Thinking Outside the Box.*

Maybe it's not bad, but what we need more of right now?

Carr:  Any man loud talking spends a night in the box. You got questions, you come to me. I'm Carr, the floor walker. I'm responsible for order in here. Any man don't keep order spends a night in...
Luke: ...the box.

Carr: I hope you ain't going to be a hard case.

[Luke smiles and shakes his head]

----------
* ie/ Prudence = Folly
in stimulating Demand.

Remember FDR, people?
How we WORKED our way out
of the Great Depression?
We stimulated demand.

We, the governing People...
We elected results.
WE stimulated economic DEMAND,
(a basic economic concept
we should all be familiar with).

We stimulated demand
first artificially, with
government INFRASTRUCTURE and WORK programs
and then through the war works.
We've already built the bombers
and employed the soldiers and doctors
and independent contractors...

We're tightening our belts on defenseless
military "defense" spending.
It's what the People want,
what they elected the servants to do.

But it's no time to pinch public pennies;
(Hoover taught us that; the Japanese too.):
Now is the time to REINVEST here at home.
To get OUT of the liquidity trap
(not Double Down on stagnating and aging).

To physically BUILD UP the undergirdings of support:
our bridges, roads, banking systems, environmental defenses. And thereby building up our workers, our productive People.

A new covenant.
A new compact.
A new deal.
It's what has traditionally worked. No doubt.

Operation Timed Out.

Internet Explorer: Not Responding.
Temporary Error.
Operation Timed Out.
Please Try Again.
If Problem Persists
(for more than 3 hours...)
Please Check Your Network Connection.

Internet Explorer: Not Responding.
----------------

No, it's not a poem.
It's the best answer to tell somebody who asks, in all earnestness, why IE is considered inferior and other browsers might suit his needs "better" (Citius, Altius, Fortius! = Faster, Higher quality, Stronger!):

Other browsers will consistently respond!

"This is Our Last Dance. This is Ourselves... Under Pressure." *

Pressure: pushing down on you,
pushing down on me, no man ask for.
~Queen (esp. Freddie Mercury) and David Bowie.

Make no mistake: our most hardened child rapists and killers indeed remain men, not animals, to their dying breath. Sometimes too, we err in this country and release convicted criminals from Death Row. Or exonerate, posthumously, after a state-administered death.

If what happened last night in Oklahoma is not a cruel and unusually punishing way to snuff a man's life -- one that wise people will note was presciently predicted by scientists questioning the administration and efficacy of a killer chemical cocktail untested on humans -- then you tell me: what is?

Courtney Francisco, the reporter who witnessed the execution, provided the following timeline to NewsChannel 4:


6:23 p.m. – Prison officials raise the blinds. Execution begins.

6:28 p.m. – Inmate shivering, sheet shaking. Breathing deep.

6:29 p.m. – Inmate blinking and gritting his teeth. Adjusts his head.

6:30 p.m. – Prison officials check to see if inmate is unconscious. Doctor says, “He’s not unconscious.” Inmate says, “I’m not.” Female prison official says, “Mr. Lockett is not unconscious.”

6:32 p.m. – Inmate’s breathing is normal, mouth open, eyes shut. For a second time, prison officials check to see if inmate is unconscious.

6:33 p.m. – Doctor says, “He is unconscious.” Prison official says, “Mr. Lockett is unconscious.”

6:34 p.m. – Inmate’s mouth twitches. No sign of breathing.

6:35 p.m. – Mouth movement.

6:36 p.m. – Inmate’s head moves from side to side, then lifts his head off the bed.

6:37 p.m. – Inmate lifts his head and feet slightly off the bed. Inmate tries to say something, mumbles while moving body.

6:38 p.m. – More movement by the inmate. At this point the inmate is breathing heavily and appears to be struggling.

6:39 p.m. – Inmate tries to talk. Says “man” and appears to be trying to get up. Doctor checks on inmate. Female prison official says, “We are going to lower the blinds temporarily.” Prison phone rings. Director of Prisons Robert Patton answers the phone and leaves the room – taking three state officials with him.
...
The blinds were then lowered to prevent people in the viewing gallery from seeing inside the death chamber.
...
Minutes later – The Director of Prisons comes back into the room and tells the eyewitnesses that there has been a vein failure. He says, “The chemical did not make it into the vein of the prisoner. Under my authority, we are issuing a stay of execution.”

or
* No More in My Name:
Just Shout No! to Justice Killings.

