Median Income By State and County County and The 2016 Presidential Election

Most of Appalachia and the South have low median incomes, while much of the rural Midwest that went for Trump in the last election is comparatively affluent, as illustrated below. New Mexico is the only low median income state that chose Clinton.

Man Sentenced For Killing Denver Cab Driver

A 20-year-old man has been sentenced to 48 years in prison for the September 2015 fatal shooting of a beloved Denver taxi cab driver during a botched robbery. 

Prosecutors say the sentence was the maximum allowed for Dasean Perry under a plea agreement. In September, he admitted to second-degree murder and attempted aggravated robbery in the slaying of 49-year-old Darren Bloomquist. 

Bloomquist was driving a cab early on Sept. 5, 2015, and was dispatched to the 20000 block of E. Mitchell Place. The Denver District Attorney’s Office says when he arrived, Bloomquist was shot and killed during an attempted robbery. 

The sentence was handed down Thursday in Denver District Court, prosecutors say. Perry had just turned 19 when the shooting happened.

From here. 

Many of my relatives share a surname with the cab driver, although some limited inquiries that I've made suggest that he was not a close relative (my relatives adopted this new surname upon moving to America, because their's sounded bad in English, so this isn't surprising).

The offender won't be eligible for parole for about 36 years if he has perfect good behavior during his term, which he probably won't be able to manage.

It is a pretty typical result for a pretty typical murder case. Given the attempted robbery charge, prosecutors could have charged first degree felony murder which would have carried a sentence of life in prison or death, but no doubt used that leverage to secure a plea agreement that gave the defendant some chance at release from prison before his death and avoided the death penalty.

Delaware Temporarily Without Death Row Inmates Or Death Penalty

The Delaware's state Supreme Court earlier on declared its death penalty unconstitutional in a death penalty appeal for procedural reasons. Yesterday, it declared that its decision was retroactive causing the death sentences of the other 11 people on its death row to be converted to life imprisonment sentences. 

Delaware will not have a death penalty until the state legislature enacts a new, procedurally compliant statute, if it wishes to do so, and will not have anyone on death row until someone is convicted pursuant to that newly enacted statute.

Why Are People Religious?

Why and how are people religious?

1. If people are religious, they usually adopt the religion that is dominant in their family or community. A person inclined to be religious in Turkey is unlikely to become a Hindu or Buddhist. A person inclined to be religious in Savannah, Georgia is unlikely to take up Orthodox Christianity. In each case that would change if family members were part of one of those faiths. Usually, a person has a religious identity chosen by a parent before that person is old enough to make a conscious choice.

2. Some people are genetically more inclined to be religious in some religion than others, and in general, women are more inclined to be religious in some religion than men.

3. Religions thrive when they are preserving a threatened culture, while they wither when they merely reinforce a secure establishment culture. 

Hence, the Roman Catholic church thrived in Ireland because it preserved Irish culture against Protestant colonial overlords. The white Evangelical Christian religious movement thrives because it protects a threatened white Southern culture that was defeated in the U.S. Civil War. Black churches in the North, and immigrant churches generally, thrive because they preserve the culture of the place of origin of the migrants.

In contrast, the established churches across Europe, and mainline Protestant churches in the U.S. have seen active involvement collapse because the values espoused and culture associated with these respective churches is the secure establishment culture of the places where they are practiced. Immigrant churches start to wither and consolidate after a few generations as the culture of the descendants of the immigrants is assimilated into the establishment culture.

4. Religion, and superstition more generally, thrives when people's well being depends upon seemingly random forces that they can't control and don't fully understand. This is called the "uncertainty hypothesis" in the literature.

Among people prone to religion and superstition are farmers dependent for their livelihood upon the weather, people at risk of contagious disease they don't understand, auditioning actors, gamblers, and refugees.

People abandon religion and superstition when they feel secure and understand the forces that can impact their lives, if they have access to information that allows them to understand. People take up religion when they are insecure.

Coffee v. Expresso

An ounce—or one shot—of espresso has 63 milligrams (mg) of caffeine, according to nutritional information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. By comparison, regular coffee averages 12-16 mg of caffeine per ounce. 

So, yes, espresso technically has more caffeine, but in practice no one drinks just one ounce of coffee. You’re likely to have at least 8 ounces, which typically has 95 to 128 mg of caffeine. 

However, caffeine counts for both espresso and coffee vary among brands and depend on the type of bean, the roast, the amount of coffee used, and the way it is prepared (brewed, French press, espresso machine, etc.) For example, at Starbucks, a shot of espresso has 75 mg of caffeine and an 8-ounce cup of its Pike Place medium roast coffee has 155 mg.

From Consumer Reports.

A standard medium sized latte has two shots of expresso, which is about 126 mg of caffeine. So, regular coffee and expresso are actually about the same in typically consumed dosages.

Remembering Mrs. Wozniak

Call it an early airing of grievances.

Many of my current bad habits, I owe to my absolutely horrid 5th grade teacher at Kramer Elementary School in Oxford, Ohio, Mrs. Wozniak.

She was the one whose endless rote sentence combining exercises developed my life long habit of writing run on sentences.

She was the one whose insistence on trying to fit answers in workbook spaces did irreparable harm to my handwriting and caused my stutter that lasted until I learned to type everything to get much worse.

She was the one who taught prescriptivist grammar rules that stunted the quality of my writing style until I took legal writing classes to overcome them long after I graduated from law school.

She was the one whose demeaning treatment of students in the classroom forever branded me as a geek and nerd with negative social consequences until I got went abroad six years later. Partially because of the social forces she set in place, I ended up spending most of recess in the sixth grade in the classroom reading the dictionary instead of socializing with other kids.

No other teacher I had from kindergarten to law school was so small minded, ignorant, and soul killing.

She dented my curiosity and joy of learning in a way that it took until roughly 10th grade to get back.

She really was a horrible teacher and a horrible human being whose teaching made me and my classmates worse people then we were when we entered her classroom.

Realistically, she's probably dead now, and after thirty-five years or so, what's happened has happened. 

But, if she is out there, Mrs. Wozniak really ought to realize how much harm she did to her students during her far too long days as a teacher and feel absolute guilt and despair at negative value that her existence imposed on her community in Oxford, Ohio. We recognize people who make outstanding contributions to their community, but in truth, there are people like her who single handedly drag the community down and make it worse place for everyone. I'm sure that she was just as much of a blight in other aspects of her life in the community and to her family.

Omar Khadr Was Released On Bail Last Year

In 2007, I recounted the plight of Omar Khadr, a Guantanamo detainee who was fifteen when he ended up in the military prison charged with offenses taking place as early as when he was ten years old, who had been detained for five years at the time. 

