public choice theory” and concluded that the two systems of thought had “the same purpose and effect.

MacLean says Boudreaux found it “astonishing” that she “drew a parallel” between Buchanan and Calhoun. Here, however, is what Boudreaux actually wrote:

Even more astonishing is MacLean’s assertion that Buchanan-style libertarians’ “fundamental core concepts” come from John C. Calhoun.  Her only evidence for this claim – namely, that Calhoun was mentioned as an influence by the libertarian Murray Rothbard – isn’t evidence at all.  Buchanan was no great admirer of Rothbard, and the number of times that Calhoun is cited in any of Buchanan’s published works is zero.  As in “never.”  Not once.*  (I knew Buchanan for the last 28 years of his life and I do not recall ever hearing Jim mention Calhoun.) [Emphasis added.]

So what Boudreaux found “astonishing” was not that someone might find parallels between Buchanan’s work and that of Calhoun, but instead MacLean’s claim that Calhoun was the source of Buchanan’s ideas. Among MacLean’s claims in the book is that Calhoun was the “intellectual lodestar” for Buchanan and like-minded intellectuals. For more on MacLean’s efforts to link Buchanan and Calhoun, I recommend this post by Phil Magness.

On her critics, MacLean also adds:

Most disturbing, though, is how many of the book’s critics fail to disclose their financial indebtedness to the cause whose history my book explores. The book is critical of the network of think tanks and foundations that operate with aid from the Koch brothers. Many of the critics have benefited from grants from the Koch Foundation or related groups. Yet very few have acknowledged that financial relationship. And that’s troubling because full disclosure of such income is Ethics 101, as it calls into question the recipient’s ability to remain unbiased.

Since MacLean apparently believes some of us have not been sufficiently candid with potential conflicts of interest, I should probably remind readers that I attended law school at George Mason University, which has also received money from the Kochs, much of it long after I graduated. As I am a Virginia resident, my tuition was subsidized by state taxpayers (thanks, guys!) and a non-Koch-related scholarship. I paid the rest as I went at night while working full time. I spent a semester as a visiting professor at GMU some years later and was offered a tenured position on the faculty. I declined the offer because my bride-to-be and I decided we’d rather raise a family in Ohio than inside-the-Beltway.

Over the years I have spoken at various Koch-sponsored programs, for which I received modest honoraria. I have also spoken at programs sponsored by organizations receiving money from George Soros, the late Peter Lewis and various progressive donors. In the past, I have solicited and received grants for projects from the Charles Koch Foundation, the last of which was this roundtable eight years ago, for which I received no compensation (which probably reflects how bad I am at working the whole gravy-train thing). Ditto various progressive donors.

As longtime VC readers can attest, none of this prevented me from being quite critical of the Kochs when I thought they deserved it (as in my extensive series of posts on the Koch-Cato dispute, many of which may be found here) or from taking positions at odds with many Koch-funded organizations (such as my support for a carbon tax and other policies to mitigate the threat posed by climate change). I don’t know whether such work will affect my chances of obtaining another Koch grant should I seek one in the future, but I frankly don’t care. That’s not why I write what I write. It also has absolutely nothing to do with whether MacLean adequately substantiates her claims or fairly represents her sources.

The interview concludes with MacLean explaining that her hope is to expose the libertarian plan to “radically change the rules of governance in order to change society” so as to give capitalism “free rein” and protect “the rights of the wealthy few.” Writes MacLean: “It’s critical to bring this vision out into the open, so we can have honest debate about the kind of country we want.” I agree with MacLean that it’s important to have an “honest debate” on Buchanan’s ideas, as well as other ideas that inform public debates over the future of our great nation. Readers can decide for themselves whether “Democracy in Chains” contributes to that endeavor.

For more on the controversy over “Democracy in Chains,” see this post, which I have updated regularly.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/07/20/nancy-maclean-responds-to-her-critics/

The Ten Best Films of 2018

As one of our greatest poets once sang, the times they are a-changin'. While certain film institutions seem intent on defying the incurrence of streaming cinema, Netflix had their best year to date, releasing three of what we consider the greatest movies of 2018, and landing the top two spots. How this will impact moviemaking going forward isn’t clear yet, but it almost certainly will. Once again, our list is a wonderful blend of new voices like those of Boots Riley and Sandi Tan, alongside that of established veterans like Spike Lee and Alfonso Cuarón. We chose films from around the world this year, including entries from Korea, Poland, Mexico, and an anthology about the Old West. From documentary to comedy, drama to Western, Paul Schrader to James Baldwin—this may be our most diverse list to date, indicating the breadth of great art we saw in 2018. 

About the rankings: We asked our regular film critics and assistant editors to submit top ten lists from this great year, and then consolidated them with a traditional points system—10 points for #1, 9 points for #2, etc.—resulting in the list below, with a new entry for each awarded film. We’ll publish each critic’s individual list as the week goes on. Come back for more.

10. “Cold War”

Inside the Iron Curtain of the 1950s, a rising composer named Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and his producer, Irena (Agata Kulesza), scour the Polish countrysides and mountaintops for folk songs to bring back to Soviet bloc cities. While auditioning peasant singers to perform these folk numbers on tour, Wiktor’s eyes meet those of a confident and mysterious blond, Zula (Joanna Kulig). He’s quickly taken with her bold presence, and she soon follows his lead into a tempestuous relationship that will stretch years, borders and other partners. 

There may only be a handful of times in life you lock eyes with someone like Wiktor and Zula do in Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Cold War.” You remember where you two met in that moment, what that person wore, who else was there and how you hung on their every word as you tried to hide how intensely you both looked at each other. Some details of the day fade, others grow sharper as you replay the scene over and over—even if that person is no longer in your life. 

Beyond its lovestruck appeal, the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography of “Cold War” enchants viewers with dazzling compositions, bringing intimate moments to an epic scale. Almost every note of the movie’s eclectic soundtrack—which ranges from forlorn Polish folk tunes to sultry French jazz—aches as much as the lovers’ wistful stares. They are echoes of the way Humphrey Bogart looked at Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca,” how Omar Sharif looked at Julie Christie in “Doctor Zhivago” and the glances Maggie Cheung gave Tony Leung during “In the Mood for Love.” 

Under the lens of an unromantic reality, it’s possible to view these two lovers as mere hopeless mismatches. But in Pawlikowski’s film, there is a tragic beauty in Wiktor and Zula’s doomed-to-fail love. "Cold War" sympathizes with those who know it is a blessing and a curse to have feelings outlive an affair. (Monica Castillo)

9. “Burning”

Cats. Wells. Borders. Victims. Killers. There is a lot that’s indistinct and even invisible in the discomforting thriller “Burning” from South Korean director Lee Chang-dong. Loosely based on Barn Burning, a short story by Haruki Murakami, “Burning” rises from the ashes of unspoken battles and deeply held grudges between friends, genders and those that dwell on the opposite sides of the socio-economic tracks so casually that you wonder for a while where this devious suspense, co-written by Lee and Jungmi Oh, might take you. Trust me when I say, it will neither escort you somewhere commonplace nor answer your burning questions like an ordinary movie would—this elegantly calibrated chiller led by a pitch-perfect ensemble is more about the search amid blurring boundaries than reaching an orderly conclusion.

It all begins by a chance encounter that unfolds as uneventfully as any pivotal occurrence that would follow it. Working as a promo rep handing out raffle tickets, the young, bouncy Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jeon) spots and greets the aspiring writer Jong-su (Ah-In Yoo), a guy she knew from childhood. He doesn’t remember her, so she randomly mentions she’s had plastic surgery for beauty. Boyish to an extreme, awkward and clearly taken by Hae-mi, Jong-su follows her into her tiny rental room where the two have sex after Hae-mi (again, abruptly) reminds him he once called her ugly. Taking care of his burdened father’s farm close to the North Korea border, Jong-su finds his bliss cut short when Hae-mi leaves for an overseas trip, asks him to feed her cat Boil in her absence and comes back with the handsome, wealthy and enigmatic Ben (Steven Yeun) who seems to be everything Jong-su is not. Ben lives in an expensive apartment, drives a Porsche and (to Jong-su’s intense distaste) listens to music while cooking pasta.

A virtuoso of slow-burns (“Secret Sunshine” and “Poetry” among them), Lee Chang-dong patiently folds in mysteries as well as themes around gender and social class into “Burning,” while occasionally playing up a comedic tone that strengthens the unclassifiable nature of the film. Is the arsonist womanizer Ben a version of Patrick Bateman driven to insanity by capitalism? Does Hae-mi really have a cat or is she settling scores with the boy who was once cruel to her? Does Jong-su suffer from an overambitious writer’s imagination or is Ben’s uncanny smile really as condescending as it looks? When Jong-su acts upon his justified instincts on a bitterly cold, snow-covered day, you will inhale the frosty air with shivers down your spine, feeling only certain that “Burning” is one of those all-timers that begs to be re-watched repeatedly; a true one-of-a-kind with a lot on its mind. And Steven Yeun? His dismissive yawning is the stuff of (alleged) villains for the ages. (Tomris Laffly)

8. “BlacKkKlansman”

Every scene in “BlacKkKlansman” is practically watermarked with “A Spike Lee Joint” in the bottom right corner. This true story is the perfect vehicle for Lee's penchant for hilariously pitch black humor and it also allows him to settle an old score. Taking Godard’s advice about using a new movie to criticize another movie, Lee aims squarely at D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” ridiculing it relentlessly wherever appropriate. Not only does the film appear as a snarky punchline during a Klan rally, Lee also uses Griffith’s own devices against him by structuring Ron Stallworth’s last reel race against time as a thrilling, Klan-centric montage that serves as a corrective to Griffith’s racist imagery. This sequence deviates from the real-life story Lee is telling, so it was deemed controversial. Surely Lee relished the thought of this perception. Because when Griffith dabbled in propaganda, it was “history written with lightning.” When Lee mocked that dabbling, it was heresy written with politics. And it was just as effective!

