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Out-Of-Wedlock Birth Chart: The History
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We Come As Liberators: Capitalism's Finest Hour
Alan: If Iraq's chief export were broccoli, there would not have been an Iraq War.
Cheek-by-jowl with The Military-Industrial Complex, those who reside on the other side of the "mirrored glass ceiling" operate invisibly, sequestering ever larger slices of every pie.
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http://paxonbothhouses.
Cheek-by-jowl with The Military-Industrial Complex, those who reside on the other side of the "mirrored glass ceiling" operate invisibly, sequestering ever larger slices of every pie.
"The Rich Aren't Just Grabbing A Bigger Slice Of The Pie. They're Taking It All"
"Plutocracy Triumphant"Cartoon Compendium
"Taibbi: The $9 Billion Whistle Blower At JPMorgan-Chase. Financial Thuggery At The Top"
http://paxonbothhouses.
"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"
"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"
"Pope Francis Links"
"Pope Francis Links"
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Deregulation Is To Blame For Two Decades Of Financial Crises
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Republican Rule And Economic Catastrophe, A Lockstep Relationship
What happens when you turn over regulatory responsibilities to people who think there is really no need for regulation?
The United States, and much of the world, tried that for a large part of the last quarter-century. Along the way, a series of crises sent out warning signals that were not heeded.
After the economy recovered from the stock market crash of 1987, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman who had poured money into the market to stem the damage, was celebrated as a hero. He believed in what came to be derided as “market fundamentalism,” holding that markets were far smarter than governments and would produce optimal results if only there were no interference from politicians.
That analysis certainly seemed reasonable through much of the 1990s. The economy grew without a recession for 10 years, the longest such stretch in United States history. A few people worried that bad things could happen as a result of the explosive growth in derivative securities, but they were largely marginalized by the obvious fact that only good things were happening.
One reason recessions were previously more common was that the Fed often found itself —in the words of William McChesney Martin Jr., the chairman of the Fed from 1951 to 1970 — “in the position of the chaperone who has ordered the punch bowl removed just when the party was really warming up.”
He made that remark in 1955, after the Fed raised interest rates repeatedly, seeking to slow the economy even though the inflation rate was close to zero. Fed officials, The New York Times reported at the time, cited “the continued buoyancy of the stock market” as a reason to fear that “the surge of economic growth has enhanced expectations of growth beyond reasonable limits.”
That was exactly what was happening in the late 1990s, but Mr. Greenspan saw no reason to be concerned about rapidly rising asset prices. Was it not clear that markets were efficient?
Starting in 1997, a series of crises appeared to be unrelated. Each was viewed as an extraordinary event.
It went largely unnoticed that those crises had something in common: destabilizing factors caused by financial innovation and the lack of regulation.
That was true in Asia, where countries had followed the advice of groups like the International Monetary Fund and done nothing to control huge flows of capital into their economies. When the news turned bad, that capital tried to flee. Currencies collapsed and bailouts ensued.
Republican Rule And Economic Catastrophe, A Lockstep Relationship
Then came the collapse of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund. It had used too much leverage as it traded derivative securities with strategies that assumed some market relationships were sure things. The Fed had to step in to persuade — some might say force — the big banks to bail out the fund.
As share prices rose in the 1990s, many concluded that the stock market was a sure thing, at least in the long run. A book called “Dow 36,000” became a best seller. People quit good jobs to join start-ups, hoping that stock options would make them rich when their new employer went public. Silicon Valley won a bitter battle to keep company books from having to reflect the real value of the options being handed out, arguing in essence that the party might end if that happened.
Executives at more than a few companies — Enron and WorldCom being the most notable — cooked the books to allow themselves to share in the riches.
When share prices of high-flying technology and telecommunications companies collapsed in 2000 and 2001, the scandals led to passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, which for the first time created a regulator to pay attention to the auditors, whose work had been woefully inadequate. Wall Street analysts faced new rules on the theory that they had promoted stocks they knew were worthless.
But few wanted to mess with the financial engineers.
Instead, their standing only grew. Bank capital rules came to allow the banks to use their own — presumably sophisticated — models to calculate how much capital was needed for any asset they owned. Countries like Ireland and Iceland developed large banking systems and were hailed for finding high-paying, nonpolluting jobs.
“All the new financial products that have been created in recent years contribute economic value by unbundling risks and reallocating them in a highly calibrated manner,” Mr. Greenspan said in early 2000. “The rising share of finance in the business output of the United States and other countries is a measure of the economic value added by the ability of these new instruments and techniques to enhance the process of wealth creation.”
Mr. Greenspan was far from the only one to be entranced by the wisdom of Wall Street. In another speech that spring, Lawrence Summers, the Treasury secretary at the time,discussed the problems of “market overconfidence, the toxic combination of overleverage and illiquidity, nontransparency and the risks that hedging strategies and models may not live up to their design” that had been demonstrated by Long-Term Capital Management’s collapse.
But did that mean Washington needed to act? Far from it.
“Let me be clear,” Mr. Summers said in a speech to the Futures Industry Association. “It is the private sector, not the public sector, that is in the best position to provide effective supervision. Market discipline is the first line of defense in maintaining the integrity of our financial system.”
And it was to be the only line. Later that year, with bipartisan support, Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. That act barred the regulation of over-the-counter derivatives.![]()
“The most important financial innovation that I have seen the past 20 years,” he added, “is the automated teller machine.”
There is still good reason to think that markets are better at allocating capital than are governments. But if the events leading up to the financial crisis proved anything, it is that markets freed of meaningful oversight did a horrible job.
After the crisis, financial regulation was stepped up around the world. Significantly, the countries that seem to have been the most vigilant in raising bank capital standards are the United States, Britain and Switzerland. They are the countries that have the biggest financial sectors — and thus the most to lose if their banks again teeter on the brink of collapse.
Perhaps the standard Walter Lippman set in 1933 — that a good crisis is one that leads to solutions of the problems that caused the crisis — was met. But the new reforms have not been tested.
It could be that the test is beginning in Russia, where the ruble has collapsed to the point that Russian merchants are reluctant to accept it. Capital is fleeing, and Russia appears to be hesitant to use its vaunted foreign exchange reserves to defend the currency. The government says it will not impose capital controls, but such promises only serve to increase fears they will be broken.
In the 1960s, when exchange rates were fixed — at least until a crisis forced action — there was a saying: “He lied like a finance minister on the eve of devaluation.”
The important issue for the world’s financial system is the extent to which the crisis can be contained. Russian companies owe a lot of euros and dollars, and the lenders — banks and bondholders — could suffer substantial losses. Such losses could force them to sell other assets, spreading the crisis. Already stock markets and currencies in other emerging markets are losing value, reflecting the fear of contagion. We can hope that Western banks really do have enough capital cushion to weather any storm that may develop.
In normal times, a country in trouble can turn to the I.M.F. for a bailout, albeit one with strings. Russia probably cannot do that on terms it would be willing to accept, given Western anger over its actions in Ukraine.
Indeed, wags are already suggesting a title for a book to be written about the crisis: “Crimean Punishment.”
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Most U.S. Coastal Cities Will Experience Routine Flooding Within Next 35 Years
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Vermont Abandons Commitment To "Single Payer"
Works in Canada
Canadian Healthcare Better Than U.S.
Bloomberg News Service
Pax On Both Houses: Blog Posts About Canada
(I am an American citizen and a proud graduate of The University of Toronto where I received world-class education at the same steeply subsidized cost as Canadian citizens. While a Toronto undergraduate from 1965 - 1970, I received free healthcare under Canada's Single Payer system)
Founder Of Canada's Single Payer Healhcare System Is "The Greatest Canadian Ever"
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"I think we have the chance to make history here," wrote Jonathan Gruber.
It was the summer of 2014, and Gruber, who had yet to become the infamous goat of the Affordable Care Act debate, was consulting with the state of Vermont on its health-care reforms. He was not wrong: Vermont, run stem-to-stern by Democrats since the 2010 election, was attempting to use the benefits of the ACA to enact single-payer, universal health care coverage. If successful, it would bring about the dream of Canadian-style care to one state. Who could say which states would follow suit? Maybe all of New England? Maybe all 50?
Months later, Gruber's contract with the state was quietly wrapped up. And yesterday, Governor Peter Shumlin pre-empted an end of year report on the single-payer effort by announcing that the reform plan would be set aside. "The bottom line," he said, "is as we completed the financing modeling in the last several days, it became clear that risk of economic shock is too high at this time to offer a plan that I can responsibly support for passage in the Legislature."