He pleaded guilty to war crimes before a U.S. military tribunal in October of 2010. Five years later, in 2012, after ten years at Gitmo, he was transferred to a Canadian prison. He was released on bail pending an appeal in the U.S. Courts in May of 2015. Per Wikipedia, linked above:

He was the youngest prisoner and last Western citizen to be held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay. He accepted an eight-year sentence, not including time served, with the possibility of a transfer to Canada after at least one year to serve the remainder of the sentence. Khadr was the first person since World War II to be prosecuted in a military commission for war crimes committed while still a minor. His conviction and sentence were widely denounced by civil rights groups and various newspaper editorials. His prosecution and imprisonment was condemned by the United Nations, which has taken up the issue of child soldiers. 

On September 29, 2012, Khadr was repatriated to Canada to serve the remainder of his sentence in Canadian custody. He was initially assigned to a maximum-security prison but moved to a medium-security prison in 2014. Khadr was released on bail in May 2015 (pending an appeal of his U.S. conviction) after the Alberta Court of Appeal refused to block his release as had been requested by the Canadian government. 

In 2013, Khadr filed a C$20,000,000 amended civil suit against the government of Canada for conspiring with the U.S. in abusing his rights. He said he had signed the plea agreement because he believed it was the only way he could gain transfer from Guantanamo, and claimed that he had no memory of the firefight in which he was wounded. Khadr's lawyers successfully challenged his incarceration in Canada as an adult offender. On May 14, 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected the federal government's position, ruling that Khadr had clearly been sentenced by the U.S. military tribunal as a minor. If he loses his appeal of the US conviction, underway in a separate action, he would serve any remaining time in a provincial facility rather than in a federal penitentiary.

He has served 4 years and 7 months of his eight year sentence, and apparently receives no credit for the eight years of time served he had at the time.

Sixteen years in prison for being a child soldier is absurd.

Blame Canada!

French Canadian oligarchs are sweet.

Americans are focused on the wrong border. It’s not Mexico, with all this dubious talk about building a wall, but Canada, with its Mounties, and comedy writers who move among us, betrayed only by the occasional mispronunciation of “about,” that threatens our way of life. If this nation was not founded on the free flow of syrup, it should have been. And now, as anyone with kids can tell you, the price of syrup has remained stable and high; it’s more expensive than oil. Is it Arab sheikhs who did this, Russian oligarchs? No. It’s Canadians, who, organized into an ironfisted cartel, have established a stranglehold on that honey-flavored elixir. 

In short, FPAQ—the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers—is OPEC. Formed in 1966, the federation was tasked with taking a business in which few could make a decent living—the price went north to south with the quality of the yield, which went north to south with the quality of the spring—and turning it into a respectable trade. This was accomplished in the classic way: quotas, rules. You control supply, you control price. You limit supply, you raise price. Because Quebec makes 72 percent of the world’s maple syrup, it’s been able to set the price. As of this writing, the commodity is valued at just over $1,300 a barrel, 26 times more expensive than crude. . . . I discovered this for myself on a recent trip to the supermarket. My son returned from the shelves with a small artisanal jug of Canadian syrup—“genuine maple” has prospered in concert with the boom in organic food—which cost . . . $15! It shocked me. I stormed up the aisle to see for myself, where I discovered Aunt Jemima, companion of so many Sunday mornings, in her babushka, costing just four bucks for a family-size jug. When I asked the cashier to explain this discrepancy, she pointed rudely at Aunt Jemima and said, “ ‘Cause that’s not real syrup.”

From Vanity Fair.

Insider Trading Liability Broadened

Last week, prosecutors rejoiced when the U.S. Supreme Court decided an insider-trading case called Salman v. United States, and in doing so clarified that leaking confidential information so that friends and relatives can make money in the stock market is a crime, even when the leaker doesn’t get an economic benefit.

From The New Yorker with local color related to the jurisprudence of the trial judge whose legal theory was adopted.

The decision was, however, quite a narrow one.

More Contagious Cancer

Another instance of cancer caused by a virus has been identified. Cancer causing viruses were already known to account for about one in eight cancer cases.

Newborns with congenital cytomegalovirus -- a common virus in the herpes family -- may have an increased risk of developing acute lymphocytic leukemia, according to new research. The study suggests the risk is even greater in Hispanic children.

From here.

This is the second kind of herpes virus known to cause cancer.

What Criminal Court Authority Do Non-Lawyer Judges Have?

Though it may seem surprising that judges in all of America’s courts do not necessarily need to be lawyers, the practice is fairly common. Thirty-one states have some courts where judges do not have to be a lawyer. In nine of these states that allow non-lawyer judges, along with the 19 states and the District of Columbia that require all judges to be a lawyer, the non-lawyer judges are banned from taking a defendant’s liberty in a criminal proceeding.

The remaining 22 states, primarily for reasons of cost efficiency or to facilitate justice in more rural jurisdictions, have non-lawyer judges preside over misdemeanors or ordinances that carry jail time as a possible punishment. But even among those states, 14 of them give the defendant the right to have a trial de novo on appeal – basically a whole new trial – before a judge who is a lawyer. That leaves the eight states — Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New York, South Carolina, Texas, and Wyoming — where a defendant can stand trial before a non-lawyer judge on a jailable offense, and if he is convicted and sentenced to jail, his only recourse is to appeal to a higher court with a judge who is a lawyer. But that appeal is based solely on whatever record was made in the non-lawyer court; he does not get a new trial.

As explained in the Montana cert petition, “In North v. Russell, 427 U.S. 328 (1976), the Court held that the Due Process Clause permits a criminal defendant facing the possibility of incarceration to be tried by a non-lawyer judge — so long as the defendant has the right to a de novo trial before a judge who is a lawyer.” But the U.S. Supreme Court has never decided whether it is okay for a defendant to be tried by a non-lawyer judge where a state does not give the defendant a new trial on the appeal to a court whose judge is a lawyer. And that is the issue that the Montana lawyers are seeking to have the U.S. Supreme Court decide.

From here.

The body of the certiorari petition further explains that:

Today, no state allows non-lawyer judges to try felony cases. Of the 22 states that allow non-lawyer judges to try misdemeanors that can result in imprisonment, most give the defendant the right to a de novo trial before a judge who is a lawyer. There are only eight states that still allow non-lawyer judges to try such misdemeanor cases without giving the defendant an opportunity for a de novo trial before a judge who is a lawyer. In five of these eight states (Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New York, and Texas), nonlawyer judges have this power only in certain counties. In two (Arizona and Montana), non-lawyer judges have this power only for misdemeanors punishable by six months imprisonment or less, and in one (South Carolina) they have this power only for 9 misdemeanors punishable by thirty days imprisonment or less.

The scope of the challenge in this case is narrow:

The issue is narrow, however, in two senses. 

First, the practice we are challenging represents only a tiny slice of the work of non-lawyer judges. The Due Process Clause does not bar non-lawyer judges from doing all the other things they do—trying traffic violations and other minor criminal matters that do not entail incarceration, presiding over small civil cases, conducting preliminary hearings, issuing warrants, performing marriages, and so on. Nor does the Due Process Clause bar non-lawyer judges from trying, in the first instance, misdemeanor cases punishable by incarceration, so long as the defendant may obtain a de novo trial before a judge who is a lawyer. Nonlawyer judges still have important roles to play in the states’ legal systems. 