John David Washington and Adam Driver give stellar performances, though the latter is surprisingly the film’s biggest proponent of identity introspection. While Washington hides his identity behind a telephone and a voice, Driver hides his in plain sight, thereby incurring more collateral damage. And though the plot comments on racism and anti-Semitism, Lee builds a reality-based trap door into his cinematic contraption, one that opens as soon as he invokes his trademark people mover shot. Suddenly, we’re thrust into the terrifying, present day fate that befell Heather Heyer, whose appearance at the Charlottesville protest ended with her death. This real-life footage is a provocation, but it’s one bursting with truth about the state of racism in America and is therefore not exploitative. Lee dedicated “BlacKkKlansman” to Heyer, and the film’s rise in the award season coincides with the recent guilty verdict delivered to the man who killed her. This is one of Lee's most urgent and timely films. It's also one of his best. (Odie Henderson)

7. “Annihilation”

In 2018, Stanley Kubrick’s landmark science fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey” turned 50. That same year, writer-director Alex Garland released “Annihilation,” a rare film that lives up to the totality of what made “2001” so revered and valuable, rather than merely imitating certain aspects of its design, structure, or tone. It’s one of the great science fiction films of recent years, easily the equal of “Ex Machina,” “Arrival,” “Under the Skin” and “Blade Runner 2049,” and superior to all of them (except “Under the Skin”) in one respect: it encourages multiple interpretations and deeply personal responses, while waving off any attempt to simplistically “explain” what the audience has seen. Adapted from the first of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach novels, the movie structured as a series of discrete set pieces, complete with Kubrickian chapter titles (a la “The Shining” as well as “2001”). If you watch it more than once—as you should; it deepens with every viewing—you start to see it as a set of thought prompts rather than a traditional narrative, though one that’s anchored to strong, simple characterizations and full performances.

The heroine is Army soldier turned biologist Lena (Natalie Portman), whose husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) went missing for a year during a top secret mission, then briefly, miraculously returned to her shortly before puking up blood and being rushed to the intensive care unit at a top secret research facility in a swamp near the Florida coastline. The area was impacted by a meteor that created a “Shimmer”—a demarcated zone where the rules of evolution seem to have gone haywire, integrating the DNA of plants, mammals and reptiles that were thought incompatible, and killing off all the members of expeditions sent to explore the place (Kane is the only survivor, though we immediately sense that the person returned from the Shimmer isn’t actually Kane). Lena joins up with four other women—Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez), Radek (Tessa Thompson), and Sheppard (Tuva Novotny)—to journey into the Shimmer and attempt to understand it.

But there are limits to understanding, and the key to the excellence of Garland’s film is its determination to pose questions without supplying answers. I hosted a screening of the film back in March—my third viewing—and discussed it with the audience afterward, and together we came up with at least nine different answers to the question, “What is this movie about?”

It’s possible to piece together what happened, event-wise, to everyone in the expedition, and how one event might’ve led to another, culminating in the finale, an audacious two-character confrontation that feels like a cross between a modern dance performance and a spectral assault. But once you’ve done that, you’re still left with the question of what it all meant, and you’re on your own. Which is as it should be, because in life, you’re on your own, too. (Matt Zoller Seitz)

6. “Shirkers”

One indication of why this is a near-great film: although it is a relatively straightforward and coherent narrative account—albeit one so surprising as to be, weirdly, equally exhilarating as it is upsetting—almost everyone who watches it has a different idea of its theme. Is it about toxic males holding women down? The challenges facing a female artist? The difficulty of making art in Singapore?

Sandi Tan’s documentary memoir/detective story cannily maintains a core pose of modesty while insinuatingly exploring a series of big ideas. Serving as her own narrator, Tan tells of her 1990s time as an artistically ambitious teen in Singapore, under the spell of maverick filmmakers like David Lynch and believing she had found a cinematic partner in crime with an older man from the States, a teacher and self-styled would-be auteur named Georges Cardona. Sandi forges alliances with the smaller-than-a-handful number of like-minded conspirators on her not-yet-economically-booming island to make her film. A film that Cardona absconds with, leaving behind no explanation or apology.

The rediscovery of the footage in 2010 made this movie possible. But it didn’t determine this movie’s power. Even if it took Tan several decades to realize it, “Shirkers” proves her a born moviemaker. (Glenn Kenny)

5. “If Beale Street Could Talk”

When I interviewed writer/director Barry Jenkins about “Moonlight,” we talked about the movie’s haunting score, composed by Nicholas Britell. “Many directors would use songs of the era to place the audience in the film’s three time periods,” I said. “Two things,” he replied. “First, we could not afford the rights to those songs. But more important, I believe these characters deserve a full orchestral score.”

I thought of those words as I watched Jenkins’ latest film, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” based on the 1974 novel by James Baldwin. Or, I should say, it did not feel like I was watching the film. It was more like I was immersed in it. The entire theme of the movie could be, “These characters deserve a full orchestral score” along with the highest level of every other creative and aesthetic element available to a filmmaker, from Baldwin’s lyrical words to the luscious cinematography of “Moonlight’s” James Laxton, another gorgeous score by Britell, and performances of infinite sensitivity and humanity.

“If Beale Street Could Talk” succeeds brilliantly at one of cinema’s most central functions: a love story with sizzling chemistry between two impossibly beautiful people. Stephan James (“Race”) and newcomer KiKi Layne are 2018’s most compelling romantic couple. Their relationship is in every way the heart of this story, the reason we feel so sharply about the injustice that befalls James' Fonny, the film's most undeniable signifier of generations of institutional racism. We see that most powerfully when Regina King, as the girl’s mother, looks in the mirror as she prepares like a matador entering the bullring for a meeting that could make all the difference for the couple. She cannot expect much, but she has to try. Throughout the movie, there is resignation and there are diminished hopes but there is also resilience. And “Beale Street” reminds us that there is also undiminished and imperishable love: romantic love, the love of parents and siblings, even an unexpected encounter with a warmhearted landlord. There is the love Baldwin and Jenkins have for these characters. And, most of all, it reminds us that this is a story that deserves to be told with the best that movies have to offer, including a full orchestral score. (Nell Minow)

4. “First Reformed”

Ethan Hawke just gets better with age, as he casts aside the boyish good looks and swaggering sense of rebellion that made him both a superstar and an indie darling in the 1990s for more mature, fascinatingly flawed characters. He's well into his 40s now and letting the passage of time show on his face, in his demeanor and in the complicated men he's choosing to play on screen. In Paul Schrader, Hawke is ideally matched with a filmmaker whose own work has only grown deeper and more resonant over the past several decades. "First Reformed" feels like a culmination of sorts for both the writer/director and his star. It has echoes of past efforts from both while it also wrestles with bracingly contemporary themes of personal responsibility, stewardship and activism. 

Hawke stars as Reverend Ernst Toller, a country priest in upstate New York whose involvement in the lives of a married couple in his congregation steadily causes him to lose his grip. With heavy shades of the iconic character he created in Travis Bickle, Schrader vividly presents a man who's grappling with reality and his perceived role within it. He says so much within the film's quiet stillness and precise austerity as well as with masterful narration that offers a glaring contrast between Toller's journals and the truth. "First Reformed" represents the best work of Hawke's lengthy and eclectic career, and it's a welcome return to form for the veteran Schrader. But it also allows Amanda Seyfried to show a dramatic depth we haven't seen from her before as the woman who could be Toller's salvation or his undoing. That sense of ambiguity only becomes more gripping as the film progresses, leading to an ending that's boldly open for interpretation but is undeniably daring and haunting. (Christy Lemire)

3. “Sorry to Bother You”

Like many good dark comedies (ex: "Office Space," "Bamboozled") the hysterically caustic "Sorry to Bother You" feels like a full-blown panic attack. The film's class conscious anxiety (and mordant sense of optimism) is also contagious, as it is in movies like "Starship Troopers" and "Putney Swope." 

With "Sorry to Bother You," writer/director Boots Riley takes credible, if pointedly exaggerated sources of social, racial, and economic tension and exaggerates them beyond the realm of our known experiences. At the same time: Riley's thrillingly inventive conception of the rise-fall-rise-fall-and-rise-again character arc of call center worker drone Cassius "Cash" Green (an incredible Lakeith Stanfield) always feels real enough, even when it takes a hard turn into (what is currently) the realm of science-fiction.

In that sense: "Sorry to Bother You" is also a great American social critique (ex: "A Face in the Crowd," "Idiocracy") since it teaches viewers how to watch it. Riley handily realizes Francois Truffaut's goal of introducing four ideas per minute—and they're each fully-realized and easily understood. That's a major talent when your film essentially weaponizes audience surrogate Cash's relatability. We grow more and more aware of the unbearable heaviness of Cash's existence as a young, black, and talented man. First he stops thinking of himself as a barnacle on an unfathomable ship of industry and starts to see himself as a major player. Then he stops letting himself be seduced by the trappings of his newfound financial success and starts to focus on the application of his talents. Finally, Cash stops fooling himself into thinking that he's just a messenger of utilitarian progress and becomes a victim of his own self-deluded progress. But by then it's too late.

Or not. It's late, but it ain't never. (Simon Abrams)

2. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”

Like so much of the best work of Joel & Ethan Coen, their latest film is a tough one to describe. On the surface, it’s an old-fashioned anthology piece, a reworking of what was once an idea for a TV series into a collection of Old West vignettes, playing out like a storybook. But that sells it short. It sells short how each narrative feels like it flows into the next. It sells the short the mastery of tone both within each individual story and tying together the overall piece. It sells short the way the Coens intertwine their vision of the Old West with a dissection on the very practice of storytelling and their roles as beloved storytellers themselves. And it sells short the incredible individual pleasures within each of the six short films, all of them bursting with gorgeous cinematography, memorable performances, and fascinating subtext. It’s the best western in years because it’s both completely knowledgeable about the tropes of the genre and able to subvert them at the same time.

Take the opening short, the one that gives the film its name. A singing cowboy plods through the desert, warbling a tune to the rhythm of his horse’s footsteps. He speaks directly to the camera, showing us that he’s been labeled a misanthrope—a title that has been incorrectly applied to the Coens’ dark sense of humor on more than one occasion. This leads one to presume that what follows is designed to defy or subvert that label. But that’s not really what happens. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is constantly going left when you expect it to go right—and then making you feel dumb for thinking it would ever go right.

