"We must be ready to dare all for our country. For history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. We must acquire proficiency in defense and display stamina in purpose." - President Eisenhower, First Inaugural Address
I confess, I am a fan of the American Ninja Warrior competition which is a summer series on NBC. I find the show interesting on a number of levels, both in its efforts to appeal to a wide audience and in the lessons the participants share with the audience.
Second, I am a believer that testing one's mental and physical limits is vital - at any age, adjusting for the things life has thrown at you.
This brings me to the Warrior Games, perhaps less flashy that ANW, but which carries many of the same messages:
You can't win if you don't try.
Trying is winning.
Effort is everything.
Everyone will fail at some point.
Failure is not the end, but the beginning.
There are no losers - only differing degrees of success.
How do Vietnam POWs fit into this? Let me recommend, again, Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton: Six Characteristics of High-Performance Teams, in which men under the most dire of circumstances overcame their environment and pushed beyond limits to become more, much more than broken men. John McCain? Just one of the winners that were forged in that place and time.
What to make of this? We may not be ninja warrior stuff but we all face the challenges of life. How each of us take on those challenges is . . . what makes heroes. Discouragement and doubt are dream killers but take heart from those who refuse to surrender to them - and begin to live bravely, one small step at a time toward your goals.
Thinking of Freedom of Thought and Speech and the willingness of some to believe they have the ideas to make a better world, if only everyone would conform.
Their weapons are the coercive direction of the life and labor of mankind. Their doctrine is that disorder and misery can be overcomeonly by more and more compulsory organization. Their promise is that through the power of the state men can be made happy. Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves communists, socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must, by commanding the people how they shall live, direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come. They believe in what Mr. Stuart Chase accurately "describes as "the overhead planning and control of economic activity." This is the dogma which all the prevailing dogmas presuppose. This is the mold in which are cast the thought and action of the epoch. No other approach to the regulation of human affairs is seriously considered, or is even conceived as possible. The recently enfranchised masses and the leaders of thought who supply their ideas are almost completely under the spell of this dogma. Only a handful here and there, groups without influence, isolated and disregarded thinkers, continue to challenge it. For the premises of authoritarian collectivism have become the working beliefs, the self-evident assumptions, the unquestioned axioms, not only of all the revolutionary regimes, but of nearly every effort which lays claim to being enlightened, humane, and progressive. So universal is the dominion of this dogma over the minds of contemporary men that no one is taken seriously as a statesman or a theorist who does not come forward with proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and multiply their intervention in human affairs. Unless he is authoritarian and collectivist, he is a mossback, a reactionary, at best an amiable eccentric swimming hopelessly against the tide. It is a strong tide. Though despotism is no novelty in human affairs, it is probably true that at no time in twenty-five hundred years has any western government claimed for itself a jurisdiction over men's lives comparable with that which is officially attempted in the totalitarian states. No doubt there have been despotisms which were more 'cruel than those of Russia, Italy, and Germany. " There has been none which was more inclusive. In these ancient centres of civilization, several hundred millions of persons live under what is theoretically the absolute dominion of the dogma that public officials are their masters and that only under official orders may they live, work, and seek their salvation.
But to those who Lippmann describes, there is this:
Can't read Twitter today or the past few days without wondering whatever happened to facts.
Not speculation. Not "sources" who won't come forward for cross-examination. Not editorials, not opinion pieces.
Facts.
Now, as a lawyer it never surprised me that in a trial or a deposition that two
people can look at the same thing and get two different meanings from it. That's why we have juries and judges to decided whether the weight of the evidence offered makes one meaning more likely than another.