Second, the practice we are challenging survives only in three states and parts of five others. All the other states guarantee defendants facing incarceration a trial before a judge who is a lawyer. So did Montana, for more than a century. In these states, moreover, it is likely that, as in Montana, some of the judicial positions not required by statute to be staffed by lawyers are nevertheless currently occupied by lawyers. If the Court holds that due process in these cases requires a judge who is a lawyer, the Court’s decision would require only a modest change to current practice.  

The impact of the case in Colorado would be pretty minimal. 

There were only four non-lawyer judges in Colorado the last time I checked, each serving in a county court (whose jurisdiction is limited to misdemeanors and arraignments), in rural counties. All of them are selected on a merit basis, are at least college educated and receive meaningful judicial education. And, a slight tweak to the nature of the appeal right in the very small percentage of criminal cases that do not result in a plea bargain before these four judges, to make the arrangement constitutional, would be a straightforward step for the Colorado General Assembly to take.

Notably, municipal court judges in Colorado, while arguably further down the judicial hierarchy than county court judges, must generally be lawyers.

In Montana, the state at issue, there are seven non-lawyer judges in courts of record whose decisions are not appealed with trials de novo out of eleven judges in the eight of 56 Montana counties that have made their "justice courts" into courts of record that are not appealed de novo (something that did not exist from 1895 to 2003 in Montana). As of 2011, city courts were allowed to follow suit in Montana and five cities created city courts of record, each with a single non-lawyer judge.

Both cases brought before the U.S. Supreme Court from Montana that are at issue here were tried before one Park County non-lawyer judge:

The judge in both trials was Park County’s elected Justice of the Peace, Linda Budeski. Justice Budeski is not a lawyer. According to her campaign materials, before becoming a judge she spent 24 years as a cashier and meat wrapper at a grocery store, and six years as a prevention specialist for a chemical dependency program. Re Elect Linda Budeski for Justice of the Peace (http://goo.gl/yz4BX6). 

Montana requires Justice Budeski, like others in her position, to attend two kinds of training sessions. First, every four years, after each election, justices of the peace must complete a four-day “certification” course, where they receive training in some of the fields they will encounter on the bench. These topics range from introductory matters like “The Basics of Law” and “Judicial Demeanor” to more specialized areas like Courts and Jurisdiction, Constitutional Law, Initial Appearances, Evidence, Search and Seizure, Landlord-Tenant Law, Criminal Procedure, Orders of Protection, Civil Procedure, Traffic Law, Legal Research, Court Financial and Docket Management, Small Claims, Youth Offenders, and Contracts. Second, justices of the peace must attend two annual continuing education sessions. Mont. Code § 3-10-203(2). These sessions must provide a total of at least fifteen hours of training per year. Montana Judicial Branch, Judicial Education (http://courts.mt.gov/cao/ct_services/jud_ed). 

Montana’s non-lawyer justices of the peace thus begin their careers after a four-day training course consisting of approximately 28 hours of study. To put that in perspective, one cannot become a manicurist in Montana without at least 400 hours of study. Mont. Admin. R. 24.121.601(3)(e)(ii). To become a barber in Montana requires at least 1,500 hours of study. Mont. Code § 37-31-304(2)(a)(ii). Montanans wishing to practice cosmetology need 2,000 hours of study. Id. § 37-31-304(3)(a). That is 71 times as much training as it takes to become a justice of the peace and sentence defendants to incarceration. 

The situation is much more serious in New York, where non-lawyer judges are elected, rather than selected on a merit basis, there are far more non-lawyer judges, and there is a long history of troubling conduct by non-lawyer judges in criminal cases in the state.

I'm not familiar enough with the situation in the other six states to know what impact it would have.

Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court isn't required to take the case, and the outcome of the case if it did take it to resolve this basis issue of constitutional law is unclear.

A Footnote On The Gentry

The Montana cert petition linked above makes an interesting observation that in English law, Justices of the Peace had to be members of the gentry which Wikipedia explains in the British context as follows:

The British upper classes consist of two sometimes overlapping entities, the peerage and landed gentry; any male member of either may regard himself as a gentleman, in a special sense mutually understood between hereditary members of the class, which will often exclude life peers. In the British peerage, only the senior family member (typically the eldest son) inherits a substantive title (duke, marquess, earl, viscount, baron); these are referred to as peers or lords. The rest of the nobility are referred to as landed gentry (abbreviated "gentry"). Except for the eldest sons of peers, who bear their fathers' inferior titles as 'courtesy titles' but for Parliamentary purposes counted as commoners, they usually bear no titles apart from the qualifications of esquire or gentleman (which are ranks recognised in law, although now without any legal consequence); exceptions include the baronet (a title corresponding to a hereditary knighthood), those that are knighted (for life, called Sir X Y), Scottish barons (who bear the designation Baron of X after their name),[17] and Scottish lairds (whose names include a description of their lands in the form of a territorial designation).[18] 

The term landed gentry, although originally used to mean nobility, came to be used for the lesser nobility in England around 1540. Once identical, these terms eventually became complementary. The term gentry by itself as commonly used by historians, according to Peter Coss, is a construct applied loosely to rather different societies. Any particular model may not fit a specific society, yet a single definition nevertheless remains desirable.[19][20] Titles, while often considered central to the upper class, are not strictly so. Both Captain Mark Phillips and Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, the respective first and second husbands of HRH Princess Anne, lacked any rank of peerage at the time of their marriage to Princess Anne. However, the backgrounds of both men were considered to be essentially patrician, and they were thus deemed suitable husbands for a princess. 

Landed gentry is a traditional British social class consisting of gentlemen in the original sense; that is, those who owned land in the form of country estates to such an extent that they were not required to actively work, except in an administrative capacity on their own lands. The estates were often (but not always) made up of tenanted farms, in which case the gentleman could live entirely off rent income. 

Esquire (abbreviated Esq.) is a term of British origin, referring only to males, and used to denote a high but indeterminate social status. The most common occurrence of term Esquire today is the conferral as the suffix Esq. in order to pay an informal compliment to a male recipient by way of implying gentle birth. In the post-mediaeval world, the title of esquire came to belong to all men of the higher landed gentry; an esquire ranked socially above a gentleman but below a knight. In the modern world, where all men are assumed to be gentlemen, the term has often been extended (albeit only in very formal writing) to all men without any higher title. It is used post-nominally, usually in abbreviated form (for example, "Thomas Smith, Esq."). 

A knight can be either a mediaeval tenant giving military service as a mounted man-at-arms to a feudal landholder, or a mediaeval gentleman-soldier, usually high-born, raised by a sovereign to privileged military status after training as a page and squire (for a contemporary reference, see British honours system). In formal protocol, Sir is the correct styling for a knight or a baronet, used with (one of) the knight's given name(s) or full name, but not with the surname alone. The equivalent for a woman who holds the title in her own right is Dame; for such women, the title Dame is used as Sir for a man, never before the surname on its own. This usage was devised in 1917, derived from the practice, up to the 17th century (and still also in legal proceedings), for the wife of a knight. The wife of a knight or baronet is now styled "Lady [Surname]".

