Lives in a Shoe

Alcatraz

 

also:

https://www.lifezette.com/video/history-of-americas-most-famous-prison/

 

 

The site in Rome where Julius Caesar was killed is now a stray cat-sanctuary

Fast forward in time to today, some 2060 years later, on the same spot where Caesar roared his famous last words “Et Tu Brute?” (You too, Brutus?), and the most frequent sound that can be heard is “Meow.” Torre Argentina now makes the perfect no-kill shelter for over 250 homeless cats. Exactly here, these lovely felines have found their “purrfect” home, adding a new piece of history to the ancient locality.

 

When in the Course of Human Events...

One of the Founding Fathers, John Adams, predicted that Independence Day would become America’s greatest holiday. This is what he wrote to his wife Abigail on July 3rd 1776: “(This) the Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Adams got the day wrong, though. Congress voted for independence on July 2nd 1776, but didn’t approve the text of the declaration until the Fourth.

Don't Know Much About...

Democracy: Two Wolves and a Sheep Voting on What's for Dinner.

...and some of us maybe do not remember our civics lessons so well.  The good folks at The Peoples Cube are here to help:

Now that everybody has discovered that we have an Electoral College and that the cat's out of the bag, so to speak, let's take a quick look at why we have what on the surface appears to be a quirky method of choosing our executive head.

  We all remember the Great Compromise, right?  That was when at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 two plans of representation were proposed, each with a legitimate argument in favor of it. Virginia, the most populous state, naturally thought a legislature in which states were represented by population was fair. After all, why should the clear majority of the people be effectively thwarted by a small state? The New Jersey delegates, needless to say, saw it differently. Each state should be represented equally. After all, why should a small state be rendered irrelevant by a domineering large state?  

So, what to do? A Connecticut delegate, Roger Sherman, seeing the justice of both positions, proposed that both could be done. He wasn't the first to conceive of the idea, but he did manage to persuade the Constitutional Convention to buy into the idea. Thus was born a bicameral (two house) legislature in which there would be a House of Representatives in which states would be represented by population, and a Senate in which states would be represented equally. For a bill to become law requires the approval of both houses.

The Electoral College is an extension of the Great Compromise. As James Madison put it in Federalist # 39, "The votes allotted to them are in a compound ratio, which considers them partly as distinct and coequal societies, partly as unequal members of the same society." This is why each state has a number of electors determined by a simple formula: # of representatives + # of senators = # of electors. This allows for a larger voice for the more populous states, but also prevents the less populous states from being rendered voiceless in choosing a president.

But why a group of electors? Alexander Hamilton put it this way in Federalist # 68, "They [the delegates to the Convention] have not made the appointment of the President to depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes; but they have referred it in the first instance to an immediate act of the people of America, to be exerted in the choice of persons for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment." In the context of hampering a foreign power from influencing our elections (The Russians! The Russians!), the electors are to be temporarily assigned the task of choosing the president and going home. That they are not in public office nor a permanent institution means they are less likely to be subject to corrupting influences.

In one of my Government classes, we discussed hopeful Oregonians wanting to secede from the Union and perhaps join with California, Washington, and British Columbia to form the new country of Cascadia (apparently they presume Canadians will have the same fervor for secession), and henceforth choose their president strictly by popular vote. One of my students, a freshman, pointed out that if they did, California would dominate all the presidential elections making the votes of the other regions irrelevant. Precisely.

Anniversary of Repeal -- Clink!

Dec. 5 Is Repeal Day, the Day We Got Back Our Alcohol.

Civil Discourse Maybe

Cass Sunstein:  
If you think that Barack Obama has been a terrific president (as I do) and that Hillary Clinton would be an excellent successor (as I also do), then you might want to consider the following books, to help you to understand why so many of your fellow citizens disagree with you:

2016 ELECTIONS
Five Books to Change Liberals' Minds
385OCT 11, 2016 8:00 AM EDT
By
Cass R. Sunstein
It can be easy and tempting, especially during a presidential campaign, to listen only to opinions that mirror and fortify one's own. That’s not ideal, because it eliminates learning and makes it impossible for people to understand what they dismiss as “the other side.”

If you think that Barack Obama has been a terrific president (as I do) and that Hillary Clinton would be an excellent successor (as I also do), then you might want to consider the following books, to help you to understand why so many of your fellow citizens disagree with you:

“Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Conditions Have Failed,” by James Scott. In this wildly imaginative book, dealing with agriculture, urban planning, and Esperanto, Scott argues that modern governments, relying on top-down knowledge, tend to be clueless, because they depend on “thin simplifications” of complex systems -- and hence lack an understanding of how human beings actually organize themselves.