It was a resounding defeat for progressive governance, and conservatives are giving a little backhanded credit to Gruber. Tea Party activist and Breitbart.com contributor Michael Patrick Leahy calls the single-payer plan the "first casualty" of Gruber's gaffes. Ever since conservative watchdogs dug up a video of Gruber mocking a constituent complaint about single-payer, Gruber had been sidelined as an effective, trustworthy advocate for the plan. That was especially problematic as a state representative from Shumlin's own party, Cynthia Browning, was suing the state for more records about the cost estimates.
"If I’d have gotten the documents I asked for in March, Vermonters would have known more about this plan and would have had a chance to make suggestions and criticisms," Browning said this week in an interview with Vermont Watchdog's Bruce Parker. "At this point it’s very hard for me to trust anything this administration says. Even if the reports they put out have valid data, they don’t tell the rest of the truth."
Browning probably deserves more credit for the public skepticism than Gruber; mathematics deserves the credit for Shumlin's decision. As Vox's Sarah Kliff explained, Shumlin only caved on single-payer after the Green Mountain Care Board issued a report that reduced expectations for how the program could be funded. The monies from ACA waivers and Medicaid were falling short, which meant that single-payer could only be implemented, by 2017, with a new 11.5 percent income tax.
That could not happen given Shumlin's current political capital. Leave aside the legal volleying from his own party. Shumlin, the 2014 chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, had a disastrous year. Not only did his party lose winnable races in Maine, Massachusetts, and Maryland; Shumlin himself has not yet been re-elected. He stumbled against an underfunded Republican opponent, edging him by 1 percent of the vote, and falling short of the 50 percent needed for outright victory. The governor's opponent had promised to "end the failed health care experiment,"and nearly done so. To return to power, Shumlin needed the legislature to re-elect him, a few weeks after the Green Mountain Care Board's report.
He had no political capital, so he didn't spend it. That came as a shock to plenty of people expecting Vermont to "make history." On Monday, I interviewed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and asked why he thought Shumlin had nearly lost. Did it have anything to do with a single payer/tax backlash?
"No, I think we had the lowest turnout in history," said Sanders. "We should learn from what happened last month. The American people are very demoralized right now."
Sanders, the only self-declared socialist in the Congress, has not commented or responded to a request for comment about Shumlin's single-payer decision.
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The Colbert Report: A Retrospective
Fresh Air with Terry Gross: Looking Back On Stephen Colbert. http://www.npr.org/2014/12/18/371659078/a-tribute-to-stephen-colbert-a-self-proclaimed-junkie-for-exhaustion
Stephen Colbert is immortal. On his show's final episode, Colbert accidentally shot and killed the Grim Reaper, then declared that he would live forever. Then scores of celebrities appeared, from the Cookie Monster to Paul Krugman, before Colbert departed on a sleigh with Santa Claus, Abraham Lincoln and Alex Trebek. Colbert will host "The Late Show" starting next year. Emily Yahr in The Washington Post.
His satire is as devastating now as it was nine years ago. "What we were seeing was the perfect indictment of the world of political punditry, yes, but also a send-up of our inflexibility when it came to opinions, reason and the truth." Hank Stuever in The Washington Post.
But did casual viewers ever get the joke? Political scientists surveyed people after asking them to watch Colbert perform in his character of a conservative talk-show host. Many seemed unsure whether the comedian was kidding or serious. Alice Robb in The New Republic.
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"Roman Hospitality: The Professional Women Of Pompei." 1 Prostitute Per 71 Men
John DeFelice, Roman Hospitality: The Professional Women of Pompeii; Marco Polo Monographs, 6. Warren Center, PA: Shangri-La Publications, 2001. Pp. 306. ISBN 0-9677201-7-6. $39.50.
Reviewed by John R. Clarke, University of Texas at Austin (j.clarke@mail.utexas.edu)
Word count: 2980 words
This monograph is a revised version of the author's dissertation, "The Women of Pompeian Inns: A Study of Law, Occupation, and Status (Roman Empire)" (Miami University of Ohio, 1998). The author challenges the notion, stemming from the study of Roman law and literature, that women associated with hospitality businesses were all prostitutes. In addition to reexamining Roman law and literature, DeFelice studies the material remains of inns and taverns, principally at Pompeii. Following the text and a select bibliography (157-175), he provides an Appendix, called "Master List of Hospitality Businesses in Pompeii," consisting of catalogue entries (176-306).
DeFelice begins with a rapid survey of modern scholars (from Ludwig Friedländer to Jane F. Gardner), who all insist that the female staff of thermopolia and cauponae were prostitutes. He rightly criticizes the impressionistic nature of their claims. Some authors accept as truth elite texts that indicate that such women shared the infamia of prostitutes; others make them into sex-workers by misreading archaeological evidence. In effect, most modern literature on the subject tells us more about the sexual imagination of modern scholars than it does about the work of these ancient Pompeian women.
DeFelice reasons that if Pompeii had a population of 10,000 inhabitants, and that his 151 inns, taverns, and/or snack shops each employed four women, there would have been one "waitress-prostitute" for every seven adult men at Pompeii. This figure is even more preposterous than the ratio of one prostitute for every 71 men based on the assumption that there are 35 brothels at Pompeii. He goes on to demonstrate, quite sensibly and following Wallace-Hadrill, how unreliable both the archaeology and nomenclature of hospitality establishments are. Archaeologists have used the labels popina, taberna, caupona, hospitium, anddeversorium capriciously. In effect, the most important distinction is whether establishments provided just food and drink (tabernae and popinae) or were able to provide overnight accommodations (hospitia,cauponae, stabula). DeFelice also reviews some of the evidence from graffiti and well-known texts for the low quality of lodging and the low social status of lodgers. In his quick survey of "representative remains" at Pompeii, the author provides no plans of the buildings, so that the reader must either accept his interpretation of the spaces described or sift through standard sources for corroboration.
In his introduction to Roman women in taverns and inns (34-38), DeFelice correctly criticizes Della Corte's unfounded contention that IX, 9, 2, the so-called Tavern of Asellina, was a caupona-lupanar. DeFelice cites Horace (Epistles 1.14.18-25) as evidence that taverns were sometimes associated with prostitution, but also Ulpian's definition of a prostitute from the third century A.D. (Digesta 23.2.43.pr.).
In chapter 3 DeFelice examines Roman marriage law in an effort to define the status of women who worked in taverns and inns. His review of the problems of trying to reconstruct first century A.D. law from Justinian's sixth-century Digest brings him to state that "..., a clearly delineated concept of infamia did not exist until Pompeii was long covered in ashes," (40). It is unlikely that women in the hospitality industry were legally eligible for legal marriage (conubium), for they were unlikely to be Roman citizens (either freeborn or freed). This chapter is particularly useful in demonstrating the difficulties of determining how Roman law functioned in the first century when the major sources are much later. He then argues that although tavern workers could not have conubium, that is, the right to engage in legal marriage, he theorizes that they could have been married in the relationship of concubinatus, a union, sometime long-term, that could not produce legitimate children.
DeFelice analyzes the relationship between Niceros and Melissa in Niceros' story of the werewolf Satyricon61-63 to examine the long-term relationship known as contubernium, questioning the status of Melissa's relationship with Terentius, the innkeeper who dies. In a somewhat circular fashion, the author concludes that "there was the potential of at least some forms of non-legal and legal marriage or concubinage in the lives of a copa or popinaria" (68). In the final section of the chapter the author asks whether the contubernium of a woman in the hospitality trades could have developed into what he calls ius matrimonium (see below). On the basis of Susan Treggiari, "Contubernales in CIL VI," Phoenix 35 (1981): 59-81, he plots a possible trajectory for a woman in the hospitality industry, a slave in contubernium, who wishes to progress to marriage. She would have to be manumitted and have a child who survived one year; if she continued working in the inn, she would be manager (institor) and not have the direct contact with the customers that gave her the status of infamia.
In arguing for the possibilities of relationships other than that of prostitute and client for the personnel of taverns and inns, DeFelice argues for upward mobility like that of the immigrant to America (76). He also assumes that what these women wanted was legal, "bourgeois" marriage--a position that strikes me as anachronistic. Left out, of course, are the male hospitality workers, who may have had marriage-like arrangements with female workers, or with their male or female owners/employers -- all this in addition to sexual relations with customers. Such relationships were outside the concerns of the law.