Membership in the gentry was originally pre-requisite to the honorific "Gentleman", a term that like the honorific "Sir" originally confined to knights, has been inflated to have almost general application. Alexander Hamilton, the claimed grandson of a Scottish laird after whom he was named, would have had a birthright to membership in this class had his birth not been illegitimate (and his paternity not entirely certain, another biological father has been suggested). 

The term "Landlord" derives from this historical class elevation of the gentry, and often when someone owned much of the land somewhere, it was expedient to give that person not just the legal authority of a property owner, but also the sovereign authority of a Justice of the Peace, to handle minor civil disputes and criminal matters.

Past Decade Good For Amazon, Bad For Department Stores

Cindy Brown‏@datacindybrown

The retail industry needs to move to digital faster.Shocking how the brick and mortar have lost market value and Amazon has gained. @BMDInc

4:12 PM - 13 Dec 2016

Note that Sears includes Kmart, as the two firms merged in 2004. Other notable brick and mortar retailers, such as Circuit City and Sports Authority have gone out of business entirely in the meantime.

Quote of the Day

What's the speed of dark?

- Fortune Cookie

Autism Mutation Study Discovers The Obvious

To the surprise of no one, mutations in people with autism tend to effect the "essential genes" in a person as opposed to the not very important, you could do just fine without them, genes in the human genome. Who knew?

A paper with the same theme, but a less obvious conclusion has the following abstract and citation:

Genetic susceptibility to Intellectual disability (ID), autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia (SCZ) often arises from mutations in the same genes, suggesting that they share common mechanisms. We studied genes with de novo mutations in the three disorders and genes implicated by SCZ genome-wide association study (GWAS). Using biological annotations and brain gene expression, we show that mutation class explains enrichment patterns more than specific disorder. Genes with loss of function mutations and genes with missense mutations were enriched with different pathways, shared with genes intolerant to mutations. Specific gene expression patterns were found for each disorder. ID genes were preferentially expressed in fetal cortex, ASD genes also in fetal cerebellum and striatum, and genes associated with SCZ were most significantly enriched in adolescent cortex. Our study suggests that convergence across neuropsychiatric disorders stems from vulnerable pathways to genetic variations, but spatiotemporal activity of genes contributes to specific phenotypes.

Shahar Shohat, et al., "Varying intolerance of gene pathways to mutational classes explain genetic convergence across neuropsychiatric disorders" (Pre-Print November 27, 2016).

Fake U.S. Embassy Operated For Ten Years

It is stunning that organized criminals were able to operate a fake U.S. embassy issuing fake visas at $6,000 each in Ghana for ten years without anyone doing anything about it. Action was taken this year to shut it down.

Options And Tradeoff In Energy Policy

* Fracking pollutes local groundwater, causes earthquakes in places far from fault lines, uses scarce freshwater resources that could otherwise provide water for people, animals and plants, pollutes the areas where drilling takes place, and is one of the most hazardous industries for workers (in part because worker safety in the industry is regulated by underfunded OSHA instead of adequately funded MSHA). Setting up drilling sites can destroy natural habitats.

But, fracking increases the supply of oil and natural gas at lower prices than conventional extraction methods. This lowers the price of oil and natural gas which have consequences discussed below, reduces U.S. dependency on foreign oil which frees us to oppose abhorrent practices of oil rich countries, and boosts the U.S. economy not only because oil and gas prices are lower, but also because oil and gas production jobs are in the U.S. and not elsewhere.

* High petroleum (i.e. oil and gasoline and diesel) prices encourage energy conservation measures like fuel efficient cars and encourage oil users in industrial and home heating uses to switch to alternative fuels that are cleaner like natural gas and non-coal derived electricity. Moving away from oil reduces air pollution, from oil spills at sea and on land, and slows man made climate change leading to global warming. 

High oil prices also drive up the costs of fertilizer and pesticides which makes organic farming economically competitive with conventional farming.

There is a limited world supply of oil, someday  we will run out, and that could be a huge problem for our economy if we don't transition away from it.

But, high oil prices also provides more funds to oil rich despots and conservative elites in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia and Iran whose funds are the lifeblood of ISIS and fundamentalism Islam, it funds economically irrational authoritarians in Venezuela, it funds conservative Evangelical Christians in places like Texas, and it allows governments in places like Mexico to rely on natural resources as a crutch instead of focusing on building a productive middle class.

High oil prices slow down the economy and sends U.S. money out of the country. Low oil prices lead to economic growth, lower real prices, and easy the lives of the working and middle class.

* Natural gas is the least polluting fossil fuel when used, by far, although extracting it (often via fracking) can lead to environmental harms, and the total production process including transporting natural gas by pipelines lead to far fewer injuries, although occasionally natural gas leaks can lead to huge explosions anywhere it is used.

Natural gas is a cleaner alternative to heating oil, it is a cheaper fuel for heating homes and offices than electricity, it is a cleaner fuel for generating baseline electricity than coal, and a cleaner alternative to gasoline and diesel in converted vehicles.

Natural gas used in the U.S. is mostly produced in North America, which reduces U.S. economic dependency upon and the need to politically defer to politically questionable overseas and Latin American suppliers who are largely also oil suppliers.

Lower natural gas prices boost the economy and encourage energy users to switch to natural gas from more polluting fuels.

While we are less close to running out of natural gas than we are to running out of oil, the global supply of natural gas is also finite, so in the long term we need to transition away from it.

* Pipelines pose risks of environmental harm when they break and spill oil or flare natural gas, for example, poisoning water supplies and destroying habitats, and they can cross environmentally and culturally sensitive areas without much flexibility. But, pipelines are generally safer in terms of accidents, less likely to cause environmental harm, and cheaper than transporting oil or natural gas by truck, by train or by ship, and rail lines and roads pose similar habitat concerns.

* Coal is the most polluting fossil fuel. Mining it is dangerous to workers. Transporting it by truck or train or boat causes more deaths and prevents rail traffic from being used for alternative means of transportation. A huge share of all train and river barge transportation is of coal. Most coal is strip mined which completely destroys habitats. Mined coal is accompanied by a host of toxic and radioactive wastes that poison ground water and the land where it is stored. Coal creates more air pollution than any other form of fossil fuel speeding man made climate change leading to global warming. The number of deaths caused by air pollution from coal is immense.

Coal is more awkward to use, due to its solid form, than oil or natural gas or electricity. It is predominantly used by utilities to generate electricity, although it is also used in coke form, in steel production, and in a few other minor uses.

Coal's main advantages are that it is the most abundant fossil fuel, it has historically been cheap (until pollution mitigation or carbon taxes and pollution related illnesses are considered), its prices have been stable over time, it created good paying domestic jobs and it doesn't have to be imported increasing energy independence.