Of course, in the perfect world, reporting would be (as science purports to be) "value free." Hard to do, as studying sociology teaches:
Sociologists should observe value neutrality while conducting social research. It means that he should exclude ideological or non -scientific assumption from research. He should not make evaluative judgment about empirical evidence. Value judgment should be restricted to sociologists' area of technical competence. He should make his own values open and clear and refrain from advocating particular values. Value neutrality enables the social scientists to fulfill the basic value of scientific enquiry that is search for true knowledge. Thus sociology being a science cherishes the goal of value neutrality. According to Alvin Gouldner value-free principle did enhance the autonomy of sociology where it could steadily pursue basic problems rather than journalistically react to passing events and allowed it more freedom to pursue questions uninteresting either to the respectable or to the rebellious. It made sociology freer as Comte had wanted it to be -to pursue all its own theoretical implications. Value free principle did contribute to the intellectual growth and emancipation of the enterprise.Value-free doctrine enhanced freedom from moral compulsiveness; it permitted a partial escape from the parochial prescriptions of the sociologists' local or native culture. Effective internalization of the value-free principle has always encouraged at least a temporary suspension of the moralizing reflexes built into the sociologist by his own society. The value-free doctrine has a paradoxical potentiality; it might enable men to make better value judgments rather than none. It could encourage a habit of mind that might help men in discriminating between their punitive drives and their ethical sentiments. However in practice it has been extremely difficult to fulfill this goal of value neutrality. Values creep in various stages in sociological research. According to Gunnar Myrdal total value neutrality is impossible. 'Chaos does not organize itself into cosmos. We need view points.' Thus in order to carry out social research viewpoints are needed which form the basis of hypothesis which enables the social scientists to collect empirical data. These view-points involve valuations and also while formulating the hypothesis. Thus a sociologist has to be value frank and should make the values which have got incorporated in the choice of the topic of the research of the formulation of hypothesis clear and explicit at the very outset in the research. The value-free doctrine is useful both to those who want to escape from the world and to those who want to escape into it. They think of sociology as a way of getting ahead in the world by providing them with neutral techniques that may be sold on the open market to any buyer. The belief that it is not the business of sociologist to make value judgments is taken by some to mean that the market on which they can vend their skills is unlimited. Some sociologists have had no hesitation about doing market research designed to sell more cigarettes although well aware of the implications of recent cancer research. According to Gouldner the value-free doctrine from Weber's standpoint is an effort to compromise two of the deepest traditions of the western thought, reason and faith but that his arbitration seeks to safeguard the romantic residue in modern man. Like Freud, Weber never really believed in an enduring peace or in a final resolution of this conflict. What he did was to seek a truce through the segregation of the contenders by allowing each to dominate in different spheres of life.
At any rate, Twitter seems to be about as "fact free" as you can get lately. Idle conjecture, ideologically driven "interpretations" of events and total bias are fun, I suppose, but really, I like facts - even those often contradictory facts that need to be weighed carefully by a jury.
Usually the argument to the jury goes along the line of "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, the only reasonable conclusion is that it is a . . . duck"
Mr. Gowdy does a nice job setting the ducks up in a row.
Feel free to disagree, but this mess stinks to high heaven and it's not going to go down quietly.
UPDATE: Rep. Hurd from Texas hits hard with concerns that any one of us who knows anything about breaches of security have:
1. Can we talk in a civil fashion about "climate change?" Or is even raising the possibility of such a discussion grounds to be investigated by over-reaching state attorneys general as some species of fraud or to be hounded by those who cannot understand questioning what they accept as gospel?
2. In the controversy over North Carolina House Bill 2, how many times has anyone offered to let you read the actual bill? Here it is:
You might note the following: (1) the bill has no impact on private businesses (theaters, gyms, private schools, private universities, restaurants, coffee house, bars, private arenas where sports are played, hotels, motels, stores, shops, salons, barbershops, etc) which are free to allow their patrons to access restrooms and other facilities as they see fit); (2) North Carolina is not a pure home rule state in which:
. . . an amendment to the state constitution grants cities, municipalities, and/or counties the ability to pass laws to govern themselves as they see fit (so long as they obey the state and federal constitutions)
North Carolina is mostly a non-home rule state:
In other states, only limited authority has been granted to local governments by passage of statutes in the state legislature. In these states, a city or county must obtain permission from the state legislature if it wishes to pass a law or ordinance which is not specifically permitted under existing state legislation. Most non-home rule states apply the principle known as Dillon's Rule to determine the bounds of a municipal government's legal authority.
Why does that matter? HB2 was passed as a response to a city of Charlotte ordinance that the state legislature found to be outside of the power granted to the city by the state legislature. As set out in the Charlotte Observer:
In a one-day specially convened session Wednesday, North Carolina’s legislature passed a sweeping law that reverses a Charlotte ordinance that had extended some rights to people who are gay or transgender. The law passed by the General Assembly and signed that same night by Gov. Pat McCrory goes further than a narrow elimination of Charlotte’s ordinance, which had generated the most controversy by a change that protected transgender people who use public restrooms based on their gender identity. The new law also nullified local ordinances around the state that would have expanded protections for the LGBT community. The state has long had laws regulating workplace discrimination, use of public accommodations, minimum wage standards and other business issues. The new law – known as HB2, the Charlotte bathroom bill or, more officially, as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act – makes it illegal for cities to expand upon those state laws, as more than a dozen cities had done including Charlotte, Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Durham. North Carolina’s new law sets a statewide definition of classes of people who are protected against discrimination: race, religion, color, national origin, age, handicap or biological sex as designated on a person’s birth certificate. Sexual orientation – people who are gay – was never explicitly protected under state law and is not now, despite recent court decisions that legalized same-sex marriage. *** Transgender people who have not taken surgical and legal steps to change the gender noted on their birth certificates have no legal right under state law to use public restrooms of the gender with which they identify. Cities and counties no longer can establish a different standard. Critics of the Charlotte ordinance cite privacy concerns and say it was “social engineering” to allow people born as biological males to enter women’s restrooms. McCrory’s office says businesses aren’t limited by the bill, and that private companies and private universities can adopt new or keep existing nondiscrimination policies. Private businesses can establish their own practices concerning LGBT employees and customers; the new law does not allow so-called “public policy common law” complaints in state courts to challenge those practices.