Since I am not an expert on Roman law, I requested my colleague, Professor Andrew Riggsby, to comment on this chapter. With his permission, I include his remarks in this and the following paragraph. Riggsby notes that, given his thesis, DeFelice underestimates the availability of marriage in several ways. He claims (46) that free persons cannot marry famosae; the rule likely applies to the free-born only (Tit. Ulp. 13.2, though cf. 16.2). As for his concerns (e.g. 72-73) about the Augustan requirement that slaves be 30 to receive full citizenship on manumission, there are various exceptions. The most salient one is in the case of female slaves freed for the purpose of marriage (Gaius 1.18). DeFelice rightly points out that aliens could not marry Romans and that it was hard, in any individual case, to determine whether a person of foreign descent was "slave, freed, or peregrina" (46, cf. 58 and 69). This omits an important possibility. Descendants of slaves could be free-born Romans yet ethnically distinct. References to "foreigners" in electoral contexts suggest that this group made up a substantial part of the urban population of Rome already by the end of the Republic. At the other end of the spectrum, freeborn peregrines could not marry Romans, but Roman law did not prevent them from marrying each other. So, for instance, Roman law would not in theory deny the validity of the marriage of two Jewish immigrants; it would just have nothing to say in the matter. (In practice, Roman law might actually go further and give some legal consequences to such marriages; see Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage [Oxford, 1991] 49-51.) Despite DeFelice's long disquisition on the difficulties of extracting earlier Roman law from our generally late sources, he leans very heavily on two demonstrably late imperial constitutions (3 Non. Feb. 326; actually one enactment preserved in two sources CTh 9.7.1 = Just. C. 9.9.28). This is the earliest text that even suggests (and the point is not entirely clear even here) that waitresses as such were infames, yet he takes that point as generally valid in much of his subsequent discussion (e.g. 58, 76).
Riggsby notes many incidental problems with the technicalities of law and of Latin. "Ius matrimonium" is not a legal term, nor, indeed Latin; he must mean iustum matrimonium, (as on p. 60). Contubernales(passim) is not singular. Stuprum, even as a legal concept, is not an Augustan invention (47). For the Republican evidence, see Elaine Fantham, "Stuprum: Public Attitudes and Penalties for Sexual Offences in Republican Rome," CV 35 (1991) 267-91. Conubium is not, under normal circumstances, "granted" (passim) but simply falls out from personal status. This is important because the burden is not on a person to show that she is not infamis (see esp. 74). "Concubinatus" is somewhat more common than DeFelice claims (53), but perhaps more importantly "concubina" is quite common in the legal sources.
In Chapter 4, "From amicae to puella II as: Exploring Informal Sexual Relations in Pompeii," the author revisits the 151 structures that he believes are inns or taverns and analyses the graffiti for evidence about the relationships the women working in these establishments had. These relationships include slave-master relationships, short-term romantic relationships (among slaves), and prostitution. The section on short-term romantic relationships includes a discussion of the well-known graffiti documenting the competition of Successus and Severus for the tavern-maid Iris (CIL IV.8258, 8259), and a long excursus on the poor reputation of inns among elite writers, especially Ovid. DeFelice's definition of prostitution follows that of Thomas A. J. McGinn: prostitution includes payment for sexual service, sex with random partners with no allowance for preference, and lack of emotional bond between partners. Using this working definition, the author attempts to identify buildings at Pompeii specifically used as brothels (100-128).
He rightly criticizes Ray Laurence's characterization of "deviant zones" at Pompeii, based principally on the location of inns, brothels, and suspected rooms where prostitutes operated (cellae meretriciae,.1 Even Wallace-Hadrill's reasonable criteria for defining a space as a brothel (a room set aside and furnished with a masonry bed; erotic paintings over the door or in the room; sexual graffiti) are, admittedly, subject to modern misinterpretation. Under the heading "Exploring Sex in Brothels and Taverns," DeFelice examines the thirteen hospitality establishments that Hans Eschebach, in his 1970 publication, designated caupona-lupanaror taberna-lupanar.2 He demonstrates that there is little evidence to support the hypothesis that there was prostitution on the premises. For Eschebach, the usual reason for making an inn into a brothel is that the excavator found graffiti of the "hic bene futui" variety in the building. Yet DeFelice, on the basis of the graffiti recorded to date in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, points out that with rare exceptions, the inscriptions found in 84 of the 151 structures identified as inns have no sexual content. Those that do are often problematic. For instance, the caupona at I, 2, 20-21 has the greatest concentration of "futuo" graffiti, yet it has neither images of people engaging in sex nor any rooms with masonry beds. DeFelice suggests that rather than being a dedicated brothel, it was a place where the sexual trysts recorded in the graffiti occurred.
He rightly criticizes Ray Laurence's characterization of "deviant zones" at Pompeii, based principally on the location of inns, brothels, and suspected rooms where prostitutes operated (cellae meretriciae,.1 Even Wallace-Hadrill's reasonable criteria for defining a space as a brothel (a room set aside and furnished with a masonry bed; erotic paintings over the door or in the room; sexual graffiti) are, admittedly, subject to modern misinterpretation. Under the heading "Exploring Sex in Brothels and Taverns," DeFelice examines the thirteen hospitality establishments that Hans Eschebach, in his 1970 publication, designated caupona-lupanaror taberna-lupanar.2 He demonstrates that there is little evidence to support the hypothesis that there was prostitution on the premises. For Eschebach, the usual reason for making an inn into a brothel is that the excavator found graffiti of the "hic bene futui" variety in the building. Yet DeFelice, on the basis of the graffiti recorded to date in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, points out that with rare exceptions, the inscriptions found in 84 of the 151 structures identified as inns have no sexual content. Those that do are often problematic. For instance, the caupona at I, 2, 20-21 has the greatest concentration of "futuo" graffiti, yet it has neither images of people engaging in sex nor any rooms with masonry beds. DeFelice suggests that rather than being a dedicated brothel, it was a place where the sexual trysts recorded in the graffiti occurred.
Just as sexual graffiti do not mean that an inn was a brothel, neither do explicit paintings of sexual intercourse. DeFelice's analysis of the paintings in room b of the Inn on the Street of Mercury (VI, 10, 1.19) follows my own and agrees with my conclusion that if the three drawings by Henri Roux accurately record the now-destroyed erotic pictures they allude to sexual acrobatics of the theater rather than advertising services available to clients.3 The famous painting with the caption "lente impelle," taken from the tavern at VII, 9, 33 and now in the Naples Archaeological Museum, but found in a room without masonry bed, does not, the author contends, make the room a cella meretricia. The room nicely decorated with six (five surviving) paintings of male-female intercourse in the so-called "Casa del Ristorante" (IX, 5, 16), was unlikely to have been a dedicated brothel, as I attempt to establish through analysis of all remaining evidence and the published excavation reports. De Felice's three paragraphs on this structure conclude that "Clarke . . . is not completely convinced it is a lupanar" (119). In another case, a room next to VII, 11, 11.14 (located at 12 under the stairs) may have been a cella meretricia, but as DeFelice rightly points out, the fact that there is a carved tufa phallus by the entrance has nothing to do with the sex business and everything to do with the apotropaic powers of the phallus.
In the end, I am not sure that application of Wallace-Hadrill's three criteria for brothels proves very much; more convincing is a full analysis of all the material evidence, and without plans, photographs, and -- above all -- extensive analysis of urban context, DeFelice's conclusions remain tentative. What is more, under the heading "Exploring Additional Locations," the author goes even farther out on a limb than had Eschebach, Della Corte, or Fiorelli, suggesting on the basis of graffiti found in other inns that prostitutes frequented them looking for business (123-127). Even so, he concludes: "The assumption that tavern worker equals prostitute, though echoed in several places in the Roman law of late antiquity is not supported by the evidence found presently in Pompeii." (128)
DeFelice's concluding chapter is a critique of the "moral geography of place" (129-156). He examines the fifth chapter of Laurence (cited above, note 1) and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, "Public Honor and Private Shame: The Urban Texture in Pompeii," in Kathryn Lomas, ed., Urban Society in Roman Italy (London, 1995), 39-63. He rightly points out the difficulties of applying a contemporary virtue-vice opposition to Pompeii in order to differentiate "positive" from "negative" (or "deviant") spaces in the city. Wallace-Hadrill uses Seneca's identification of virtue with the forum as opposed to "lowly pleasure" with the eating house (Seneca De vita beata 7.3 ); for DeFelice, Seneca's categorizing reflects the philosopher's Stoic morality but not the moral geography of Pompeii. What is more, "deviant" behavior is a movable feast, if PlautusCurculio 461-485 is any gauge. Any area of the Roman city could be the background for vices such as prostitution and gambling.
DeFelice concludes, on the basis of further textual analysis (especially Juvenal Satires 8.146-185), that the concept of moral geography applies only to the movements of the Roman elites. Attacks on the "immorality" of elites served to enforce at least the appearance of self-control and financial responsibility of their own class. If an elite frequented inns and taverns, he crossed an elite social boundary and risked moral criticism and the ability to justify his moral and social superiority.