If oil and natural gas are sufficiently expensive, it is possible to create synthetic liquid and synthetic gas alternatives to oil and natural gas from coal (the Nazi regime did so briefly at the end of World War II and a few proof of concept plants were established when oil prices were $100 a barrel). These processes could postpone the need to transition the economy away from oil and natural gas as those resources run out and limit price increases when and if supplies of oil and gas grow scarce.

* Biomass, biodiesel, ethanol and incineration of trash as energy sources, unlike traditional fossil fuels, are renewable and could provide supplies of fossil fuels in applications like lubricants, plastics, nylons, aircraft fuel, farm equipment fuel, fertilizers, pesticides, fuel for fishing boats, and the like that have no good alternatives when oil supplies run out. Many of these recycle waste into valuable energy, reduce dependency on foreign oil and reduce oil prices somewhat.

But, these sources are frequently as polluting when used as oil and coal, trash incineration as as awkward or more so than coal as a solid fuel source, and there is a limited supply of recycled grease and other combustible wastes that can be made into biodiesel.

You can grow plants specifically for the purpose of creating fuel oils, but this drives up the price of food that could be grown with the same resources, and it is basically not viable to generate more than a modest fraction of current oil consumption this way even with maximally efficient food production.

* Co-generation is a system that uses waste heat from generating fossil fuels or nuclear power for space heating in nearby buildings, making systems more efficient. But, it only works in close proximity to power plants.

* Geothermal energy (basically tapping into the same kind of heat from the Earth that generates hot springs and geysers) is renewable, doesn't create any pollution that wouldn't be created already, and can be reasonably cost effective. But, there are only a few isolated places where it is available as a natural resource, it isn't abundant enough to export for long distances and use as a major share of total energy supplies, and geothermal energy facilities make natural wonders like hot springs and geysers less vibrant.

* Nuclear fission has immense energy density, so the amount of fuel that needs to be mined, transported to power plants, and stored at power plants is stunningly tiny compared to any form of fossil fuel. Nuclear fission plants need to be refueled only on the order of once per one to three decades. These plants generate no air pollution when working properly. The number of worker injuries and injuries to the public associated with mining uranium and transporting it are tiny relative to any fossil fuel. There is basically no radiation risk to neighbors or workers in a nuclear fission plant when it is operating properly. And, the fuel costs of a nuclear power plant are quite low.

The main down sides to nuclear fission power are:

1. It is pretty much useless for any purpose other than generating electricity that is added to the grid, although if designed properly, waste heat can be utilized productively rather than constituting heat pollution to local rivers and clouds. This is mostly a question of scale. Nuclear power plants can be made small enough for a large submarine (ca. 8,000 tons), or ship, or as a village power plant, but not small enough to put in a car, truck, aircraft or locomotive on a train.

2. Nuclear power does impose demands on local water supplies in most plant designs.

3. Because the technology is relatively new, because public safety concerns are great (whether this is justified or not), and because there hasn't been much mass production of plants on the same design, nuclear power plants are the most expensive kind of power plant to design and build.

4. Public fear of radioactive materials has led to fierce opposition to sensible nuclear waste storage facilities for high and low level nuclear wastes, and unrealistic demands on nuclear waste storage facility standards that have left far more troublesome interim solutions in place. The U.S. has also been slow to adopt uranium reprocessing technologies that would greatly reduce the amount of high level nuclear waste in existence by recycling rather than throwing away a valuable potential source of nuclear fission energy.

5. Nuclear power plant fuel and high level nuclear waste must be carefully guarded against diversion by terrorists or rogue nations to create catastrophically deadly nuclear weapons.

6. While the failure of a nuclear power plant is extremely rare and can be mitigated with good future nuclear power plant design, it can't be reduced entirely to zero and there have been a handful of nuclear power plant failures in history. In the U.S., the most famous, which led to very little lost human life was the Three Mile Island incident. The Chernobyl plant failure in the Ukraine (where mitigation measures were recently upgraded with a protective steel "barn" over the melted down plant) was very serious in terms of lost lives, health impacts and lost use of property, however, and the Fukushima plant failure in Japan, at a quite high risk location, has likewise caused non-negligible impacts.

In sum, nuclear fission power is plagued with exaggerated public fears of the danger it poses while more mundane fossil fuels are actually far more harmful to human life, but it does have to be carefully managed and the supply of nuclear fuel while currently abundant relative to demand, is also not infinite.

* Nuclear fusion power plants involve some of the same issues of fuel (deuterium and tritium) security although less intensely, but fuel would still be cheap and energy density would still be high. It would not have the same risks of meltdown or nuclear waste that a fission plant does even though it could give rise to a one time explosion if there was massive plant failure with a localized impact that could be mitigated with good land use. Like nuclear fission, it would only be useful for generating electricity on a power plant scale.

It would be cheap, but the costs of building a nuclear fusion power plant, potentially requiring rare or toxic materials, would still be very high, preventing a nuclear fusion power plant from generating "too cheap to meter" electricity, even if fuel and operating costs were negligible. It could be price competitive, but not dramatically cheaper. But, it would be a permanent, sustainable solution to running out of both fossil fuels and uranium.

The main problem with nuclear fusion is that while we understand the physics governing it more or less perfectly in theory, and can make nuclear fusion bombs, we can not managed to engineer any sustained net power producing nuclear fusion electrical power plant and realistically, it could be many decades before we can, if ever.

* Hydropower is renewable, generates no air pollution, doesn't use anything toxic or produce waste to generate electricity, which is the sole kind of energy it can generate. It can be used as a 24 hour baseline electricity source.

But, there are limited supplies of it because there are only so many rivers that can be effectively dammed. In the arid west, dams are already valuable as a way to manage scarce water resources, but dams also flood large areas of otherwise useful land and destroy not only the ecologies of the flooded areas but also the ecologies that had depended upon free flowing rivers.

* Tidal power in principle provides essentially all of the clean energy benefit of hydropower, apart from being a little bit less of a 24 hour power source, without flooding large areas of useful land. But, they are extremely technologically challenging to put in place and every system must be custom, with only a couple of facilities that are current viable, and it can disrupt sensitive tidal ecosystems. Obviously, it can only add to the grid in coastal locations.

* Wind power is renewable, non-polluting, cost effective in large areas, intermittent but more reliable than solar in many areas, has a modest land footprint, and not ultra-hazardous in any respect. It needs to be paired with batteries or another baseline electricity source, and is can pose a hazard to some kinds of birds. Wind power is rapidly making up a much larger part of the total electric grid.

* Sails and kites with modern designs can reduce fuel demands greatly for ships making transoceanic trips, particularly is speed is not at a high premium.