It’s also a fascinating dissection of death—from enemies, former friends, and even by one’s own hand. Death comes for everyone. It’s a theme woven through all six vignettes, and it’s telling that the final piece is about a pair of men who distract their targets with stories. If filmmakers have ever put themselves on screen more bluntly, I can’t think of when. While the story is unfolding, there’s something else happening underneath or off to the side. Joel and Ethan Coen are two of our most impressive cinematic magicians. You’re so carefully enjoying what one hand does that you don’t realize how much they’re doing with the other one until it's over. And then you just want to watch it all over again. (Brian Tallerico)

1. “Roma”

Alfonso Cuarón's "Roma" takes place in the Mexico City neighborhood where he grew up in the 1970s. Filmed in vivid black-and-white (Cuarón shot it himself), "Roma" features long long takes, the camera moving horizontally through a house, across fields, into the sea, down city streets, creating a sense of reality so intense it almost tips over into dream. The film's central figure is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a Mixtec woman working for an upper-class family as a nanny and a maid (she is based on the woman who raised Cuarón). Surrounding Cleo is a world of political upheaval, seething student protests, marital strife, economic stresses, and cops in riot gear. In another film, these events would be center stage, but in "Roma," they drift in the background, seen through windows, heard through open doors, as Cleo strolls by, or around, trying to manage her own life, enduring stress and doing her best. "Roma" is pierced with issues of class, privilege, ethnicity, and resurrects a time and place, a whole era, with details that sometimes overwhelm, like a wave roaring into shore. Swarms of extras live out their lives in complicated vignettes unfurling behind the action, seen briefly as the camera moves by, gone in a flash. The city, the house, the village, all bristle with life. This is a very personal film for Cuarón, and "Roma" is both a determined act of memory and a work of powerful tribute. (Sheila O’Malley)

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May 30, 2018: In other news

Sermon given by David Johnson for ChickenFest

Editor’s note: this is the sermon given Sunday, May 27, at The Record Park by Arbor Grove United Methodist Church’s lay leader David Johnson.

 Good morning!  Welcome once again to America…my favorite nation…home to my favorite state, North Carolina…which houses my favorite county, Wilkes….which contains my favorite communities…two of which I am living in simultaneously these days due to family illness…Mulberry and Purlear. It’s great to wake up here. I am very glad that there is a "here" to wake up to.  But for the grace of God and the sacrifices of many men, women, and families, it might be a very different "here"…a different reality that we would be living in.

But for those who willingly went to fight our enemies on foreign battlefields…our salutes and allegiances might be to a flag containing a swastika, a rising sun,  a hammer and sickle, or even an Isis insignia instead of the stars and stripes.  I have read about and seen the effects of these regimes in their heyday, and I thank God that they were not successful in raising those flags over American territory.  In all of our imperfections as a culture, I still prefer our way of life and our creed to those of our political and military enemies.

Let me share a short scripture about these sacrifices:

John 15:13  

…greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends…

It almost seems inevitable that the nation who would have the most personal freedom and become the most desirable goal for those that would leave a land of their birth to relocate in a land of more advantage, would become the nation that would have to fight the hardest for Survival both from outside and also from within.  And that has been the case with the United States.

Over two centuries ago we invoked the name and blessings of God in our very creed and national motto when we said that we considered all men to be created by that God as equals…and then we spent the next century combining enslavement and relocation of two different races of people in our quest to occupy and flourish on the continent.  But by the grace of the Lord, our national conscience eventually changed and his words uttered first to the Hebrews that he had delivered from their own slavery, then uttered to the gentiles (that included Greeks, Romans, Ethiopians, and of course, our ancestors)…those words kept coming up in our national dialog and in our desire to live up to our creed.  Eventually, by God's help, we have progressed closer to that point of true personal freedom for all our citizens than ever before.

Yet all through the years of our efforts to govern ourselves, we still have taken our place on the age old stage of warfare.  Sometimes, we were fighting amongst ourselves while we were fighting other nations. Yet to this point of today, God has seen fit to let us exist and given us the strength to persevere over our enemies both outside…and in.

This survival came and still comes with a price…a price in wealth…war is expensive…but more importantly, and sadly, a great price in human lives.  No one in their right mind who has ever been in a war wants to see another one. Yet many who have fought one battle and survived, have willingly fought again in order to keep our country, our people, and our way of life secure.  And many of these folks paid the price with their own lives.  It is them that we wish to honor today.  Yet how can we do that?

How do you repay someone that has given their life for you?

In Old Testament times, the Hebrews followed the commands of God through Moses…reluctantly sometimes, because they desired to be free from Egypt's slavery. Yet whether they knew it or not, it wasn't just the Egyptian captivity from which they needed to escape, it was the power of sin and their over and over again rejection of god's plan for them that they needed to be freed from.

Their success against their worldly enemies only seemed to make them more dependent upon earthly answers like a human king with a crown and successors.  Earthly idolatry would constantly come between them and God.

Only the hand of God plus the faith of some Israelites would allow them to survive wars with philistines, defeat and captivity by the Babylonians, and occupation by the Romans, plus being exiled and dispensed into the world for centuries.

Yet the faith of some, plus the power of an almighty god brought them back to the land for which they had fought so many times at the cost of countless lives. Their heroes are commemorated in scriptures…Joshua, Gideon, Samson, David, and a man you may have heard of named Jesus, who many of them rejected, plus many others. Their descendants are still there now…not just because of their might, but because god decreed it and allows it.

We are told these histories by songs, by sermons, and by reading the Bible.  It is important that we remember them because their story... Is our story.

In our case, as English subjects in the 16 and 1700’s we felt enslaved by oppressive government.  Men and women desired to live a life of their own choosing, even if in a harsh environment in order to feel free from the hand of a king. Our first war in America was one of decision…are we willing to risk death to be a free people?  Against a superior military force from England, 13 colonies made that choice and fought those battles.  As in all wars, not all the troops came home…but there was no controversy as to the results of the war.  We wanted to be a free nation…and we had paid the price to be one.  And by God's help and only by his help we became one.

Yet less than a century later we would fight the war that not many nations survive…                                       a war amongst ourselves.  Five years later at the end of that war, we started patching things up…but at the cost of over a half million troops and citizens, all Americans…all dead.

 Only the hand of god had kept us from totally disintegrating.  It was actually at the end of this war that our memories of our fallen soldiers began to take on days of commemoration, one state or one town at a time. Decoration days began to form.  Yet warfare continued to be a constant part of our culture.

Just after the industrial revolution, the world tried its hand at a global war, and men marched off to trenches in France, Germany, and other parts of Europe. When it seemed that United States allies or interests were threatened, our troops took their place before the cannons, guns, and mustard gas.  Some of your kinfolks didn't come back.  But they had been willing to go in order to see us survive.

World War Two was just a bigger, wider, more technologically advanced version of world war one…with one striking difference.  This time the enemy had hit us at Pearl Harbor…our land…the home front.

The result was an industrial upheaval…many businesses were converted to wartime efforts.  Gas, clothing and other goods were rationed willingly.  Even housewives gave broken skillets or pots, all scrap metal was collected to be shipped and converted to weaponry.

And almost all families gave up young men and in some instances young women that would not return from the effort.  But it was done with the prayer that God would bless that effort and our land would survive and thrive.

As the years progressed to now, we have not escaped our involvement in war.  There are those who say that our leaders have gotten us into most of the modern day ones willingly for wealth or world domination etc.  I don't know the truth about that.  But I do know many of the people who have fought…I know some who have died….and I know some who are fighting now. The ones that I know or knew either went when called, or volunteered.

And they did it because they loved this land.  And in most instances they loved the lord who allowed us to be in this land.

We know beyond the shadow of a doubt that we do not live in a perfect world.  And as much as I love it, I will be the last to say that America is a perfect nation.  But my hopes and prayers for her survival involve her becoming a more faith-filled nation and a more godly nation. 

Yes, we are in the middle of the opioid crisis, yes we are ridden with moral problems, with school shootings and corruption in high places, (and in low places for that matter), homelessness plus latter generations some of who don't even recognize that there is God, not to mention the terrible war technology with which many nations hold each other and parts of the world hostage.

But these problems are still symptomatic of the same sins that brought us to war before.  The same sin that pits North Korea against the U.S. is from the same source that caused Cain to kill Abel. The genocide that has taken place in Syria and other parts of the world also took place when an early Pharaoh tried to kill all young Hebrew male babies in order to find and eradicate a future Moses…or when Herod tried the same trick to find and kill a baby Jesus. Even in the middle of the slaughter, God's plan prevailed.  Satan is Satan, and the wages of sin is death.  How miserable would we be if there was not a better way?

There is probably no one sitting here that has not been touched directly or indirectly by a death of a family member or friend on a battlefield somewhere sometime.

What makes men and women risk their lives for a cause?

Not just the status quo…not just a national pride…but the hope and prayer of something better.

Soldiers have died from American forces ever since there was an America not just because they wanted America to survive, but because they wanted a better America to survive!

If we could talk to fallen soldiers what would they tell us their desires for us would be?  

How would they want to be honored or remembered?

 They would probably tell us they hoped that the battle they fell in would be the last one…or that our nation would turn itself into a more Godly representation of his love.  

I wonder if they would tell us to be more about the Golden Rule than the golden bank account?

Would they tell us to pray to the God that helped us found this nation that we can stop being so polarized and deathly opposed to each other before we crank up the next Civil War?   With the technology that we possess even locally, who wants to fight that conflict again?

Yet we seem to fight our own personal wars with each other on all the social media sites.  How long until this boils over into the streets?

War is a reality…Satan has seen to that.

God's words from Jesus confirm it.

Matthew 24:6 

 …and ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

    But don't we have a responsibility as well to assure each other that our friends and family members didn't die in vain?

They sacrificed themselves so that we can keep the fight on the home front against sin, both in our lives and in our nation.  It will not be defeated until Christ returns yet what are we supposed to do until he comes?

We witness...we work…….we feed those who can't feed themselves…we house those who have no roof…we testify as to what God has done for us and what he can do for others.

 And we remember those whose lives were given for us to have the opportunity to do these things.

What brought the victory for them?  Sacrifice!

What brought the sacrifice?  Love! Love of God, love of family and love of this country!

It wasn't mercenary payment that made them fight!

It wasn't prestige, nor fear, nor pride…it was the continued survival, comfort, and freedom of those they loved!