What Can Be Gleaned...

from Justice Ginsburg's latest media interview?
(with Jeffrey Rosen, last week):

Rosen: What does Brown mean today and is there agreement about the core meaning?

Ginsburg: The culmination of the civil rights cases that led up to Brown came 13 years later in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia. It was the story of a couple that grew up in the rural area of Virginia where people got along with each other. …

So Mildred and Richard Loving came to D.C. to get married because they couldn’t get married in Virginia. They went back to Virginia. One night the sheriff comes to their home with a flashlight and said, “Get out of bed and come with me to see the judge.”

They pointed to their marriage certificate, which they had framed and he said, “That doesn’t count for anything here.”

So the judge said he would not sentence them to prison if they agreed to leave the state of Virginia and never come back together. Then the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were very important in the country. And Mildred Loving thought that maybe there was hope the system would work for her. So they brought the case and it ended again with a unanimous decision in Supreme Court in 1967.

The Loving v. Virginia decision is when apartheid in America ended, not with Brown.

What Can Be Gleaned...? Your guess is as good as mine!

(Way to steer that question, Ruth!
Zoom, zoom -- Drivers wanted.)

Like a Bird... on a Wire...

Like a drunk, in a midnight choir...
I have tried, in my way, to be free.

So much has happened since I last wrote here:  I slipped home for Easter, briefly, in the rent-a-car that replaced my Malibu after it was totaled in front of my house the night before I was due to start this year's test-scoring season in the Cities.

The hit-and-run driver  left his 2012 Buick Town and Country van at the scene, and took off on foot with beer cans allegedly left inside, according to local news reports.   The vehicle is insured, but the owner allegedly reported it stolen, the day after the accident.

Got that?

"Were the keys in the ignition?" I keep asking, but if you drink and drive, perhaps for some people it indeed does pay off to abdicate responsibility and make others prove you are at fault for their losses.   I can't believe I'll bear the costs of the out-of-pocket expenses caused by an insured vehicle, with Illinois tags attached and an initially (at least) uncooperative owner, who admits to being in the area but denies knowing the whereabouts of his van, according to the insurance investigator who contacted me regarding the ongoing investigation.

Sad message to send, if drinking and driving... and running from a scene after striking a legally parked car with such impact as to total it, can't be properly penalized and innocent others bear the costs.

In the middle of the night too, Sunday, just hours before I would have been gone, heading over to work in the Cities.

Needless to say, I lost out on that particular state project -- New Jersey.  You have to be there the initial days of training to learn the rubric, what the state committee has decided the student answers are being scored on (the variety of response in what's acceptable and what's not), which will be applied again and again in the following weeks as the tests roll in on the trucks to Minnesota, and are scanned on to us at the computer monitors.  There's too much missed to make up if a scorer is not trained with the group from the start -- think consistency -- although I was reassigned to another state's test in a different subject area, starting soon.

This is my third year scoring, and while it gets harsh on the eyeballs hour after hour, you learn a good deal about the educational expectations, standards, and even immigrant populations in various states of our nation: Last year, I worked on the Michigan English-as-a-second-language tests, from scoring kindergartners forming select English alphabet letters all the way up to immigrant high-schoolers demonstrating their English language skills in mini-essays written from a prompt.   Break your heart, some of them, telling you who their hero is, or where they would choose to go if they won an all-expenses-paid trip to anywhere...

Back "home", often, to places where they sometimes know war and destruction have replaced their childish memories.  Cousins mean more to immigrant children, too.  They're aware of the sacrifices their parents are making, and though some of these young people perhaps should have the least reason for optimism, you'd never know it by reading what they write, in their own words.