* Photovoltaic solar power is attractive in a few places as a source of utility electricity in the Southwest, where supplies of solar power also coincide with air conditioning driven demand for electricity to a significant extent, since days in the Southwest got hot, but nights rapidly cool. It is also a good niche source of electricity in places were a larger electrical grid is not available, and is an expensive, but decentralized partial power source for homes and businesses connected to the electrical grid, especially when reverse metering is available.

Prices for solar electricity generation have plummeted with technological advances (although tax subsidies have clouded the issue of price).

Solar electricity is renewable and the fuel is free. Some solar cell production methods use toxic or scarce materials, and solar cells can take up lots of space and can break and need to be replaced over time.

Critically, photovoltaic power systems don't work when its dark, and have degraded performance where days are shorter and cloudy days are common, making it less attractive cost wise in those places. And, it isn't a viable source for 24 hour baseline power without being joined to some efficient and large scale power storage technology, or having a backup alternative power source (like nuclear or natural gas power electricity).

* Heat solar power is a simpler and more efficient use of solar power for water heating and space heating, especially when reaching a boiling point is not necessary. This includes solar hot water heaters, solar pool heating, and passive solar arrangements to use the sun to reduce heating needs in buildings.

* Energy conservation is a good substitute for energy consumption and great progress is being made in reducing the energy consumed on lights (due to LEDs and motion detectors), electronics (due to solid state computer memorized and reduced size computer chips), heating and cooling (due to insulation, and ground heat exchange systems), and vehicles (due to lower weight materials, regenerative braking, and reduced energy consumption at idle, especially by hybrid and electric vehicles). In transportation, the most overlooked way to increase fuel efficiency is to increase passenger occupancy in vehicles, which makes old school buses as energy efficient as a top of the line hybrid vehicle.

* Plug in electric vehicles and electrically powered rail systems make it possible to substitute gasoline and diesel (and to a lesser extent natural gas) for electricity off the grid which is increasingly become cleaner, more renewable and has less rapidly fluctuating prices. Electrically powered urban rail systems have basically no downsides relative to conventionally fueled locomotives, high speed rail operates on the same basis, and freight rail could be relatively easily adapted to be electrically powered with existing technology.

Notably, it takes considerable electricity to refine crude oil into gasoline or diesel fuel, so converting cars and trucks and buses to electricity will have less impact by increasing overall electricity demand than one might expect.

* The need for better energy storage systems (batteries and battery substitutes) in terms of cost, range, energy density, rechargeability, and environmental soundness of their construction, is pretty much the exclusive barrier to widespread conversion to electric cars and trucks, and also, at another scale, to conversion to renewable but intermittent power sources for the electrical grid. Existing batteries needed for an electric car are expensive, have limited range, can take a long time to recharge, and can require toxic or scarce materials to make.

Trump Voters Still Delusional

People who voted for Trump in the last election remain likely to believe a lot of basic facts that are completely false or are absurd.

-40% of Trump voters insist that he won the national popular vote to only 49% who grant that Clinton won it and 11% who aren’t sure. 

-Only 53% of Trump voters think that California’s votes should be allowed to count in the national popular vote. 29% don’t think they should be allowed to count, and another 18% are unsure. 

There’s been a lot of attention to the way fake news has spread and been believed especially by Trump supporters and that’s borne out in our polling: 

-73% of Trump voters think that George Soros is paying protesters against Trump to only 6% who think that’s not true, and 21% who aren’t sure one way or the other. 

-14% of Trump supporters think Hillary Clinton is connected to a child sex ring run out of a Washington DC pizzeria. Another 32% aren’t sure one way or another, much as the North Carolinian who went to Washington to check it out last weekend said was the case for him. Only 54% of Trump voters expressly say they don’t think #Pizzagate is real. 

There’s also been a lot of discussion recently about how we might be in a post-fact world and we see some evidence of that coming through in our polling: 

-67% of Trump voters say that unemployment increased during the Obama administration, to only 20% who say it decreased. 

-Only 41% of Trump voters say that the stock market went up during the Obama administration. 39% say it went down, and another 19% say they’re not sure.

From Public Policy Polling.

Who cares what the truth is if you are rewarded by voters, and you can convince voters that things that are patently false are actually true?

George W. Bush looks "reality-based" compared to Trump and his supporters.

One of the biggest challenges for Democrats and liberals over the next four years will be figuring out how to get conservative perceptions of reality to correspond more closely to reality itself.

Meritocracy in China

Less than ideal evidence nonetheless suggests that modern Chinese civil servants, continuing an ancient Chinese tradition, are competent and talented.

For a while I have been arguing that China is much more of a meritocracy than many outsiders (or for that matter insiders) believe. You have to distinguish type I from type II error; the princelings do unjustly well but smart people from rural areas are elevated at fairly high rates. Most important jobs are filled by very smart people. Therefore I am happy to see this new paper by Margaret Boittin, Gregory Distelhorst, and Francis Fukuyama:

. . . . We surveyed over 2,500 Chinese municipal officials on three organizational features of their bureaucracies: meritocracy, individual autonomy, and morale. They report greater meritocracy than U.S. federal employees in almost all American agencies. . . .

There are other interesting results in the body of the paper. The only U.S. federal agencies with higher meritocratic self-assessment than the Chinese mean are the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the SEC, the OPM, and Education. Homeland Security, Agriculture, and HUD do the worst, with the performance of the branches of the military being poor as well . . . . You will note that Chinese civil service jobs are highly coveted, and on average there are fifty applicants for each slot, making those jobs more exclusive than Ivy League universities.

From Tyler Cohen.

Rural Living Is Less Healthy

One of the more notable bits of news in the wake of this election was that the largely urban part of America that voted for Hillary Clinton contributed twice as much to the economy as the largely rural part of America that voted for Donald Trump. In addition to being more economically productive, urban America is healthier than rural America. 

Interestingly, rather than being better off because they have lower taxes, taxes that are too low are one of many reasons that rural counties are less healthy, because they don't provide sufficient public services.

The 2016 County Health Rankings, released Wednesday, compare health disparities among nearly all the counties in the country on the basis of more than 30 factors, including education, housing, exercise and commuting time. The report shows dramatic differences between rural and urban counties on a number of measures, most notably premature death rates. 

Rural counties have higher rates of smoking, obesity, child poverty and teen births, as well as higher numbers of uninsured adults than their urban counterparts, according to the report, a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Large urban counties have lower smoking and obesity rates, fewer injury deaths and more residents who attended some college. 

"What we think is going on here is that ... in rural areas, there is a smaller population, fewer businesses, fewer taxes -- and they're struggling to offer as many opportunities as urban," said lead researcher Bridget Catlin. "All of this has a significant impact on health." . . . 

"Urban residents definitely have better access to health care, but there's far more to good health than just that," said Catlin. "People have an impression of rural areas as healthy living and the great outdoors, but there aren't sidewalks. It can actually be more difficult to get out and exercise. Urban can offer more recreation facilities and more safe options." 

"Rural populations are also aging faster than urban areas," said Catlin. "Younger people who do go to college and leave home -- many of them don't return back home. What's left is an older population in the rural areas."