This love motivated them to stand in front of otherwise insurmountable odds and still fight on.

Love reminds us of the presence of God within us…for without God there is no love…only a mockery of love.  The gospel of John says that Christ was here from the beginning and went to the battlefield for our own survival. The only mention of motivation in John 3:16 was love.

Our fallen war dead are the David’s and Gideon’s and Joshua’s of our day.  We can remember them with flags, flowers and tombstones…but, the only way to honor them is to perpetuate and improve the imperfections of the nation that they left us in a more Godly way.  To do this we must love God and because of his love we should love others just like we love ourselves.

 In this way we not only honor them and their sacrifice, but we honor the God who made us and Jesus who made the ultimate sacrifice for us in the battle for our souls.

It is only by joining in that struggle that we improve ourselves…improve our nation…and honor our fallen heroes in a way they would approve.

God bless you all.  Fall in behind Jesus….and fight on.

Amen

First Things First: Uncle Reno’s Just So Stories

What do you get when you click on an article in First Things, that heady brew of theological harrumphing first set in motion by frenzied spiritual striver Richard John Neuhaus, about whom I (mostly) snickered here? Well, judging from this piece by the site’s editor, R.R. (Richard Russell) Reno, “End Times Anxiety”, you’ll learn a little, you’ll laugh a little, and you’ll conclude with a piece of sustained derision.

Surprisingly (or not), the Catholic Dr. Reno and I have a similar reaction to “Modern Times”, at least in part:

“Our present cultural moment is one of suspicion, anxiety, and worries about vulnerability. Many, perhaps most, fear that they are being discriminated against and marginalized. And those who don’t? They often live in the fear that they will be accused of white privilege or some other sin. Perhaps this is to be expected. Patriarchy, racism, heteronormativity—they are said to infect everything. One area of public discourse immune from the postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion is wonkish policy debate. But this is dominated by economistic thinking, which takes as its first premise rational self-interest. Here, too, we’re pictured as eyeing each other with competitive suspicion.

“The anxiety baffles me. Our society works pretty well. In many cities, crime is down dramatically, reaching historically low levels. The economy grows, both here at home and globally. American war-making has settled into a pattern of limited engagement that leaves most of us undisturbed. Meanwhile, public culture rings with warnings that things are heading toward disaster—global warming, resurgent racism, populism. Every week our office receives review copies of another book that promises to show us how to “save liberal democracy.”

Okay, I could do without the snicker about “postmodern hermeneutics” and the cutesy putdown of “rational self-interest”, but, hey, the guy’s Catholic. RR rumbles on a bit—well, more than a bit, actually—and then quotes to good effect someone I usually don’t care for much at all, Peggy Noonan, to wit:

“When at least half the country no longer trusts its political leaders, when people see the detached, cynical and uncaring refusal to handle such problems as illegal immigration, when those leaders commit a great nation to wars they blithely assume will be quickly won because we’re good and they’re bad and we’re the Jetsons and they’re the Flintstones, and while they were doing that they neglected to notice there was something hinky going on with the financial sector, something to do with mortgages, and then the courts decide to direct the culture, and the IRS abuses its power, and a bunch of nuns have to file a lawsuit because the government orders them to violate their conscience. . . .”

Well, again, I don’t think the IRS is abusing its power, and I don’t think the Little Sisters of the Poor should complain about being required to offer health care plans to their employees that provide free birth control pills,1 but the fact that Wall Street was rewarded for blowing up the economy,2 and that neither the Bush nor the Obama Administration had the nerve to walk away from a series of disastrous and counterproductive wars,3 not to mention occasional bloody acts of terrorism in the U.S. by isolated individuals (and not al Qaeda or ISIS or any other international terrorist group), are fundamental contributors to our national malaise.

I could go on in this vein for some time, but I already have, well, almost constantly for the past ten years, but my most recent “big picture” outburst, “Paging Dr. Yeats! Paging Dr. Yeats!, appeared only a couple of weeks ago, so I won’t belabor the point, except (and, okay, this is a pretty big “except”) it would be nice if Peggy, and maybe R.R. would admit that 1) the Republican Party started all these goddamn useless foreign wars and keeps looking for new ones (e.g., Ukraine, Syria, Iran, China) and 2) did their level best to not only prevent President Obama from countering the effects of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression but actually sought to wreck the U.S. economy in the hopes of driving Obama from power.4

Well, enough of that. Suffice to say that the failure of the center has strengthened the extremes, and encouraged the notion that “truth” resides there. The more “passionate” you are, regardless of substance, the more valid. You can read either R.R. or myself on the fine points.

R.R. has something more satisfying to say, about which I’ll also carp, mourning the death of “the most significant influence on my intellectual life,” George Lindbeck (this article is my introduction to both men). Lindbeck was a Lutheran, who taught at Yale Divinity School and, according to Wikipedia, is one of the founders of “postliberal theology”, whatever that is. Wikipedia’s writeup highlights Lindbeck’s involvement in the movement and “explains” that many second-gen postliberal types, including R.R. himself, left the Protestant faith and joined the Catholic Church, quite in the manner (as Wikipedia also notes) of the Oxford “Tractarian Movement” in Victorian England.

R.R. tells us that “[Limbeck] was and remained a Lutheran, and he had only a small degree of sympathy for my conservative political leanings. But I can’t imagine thinking about theology the way I do without his example”:

“Lindbeck taught me this lesson [something about theology, obviously] when lecturing on an early medieval controversy between two monks, Radbertus and Ratramnus. Their dispute concerned whether or not the consecrated bread and wine is Christ’s physical body or his spiritual body. His patient unpacking of this controversy allowed me to understand his metaphor of “grammar.” Both monks wanted to affirm the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the consensus affirmation for almost all Christians, not just in the twelfth century, but in our time as well. However, there is no consensus about what makes things real—a metaphysical question. As a consequence, it’s possible for someone to treat spiritual presence as more real than physical presence. Platonism encourages this way of thinking. The Pythagorean theorem is more “real” than any particular right-angle triangle. Others find this dissatisfying and emphasize the thatness of things, which is to say, their physical presence. This, moreover, is not just a matter of differing philosophical intuitions. The Bible suggests divergent metaphysical affirmations. The opening chapters of Genesis encourage a focus on physical presence, but Jesus’s statement that his kingdom is not of this world points toward the view that the spiritual is more real than things we can see and touch.”

Well, if you’re still with me, I just want to chuckle, amidst all this learnedness, about the line “Both monks wanted to affirm the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the consensus affirmation for almost all Christians, not just in the twelfth century, but in our time as well.” That is so not true. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, is rejected by the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation (both bread and body and wine and blood), the Eastern Orthodox notion of “mystery”, which explicitly and unsurprisingly rejects the Catholic doctrine (in his “twelfth century” reference, R.R. forgets, as so many Catholics do, the very existence of the Eastern Orthodox Church), the Anglican Church’s “whatever”, and the Calvinist rejection of any “magic” at all, part of the basic Protestant thrust to strip the priests of divine authority.5 And today, among the majority of American Protestants—the Evangelicals—the Eucharist plays no role in their faith whatsoever.

Furthermore, R.R. could have chosen, but of course did not, a topic that would prove more obviously divisive, such as the existence of Purgatory, which is rejected by all Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox, or, most divisive of all for Catholics and Lutherans—even more so the infallibility of the Pope when speaking on matters of faith—the question of free will versus predestination. What R.R.’s affection for Lindbeck signifies is the flocking together of all those who fancy metaphysical reveries, which, like the brook, can go on forever.

According to Wikipedia, Lindbeck and his fellow postliberal pals went back to Karl Barth, among others, for inspiration, which makes sense because Barth was one of the early twentieth-century enemies of “Whiggery”, ridiculing the idea that Christ was the first socialist (as Leopold Bloom called him). By my wildly casual reading, Barth took Kant’s categories, designed to secularize Protestant values, and reworked them to justify the metaphysical theology that Kant felt he had disassembled, naturally making it even more rigorous, and “postliberal/antiliberal” as he did so. Progress? Bah! Enlightenment? Nonsense!

Wikipedia informs me that the seminal event in Lindbeck’s career was serving as a guest observer at the famous/infamous “Vatican II” council,6 running from 1962 to 1965, which opened up for Lindbeck, one can be sure, whole new worlds (an infinite number, in fact) of metaphysical speculation. “Why can’t we have this?” he must have exclaimed.

Wikipedia further informs me that Lindbeck and his followers were heavily influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953 and written largely to reject the ideas expressed in the only work that Wittgenstein published in his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.7 The notion that one has to master Wittgenstein to get into heaven strikes me as a little strict and just a bit off point. Wittgenstein, though heavily influenced by Christianity personally, certainly never belonged to a church, and moreover always encouraged his students not to pursue a career in philosophy but rather to serve humanity via medicine. The point of philosophy, Wittgenstein thought, was to prove that the study of philosophy led nowhere—though of course that was all he ever thought about.

Wittgenstein’s thought strongly echoes the ideas expressed in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which “explains” why all traditional metaphysics are false—because it applies concepts that effectively describe the finite world to “infinite” realms, where they are out of place. Unfortunately, finite concepts are the only ones we have. Wittgenstein’s favorite philosopher was Artur Schopenhauer, who saw himself as Kant’s disciple. Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, a substantially simpler work than the “thorny” Critique, effectively explains, to my mind, why the theological hairsplitting that so engages both Lindbeck and Reno never ends. And why would they want it to, since they enjoy it so much? Of course, the larger doctrinal divisions between “confessions” are very largely the result of power struggles between entrenched groups, not spontaneous musings, which is why such groups always find ways to disagree with, not to mention burn, one another.

Yeah, this is a long post. Well, you’re here, aren’t you? After bidding farewell to his Lutheran mentor, R.R. throws a few random punches, at modernizing Catholics and free-market know nothings, before coming up with the riff that set me off in the first place, “explaining” how Ronald Reagan engineered morality by cutting taxes, thus encouraging hard work instead of dissipation:

“This was brought home to me decades ago when I was watching John Updike being interviewed on Book TV. He was asked what he thought of his early novels. The celebrated author adopted an amused look and allowed that they were to some degree dated. He recounted a recent trip to an elite university. The students told him that his stories, many of which revolve around afternoon martinis and sexual escapades, ring false. It was not as though life in upscale America had become more buttoned up in the interval between the publication of Rabbit, Run (1960) and their adolescent years in the 1990s. Rather, they told Updike, no adults were home in the early evenings, and their parents were too tired to throw the sorts of cocktail parties that provide the occasions for the alcohol-fueled transgressions that figure prominently in Updike’s fiction. As Updike told the interviewer, he had to inform these hard-charging, high-achieving kids that upper-middle-class grown-ups didn’t work so hard in the 1950s. People had more time on their hands.”