In his catalogue, DeFelice updates the works of Tönnes Kleberg, Hotels, restaurants et cabarets dans l'antiquité romain (Uppsala, 1957), Sharon A. Ruddell, "The Inn, Restaurant and Tavern Business in Ancient Pompeii," (M.A. thesis, University of Maryland, 1964), and Eschebach (1970). His principal tool is Halsted B. Van der Poel's unfinished cartography project, RICA (Researches in Campanian Archaeology), published in the volumes of the Corpus Topographicum Pompeianum (Part V, 1981; Part IIIA, 1986). Most entries begin with a quotation from Ruddell's catalogue, with additions from other published sources and references to bibliography, plans, and inscriptions recorded in the CIL. The catalogue entries proceed by Regio and Insula (from I, 1, 1 to IX (15). D/E), and they number more than 151, for, when the author has grounds for doubting that a building was a tavern or inn, he enters the address but does not assign it a catalogue number. I found DeFelice's catalogue quite useful, both in publishing Ruddell's catalogue and in updating structures excavated but officially unpublished or published incompletely. It is a compilation of secondary sources, but a useful one nonetheless. Among other virtues, it provides the reader with a history (often quite checkered) of the excavation and identification of these structures at Pompeii and a guide to the locations of the graffiti found on them.
Despite its many virtues, the book is very poorly edited. Typos and grammatical errors abound. An early warning is the fact that the author's name is misspelled (in gold letters) on the cover and also on the title page (hand-corrected with whiteout on my review copy). The use of fancy first letters for the first word of the first sentence of a subheading results in the typographical nightmare "Pumerous" for "Numerous" (30). Content is often in dire need of editing. On page 30, the author writes: "As previously stated, popinae were suited for a quick sit down meal. This was usually on stools at a table, a feature, which Martial found to be both ill-mannered and distasteful." On page 32 we find: "Customers often had to eat sitting at tables in many of the lower class ones, and not recline. This habit Martial found low class, boorish, and offensive."
The author (or editor) provides no figure call-out numbers in the text, so that the reader must determine the purpose of the illustrations, all fuzzy line drawings digitized from existing publications (including my own). The captions are confusing and inaccurate. For instance, Fig. 4:11, a drawing from Pompeii VII, 9, 33 confuses this image (the famous scene of male-female intercourse with the words LENTE IMPELLE) with the so-called "tightrope walkers" known from Barrè, Herculaneum et Pompei (1827), pl. 35. The author adds: "Most recently used in Clarke, p. 210"; in fact I reproduce an original photograph of the LENTE IMPELLE painting (Naples inv. 27690) on p. 259, Fig. 100 of Looking at Lovemaking. There are some errors of fact as well, and again I provide but one example as a caveat. Within his discussion of the liberty of a man to have sex with a variety of women outside of marriage without legal consequences, DeFelice gets the story of Cato wrong, claiming that he praised two young citizens emerging from a brothel. All the relevant texts are in the singular.4
If the reader is patient with the rough editing and typos, Roman Hospitality presents useful and sometimes provocative observations on Roman attitudes toward taverns and inns and the women who worked in them. He puts Pompeian hospitality establishments into perspective principally through his updating of Ruddell's catalogue and his selective study of the graffiti. Speaking as an art historian, I find that DeFelice's use of visual representation falls quite short of the needed contextual reevaluation. I repeatedly wished that the author had sent his manuscript to expert colleagues and then submitted it to a university press where it would have gotten the careful editing and vetting it deserves.
Notes:
1. Ray Laurence, Roman Pompeii: Space and Society (New York, 1994), 70-87.
2. Hans Eschebach, Die städtbauliche Entwicklung des antiken Pompeji . Römische Mitteilungen, Supplement 17 (1970); but see now Liselotte Eschebach, ed., Gebäudeverzeichnis und Stadtplan der antiken Stadt Pompeji (Cologne, 1993).
3. John R. Clarke, Looking at Lovemaking (Berkeley, 1998), 206-212.
4. Clarke, Looking at Lovemaking, 196-199, notes 7-9.
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Assault Rifle Amusement Park For Children Set To Open In Florida
Americans are nuts.
Garden variety wacko.
"Breaking Bad" ain't got nothin' on The Land of The Free.
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"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"
"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"
Assault Rifle Amusement Park For Children Set To Open In Florida
A while back some idiots in Texas thought it would be a great idea to have a meet and greet with gun bearing kids sitting on Santa's lap.
Not to be outdone by Texas stupidity, Florida has taken things even further.
A new attraction where children as young as 13 fire military-grade weapons in zombie, gangster and cowboy-themed simulators has been slammed by gun control campaigners.Alls it would take is one 'concerned citizen on 911' to end one of these kids lives, if some other accident doesn't happen first.Although management claim their Orlando, Florida, attraction provides a safe place for the use of firearms, critics claim it is unsuitable for an area known for its child-friendly attractions.The website for the business - named Machine Gun America - states it is Orlando's 'first automatic adrenaline attraction'.
Of course this is not about gun safety, firearm awareness or even common sense... its about being Rambo or living out The Walking Dead fantasies:
It explains: 'Whether you're looking to unleash your inner action star or become a zombie hunter, experience the exhilarating rush of shooting real machine guns and powerful firearms for a thrill like any other.'Adam Lanza would have no doubt loved that. Don't worry though, because there will be proper supervision:
'No one ever shoots by themselves, and no guest is ever in control of the weapon without a range safety officer next to them and participating with them,' he told WTSP.Because things like this never happen:
A Violet Township trustee who accidentally shot and wounded a student who was taking his concealed-carry class last year resolved the criminal case against him yesterdayHell, even the DailyMail article (not normally known for its opposing viewpoints on gun issues) threw this into the article:
In late August, a nine-year-old girl accidentally shot dead firing range instructor Charles Vacca, 39, after an Uzi she was firing recoiled upwards out of her grip.One person who obviously wont attend, and wont have the NRA stick up for them...The shocking recording taken by the girl's parents and released by police shows Vacca standing closely next to the girl when the gun recoiled as she fired on full automatic mode.Mr Vacca died after being fatally struck in the head.
5:48 AM PT: While on the topic of idiots with guns, lets note that Discovery Channel Sons of Guns reality tv 'star', has been indicted on multiple counts of rape
Sons of Guns star Will Hayden was indicted by a Baton Rouge grand jury Wednesday on three counts of rape, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune.Hayden's indictment comes about four months after the 49-year-old was arrested for allegedly molesting a young girl. Days after his August arrest, Hayden was formally charged with raping his 12-year-old daughter. The victim stated that Hayden allegedly raped her almost daily since March 2013, according to legal docs obtained by E! News at the time
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New Yorker Cartoon: Above All, Do No Harm
“Of course, this could also be confirmation bias from me wanting you to get sick.”
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New Yorker Cartoon: Difference Between A Tourist And A Traveler
And even more big buildings to your right!
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New Yorker Cartoon: The Dawning Of The Age Of Aquarius
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New Yorker Cartoon: The Whole Family Gathers For Christmas
“We’re going to see my family. There’s an extra twenty in it for you if we never get there.”
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John Conyers Jr.: How Congress Can Address Our Racial Outrage
Desiree Griffiths, 31, of Miami, holds up a sign saying "Black Lives Matter", with the names of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two black men recently killed by police, during a protest Friday, Dec. 5, 2014, in Miami.
John Conyers Jr., a Democrat, represents Michigan’s 13th Congressional District in the House.
Nearly 50 years ago, the Kerner Commission, which was created in the aftermath of the country’s 1967 riots, warned that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” And now, six years after the election of our first African American president, we still find ourselves riven by racial distrust and fear. The string of deaths of unarmed blacks by police officers in Cleveland, Phoenix, New York and Ferguson, Mo., challenge not only the strength of our criminal and social justice systems but also the credibility and legitimacy of our political system.
In 1965, when I came to Congress, I joined a legislative body that was still able to work together at times of national crisis. The first major bill I voted on, the Voting Rights Act, was a response to widespread outrage over the police reaction to the “Bloody Sunday” protests, including the beatings in Selma, Ala. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) and his Republican counterpart, Everett Dirksen (Ill.), introduced the bill, and the final legislation enjoyed more support from Republican than Democratic members, an almost unthinkable dynamic today.
Even after the divisive impact of the so-called “Gingrich Revolution” when Congress was truly tested, we were able to rise to the occasion. In 1996, in the midst of a wave of arsons targeting African American houses of worship, then-Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde, a stalwart Republican from Illinois, asked me to work with him on a legislative response. We disagreed on most of the major social issues of the day, from abortion to affirmative action. However, during this crisis we found a way to introduce and pass the Church Arson Prevention Act, which not only gave law enforcement needed prosecutorial tools but also sent a loud and clear signal to the minority community that Congress was willing and able to act.