Evidently influenced by Friedrich Hayek’s powerful arguments about the inability of planners to capture the dispersed knowledge of individuals, Scott goes even further, arguing that both faceless bureaucrats and free markets can do violence to sensible local practices. After you read him, you’ll never see the Clean Air Act or the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, or any proposal for large-scale reform, in the same way again.

“A Matter of Interpretation,” by Antonin Scalia. Many progressives understand Scalia, and other conservative judges, in crassly political terms -- as opponents of affirmative action, abortion, gun control, and campaign finance legislation. But what Scalia cared most about was clear, predictable rules, laid down in advance. In this book, he argues for approaches to interpretation that produce clarity, generality, and fair notice, and that sharply constrain the discretion of federal judges.

Scalia’s plea for adherence to the public meaning of legal texts, and to the original understanding of the Constitution, derive from his commitment to rule-bound law. Even if you are unconvinced by Scalia’s arguments, they will get under your skin -- and you are likely to agree on the importance of finding ways to accommodate his concerns.

“Side Effects and Complications: The Economic Consequences of Health-Care Reform,” by Casey Mulligan. Economists love to draw attention to the unintended consequences of apparently public-spirited reforms. For example, big increases in the minimum wage can increase unemployment, and expensive environmental controls imposed on new cars might actually increase environmental harm, by increasing the prices of cleaner vehicles and thus decreasing fleet turnover.

Mulligan’s central claim is that the Affordable Care Act is imposing large implicit taxes on full-time employment, producing real reductions in wages. The result, he argues, is that many employees would do far better if they worked fewer hours per week -- and in some cases, if they didn't work at all. He projects that by creating a disincentive for full-time employment, health care reform will produce “about 3 percent less employment, 3 percent fewer aggregate work hours, 2 percent less GDP, and 2 percent less labor income.”

As he acknowledges, Mulligan’s particular numbers are highly speculative (and in my view, they are unsupported by current evidence). But he is certainly right to emphasize the importance of asking about the potential adverse side-effects of any significant social reform -- and at the very least, he offers cautionary notes about the need to monitor the actual consequences of the Affordable Care Act.

“The Righteous Mind,” by Jonathan Haidt. Do conservatives have moral commitments that progressives may not even recognize? Haidt says yes, and he identifies three: authority, loyalty and sanctity. If, for example, someone has betrayed a trust, or treated a boss or a parent disrespectfully, conservatives are far more likely to be outraged than progressives.

Haidt is not himself a conservative, but he offers a sympathetic explanation of why progressives often fail to understand their political adversaries. He also shows that the moral commitments that resonate among conservatives have deep roots in human history -- and that it is a form of blindness not to acknowledge and respect those commitments.

“Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes,” by Robert Ellickson. Progressives tend to believe that without a strong government, social order just isn’t possible; you would have anarchy. An impressive body of research -- much of it by Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom -- demonstrates that this belief is wrong. Sometimes people can sort things out well enough on their own, benefiting from social norms that have nothing to do with government.

Ellickson offers one of the clearest and most convincing demonstrations of this point. He shows that in many domains, neighbors find good ways to cooperate and to settle disputes, and that their voluntary practices work to their mutual advantage. His book can be seen as a companion to Scott’s, showing that if you don’t limit yourself to the narrow perspective of a government planner, you can see far more, and in particular the possibility that local practices are doing just fine.
Having read these books, you might continue to believe that progressives are more often right than wrong, and that in general, the U.S. would be better off in the hands of Democrats than Republicans. But you’ll have a much better understanding of the counterarguments -- and on an issue or two, and maybe more, you’ll probably end up joining those on what you once saw as “the other side.”

 

17th Century London,1666, Digital Recreation

We are six students from De Montfort University taking part in the Crytek Off the Map project, building a 3D representation of 17th century London before The Great Fire.

 

Brobdingnagian Pays Respects to Petite Cultural Icons

Looming beside Ike and Mamie, in Abilene.

 

Does She Deserve a Place on Our Money? Hell Yeah.

National Review:  What They Didn't Teach You in School About Harriet Tubman.

Harriet Tubman was a black, Republican, gun-toting, veterans’ activist, with ninja-like spy skills and strong Christian beliefs. She probably wouldn’t have an ounce of patience for the obtuse posturing of some of the tenured radicals hanging around Ivy League faculty lounges.

 

 

 

 

IN LIGHT OF THE HARRIET TUBMAN NEWS, they’ve put this story by Charles C.W. Cooke on blacks and the Second Amendment outside the paywall. Read the whole thing.