I could point out—and I will—that Rabbit, Run was not about upper-middle-class grown-ups. “Rabbit”, saddled with the ludicrously “loaded” last name of “Angstrom”,8 is a former high-school jock who sells a kitchen “gadget” called the “MagiPeeler” for a living. Updike wrote quite consciously, and conscientiously, about the middle class. Couples, his raunchy blockbuster, which came out in 1968, had more of a mixed group—everyone from a “contractor” to a nuclear physicist, but I think we’re hardly in Don Draper territory.9

More importantly, if we look at the actual data, instead of a novelist’s musings, we find, well, a mixed bag. According to *Measuring Leisure: The Allocation of Time Over Decades, published in 2006 by Mark Aguiar and Eric Hurst for the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, hours worked by individuals with more than a high school degree declined from 1965 to 2003, from 52 to 43 hours per week. Another study, The Expanding Workweek? Understanding Trends in Long Work Hours Among U.S. Men, 1979-2004, by Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano for the National Bureau Of Economic Research, did find an increase, but dated the origin from 1970, 12 long years before Ronnie’s big cuts took effect.

Most importantly of all, wasn’t there a fair amount of hanky-panky going on in the eighties and nineties, alcohol-fueled or no? How about Donald Trump, hangin’ in Studio 54, aka “Cocaine Alley”, watching supermodels bangin’ n’ snortin’ in public? And what about soon to be chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors Larry Kudlow, who blew up his Wall Street career and his marriage via the White Lady back in 1995? And how about Wall Street “Wolf” Jordan Belfort, whose lifestyle was even more obscene than the hours he worked? Seems like this postliberal theology stuff might not be all it’s cracked to be. In fact, I wonder what either Barth or Wittgenstein might think of R.R.’s “logic”.

Afterwords R.R.’s affectionate tribute to his mentor Lindberg suggests that genial companionship is more highly valued than mere “ideas”. Although both men surely took all their high-flying metaphysics seriously—believed they were necessary for salvation, which is pretty important after all—one can bet that neither ever tried to “convert” the other. How gauche can you be? If he could have done so, would Ross have journeyed to Lindberg’s deathbed, priest in tow, to save his friend’s soul? I think not. But wasn’t it his Christian duty to do so? Just sayin’.

Yeah, the gals don’t want to spend their money on birth control. But health care is “compensation”. Could the Little Sisters forbid their employees from using their wages to buy birth control pills? Then why should the employees be denied the opportunity to select a health care plan that offered them for “free”? ↩︎

The federal bailout was necessary, but in the past when the International Monetary Fund bailed out “bad” nations like South Korea they were required to “reform”. Far from requiring Wall Street to “reform”, the Obama Administration, led by Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner, rewarded them. Furthermore, while Wall Street bankers drank their own Kool-Aid during the Boom (making the same investments they advised their clients to make), when things were falling apart there was a great deal of criminal deceit, as might be expected. The Obama Administration swept this under the rug. “Do you want us to put everyone in jail?” ↩︎

The Bush Administration, of course, could hardly abandon its “Mission Accomplished” swagger without looking like losers. The possibility that the Obama Administration would pursue a policy of military withdrawal was destroyed by the rise of ISIS and Putin’s seizure of the Crimea. It is “arguable” (I know it is, because I’ve done it a lot) that Hillary Clinton’s aggressively anti-Russian policy in Eastern Europe, and her general contempt for Russian “interests”, led directly to the Ukrainian crisis that precipitated Putin’s decision to invade land that had been part of Russia for several centuries. ↩︎

After 9/11, the Democrats accepted the need for national unity and led President Bush set the national agenda, which he did with a clear eye towards partisan advantage. Under Obama, the Republicans furiously resisted every presidential proposal and were determined to undermine every possibility of economic recovery, because Obama. ↩︎

Voltaire, that shallow, shallow fellow, put it more succinctly: “The Catholics say they eat God, and no bread. The Lutherans say they eat God and bread. And the Calvinists say they eat bread and no God.” Luther invented the “theory” of consubstantiation because he had to be different from the Catholic Church, yet, having one foot still in the Catholic Church, couldn’t go “full Calvin”. Luther’s affection for the “traditional” Eucharist is “interesting” because he stripped away all other elements of priestly “magic” (holy relics, extreme unction, etc.). ↩︎

As Ross Douthat shrewdly observed, Vatican II was largely intended to make the Catholic faith palatable to the American establishment, which, the Vatican shrewdly reckoned, was the only force that could save them from communism. Among other things, Vatican II abolished the Index  Librorum Prohibitorum, the “Index of Prohibited Books”, which had been updated as recently as 1948 and embarrassingly included such classics as Galileo (of course), Montesquieu (the “celebrated Montesquieu”, as the Founding Fathers always called him), and “even” Blaise Pascal (I guess for making fun of the Jesuits and for not renouncing the evil Cornelius Jansen). ↩︎

It’s a little shocking that Word can’t spell “tractatus”. I’ll bet that Bill Gates has read Wittgenstein. ↩︎

You can learn all about Angstroms here. It’s possible, I guess, that Updike met someone named “Angstrom” (it’s a Scandinavian surname as well as a unit of measurement equal to one ten-billionth of a meter) and therefore felt entitled to use it. ↩︎

I wrote an “homage” of sorts to Updike in my little book Author! Author! Auden, Oates, and Updike, though I doubt if he would appreciate “The Apotheosis of John Updike: A Modern Triptych”, which “he” narrates in the first person. ↩︎

Theo's journey: A transgender child at war with his body

New Post has been published on http://usnewsaggregator.com/theos-journey-a-transgender-child-at-war-with-his-body/

Theo's journey: A transgender child at war with his body

Theo Ramos learned how to cut himself when he was in fifth grade, when his body seemed to revolt.

Exploring online was easy, with hashtags like #scars, #hurt and #brokeninside.

Nothing made sense back then, but Theo absorbed what he saw on websites like a religion. All he could focus on was how the exterior he was born with — that of a girl — didn’t look or feel right. That was six years ago, when he had another name and a different gender.

Back then, Theo felt that his body was rebelling in disturbing ways. He developed breasts and got his period. He felt like a boy, but every month, the cramps reminded him of reality.

He became a child at war with his body. He wasn’t aware of words like gender dysphoria or transgender; those would come later. So would the national debates, the furor over bathrooms, and discussions of how to help children who didn’t feel right in their own skin.

“When you’re 10 years old, you really shouldn’t be worried about who you are,” Theo would say years later, in a moment of reflection. “You shouldn’t be having that existential question when you’re in fifth grade. You should be worried about homework and the fifth-grade dance coming up.”

He knew he was different from other kids in class. One day in the girls’ bathroom at his South Florida elementary school, Theo made the first of many gouges in his arm, using a paperclip. Pricks of blood bloomed on his fair skin. A teacher and a school nurse whisked Theo to safety.

Theo’s mother, Lori Ramos, got the call from the principal. Her child was in the hospital. Ramos burst into the ER: Was it a fall, a fight, a shooting?

“What’s going on here?” Ramos demanded of doctors and school staff. The answers were confusing: Her child had asked a teacher to call her by a different name, use different pronouns. Her child didn’t feel normal and wanted to be a boy.

Ramos was bewildered — she saw no prior clues her child felt this way. And she was no stranger to transgender, gay, lesbian and bisexual issues — she worked in a clinic for HIV patients.

When she’d given birth in 2001, in a hot tub on the family’s back porch in a Florida suburb an hour south of glitzy Miami Beach, she was thrilled. “I had my older son, and I had my girl, and my family was complete,” Ramos said.

Her baby. Her “sunshine girl.” One who was no longer filled with light.

Theo was involuntarily committed for 72 hours so doctors could determine whether he was a danger to himself or others. Soon, therapists and doctors had a diagnosis: gender dysphoria, a conflict between a person’s physical or assigned gender and the gender with which they identify.

But a diagnosis didn’t solve Theo’s problems or make him feel better. When he tried to look like a boy, everyone at school noticed. His mother was accepting; his father wasn’t. He threatened to disown Theo.

Theo again turned to the internet. He started cutting around his thighs and hips — his “problem areas.”

When Theo saw thin kids online, he looked at his own baby fat and, once again, didn’t fit in. He wouldn’t eat for days, or he’d force himself to throw up.

Cutting and vomiting weren’t painful, not exactly. They were more of a stress release, a way to match physical pain to what he felt inside: “I just know that it isn’t right, that the body I have isn’t supposed to be this way.”

Small aggressions at school led to outright bullying. Other kids asked what was in Theo’s pants, if he had a penis, if he could show them. Theo started missing school. A therapist diagnosed depression and anxiety disorder.

If only Theo could become a boy through hormone therapy — that, he thought, would solve his problems.

“It’s just like every time I’m misgendered it feels like a wrench clamping around my heart and it slowly grows tighter and tighter,” he explained. “Being addressed as female or identifying as female never felt right to me; it always gave me this acute sense of discomfort and pain.”

Hormone therapy for transgender children is a recent, controversial practice. It hasn’t been studied much. The concept that children can be transgender has been discussed in the open only recently; previously, it was something to be hidden, squashed and ignored. About 150,000 teenagers in the U.S. identify as transgender, according to a 2017 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA’s School of Law. About 1.4 million U.S. adults identify as transgender.

Medical professionals have come up with protocols for children and teens. They recommend that some kids with gender dysphoria essentially pause puberty with hormone blockers until they’re certain they want to live as a different gender. But the child must be prepubescent. It was too late when Theo and his parents learned about the option.

Theo could take testosterone, but rigorous counseling sessions were recommended first. This annoyed Theo: Why not become a boy right away?