Today, at a time of greater polarization and gridlock, Congress is again being challenged. I don’t labor under the illusion that Washington has all the answers — we can’t do anything to bring back the four individuals who were killed. But there are some common-sense actions Congress can take:
• First and foremost, at a time when we have more than 2 million individuals in prison — 60 percent of whom are minorities — we need a federal law limiting racial profiling and reducing over-incarceration. Research demonstrates people of color are profiled and arrested at disproportionately higher rates as well as charged with harsher counts andsentenced more severely than whites. We were on the verge of enacting a ban on profiling in 2001 and President George W. Bush called for it in his State of the Union address, but it became politically untenable in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
• Second, we need a fairer system to resolve allegations of police brutality. If the nation has learned anything over the past several weeks, it’s that relying on a grand jury system led by local prosecutors is insufficient to protect against police misconduct. That’s why I have proposed legislation to strengthen the Justice Department’s ability to conduct “pattern and practice” investigations and to foster a system of improved standards for federal and state police operations, especially in the areas of accountability and oversight.
• Third, we need to update the Voting Rights Act — which has been severely undermined by the Supreme Court’s recent Shelby County v. Holderdecision — so that we can prevent voting discrimination practices before they take effect. One of the lessons of Ferguson is that minority communities that do not believe they have political representation run the risk of becoming alienated from their public officials. It is by now well known that Ferguson, an overwhelmingly African American community, had only three black officers out of 53 on the police force and just one black on the six-person city council. Our nation can and must do better.
After the midterm elections, our congressional leaders declared a newfound fidelity to bipartisanship. The recent string of tragedies makes clear that now is the time to convert their words into legislative action. I understand that remaining partisan differences — if not outright anger — have prevented cooperation in the past. However, it’s instructive to recall that such differences did not stop conservative President Ronald Reagan from signing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday bill into law in 1983. Nor did they prevent Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Bush from working with me and other Democrats to extend the Voting Rights Act in 2006.
On Jan. 6, I will become the dean of the House of Representatives, and my first responsibility will be to swear in John Boehner as House speaker. Both of us can recall an era when Congress was more capable of responding to a national crisis. It is therefore my hope that we will be able to rekindle that heritage of collaboration and work together toward soothing the racial scars exposed in Missouri, Ohio, Arizona and New York.
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New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, December 22, 2014
Well dear, it's not the foreplay I had in mind. But those microphones show promise.
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Fracking: A Great "Here And Now" Show About Cuomo's Ban In New York State
An opponent of the hydraulic fracturing holds a sign during a demonstration on March 20, 2014 in New York. The demonstrators say “fracking,” the process used in natural gas drilling, is dangerous for water supplies and food sources.
Mixed Reaction As New York Bans Fracking
This week, New York became the second state in the nation to ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Vermont’s ban, which was the first, was largely symbolic, as the state doesn’t have any real natural gas resources. New York, though, sits on the gas-rich Marcellus Shale, and the debate over whether to open it to fracking has been deeply emotional and contentious.
Here & Now’s Robin Young talks to the mayor of Elmira, New York, Susan Skidmore, who was in favor of the ban, and to dairy farmer Kevin “Cub” Frisbie, who had been hoping to lease his land for drilling.
Interview Highlights: Susan Skidmore and Kevin Frisbie
Skidmore on silica and other fracking environmental concerns
“The silica blows around, it’s on the ground, it’s in the air. You know once it gets into your lungs, it doesn’t come out. One of the railroads they use here in Elmira is right next to our largest park, and we’ve been rebuilding that. It’s a historic park and some days you can go down there and you can’t even see the roads or the lines in the roads because of all the silica. And the rail yard is right behind residential houses.”
Skidmore on farmers who want to lease their land for fracking
“I do have sympathy for those farmers. In some cases, we have the farmers that need to have some sort of income—so they want to lease their land out—and we have farmers who want to protect their income because they sell holistic food, and they can’t. This is a huge thing for upstate New York with organic farming, microbreweries and those sorts of things.”
Frisbie on his support for fracking
“Pennsylvania has jumped into it, and they’ve made some mistakes but they’ve fixed them. And that’s what annoys me the most is that people forget what a great country this is and when mistakes are made, we have the capacity in this country to fix anything that’s broken.”
Frisbie on the health concerns of fracking
“One of the most sacred things that we have is our land and our water — next to our family —it’s the most important. I’m on a fourth generation farm. The last thing I want to do is decimate the property that I own. I want to pass it on to my kids or to someone else that will keep it in better shape than I took it. Fracking has been in Texas for 40-50 years — they have a hundred thousand operating wells and if there was mass issues of health in Texas, we would be reading about it in the paper.”
Guests
- Susan Skidmore, mayor of Elmira, New York. She supported the ban on fracking.
- Kevin “Cub” Frisbie, dairy farmer in Tioga County, and member of the Joint Landowners Coalition, which is in favor of fracking in New York.
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Land Mines Provide Surprising Refuge For Leopards in Iran and Iraq
This Persian leopard was photographed by a camera trap in Kavir National Park, Iran. There are fewer than a thousand of the animals left in the wild.
For Leopards in Iran and Iraq, Land Mines Are a Surprising Refuge
Land mines keep people out of the Persian leopard's last habitats, creating a conundrum—removing the hazards leaves the cats more vulnerable.
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 19, 2014
SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq—Few parts of the world look more hostile to big cats than the rugged wilderness that flanks the northern Iran-Iraq frontier.
Once spread across the Caucasus region, Persian leopards now are relegated to this former war zone, along with a few isolated pockets of rural Iran. Here, hundreds of thousands of Iranian and Iraqi soldiers bludgeoned one another to death in some of the late 20th century's most brutal battles. Even today, border guards patrol the once fiercely contested high ground.Laced with land mines and roamed by packs of dedicated poachers, it's an environment seemingly calculated to imperil even the most fleet-footed animal. Yet this is the place the world's largest leopard calls home.
But through it all the leopard has endured, and oddly enough, the region's violent past has contributed to its survival. As part of the decade-long conflict, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his Iranian counterparts planted an estimated 20 million to 30 million land mines in the 1980s. Two decades after the last of the big minefields were laid, the explosives continue to maim and kill local residents.
But the mines also have become accidental protection for the leopards, discouraging poachers from entering certain areas.
And now interest in clearing the land mines throws into sharp relief the conflict between human and wildlife interests. Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdistan region is developing swiftly, and along with that comes hot pursuit of oil and gas deposits—many of which lie in leopard-heavy highlands—to fuel its likely bid for independence.
Conservation efforts have struggled to gain traction in large swaths of the Middle East. As in many developing regions, the welfare of the environment is a distant consideration amid economic peril and political flux. But the emergence of the Islamic State jihadist group, which now controls swathes of Syria and Iraq and which was recently camped on Iran's doorstep, has pushed the plight of the Persian leopard even further from local decision-makers' thoughts.
That's why the region's conservationists now find themselves in the not-so-comfortable position of opposing some land-mine clearance efforts. Clearing the way for people to return to those areas could put the leopards back at humans' mercy, they say. (Read about howMozambique is clearing land mines.)
"Environmentally speaking, mines are great, because they keep people out," said Azzam Alwash, head of the conservation group Nature Iraq.
Hunters at Bay
Ahmed Kurdi holds court in his brother's roadside restaurant outside the Iraqi city Sulaymaniyah, commonly known by its Kurdish name Slemani. His squat build and soft hands seem ill-suited to making stiff climbs in the Zagros Mountains, but Kurdi is an experienced marksman who is keen to tell stories of hunting leopards.
"My cousin and I were hunting goats near his village in Iran when we saw this big animal moving slowly high up on the rocks," Kurdi said, mimicking his shooting motion. "It was a long way away, but it was a challenge that I couldn't resist."
The market for leopard pelts has mostly dried up, but there's still a certain cachet associated with ensnaring such an exotic creature. As a result, the harsh penalties attached to killing leopards haven't done much to dissuade determined trophy hunters.
The land mines, though, do a good job of keeping people off certain peaks, and these have become the leopards' favorite haunts.
"A lot of the animals now stay up in the high mountains where all the land mines are. We can't really go there, so we can't really hunt," Kurdi said in explaining his reluctant decision to hang up his rifle.
Not that leopards are entirely immune themselves to the hazards of land mines.
They're nimble, spend much of their time in trees or on rocks, and are light enough when their weight is spread over four legs not to trigger anti-tank mines, which typically are activated by payloads of more than 176 pounds (80 kilograms).
But at least two are thought to have been killed by triggering the prongs and tripwires of the region's ubiquitous Italian-made V69 antipersonnel mines. A video has also surfaced in which a leopard appears to have bled to death after losing a leg while navigating an explosive-laden mountain pass.
Mine Protection
It might seem extraordinary that deadly devices have contributed to the Persian leopard's continued presence in the Zagros Mountains, but the prospects of the region's animal life have always been intimately wrapped up with the fortunes of the local people.
Hunters aside, Alwash fears the swift degradation of the leopards' habitats if mine removal frees up land for development around Sulaymaniyah and other small cities—which continue to expand, suggesting his worries are well-founded.