From CNN.

Patent Law Tamed Yet Again

The United States Supreme Court made another major shift in patent law on Tuesday, overruling Federal Circuit precedents that had held that any design patent violation entitles the prevailing party to 100% of the profits from the product utilizing the patent, in the case of Samsung Electronics Co. v. Apple, Inc. According to the official syllabus of the decision (in the link above) the holding is that:

In the case of a multicomponent product, the relevant “article of manufacture” for arriving at a [35 U.S.C.] §289 damages award need not be the end product sold to the consumer but may be only a component of that product.

In the case, Samsung was ordered to pay $399 million to Apple for breaching design patent aspects of the iPhone that were a small component of the total product. The U.S. Supreme Court held in a unanimous opinion that damages for breach of a design patent should instead be proportionate to the contribution that the patented element makes to the total product - in this case, probably a small fraction of the total $399 million of profits that Samsung made from selling the infringing phones.

The decision resolves what had been a serious fundamental flaw in patent law that produced damages that were grossly disproportionate to the true value of the harm from an infringement. Under the old rule of law, it could easily be the case that the damages award for multiple breaches of different patents that all contribute to the same product could result in total damages far in excess of the total profits from the sales of the goods.

This is a particular barrier to technological innovations, because it is often not at all clear until a court finally resolves the issue, whether a product infringes a patent, and because there is no fool proof way to review the existing catalog of patents when designing a new product. Yet, a patent holder can recover for patent infringement even if the product is designed and/or invented completely independently of the patent holder's invention.

Also, a the patent holder can take a wait and see approach and only sue in cases where an allegedly infringing product becomes profitable, without bearing any of the downside risk, when potentially infringing products turn out to generate little or no profits.

This is one of an ongoing string of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have generally narrowed the scope of what can be protected by patent law and the consequences for infringing a patent. Previous cases have, in particular, narrowed the scope of patentable business processes and software, made it easier to sanction weak patent infringement claims with attorneys' fee awards, narrowed the general presumption that injunctions are available for every patent infringement, and now, narrowed the scope of damages which can be awarded for an infringement that is a minor part of a product.

For a long time, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed away from patent law, which is a quite insular and technical speciality in the law, since circuit splits of authority never arose because all patent law cases are handled on appeal by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a bench full of judges with private practice backgrounds in firms that enforced patents, resulting in a degree of institutional capture. But, the U.S. Supreme Court eventually got wise to this problem and has embarked on a slow but steady roll back of the Federal Circuit's patent law excesses.

Patent holders are now about 3 pro to 17 against to 4 neutral in U.S. Supreme Court litigation implicating patent law since 2005, a period which also included the America Invents Act in 2011 which was a major reform. There has also been related nationalization of trade secret law this year.

An important piece of patent legislation of venue for infringement actions has some change of passage either in the lame duck session or in the next Congress.

Other Relatively Recent Posts on Patent Law at this blog include:

* 15% of U.S. Tech Patent Litigation Due To Patent Troll Enforcement Of Three Dubious Patents

* Patents Are Much Harder To Get Than They Were A Dozen Years Ago

* Almost Half Of Fully Litigated Patents Are Invalid

* Fed Circuit Wrong Again On Patent Law

* The Law Against Using Your Own Ideas

* Tax Strategy Patents Are No More

Community Bail Funds

The framing of Community Bail Funds as "Bail Nullification" is in my view, counterproductive, but the practice itself is a fascinating end run around the failure of other policy makers to implement bail reform, which has been repeatedly demonstrated for half a century or so, to be an effective and workable criminal justice reform.

The longstanding scholarly debate over the ability of community members to engage in nullification has been confined to the study of jury nullification — when jurors acquit someone despite knowledge of their legal guilt. 

This Article explores the possibility of community nullification beyond the jury by analyzing the growing and unstudied phenomenon of community bail funds, which post bail for strangers based on broader beliefs regarding the overuse of pretrial detention. When a community bail fund posts bail, it can serve the function of nullifying a judge’s determination that a certain amount of the defendant’s personal or family money was necessary to ensure public safety and prevent flight. 

This growing practice — what this Article calls “bail nullification” — is powerful because it exposes publicly what many within the system already know to be true: that although bail is ostensibly a regulatory pretrial procedure, for indigent defendants it often serves the function that a real trial might, producing guilty pleas and longer sentences when an individual cannot afford to pay their bail. 

By examining the ways in which community bail funds serve the functions that a nullifying jury might — allowing popular participation in an individual case to facilitate larger resistance to the policies and practices of state actors — this Article argues that community bail funds have the potential to change how local criminal justice systems operate on the ground, shifting and shaping political and constitutional understandings of the institution of money bail. 

Community bail funds give a voice to populations who rarely have a say in how criminal justice is administered, especially poor people of color. And the study of bail funds helps point toward other ways in which bottom-up public participation can help create a criminal justice system that is truly responsive to the communities that it is ultimately supposed to serve.

Jocelyn Simonson (Brooklyn Law School) has posted Bail Nullification (Michigan Law Review, Vol. 115, 2017, Forthcoming) on SSRN via the Legal Theory Blog.

Quote Of The Day

The race of man . . .  cannot long be happy without virtue, nor actively virtuous without freedom, nor securely free without rational knowledge.

-- William Jones

When Do Placebos Work And Why?

Placebos are particularly effective with conditions related to nervous system chemistry and immune response.

Do placebos and the power of the mind work? What I’ve found is yes, but not with everything. There are rules and conditions in which healing can be incredibly effective. Parkinson’s, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, depression, anxiety, certain types of asthma, and autoimmune deficiencies are all very placebo-responsive. 

But cancer is not. . . .

Placebos have been particularly effective in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. How do you explain that?

Parkinson’s is the perfect disease to talk about placebos. It is a chronic deficiency of dopamine, which is one of those brain chemicals that does a lot of jobs in our bodies. One of [dopamine’s] important roles is in reward processing: how we think about good things we might get in the future.

Expectation drives placebos. And dopamine is a chemical that’s very responsive to our expectations. Parkinson’s happens to be a deficiency in the very chemical that’s very important in placebo effects and rewards.

If you look at Alzheimer’s, which does not have a high placebo response, you start to see that there are rules at play when it comes to placebos. It’s not your brain magically doing all these crazy things. There are certain chemicals we have access to and others we don’t.

From a National Geographic interview with Erik Vance, the author of Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal, which was published by National Geographic.

Some of this appears to be related to neuroendocrine systems in the body such as the HPA axis:

The hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA axis or HTPA axis) is a complex set of direct influences and feedback interactions among three endocrine glands: the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland (a pea-shaped structure located below the hypothalamus), and the adrenal (also called "suprarenal") glands (small, conical organs on top of the kidneys). 