Experts say impatience is common: Transgender children want to transition, and waiting is frustrating. Even under regular circumstances, teens and patience aren’t usually mentioned in the same sentence.

Doctors say going slow when treating trans teens is essential for physical and emotional well-being, and note that if a teen’s feelings last until age 16, the desires are probably permanent.

Theo insisted testosterone could bring peace with his body: “If I could just start T therapy, I would know I was on the way to being who I’m supposed to be.”

His parents, though, worried about the effects on their growing child.

Theo wanted testosterone, but his anxiety sometimes made him question his desires. It became a regular topic of conversation between mother and son.

“I’m nervous,” Theo said in the spring of 2016. He was 14. “What if I do change my mind?”

“Well, what if you do?” asked his mother.

“I can always stop,” Theo said.

Ramos shook her head. “The changes are permanent.”

———

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Associated Press followed Theo Ramos for more than a year as he grappled with his gender dysphoria. This is the first installment of a three-part story.

PART ONE: As a child grappling with gender dysphoria, Theo Ramos found himself at war with his body.

PART TWO: Living with a transitioning transgender child “is anything but a straight line,” as his mom says.

PART THREE: Visibility of transgender issues is at a high, but all the talk in the world doesn’t make life any easier as a gender-fluid or transitioning kid.

———

Follow Tamara Lush on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tamaralush .

Original Article:

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[Jonathan H. Adler] Nancy MacLean responds to her critics

Neither Nancy MacLean, author of the controversial “Democracy in Chains,” nor her publisher has responded to my invitation to post a response to criticism of her book. MacLean has, however, responded to her critics in an email interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, which also covers the controversy in an accompanying story.

The interview is worth reading. Here are a few highlights.

First, the interview discusses the attacks on her book. MacLean confirms that she authored a Facebook message alleging the existence of a “coordinated” campaign against her book. The Chronicle then asked her about that allegation.

Do you have any evidence for your claim in that Facebook message that the attacks on your work are “coordinated”?

I’m not saying they called each other up and planned a series of critical responses to my book. What I’m saying is many of the critics come from similar backgrounds — they are libertarians who trained at or are employed by the very institutions I write about in my book.

And some of the rhetoric has been quite threatening. Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of National Review, said I should worry about the “the libertarian super-posse on my ass.”

So, according to MacLean, the only evidence of “coordination” behind the criticism of her book is, well, that many of us are libertarians who attended or teach at George Mason, and whom Jonah Goldberg referred to as a “super-posse.”

As for some of the substantive critiques of her book that have come from liberals, this is what MacLean has to say.

The left-wing historian Rick Perlstein wrote in a Facebook post, “The foundation of the entire book [Democracy in Chains] is a conspiracy theory that suggests that if you understand THIS ONE SECRET PLAN, you understand the rise of the right in America in its entirety. Which suggests you don’t need to understand any of a score of other important tributaries. … That you don’t need to read anything else. Which is actively dangerous to historical understanding.” Perlstein was commenting on an article by Farrell and the political scientist Steven Teles. Its basic thrust was that your book caricatures its right-wing subjects in a way that does a disservice to political discussion and even misleads those on the left and center searching for a way forward. What’s your response to Perlstein, Farrell, and Teles?

As a scholar, I would never say “you don’t need to read anything else.” Of course there were other tributaries feeding the right; we have a huge body of scholarship now that explores them, much of which I cite in the 60 pages of endnotes that document the text. But my work draws attention to a missing piece of the puzzle that had been ignored, one that puts the current alarming state of our politics in an illuminating new light.

As for Farrell and Teles, I have to assume, based on what they wrote, that they did not give my book a close reading. My book is not a history of public choice (which I explained was broader than the Virginia variant on which I focused). The book traces the history of an idea — the idea of enchaining modern democratic government, as developed by James Buchanan. It shows how that idea came to appeal to an extremely wealthy and messianic individual, Charles Koch, who has harnessed it and organized other extremely wealthy donors to fund efforts, staffed by thousands of people, to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people and already seem to be producing an utterly unsustainable society in terms of social norms and governance.

So those who disagree with her, or who critique her work, simply didn’t read the book closely enough. Here, for the record, is an excerpt from the Farrell and Teles critique:

While some on the left have hailed the book, libertarians and conservatives have attacked it online. Several have argued that MacLean misleadingly truncates quotes, to make it seem as if Buchanan and other libertarians such as Tyler Cowen are anti-democratic. While they obviously have a great deal of skin in the game, their critiques of the book have landed a number of solid blows.

For instance, when MacLean claims that Cowen is providing “a handbook for how to conduct a fifth column assault on democracy,” she cites as evidence Cowen’s statement that “the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” Unfortunately, she declines to provide the reader with the second half of the sentence, which goes on to note that “it would also increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” Nor, as she has claimed in interview, is the title of Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution a signal to the illuminated that Cowen is undertaking a gradual revolution by stealth (it’s actually a well-known term for the birth of modern economics).

She accuses David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, of believing that “close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich” when he writes about a “parasite economy” of predators and prey. In fact, the predators Boaz is talking about are specific interests lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, quotas, or trade restrictions. While his claims can be contested, they are simply not what MacLean says they are.

Elsewhere in the interview, MacLean says that she and Farrell “have a different understanding of what would constitute adequate evidence” to support a claim” (in this case, the claim that a paper James Buchanan published in the Cato Journal was an important strategy document). As for close reading of sources and use of evidence to substantiate claims, this review by J. Morgan Kousser of MacLean’s 1994 book on the Ku Klux Klan appears somewhat prescient.

On the question of whether Buchanan’s work bears any relation to that of John Calhoun, MacLean writes:

The anger over my linking Buchanan with Calhoun at least brought me a moment of levity. George Mason’s Donald Boudreaux called it “astonishing” that I drew a parallel between Buchanan’s political economy and that of John C. Calhoun. Yet it was not I but Boudreaux’s own colleagues at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, who called the antebellum South Carolina senator’s thought “a precursor of modern public choice theory” and concluded that the two systems of thought had “the same purpose and effect.

MacLean says Boudreaux found it “astonishing” that she “drew a parallel” between Buchanan and Calhoun. Here, however, is what Boudreaux actually wrote:

Even more astonishing is MacLean’s assertion that Buchanan-style libertarians’ “fundamental core concepts” come from John C. Calhoun.  Her only evidence for this claim – namely, that Calhoun was mentioned as an influence by the libertarian Murray Rothbard – isn’t evidence at all.  Buchanan was no great admirer of Rothbard, and the number of times that Calhoun is cited in any of Buchanan’s published works is zero.  As in “never.”  Not once.*  (I knew Buchanan for the last 28 years of his life and I do not recall ever hearing Jim mention Calhoun.) [Emphasis added.]

So what Boudreaux found “astonishing” was not that someone might find parallels between Buchanan’s work and that of Calhoun, but instead MacLean’s claim that Calhoun was the source of Buchanan’s ideas. Among MacLean’s claims in the book is that Calhoun was the “intellectual lodestar” for Buchanan and like-minded intellectuals. For more on MacLean’s efforts to link Buchanan and Calhoun, I recommend this post by Phil Magness.

On her critics, MacLean also adds:

Most disturbing, though, is how many of the book’s critics fail to disclose their financial indebtedness to the cause whose history my book explores. The book is critical of the network of think tanks and foundations that operate with aid from the Koch brothers. Many of the critics have benefited from grants from the Koch Foundation or related groups. Yet very few have acknowledged that financial relationship. And that’s troubling because full disclosure of such income is Ethics 101, as it calls into question the recipient’s ability to remain unbiased.

Since MacLean apparently believes some of us have not been sufficiently candid with potential conflicts of interest, I should probably remind readers that I attended law school at George Mason University, which has also received money from the Kochs, much of it long after I graduated. As I am a Virginia resident, my tuition was subsidized by state taxpayers (thanks, guys!) and a non-Koch-related scholarship. I paid the rest as I went at night while working full time. I spent a semester as a visiting professor at GMU some years later and was offered a tenured position on the faculty. I declined the offer because my bride-to-be and I decided we’d rather raise a family in Ohio than inside-the-Beltway.

Over the years I have spoken at various Koch-sponsored programs, for which I received modest honoraria. I have also spoken at programs sponsored by organizations receiving money from George Soros, the late Peter Lewis and various progressive donors. In the past, I have solicited and received grants for projects from the Charles Koch Foundation, the last of which was this roundtable eight years ago, for which I received no compensation (which probably reflects how bad I am at working the whole gravy-train thing). Ditto various progressive donors.

As longtime VC readers can attest, none of this prevented me from being quite critical of the Kochs when I thought they deserved it (as in my extensive series of posts on the Koch-Cato dispute, many of which may be found here) or from taking positions at odds with many Koch-funded organizations (such as my support for a carbon tax and other policies to mitigate the threat posed by climate change). I don’t know whether such work will affect my chances of obtaining another Koch grant should I seek one in the future, but I frankly don’t care. That’s not why I write what I write. It also has absolutely nothing to do with whether MacLean adequately substantiates her claims or fairly represents her sources.

The interview concludes with MacLean explaining that her hope is to expose the libertarian plan to “radically change the rules of governance in order to change society” so as to give capitalism “free rein” and protect “the rights of the wealthy few.” Writes MacLean: “It’s critical to bring this vision out into the open, so we can have honest debate about the kind of country we want.” I agree with MacLean that it’s important to have an “honest debate” on Buchanan’s ideas, as well as other ideas that inform public debates over the future of our great nation. Readers can decide for themselves whether “Democracy in Chains” contributes to that endeavor.

For more on the controversy over “Democracy in Chains,” see this post, which I have updated regularly.

Nancy MacLean responds to her critics

Neither Nancy MacLean, author of the controversial “Democracy in Chains,” nor her publisher has responded to my invitation to post a response to criticism of her book. MacLean has, however, responded to her critics in an email interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, which also covers the controversy in an accompanying story.

The interview is worth reading. Here are a few highlights.

First, the interview discusses the attacks on her book. MacLean confirms that she authored a Facebook message alleging the existence of a “coordinated” campaign against her book. The Chronicle then asked her about that allegation.

Do you have any evidence for your claim in that Facebook message that the attacks on your work are “coordinated”?