A mountain that was de-mined near Iraq's Lake Dukan a few years ago was promptly appropriated by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the dominant local political party, and then fenced off and zoned for construction.
Some Iraqis don't even wait for the "all clear" before traipsing through mine-ridden terrain.
"Every day we have to stop operations because people are driving animals through the minefields," said Chris Bull, a project manager atSterling Global Operations, which, like most mine clearance organizations in Iraqi Kurdistan, is funded by international energy companies pursuing new oil and gas reserves.
In the late 1980s, the Iraqi government accelerated its eventualdestruction of over 4,000 Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. In doing so, Saddam Hussein inadvertently boosted the animal population by reducing the number of people living in the mountains and warding off resident hunters.
A few years later, however, many of these rural families came streaming home after the United States imposed a no-fly zone over northern Iraq—which pushed back government forces—and the mountains' wildlife suffered as a consequence, according to local environmentalists.
Spotted in Iran
In Iran, things have panned out a little differently for both big cats and the local people who have settled among them.
The Persian leopard population is significantly bigger here, earning the cat a far more prominent place in local mythology than in neighboring Iraq. "It was a symbol of power and courage in ancient Persia," said Amirhossein Khaleghi, a co-founder of Iran's Persian Leopard Project. The leopard's skin, he says, was used as a flag by several imperial dynasties.
This folkloric significance hasn't made leopards' lives any easier, though. Iran's roads are notoriously perilous—according to the World Health Organization, the country has one of the highest rates of traffic deaths in the world, with more than 20,000 people killed on the roads each year—and an increasing number of leopards have been killed while cutting across traffic. Others find themselves trapped without food by impassable highways.
More threatening still is pervasive overhunting and the increasingly combative stance of farmers fearful of losing sheep and cattle to the predator.
"Beyond the nature reserves, the amount of prey is declining due to rampant poaching," said Arash Ghoddousi, Khaleghi's partner in establishing Iran's Persian Leopard Project, who is studying how poachers and leopards battle for the same quarry.
"Leopards are having to go nearer villages to hunt prey, and this has brought them into conflict with livestock farmers, who use poison or kill the animal with a rifle," Ghoddousi said.
In both Iran and Iraq, it's forest rangers who are charged with protecting the leopard and pursuing those who hunt it, and despite the challenges they've performed relatively well in penalizing illegal hunters and chasing down bazaar vendors who market leopard pelts.
But the experiences of a small Iraqi forest police checkpoint perched high above the town of Qaradagh in northern Iraq illustrate the complications of safeguarding local wildlife.
Whenever the ten-strong company hears gunshots, they're supposed to fan out and patrol the surrounding hills, but the limited fuel allowance for their lone pickup truck means they seldom venture much beyond their post.
Fortunately for nearby leopards and their prey, they're rarely called upon nowadays.
"The hunting pressure is decreasing. We haven't seen leopard trails since July," said Araz, the unit commander, whose four shoulder stripes mark his nine years of service in the force.
But he and his men are furious at the leniency the dominant local politician, Sheikh al-Jaffar, a former minister in the Kurdish Regional Government, or KRG, has shown to those caught hunting illegal game. Anyone spotted with a hunting rifle in a nature reserve is immediately disarmed and turned over to the local magistrate, but the frequency with which they reappear in the mountains has left the forest patrol disenchanted.
Their colleagues across the border suffer from equally debilitating restrictions.
The Iranian government issues a limited number of hunting licenses every year, but many villagers supplement their meager diets with meat from the mountains, which has sparked a fierce conflict between the locals and law enforcement officials. The same dispute is seen the world over, but far from empowering these wardens with significant clout to combat those who threaten protected species, officials have hamstrung them with an unforgiving legal framework.
"Rangers are allowed to carry weapons, but if a ranger accidently kills a poacher, he will go through a long court experience, and probably go to prison and maybe get executed," Ghoddousi said.
Political Animal
The Persian leopard is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Calculating just how endangered the Persian leopard has become is intensely tricky, though. There are no official counts, and independent efforts to tally numbers have been continually stumped by thieves stealing the necessary equipment. The best estimates gathered by the IUCN put the total number of leopards at somewhere around a thousand, with the majority in Iran.
All ten of the camera traps Nature Iraq uses to photograph and identify leopards have been stolen, as have 24 of the 80 devices the Persian Leopard Project set up around Iran's Golestan National Park.
Both the Persian Leopard Project and Panthera, a big-cat conservation group, have nevertheless hit upon similar estimates. They place the total Persian leopard population in the 500-800 range, but fear a further reduction in numbers as its habitat shrinks.
And then there's the regional flux. The Islamic State jihadist group has lost momentum in recent weeks, as American-led air strikes weaken its assaults on some cities, but they're still running amok across parts of Iraq. Affording leopards additional protections now, while also devoting resources to publicize the cat's plight, would likely smack of misplaced priorities.
But from a leopard's perspective, some good might have come from the Middle East's turmoil. Every year, the KRG devotes some humanitarian funds toward de-mining patches of land that are of no interest to energy firms—notably leopard-heavy highlands.
This year's allowance has been diverted to the Kurdish peshmerga forces to bolster their efforts to repel the Islamic State. "Political tensions with southern Iraq as well as the ongoing fighting seem to have slowed the release of further minefields for clearance," says Bull, the mine clearance manager.
The leopards may yet remain hidden in their minefields.
Both Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish authorities have talked of opening more nature reserves, but there's also every reason to believe the leopard could follow the Persian lion and tiger into extinction.
Officials have shown little appetite to slow energy companies' growth into leopard habitats, and 95 percent of the KRG's economy is derived from oil and gas. Young Iranians appear to be waking up to their extraordinary array of wildlife, but hunting is so firmly rooted in the rural bastions where the government gains much of its support that it seems unlikely it will clamp down too hard on this traditional pursuit.
Ahmed Kurdi, the retired hunter, offers an optimistic, if wishful, prognosis.
"The leopard is very strong," he said. "They're incredible animals. We couldn't kill them all even if we wanted to."
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New Online Archive Shows Colonial New Amsterdam Was Rowdy, Filthy, Smelly
This image of New Amsterdam (modern-day New York City) circa 1670 is one of the documents now available online in the New York City Municipal Archives' collection.
New Online Archive Shows Colonial New York
Was Rowdy, Filthy, Smelly
Early manuscripts newly posted online depict New Amsterdam as an intoxicated Dutch settlement and show its leader, Peter Stuyvesant, struggling to bring order.
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 20, 2014
"WHEREAS we have experienced the insolence of some of our inhabitants, when drunk, their quarrelling, hitting and fighting each other even on the Lords day of rest, of which we ourselves have witnessed the painful example last Sunday in contravention of law, to the contempt and disgrace of our person and office, to the annoyance of our neighbors, and to the disregard, nay contempt of Gods holy laws and ordinances ..."
Most of the inhabitants of the colony's capital, New Amsterdam, likely never read that official diatribe when it was issued on the last day of May 1647 by their prudish and peg-legged leader. But today, nearly four centuries later, the residents of that once lawless outpost—now known as New York—and anyone else with an Internet connection can read some of the earliest laws promulgated in North America.So begins the first edict issued by the newly appointed director-general of New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant. The decree went on to prohibit the sale of alcohol on Sunday before "preaching" was over.
New York City's Municipal Archives has posted the first batch of some 10,000 pages of colonial manuscripts, along with early Dutch maps and illustrations. The newly digitized trove contains ordinances from 1647 to 1661, when the island of Manhattan was run by the Dutch and known as New Amsterdam. It also includes handwritten and typeset English translations from the 19th century. The release marks the start of a much larger digitization project planned for next year.
The Thanksgiving Day release was "appropriate to reflect on the development of New Amsterdam as an exuberant center of commerce, open to settlers of diverse backgrounds, in contrast to the Puritan colonies," said Pauline Toole, commissioner of New York City's Department of Records and Information Services, in a statement. "These ordinances show how New Amsterdam officials tried to maintain order in a fractious and rowdy city, and shed a light on our city's early development."
America's origin myth overlooks the future nation's cacophony of religions, races, and ethnic groups—not to mention smugglers, pirates, and prostitutes. Instead, it centers on the prim, theocratic monoculture of the Pilgrim and Puritan colonies of New England.
When the English wrested control of New Amsterdam in 1664, the unruly Dutch trading town was all but written out of the story. The exception was the quaint tale that the Dutch bought Manhattan from native Americans for $24 in trinkets, perhaps the first urban myth.
The "Duke's Plan" map was created to celebrate the takeover of New Amsterdam by the British in 1664, when the city was renamed New York, after James, the Duke of York.