These organs and their interactions constitute the HPA axis, a major neuroendocrine system that controls reactions to stress and regulates many body processes, including digestion, the immune system, mood and emotions, sexuality, and energy storage and expenditure. It is the common mechanism for interactions among glands, hormones, and parts of the midbrain that mediate the general adaptation syndrome (GAS). While steroid hormones are produced mainly in vertebrates, the physiological role of the HPA axis and corticosteroids in stress response is so fundamental that analogous systems can be found in invertebrates and monocellular organisms as well. 

The HPA axis, HPG axis, HPT axis, and the hypothalamic–neurohypophyseal system are the four major neuroendocrine systems through which the hypothalamus and pituitary direct neuroendocrine function.

Conditions that do not relate to the neuroendocrine systems, nervous system chemistry or the immune system, in contrast, are not very responsive to placebo effects. They don't work, for example, to stop cancer, retard Alzheimer's disease, prevent blood loss, or to set broken bones. In other words, if your brain doesn't have control over any of the relevant bodily symptoms, placebos don't work.

U.S. Immigration Courts Still Broken

ARLINGTON, Va. — Walk into the immigration court here, and scenes of a justice system in collapse abound. . . . The judge in Courtroom 2 had unsettling news for Edhite Pouken Shienji, a woman from Cameroon seeking asylum. After 14 years of delays, she was finally scheduled for a hearing. But at the last minute, the judge was reassigned to handle the cases of some migrants from Central America. Her hearing was postponed once again — to 2019. 

In Courtroom 8, there was a deportation hearing for Damián Martínez, from Mexico. The judge soon discovered he was a 4-month-old infant, dozing on the shoulder of his mother. Somehow the baby’s case had become separated in court records from hers. The bewildered mother, in court without a lawyer, had no clue how to fix the problem. The judge could only urge her to make sure that Damián “presents himself in all of his future hearings." . . . 

On a visit to the immigration court in Denver four years ago, cases were moving briskly, but judges were starting to worry because hearing delays were reaching 18 months. Now in Denver, the court with the longest wait times in the country, most cases drag on more than five years, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group studying federal data, has found. In Arlington, by reputation one of the nation’s best-run courts, eight judges have more than 30,000 cases, with some scheduling hearings in 2022.

From the New York Times.

Political theory predicts that political institutions respond to voters, and that immigration law, because it mostly benefits people who can't vote, will usually be sorely neglected. This theory seems to be a pretty accurate one.

Who Knew I Was In The Market For That?

Customized Internet advertising is a weird thing.

Sometimes it is spot on and even suggests purchases you'd never dreamed of but totally want once you see it (whether or not you'll actually buy something is another thing).

Often, you are bombarded with ads for things immediately after you've purchased something like that on the Internet. But, usually, you don't need any more of that thing at that point.

Other times, its just wild and weird. Today, for example, I've been getting advertisements hoping that I'll buy a $1.5 million plus apartment in a high rise in Manhattan.  Who knew that I was in the market for one of those? (Unless the Internet knows something that I don't.) My best guess is that I've been reading the New York Times more than usual.

The Red Letter Christian Pipe Dream

Christianity is what Christians do, and that is something that few people of good will can be proud of these days. I know the history that brought us to the place we are today. I can even see some psychological and sociological logic to it.  But, in my gut, I am still baffled at how Christianity became such a predominantly evil institution, in the United States and to a lesser extent, in Europe as well, as least.  But, it did.

New York Times Op-Ed writer Tony Campolo is struggling with this as well on behalf of a huge demographic, fecklessly hoping for a new movement of Christians who believe in good, but the evil in Christianity has instead driven a grass roots surge of ernest and far more moral secular humanism.

Evangelicalism was closely associated with the campaign of Donald J. Trump, and more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for the president-elect. . . . much of the good that went by the name “evangelicalism” has been clouded over; now a new movement is needed to replace it. 

When it comes to religious identity in America, the fastest-growing group is the “nones.” Nearly a quarter of all Americans, and over 35 percent of millennials, report no religious affiliation. Nones, many of whom grew up within evangelicalism, often still affirm faith in God. They left the church because they gave up on evangelical leadership. Nothing sums up their objections more clearly than evangelicals’ embrace of Mr. Trump. . . .

[T]he old guard, like the Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, were ardent Trump supporters . . . At Liberty University, the largest evangelical college in the country, thousands of students signed a petition denouncing the support of its president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for Mr. Trump and insisting that they were more interested in being Christian than in being Republican. 

Andy Crouch, the executive editor of Christianity Today, criticized both candidates, writing that enthusiasm for Mr. Trump “gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord.” He added, “They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us.”. . .

Jesus-centered faith needs a new name. Christians have retired outdated labels before. During the late 19th century, when scientific rationalism fueled the questioning of Scripture, “fundamentalism” arose as an intelligent defense of Christianity. By the 1930s, however, fundamentalism was seen as anti-intellectual and judgmental. It was then that the term “evangelicalism” was put forward by Christianity Today’s first editor, Carl F. H. Henry, as a new banner under which a broad coalition of Jesus followers could unite. 

But beginning with the culture wars of the 1980s, the religious right made a concerted effort to align evangelicalism with the Republican Party. By the mid-’90s, the word had lost its positive connotations with many Americans. They came to see Christians — and evangelicals in particular — as anti-women, anti-gay, anti-environment and anti-immigrant and as the champions of guns and war. . . . 

Perhaps we need a new reformation — one that invites Christians to return to the teachings of Jesus and offers our neighbors a truer vision of how he lived and moved in the world. . . . Maybe this is a moment in our history for evangelicals to repent and be “born again” again as Red Letter Christians.

The trouble is that there is no such movement. Not any movement with a prayer of becoming relevant, at any rate. People in the United States and indeed, in Europe as well, who give a damn about the values that the Gospel's moral messages emphasize have overwhelmingly abandoned the superstitious and anti-scientific nonsense of religion in favor of secular humanism.

Getting your morality from a source telling the story of an exorcist demigod and his exorcist followers who embrace the demon possession theory of mental and physical health is not way to live in the 21st century. Neither is putting your faith in a God who a few volumes earlier was urging his chosen people on in repeated campaigns of ruthless genocide.

Also, historically, Campolo is wrong in suggesting that Trump marks anything new. At most, Trump, whose new appointed chief of strategy offers up Hitler and Satan as positive role models for President Trump, simply made the long standing truth a bit more obvious. Evangelical Christians and many Catholics as well (although certainly not all) have firmly embraced evil and rejected any message that is remotely recognizable from the Gospel for at least a generation. And, during that time, they have come to dominate Christianity as more sane denominations with gentler, more human messages have withered in one of the most dramatic cases of institutional collapse in peacetime history.

There is no reason to imagine that this will change for the better in my lifetime, or the lifetime of my children. The rats are abandoning the ship because it is sinking and has found a less precarious place to ground themselves that is connected to reality and not half-fictional myths.

Refugees Saving Dying Neighborhoods

The linked story highlights how refugee communities, such as 70,000 Muslim Bosnians who settled in a neighborhood in Saint Louis in the 1990s, can revitalize neighborhoods in cities that are seeing massive population declines.