I’m not saying they called each other up and planned a series of critical responses to my book. What I’m saying is many of the critics come from similar backgrounds — they are libertarians who trained at or are employed by the very institutions I write about in my book.

And some of the rhetoric has been quite threatening. Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of National Review, said I should worry about the “the libertarian super-posse on my ass.”

So, according to MacLean, the only evidence of “coordination” behind the criticism of her book is, well, that many of us are libertarians who attended or teach at George Mason, and whom Jonah Goldberg referred to as a “super-posse.”

As for some of the substantive critiques of her book that have come from liberals, this is what MacLean has to say.

The left-wing historian Rick Perlstein wrote in a Facebook post, “The foundation of the entire book [Democracy in Chains] is a conspiracy theory that suggests that if you understand THIS ONE SECRET PLAN, you understand the rise of the right in America in its entirety. Which suggests you don’t need to understand any of a score of other important tributaries. … That you don’t need to read anything else. Which is actively dangerous to historical understanding.” Perlstein was commenting on an article by Farrell and the political scientist Steven Teles. Its basic thrust was that your book caricatures its right-wing subjects in a way that does a disservice to political discussion and even misleads those on the left and center searching for a way forward. What’s your response to Perlstein, Farrell, and Teles?

As a scholar, I would never say “you don’t need to read anything else.” Of course there were other tributaries feeding the right; we have a huge body of scholarship now that explores them, much of which I cite in the 60 pages of endnotes that document the text. But my work draws attention to a missing piece of the puzzle that had been ignored, one that puts the current alarming state of our politics in an illuminating new light.

As for Farrell and Teles, I have to assume, based on what they wrote, that they did not give my book a close reading. My book is not a history of public choice (which I explained was broader than the Virginia variant on which I focused). The book traces the history of an idea — the idea of enchaining modern democratic government, as developed by James Buchanan. It shows how that idea came to appeal to an extremely wealthy and messianic individual, Charles Koch, who has harnessed it and organized other extremely wealthy donors to fund efforts, staffed by thousands of people, to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people and already seem to be producing an utterly unsustainable society in terms of social norms and governance.

So those who disagree with her, or who critique her work, simply didn’t read the book closely enough. Here, for the record, is an excerpt from the Farrell and Teles critique:

While some on the left have hailed the book, libertarians and conservatives have attacked it online. Several have argued that MacLean misleadingly truncates quotes, to make it seem as if Buchanan and other libertarians such as Tyler Cowen are anti-democratic. While they obviously have a great deal of skin in the game, their critiques of the book have landed a number of solid blows.

For instance, when MacLean claims that Cowen is providing “a handbook for how to conduct a fifth column assault on democracy,” she cites as evidence Cowen’s statement that “the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” Unfortunately, she declines to provide the reader with the second half of the sentence, which goes on to note that “it would also increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” Nor, as she has claimed in interview, is the title of Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution a signal to the illuminated that Cowen is undertaking a gradual revolution by stealth (it’s actually a well-known term for the birth of modern economics).

She accuses David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, of believing that “close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich” when he writes about a “parasite economy” of predators and prey. In fact, the predators Boaz is talking about are specific interests lobbying for subsidies, tariffs, quotas, or trade restrictions. While his claims can be contested, they are simply not what MacLean says they are.

Elsewhere in the interview, MacLean says that she and Farrell “have a different understanding of what would constitute adequate evidence” to support a claim” (in this case, the claim that a paper James Buchanan published in the Cato Journal was an important strategy document). As for close reading of sources and use of evidence to substantiate claims, this review by J. Morgan Kousser of MacLean’s 1994 book on the Ku Klux Klan appears somewhat prescient.

On the question of whether Buchanan’s work bears any relation to that of John Calhoun, MacLean writes:

The anger over my linking Buchanan with Calhoun at least brought me a moment of levity. George Mason’s Donald Boudreaux called it “astonishing” that I drew a parallel between Buchanan’s political economy and that of John C. Calhoun. Yet it was not I but Boudreaux’s own colleagues at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, who called the antebellum South Carolina senator’s thought “a precursor of modern public choice theory” and concluded that the two systems of thought had “the same purpose and effect.

MacLean says Boudreaux found it “astonishing” that she “drew a parallel” between Buchanan and Calhoun. Here, however, is what Boudreaux actually wrote:

Even more astonishing is MacLean’s assertion that Buchanan-style libertarians’ “fundamental core concepts” come from John C. Calhoun.  Her only evidence for this claim – namely, that Calhoun was mentioned as an influence by the libertarian Murray Rothbard – isn’t evidence at all.  Buchanan was no great admirer of Rothbard, and the number of times that Calhoun is cited in any of Buchanan’s published works is zero.  As in “never.”  Not once.*  (I knew Buchanan for the last 28 years of his life and I do not recall ever hearing Jim mention Calhoun.) [Emphasis added.]

So what Boudreaux found “astonishing” was not that someone might find parallels between Buchanan’s work and that of Calhoun, but instead MacLean’s claim that Calhoun was the source of Buchanan’s ideas. Among MacLean’s claims in the book is that Calhoun was the “intellectual lodestar” for Buchanan and like-minded intellectuals. For more on MacLean’s efforts to link Buchanan and Calhoun, I recommend this post by Phil Magness.

On her critics, MacLean also adds:

Most disturbing, though, is how many of the book’s critics fail to disclose their financial indebtedness to the cause whose history my book explores. The book is critical of the network of think tanks and foundations that operate with aid from the Koch brothers. Many of the critics have benefited from grants from the Koch Foundation or related groups. Yet very few have acknowledged that financial relationship. And that’s troubling because full disclosure of such income is Ethics 101, as it calls into question the recipient’s ability to remain unbiased.

Since MacLean apparently believes some of us have not been sufficiently candid with potential conflicts of interest, I should probably remind readers that I attended law school at George Mason University, which has also received money from the Kochs, much of it long after I graduated. As I am a Virginia resident, my tuition was subsidized by state taxpayers (thanks, guys!) and a non-Koch-related scholarship. I paid the rest as I went at night while working full time. I spent a semester as a visiting professor at GMU some years later and was offered a tenured position on the faculty. I declined the offer because my bride-to-be and I decided we’d rather raise a family in Ohio than inside-the-Beltway.

Over the years I have spoken at various Koch-sponsored programs, for which I received modest honoraria. I have also spoken at programs sponsored by organizations receiving money from George Soros, the late Peter Lewis and various progressive donors. In the past, I have solicited and received grants for projects from the Charles Koch Foundation, the last of which was this roundtable eight years ago, for which I received no compensation (which probably reflects how bad I am at working the whole gravy-train thing). Ditto various progressive donors.

As longtime VC readers can attest, none of this prevented me from being quite critical of the Kochs when I thought they deserved it (as in my extensive series of posts on the Koch-Cato dispute, many of which may be found here) or from taking positions at odds with many Koch-funded organizations (such as my support for a carbon tax and other policies to mitigate the threat posed by climate change). I don’t know whether such work will affect my chances of obtaining another Koch grant should I seek one in the future, but I frankly don’t care. That’s not why I write what I write. It also has absolutely nothing to do with whether MacLean adequately substantiates her claims or fairly represents her sources.

The interview concludes with MacLean explaining that her hope is to expose the libertarian plan to “radically change the rules of governance in order to change society” so as to give capitalism “free rein” and protect “the rights of the wealthy few.” Writes MacLean: “It’s critical to bring this vision out into the open, so we can have honest debate about the kind of country we want.” I agree with MacLean that it’s important to have an “honest debate” on Buchanan’s ideas, as well as other ideas that inform public debates over the future of our great nation. Readers can decide for themselves whether “Democracy in Chains” contributes to that endeavor.

For more on the controversy over “Democracy in Chains,” see this post, which I have updated regularly.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/07/20/nancy-maclean-responds-to-her-critics/

Shocking New Low in Vaccine Debate — Boston Herald Calls for Violence Against Those Who Question Vaccine Safety