IMAGE COURTESY NYC DEPARTMENT OF RECORDS
"Drinking Songs and Angry Curses"
When Stuyvesant arrived in 1647 to take over the settlement at the southern tip of Manhattan, an outpost of the Dutch West India Company, the son of a Calvinist Dutch Reformed minister replaced an inept and tyrannical director-general.
Stuyvesant found a city where alcohol was made or sold in one of every four buildings. This caused, he fumed, "not only the neglect of honest handicraft and business, but also the debauching of the common man and the Company's servants and what is still worse, of the young people from childhood up, who seeing the improper proceedings of their parents and imitating them leave the path of virtue and become disorderly."
It was a place, wrote Russell Shorto in his bestseller about Dutch Manhattan, The Island at the Center of the World, where "with nightfall, the soft slap of waves along the shore was drowned out by drinking songs and angry curses."
The Dutch West India Company sent Stuyvesant to that sodden shore because it "was trying to impose order on it," Shorto said in an interview. "It was in the middle of nowhere, and it attracted the dregs of society."
Indeed, the Dutch Golden Age was in full swing and respectable burghers stayed in the Netherlands.
The archives' manuscripts vividly illustrate Stuyvesant's challenge.
Despite his immediate crackdown on Sunday drinking and fighting—drawing a knife or sword "rashly or in anger against another" could get you six months of "menial labor" on bread and water—less than a year later a frustrated Stuyvesant acknowledged few had paid attention.
"Our former orders issued against unreasonable and intemperate drinking at night and on the Sabbath of the Lord, to the shame and derision of ourselves and our nation, are not observed and obeyed, as we intended and meant, we renew them herewith," he decreed on March 10, 1648.
Few tipplers became teetotalers, though.
On December 31, 1655, the council that Stuyvesant chose to help him govern observed that "on New Years Day and Mayday, the firing of guns, the planting of Maypoles and the intemperate drinking cause, besides the useless waste of powder, much drunkenness and other insolent practices with sad accident of bodily injury." To restore order on the holidays, the council forbade such celebratory gunfire and approved a fine of 12 florins for the first offense and double or more for repeat shooters.
Alcoholism was so rampant that on December 3, 1657, citing "daily complaints" of tavern keepers detaining people for not paying their tabs, an ordinance prohibited them from accepting pawned goods from patrons who had spent all their money on drink.
Stuyvesant, however, never tried to enact total prohibition. When he and his council weren't trying to moderate drinking, they were trying to tax it—often without success. Several decrees dealt with the government's inability to collect excise taxes on homemade—and illegal—beer and wine that went unreported to authorities.
In 1865, a Dutch farmhouse stood on the corner of 7th Avenue and 50th Street, now a busy intersection not far from Central Park.
IMAGE COURTESY NYC DEPARTMENT OF RECORDS
Hogs Running Free in the Street
Stuyvesant did more than try to sober up his subjects. To tamp down frequent fires, he and his officious burgomasters on the council appointed chimney inspectors; required buckets, ladders, and hooks on street corners; and banned roofs made of hay and reeds. They also issued standards for bakers and tried to rein in haphazard construction. And they tried mightily to clean up the city streets.
"They started realizing that they needed to task people with kind of owning up to being responsible," said Sylvia Kollar, director of the New York City Municipal Archives.
The city's health and building departments can trace their beginnings back to Stuyvesant's New Amsterdam edicts.
In 1650, just a quarter century after the Dutch built Fort Amsterdam, an ordinance was passed forbidding animals to run free. It noted the "decayed fortress, formerly in fair condition, has mostly been trodden down by hogs, goats and sheep."
Hogs apparently were still on the loose eight years later, though. On a hot day in August 1658, the council banned "privies" that emptied into the street where "hogs may consume the filth and wallow in it." This, the decree stated, created "a great stench."
Incredibly, the stink must have been even worse the year before when, on February 20, 1657, the New Amsterdam council banned the common practice of throwing "any rubbish, filth, ashes, oyster-shells, dead animals or anything like it" in the street.
The online portrait of New Amsterdam "sounds like kindergarten gone wild and the leaders trying to impose order desperately," Shorto said. But he added that the ordinances alone give a skewed picture of life in the Dutch colony.
Over the next year, a more well-rounded portrait should emerge as archivists post thousands of court proceedings, minutes, petitions, correspondence, and other documents, the originals of which have undergone painstaking conservation efforts.
"There's something about the actual written documents and something beyond the words—the paper, the texture, the change in handwriting, the stains on the document," Shorto said. "It's a physical document, and to get some sense [of it] in digital form is a wonder."
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Another Police Killing: Disabled Black Man Holding a Spoon. Racists Online Cheer.
"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right
Black Kids Get Shot For Their Mistakes. White Kids Get Psychologized
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/black-kids-get-shot-for-their-mistakes.html
Judge Throws Out Black Teen's Conviction 70 Years After Exectuion
White Man Jaywalks With Assault Rifle. Guess What Police Do
"Actor Jesse Williams Gets Real About Relentless Dehumanization Of Black Men"
"The Talk." How Black Parents Tell Their Sons To Be Safe
"Ferguson Isn't About Black Rage Against White Cops. It's About White Rage Against Progress"
"More Americans Killed By Police Than By Terrorists Even Though Crime Is Down"
Whites Think Discrimination Against Them Is A Bigger Problem Bias Against Blacks
Open Season On Unarmed Black Men. White Cop Kills Another Innocuous Black Man
"White Teen In BMW Hits Three Cars, Flees Scene, Assaults Cops, And Doesn't Get Shot"
"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right
Black Kids Get Shot For Their Mistakes. White Kids Get Psychologized
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/black-kids-get-shot-for-their-mistakes.html
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/black-kids-get-shot-for-their-mistakes.html
Judge Throws Out Black Teen's Conviction 70 Years After Exectuion
White Man Jaywalks With Assault Rifle. Guess What Police Do
"Actor Jesse Williams Gets Real About Relentless Dehumanization Of Black Men"
"The Talk." How Black Parents Tell Their Sons To Be Safe
"Ferguson Isn't About Black Rage Against White Cops. It's About White Rage Against Progress"
"More Americans Killed By Police Than By Terrorists Even Though Crime Is Down"
Whites Think Discrimination Against Them Is A Bigger Problem Bias Against Blacks
Open Season On Unarmed Black Men. White Cop Kills Another Innocuous Black Man
"White Teen In BMW Hits Three Cars, Flees Scene, Assaults Cops, And Doesn't Get Shot"
Another Police Killing: Disabled Black Man Holding a Spoon. Racists Online Cheer.
In Texarkana on Monday, a woman called 911 (click for the call) at around 2 AM to report a person in her garage. The woman was frightened and said that she heard banging on the windows from the person in the garage. A police office came to investigate, and found an African-American man holding something in his hand. The officer said the individual came at him in an aggressive manner, and so fired at him, killing him.
The man was Dennis Grigsby. From the article, "Family members say Grigsby had mental problems." He was holding a spoon, the officer said with the handle up, and the officer thought it was a knife.
The local NBC affiliate reports:
"Grigsby then allegedly made an aggressive move towards the officer while carrying a metal object. The officer said he ordered Grigsby to stop but he continued to approach, forcing the officer to fire a shot into Grigsby's chest."
His mother said.
"He was real sweet. He would never hurt anybody. He had a mental illness," said Evelyn Grigsby, Dennis Grigsby's Mother.
She was asleep inside their home when the shooting happened and she says she didn't know her son had left home.
I don't have any information on Dennis' disability, but people who read my blog and myarticles around the web know how these stories play out, because they happen again and again and again, following much the same pattern. I've spent most of the last two years following and writing about cases in which police harm or kill people with disabilities, often in circumstances much like this.
In this case, Dennis wandered from his house, ended up in the garage, and then started making noise. Perhaps he was trying to get out and was confused. Perhaps he merely was interested in the spoon and the windows. We don't know.
The police officer demanded he comply and shot him when he didn't. It's fairly clear to me that the police officer followed his training (which is a problem), although a man alone in a garage with a metal object is, I believe, someone you could back away from instead of forcing compliance. That's a police strategy point I come back to a lot. There are often other options unless someone is in imminent danger, but we lack the details to judge this one right now.
So, another person with disabilities killed by police, as is true of at least 50% of all people killed by police. This one had a spoon. Whether or not the officer should be held accountable is a question I can't answer, but I can demand that this be considered a tragedy and that our thoughts be with Dennis and his family.
That's not, of course, what's happening, at least not in some places. I want to focus now on the combination of hate, mistrust, ignorance, and ableism in this Facebook thread from the local news, in which some white folks show just how much they either don't get it or don't care.
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I am a freelance columnist (CNN, Al Jazeera, Chronicle of Higher Ed, The Atlantic, etc.), blogger, long-time member of this site, and history professor. You can read my blog at How Did We Get Into This Mess? This is a modified version of my most recent post.