Now, some of rub comes when private activities occur in state or municipally owned facilities.
The NFL Carolina Panthers play in Bank of America stadium, which is privately owned. The ownership of that stadium would appear to be free to allow access to restrooms as they choose.
The NBA Charlotte Hornets, however, play in Time Warner Cable Arena, which is owned by the City of Charlotte. The area would appear to be barred from violating state law, either for basketball games or for any concerts held in this or other municipal arenas.
I leave it for you to decide whether the millionaire owners of sports teams should be subsidized in having arenas built at taxpayer expense and, thus, submitting themselves to state regulation of restroom usage.
And the same question can be asked of any city or county that owns such facilities.
“It creates a state-wide non-discrimination ordinance and public accommodations which we’ve never had before, which is a perfectly good thing to do,” Clarke said. “But it, of course, limits the protection categories to race, age, national origin, religion, color and biological sex to avoid any potential expansion of that in the courts.” Clarke said the law goes beyond the stated goals. “Then it deals with employment, so it deals with things that are utterly unrelated to LGBT rights, to bathroom usage, to public accommodations. And it deals specifically and directly with employment,” Clarke said. The law addresses the minimum wage, and does not allow any local government to set a minimum wage. “The legislature took that power expressly away, so forbade any local government from raising the minimum wage beyond what federal and state law require,” Clarke said.
You might note that the law itself offers up the right of state entities to provide single-occupancy facilities "on demand," as a reasonable accommodation for those individuals whose sexual identity is not drive by their biological sex.
So that's what the big fuss is about. Plus it's an election year and the Republicans control the state legislature which the other party is mobilizing its forces to attempt to change. It is also worth noting that the NC State Attorney General, a Democrat, is running for governor and has decreed his opposition to HB2:
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper said on Tuesday that his office will not go to court to argue to uphold the state law adopted last week that strikes down locally enacted protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Cooper, a Democrat running for governor, called the measure “a national embarrassment” that “will set North Carolina’s economy back if we don’t repeal it.”
He might have added, "But I see it as a tool to be used in trying to get elected governor."
But he also noted that the next president will have a lot of problems to deal with, and that the United States is poorly situated to deal with them. Iran, he said, is seeking domination, not peace. Observed Mattis: "(Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) summed it up very well when he said those who say that the future lies in negotiations, not in missiles, are either ignorant or traitors. ... That is the Supreme Leader. I think we should take him at his word."
yes, it is usually a bad idea to ignore someone who says he wants to kill you.
Even though Islas has lived in North Carolina since she was 6 years old, she has had to pay $50,000 a year to attend UNC as an out-of-state student without the help of federal money. Eric Johnson, spokesperson for the Office of Scholarships and Student Aid, said his office can only help pay for undocumented students when they find nonrestricted private money. “As you know, we are very limited on what we are doing because of the politics around this and because (undocumented students) are treated as out-of-state students who are not eligible for state or federal aid,” Johnson said.
Politics? How about a violation of the law? If I were to start occupying the office of Mr. Johnson because I like it better than mine, I'm sure that I would find police officers ready to help me depart that location and find myself relocated in . . . jail. Yes, her parents brought her to the U.S. - illegally. So, as far as I can tell, she has been treated just like any other foreign student who chose to attend UNC. Which seems fair enough. But:
“I was just concerned about being treated differently,” she said. “Even now, I’m a senior, and I’m applying for jobs. I hate bringing that up because I want them to see me for who I am, not my documentation status.”
Really? Does she know it is illegal to hire "undocumented workers?" I sure she is a nice person, but . . . documentation means something.
In any event, some of this discussion of accepting the rules of the place you move to reminds of a bumper sticker I use to see in Texas as a response to the migration from the Rust Belt:
"We don't care how you did it up North."
Perhaps those suffering from an invasion of Californians have similar slogan.
Read the VDH piece here. Newspeak is also alluded to. I mean "non-citizen students?" Really?
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream._Discover.
Which may remind you of a quote often attributed (wrongly it seems) to Goethe:
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."