Shocking New Low in Vaccine Debate — Boston Herald Calls for Violence Against Those Who Question Vaccine Safety von Dr. Mercola , articles.mercola.com 30. Mai 2017 The vaccine industry, public health organizations and many media outlets parroting the pre-established talking points insist that the science on vaccines is settled: Vaccines are safe and the childhood vaccination schedule is scientifically sound. End of story. According to some, the matter is so settled that anyone questioning the data or pointing out inconsistencies and/or research showing harm should be executed as punishment for “lying.” This despicable call for violence came from editorial staff at the Boston Herald. The whole nasty mess started with a measles outbreak in Minnesota, the blame for which has been placed on a large Somali community where vaccination rates have declined in recent years due to parents’ concerns about vaccine safety. Measles Outbreak Blamed on Unvaccinated Somalis According to reports, of the 51 documented measles cases in Minnesota, 47 were unvaccinated; 46 were Somali. In all, only 42 percent of the Somali population in Minnesota received the measles - mumps -rubella (MMR) vaccine in 2014, down from 87 percent in 2005 and 2006. The reason for the decline in MMR vaccination is easy enough to understand. Research has demonstrated that Americans of Somali descent have nearly double the rate of autism than the general public, and personal experiences with their children’s health deteriorating after vaccination have raised serious questions and suspicions in the Somali community that the MMR vaccine might play a role. As reported by Inquisitr: 1 “In 2013, a report from the University of Minnesota estimated that about [1] in 32 Somali children ages [7] through [9] … had been diagnosed with autism in 2010 … The lack of vaccination in the Somali community in Minnesota led to a report in [The] Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. 2 That paper indicated that most parents in the Somali community refused vaccines because they believed that vaccines caused autism. When asked why they felt that vaccines cause autism, every single one of the parents reported that they feel that vaccines cause autism ‘because they knew a child who received the MMR vaccine and then got autism.’ One-fifth of the Somali Minnesotan parents had researched the topic themselves ‘and believed that science supports the connection’ between autism and vaccines.” Boston Herald Takes Cyberbullying to a Whole New Level In what has been called a “scalding anti-anti-vax op-ed,” 3 the Boston Herald’s May 8 report on the Minnesota measles outbreak concluded with the following statement: 4 “These are the facts: Vaccines don’t cause autism. Measles can kill. And lying to vulnerable people about the health and safety of their children ought to be a hanging offense.” This obnoxious paragraph led to hundreds of angry comments, at least one of which pointed out the hanging threat was an open violation of Massachusetts’ 2014 law against cyberbullying. 5 , 6 Others rightfully suggested that if lying to the public about health was a hanging offense, then many high-ranking health officials, researchers and drug manufacturers would earn a place at the front of the line. 7 As extreme as the Boston Herald’s comment is, it’s not the first time mandatory vaccination proponents have made callous calls for violent action against those questioning vaccine safety. As noted by The Vaccine Reaction, published by the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC): 8 “In March … Scientific American published an article by Peter Hotez, M.D,. of Texas Children’s Hospital, also inciting violence against people who do not agree with current government vaccine policies. Dr. Hotez stated: ‘An American antivaccine movement is building and we need to take steps now to snuff it out.’ In 2015, USA Today published a column by Alex Berezow advocating that ‘anti-vax’ parents should be imprisoned. At the time, that seemed to be a draconian proposal, but certainly less so compared to today’s calls for execution.” Claims of Coincidence No Longer Hold Water Vaccine injuries are becoming like cancer — the prevalence is so high, most people know someone who has suffered a serious side effect from a vaccine. And, as vaccine injuries multiply, claims of "coincidence" are getting increasingly harder to swallow. This is precisely what we’re seeing among Minnesota’s Somali community, where many now reject the MMR vaccine based on the community’s firsthand experiences. Another example is Mississippi. It has one of the highest vaccination rates in the U.S. It also has one of the highest autism rates. 9 Another coincidence? In the absence of firm proof either way, many parents call for the legal right to make voluntary decisions about which vaccines their child should receive and if or when they should be given. Indeed, being able to exercise informed consent to medical risk-taking, including making voluntary decisions about vaccination, is one of the most basic human rights we have. The numbers of children suffering with chronic illness and disability, including autism spectrum disorders, are increasing. Of this there is no doubt. The numbers of children and adults who have experienced serious vaccine reactions are also increasing. Of this there is no doubt either. Boston Herald, Retract Your Hate Speech To simply turn a blind eye to these phenomena would be foolish in the extreme. Threatening violence in an effort to scare people away from looking at the possible links, if anything, should be deemed a criminal offense. Barbara Loe Fisher, president and co-founder of the NVIC, has warned for many years: “If the State can tag, track down and force individuals to be injected with biologicals of known and unknown toxicity today, then there will be no limit on which individual freedoms the state can take away in the name of the greater good tomorrow.” Considering we’re now seeing rhetoric calling for the killing of anyone advocating for safer vaccines, more humane vaccine policies and informed consent protections, it seems reasonable to say we’ve entered some very frightening territory. If leading news outlets are allowed to call for lethal action against people accused of “lying” about vaccines when they are more likely simply reporting facts and raising concerns that contradict the official rhetoric, then what comes next? Most states don’t even allow capital punishment for mass murderers, yet Boston Herald editors want to hang people for bringing up the possibility that vaccines might do harm?! I join neurodevelopment disorder researcher James Lyons-Weiler, 10 author of “The Environmental and Genetic Causes of Autism,” in calling for the Herald to retract the editorial and issue an apology for its inflammatory comments. This kind of hate speech cannot be tolerated. Fact on Legal Record: Vaccines Are Unavoidably Unsafe In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, a law that includes provisions shielding vaccine manufacturers and doctors from liability when a vaccine causes a permanent disability or death. 11 The reason drug makers and doctors were granted wholesale immunity against liability was because Congress and the Supreme Court concluded that government licensed vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe,” 12 and vaccine makers therefore should not be held liable for vaccine injuries and deaths resulting from government mandated vaccines. Remember that Supreme Court ruling whenever drug industry bobbleheads insist that the science is settled and vaccines are “safe.” Government licensed vaccines have been declared unavoidably unsafe, and that’s a matter of legal record. 13 , 14 More importantly, the science is still wide-open with regard to whether or not vaccines cause autism. Recent Research Reopens Vaccine-Autism Question A paper 15 published in the peer-reviewed, open-access Journal of Translational Science on April 24, 2017, is a cross-sectional study of 6- to 12-year-olds exploring the association between preterm birth, vaccination and neurodevelopmental disorders, using data from both vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. Preemies receive the same vaccines and number of doses recommended by the federal childhood vaccination schedule as full-term babies, and on the same time schedule, and the impact of vaccines on preemies has never been evaluated. Premature birth is a well-known risk factor for neurodevelopmental problems. However, here they found that when premature infants were not vaccinated, the association between preterm birth and neurodevelopmental disorders was nonexistent. They also found that: Term birth with vaccination was associated with a 2.7-fold increase in the odds of neurodevelopmental disorders compared to unvaccinated full-term babies Preterm birth with vaccination was associated with a 5.4-fold increase in the odds of neurodevelopmental disorders compared to the odds of neurodevelopmental disorders given term birth and vaccination Preterm birth with vaccination was associated with a 12.3-fold increased odds of neurodevelopmental disorders compared to preterm birth without vaccination So, is the science truly settled when one of the first studies of its kind — one that actually compares vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations —finds vaccination increases a child’s odds of a neurodevelopmental disorder such as autism by 270 percent? I’m not saying “vaccines cause autism.” I’m saying it’s unscientific to say “vaccines don’t cause autism.” Overwhelmingly, the evidence tells us that scientists still do not know for sure either way — which is why we so desperately need more and better quality research. In the meantime, death threats for reporting on and investigating these controversies are what really needs to be “snuffed out.” More Research Questioning Vaccine Efficacy I recently interviewed Neil Miller, medical research journalist, on his outstanding book “Miller’s Review of Critical Vaccine Studies: 400 Important Scientific Papers Summarized for Parents and Researchers.” His book has two studies that he personally published that document serious concerns about vaccines. Our fascinating interview will be posted later this year but in the meantime, I wanted to share the highlights of the interview by mentioning the two studies Miller published. The U.S. requires infants to receive 26 vaccine doses, the most in the world, yet 33 nations have better infant mortality rates. His first study, published in 2011, 16 analyzed the vaccination schedules of 34 developed nations and found a significant correlation between infant mortality rates and the number of vaccine doses infants receive. Nations that require the most vaccines tend to have the worst infant mortality rates. The study found that developed nations that require the least number of infant vaccines tend to have the best infant mortality rates. His second study, published in 2012, 17 analyzed 38,801 reports in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) of infants who had adverse events after receiving vaccinations. Infants who received the most vaccines concurrently were significantly more likely to be hospitalized or die, compared to infants who received fewer vaccines concurrently. This study was designed to determine a) whether infants who receive several vaccines simultaneously rather than fewer are more likely to be hospitalized or die, and b) whether younger infants are more likely than older infants to be hospitalized or die after receiving vaccines. Not Knowing Whether Vaccines Cause Autism Is Not the Same as Being Sure They Don’t In 2013, a physician committee at the Institute of Medicine (IOM), National Academy of Sciences, concluded that the current federally recommended childhood vaccine schedule for infants and children from birth to age 6 had not been adequately studied for safety, 18 and that studies are needed to examine the: Long-term cumulative effects of vaccines Timing of vaccination in relation to the age and health of the child Effects of the total load or number of vaccines given at one time Effect of vaccine ingredients in relation to health outcomes Biological mechanisms of vaccine-associated injury More specifically, the IOM committee concluded there was insufficient scientific evidence to determine whether or not the numbers of doses and timing of federally recommended vaccines children receive in the first six years of life are associated with the development of chronic brain and immune system disorders that affect a child’s intellectual development, learning, attention, communication and behavior, such as ADD/ADHD , learning disabilities and autism. There’s Not Enough Evidence to Confirm or Deny Causation Before that, the IOM’s vaccine safety review, “Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality,” 19 published in 2011, which looked at eight specific vaccines, including the MMR, concluded there was insufficient evidence to either confirm or deny causation for most reported poor health outcomes — including autism — following receipt of these vaccines. In other words, based on the scientific evidence, WE DO NOT KNOW whether vaccines cause autism. So again, when one-size-fits-all vaccine proponents claim to know the score and that “vaccines don’t cause autism,” they’re not telling the whole truth. Should they hang by the neck for that? Importantly, the IOM’s 2011 report also highlighted the fact that: Some people are more vulnerable to suffering vaccine reactions and injury for biological, genetic and environmental reasons In most cases physicians do not know what those individual susceptibilities are It’s virtually impossible to predict ahead of time who will be harmed by vaccination First Do No Harm What this tells us is that we need to apply the precautionary principle of “first do no harm.” Insisting on a one-size-fits-all vaccine schedule guarantees that a certain number of people will be harmed, although we do not know exactly who or how many, since we still don’t know exactly why and to what extent some people are more susceptible to vaccine damage than others. The issue of vaccine safety is truly one of epic proportions, because the side effects, when they occur, are typically lifelong or lethal. We cannot afford to abandon the conversation about vaccine safety out of fear of harassment (or the threat of hanging), because the issue of forced vaccinations is cropping up everywhere you turn these days. For example, a recent bill before the Texas House of Representatives to reform the state's foster care system included a sneaky provision requiring foster children to get prompt medical exams. 20 Suspecting the provision had the aim of forcing vaccinations, retired medical consultant Bill Zedler, R-District 96, introduced an amendment to prevent doctors from vaccinating foster children during these legally required medical exams, upholding parents’ rights to make vaccination decisions. Public Health Measures to Prevent Disease Must Include Safeguards for All We must continue pushing for greater safety for all children and adults, not just for those lucky enough to be free of individual susceptibility to vaccine damage. Human sacrifice is no longer a permissible religious practice. Why should it be permissible in medical practice? As noted in The Vaccine Reaction: 21 “[E]ach of us has the basic human right to be informed about any medical intervention a doctor proposes to perform on us or our minor children, and we have the right to consent or not to consent to that intervention … According to Barbara Loe Fisher … informed consent is an ‘overarching ethical principle in the practice of medicine for which vaccination should be no exception’ … ‘We maintain this is a responsible and ethically justifiable position to take in light of the fact that vaccination is a medical intervention performed on a healthy person that has the inherent ability to result in the injury or death of that healthy person.’” Original Page: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/05/30/boston-herald-calls-for-violence-against-vaccine-safety.aspx Shared from Pocket