I am a freelance columnist (CNN, Al Jazeera, Chronicle of Higher Ed, The Atlantic, etc.), blogger, long-time member of this site, and history professor. You can read my blog at How Did We Get Into This Mess? This is a modified version of my most recent post.
To read more, you could 'like' my public Facebook page.
Or you could follow me on Twitter:
You can click on their profiles, see their beautiful children, their boats, their love of football, their pretty lives, all while reading their lack of empathy for Dennis.
It's a morass of pro-violence speech, reinforcing the #cultofcompliance, saying that if you don't obey a cop, you deserve to die. One says she feels so sorry ... for the cop. Few express sadness for the victim. Many bluster with bravado, saying that if someone broke into their home, they'd kill them before the cops had a chance (and I believe them). Lots of comment trashing liberals and the liberal media. Lots of comments linking this killing to Garner and Brown and so many others.
Over on my original blog post, I have screen caps and pasted comments, which I can't do here. But here's the content:
It's loaded with ableism, people saying that if Grigsby was so "mentally challenged," he should have been in a home. Here's a sampling.
Brandy Thorn If he was that mental then he should have been in a home not someone else home!And then there's this.Jo Ann Hill Odom Thank you Brian , if he was that mentally challenged , why was he not in a facility that could take care of him ? Does not make sense that he was able to make the decision to even break into someone's house if that mentally ill . Mental illness is a very bad thing for any family to deal with and sometimes they can not control the person with the mental illness because they get out of control , so I do understand the hurt that his parents and family are feeling ! I do understand both sides if this story and I think Channel 12 is doing a great job with this story cause they are covering both sides of it with all the details they have ! We have to have officers on the street to protect us ! If not what would this world be ???? Just saying ......Dakotah Klein Put you damn hands up!!! It's not that hard. Even go to the ground. You retards wanna play badasses till you get 3 in your chest.
Ray says - If you hate the cops, next time you need help, call a crackhead.
Stuart responds (in what I think is a libertarian critique) by showing a picture of what is likely Nazi (or other fascist execution), saying "Never forget that this was legal at the time ...what unjust actions has your government codified into action?"
Then: Kenny Crawford ^^^ there are "rows" in prisons right now that they should be using this method to clear out. Instead it's our tax dollars feeding and housing them for the next 40 yrs.
So that's Kenny. A news story in which police killed a man holding A SPOON drives him to opine on how all those people on death row (and yes, he's thinking of black people), should just be put down.
This is the divide in America. That even in a situation when police kill a black man with intellectual disabilities who was only holding a spoon, there's no sympathy, no empathy, and certainly no second thoughts. The Cult of Compliance lives on in these people.
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I am a freelance columnist (CNN, Al Jazeera, Chronicle of Higher Ed, The Atlantic, etc.), blogger, long-time member of this site, and history professor. You can read my blog at How Did We Get Into This Mess? This is a modified version of my most recent post.
I am a freelance columnist (CNN, Al Jazeera, Chronicle of Higher Ed, The Atlantic, etc.), blogger, long-time member of this site, and history professor. You can read my blog at How Did We Get Into This Mess? This is a modified version of my most recent post.
To read more, you could 'like' my public Facebook page.
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Jon Stewart Probes The Spectacular Idiocy Of Climate Change Deniers
Burn Noticed
Stewart reveals the spectacular idiocy of climate change deniers.
http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/8q3nmm/burn-noticed
- The Guardian: "John Oliver's Viral Video Is The Best Climate Change Debate You'll Ever See"
Daily Show host Jon Stewart burned three Republican lawmakers who sit on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology for their embarrassing climate illiteracy.
Stewart presented clips of Reps. Larry Bucshon, Dana Rohrabacher, and Steve Stockman trying to outsmart White House scientific advisor John Holdren on climate change during a hearing last week, only to have Holdren obliterate them with his wealth of expertise on the subject.
Holdren had the Sisyphean task of “pushing a million pounds of idiot up a mountain,” Stewart quipped.
At one point, Holdren recommended to Buschon that he take a “look at the scientific literature” regarding climate change.
Bucshon responded by saying he doesn’t need to consider the conclusions of “climatologists whose career depends on the climate changing,” stating, “I could read that, but I don’t believe it,” revealing Bucshon’s arrogance about his own ignorance.
“Since we’re talking about the influence money might have on climate change opinion, it turns out Representative Buschon’s three biggest campaign donors are Murray Energy, Koch Enterprises, and Peabody Energy,” Stewart said. “And trust me, those three well-funded companies would love to disprove climate change to the satisfaction of the scientific community at large. So if scientists could be bought, these motherf*ckers would’ve already made it rain in nerdtown.”
Stewart went on to rip Bucshon’s false equivalency when saying “both sides” of the climate change debate should avoid using “scare tactics.”
“What he’s basically saying is, it is unfair to talk to us about the scientific or medical consequences of our actions because they’re scary, and we really don’t feel like doing anything about it, anyway, so from now on, why not agree that science and the oil industry both have opinions?” Stewart asked. “Oh, and before you tell your kids to wash their hands after they take a sh*t so they don’t spread disease? Maybe we should also spend an equal amount of time hearing from Big Fecal.”
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Time Magazine: Gas Price Under $2.00 A Gallon In 24 States
Alan: Count the number of right wing commentators who say:
1.) Gas prices are collapsing under Obama.
2.) Obamacare is not a train wreck.
3.) Ebola was a non-event, totally unworthy of discussion in the 2014 mid-term elections.
4.) Obama was not born in Kenya --- and as Ted Cruz' presidential bid reveals, it wouldn't matter if he was.
4.) Benghazi was not a Big Deal. (Reagan's leaving Lebanon after 250 Marines were killed in a terrorist attack was a Big Deal.)
4.) Obama was not born in Kenya --- and as Ted Cruz' presidential bid reveals, it wouldn't matter if he was.
4.) Benghazi was not a Big Deal. (Reagan's leaving Lebanon after 250 Marines were killed in a terrorist attack was a Big Deal.)
5.) ISIS is not a Big Deal.
6.) Global warming is real.
7.) Obama is not a Muslim.
8.) Obama has not strangled U.S. oil production.
Will any correction be forthcoming?
8.) Obama has not strangled U.S. oil production.
Will any correction be forthcoming?
Bill Maher: The Zombie Life Cycle Of Republican Lies. They Never - Ever - Die
"Bank On It: The South Is Always Wrong"
The Guardian: John Olivers' Viral Video Is The Best Climate Debate You'll Ever See
Jon Stewart Probes The Spectacular Idiocy Of Climate Change Deniers
"Red State Moocher Links"
"Why The Bible Belt Is Its Own Worst Enemy"- http://paxonbothhouses.
- "Republicans For Revolution," A Study In Anarchic Apocalypticism
"Red State Moocher Links"
"Republicans For Revolution," A Study In Anarchic Apocalypticism
The Psychiatric Diagnosis Of American Conservatives:Folie a Plusieurs
The Psychiatric Diagnosis Of American Conservatives:Folie a Plusieurs
"American Conservatives And Oppositional-Defiant Disorder"
"Conservatives Scare More Easily Than Liberals"
"Conservatives Scare More Easily Than Liberals"
"Are Republicans Insane?"
"The Republican Party Is A Satanic Cult"
"Are Republicans Insane?"
"The Republican Party Is A Satanic Cult"
Jindal Criticizes The Stupid Party: "Simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys"
Jindal Criticizes The Stupid Party: "Simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys"
"The Reign of Morons Is Here," Charles P. Pierce, The Atlantic
"The Reign of Morons Is Here," Charles P. Pierce, The Atlantic
"A Southerner Explains Tea Party Radicalism: The Civil War Is Not Over"
"People Who Watch Only Fox News Know Less Than People Who Watch No News"
"A Southerner Explains Tea Party Radicalism: The Civil War Is Not Over"
"People Who Watch Only Fox News
Know Less Than People Who Watch No News"
Christmas comes early for many commuters
An oil boom has pushed gas prices at some stations, as of Saturday, down to as little as $2 a gallon.
Price tracking service GasBuddy.com found that pockets of low prices below $2 have also cropped up across the country, while average prices across the U.S. are tracking at $2.43 a gallon.
“As of this morning, there are 24 states with prices under $2 a gallon,” GasBuddy’s senior petroleum analyst told USAToday.
Commuters in Missouri have reaped the biggest windfalls, with gas dropping to $1.96 a gallon in Springfield–and even lower in some outlying towns.
With Saudi Arabia’s announcement in September that it would keep the oil flowing, despite falling prices, analysts predict that gas prices have not bottomed out just yet. American Automobile Association analysts expect prices to fall by another seven cents, just in time for Christmas.
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