This is America's future, not a pot-bellied rancher nor a rich lonely old man.  There's no need to bring those men down really -- momentum will do the job -- but there is good reason to act to bring these newcomer children up wisely.  They have a lot to teach us, about priorities, about survival, about what counts in life.
---------------------

In other news,
as much as I tried, like a lepidopterist pinning a butterfly, to record the exact moment when we switched from winter to spring here, it happened in an instant, it seems.  As elusive as capturing Santa Claus coming down the chimney on Christmas Eve...


We've had ice out -- which mean the ice sheet slowly chunks off until the body of water is navigable -- on Rice Lake down the street for about a week now.  Buddy and I were walking the lakeshore last Monday evening, to the "tinkles" of millions of ice chunks that were being pushed up against one another in the strong winds.  The eagles were perched in a tree on the small island offshore, two of them, with a darker juvenile sitting on the edge of the ice sheet, near one of the openings, flying up and swooping in when perhaps a live fish seemed more appealing than the dead fish carcass on the ice it was picking at...

As the ice chunks were being swept into the shore, I reached out and pulled one of the bigger ones in and tossed it up on shore, where the remnants the next day were the only hint that ice ever even existed in the area.  It was a few pounds maybe, four or more inches thick.  The way the ice melts -- they're crystals joined together, hollowing out into thinner and thinner threads until they break down into smaller pieces.

Remember the ice palace in Superman II, where Clark Kent had second thoughts about renouncing his super powers to marry the mortal Lois Lane?  Build these chunks up two stories or so high, and there you'd have it.

It sounded wonderful though -- supernatural -- with the wind bringing color to the cheeks, the eagles flying by simply riding the wind overhead, and the dog on full alert for the scents of  spring now that the snows are gone.

A more bohemian "My Way" is how Leonard Cohen described his song,  his protagonists fighting past current circumstances -- breaking through that ice -- into the glory of a fresh season.

I have tried
in my way
to be Free...

BONUS FLICK:
Goldie Hawn and Mel Gibson... what's not to love?

Rise Up This Morning...

Smile with the Rising Son.

George Will for the Win.

While some activists have moved on to other progressive causes as they've gained civil rights in their home states, plenty still have their eyes on the prize: full legal recognition and equal legal rights for married gay and straight couples in all 50 states.

Read George Will's column today, in that light:

The fundamental division in U.S. politics is between those who take their bearings from the individual’s right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom, and those whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.

For the many Americans who are puzzled and dismayed by the heatedness of political argument today, the message of Timothy Sandefur’s “The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty” is this: The temperature of today’s politics is commensurate to the stakes of today’s argument.
...
Sandefur says progressivism “inverts America’s constitutional foundations” by holding that the Constitution is “about” democracy, which rejects the framers’ premise that majority rule is legitimate “only within the boundaries” of the individual’s natural rights. These include — indeed, are mostly — unenumerated rights whose existence and importance are affirmed by the Ninth Amendment.

Many conservatives should be discomfited by Sandefur’s analysis, which entails this conclusion: Their indiscriminate denunciations of “judicial activism” inadvertently serve progressivism. The protection of rights, those constitutionally enumerated and others, requires a judiciary actively engaged in enforcing what the Constitution is “basically about,” which is making majority power respect individuals’ rights.

In other words, despite the political tactics of the Right in recent decades, we don't put individual rights up for majority vote.

Sadly, in the states that did, we've empowered people to believe that other people's civil rights somehow depend on the voting whims of the majority: that they can deny those protections and unenumerated rights based on popular vote.

George Will is writing the way out.
How will we now sell the country on a judicial decision that many will reject as illegitimate in those regions and localities where there is simply no history of recognizing the full civil equality of gay people? This is how. We talk of our system of laws; our reliance as a country on principles of equality and justice.

When you have conservative thinker George Will essentially arguing that:
the "individual’s right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom"
trumps
"those whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected",
then you're already there...

Take a look around.

Roll out of bed, Mr. Coffee's dead.

The check is in the mail.
And your little angel...hung the cat out by its tail.
And your husband wants to be a girl.

Be Glad there's One Place in the World
Where Everybody Knows Your Name...
And they're always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see
People are all the same...
You wanna go where everybody knows your name.

~the unheralded first stanza of the Cheers song.
(For real. Check it out if you like.)