THE PRESS AND THE ASSEMBLY SUI GENERIS VIRTUE

"...In a pre-democratic age neither the press nor Parliament itself filled the constructive role each was later to define for itself: the contribution of both was often negative...." JCD Clark, p 130.

I would just point out that, in a democratic age, these institutions have made no more of a positive contribution than they had done in the pre-democratic age.

Each defining its role as constructive involves a fallacy, even if true on other grounds, which not. 

ORDERED WORMALD CLARENDON REV ED.

The other father of revisionism.

TWO GREAT 2010 POSTS GODS TARZAN KRUGMAN LOGIC BONDS

TWO GREAT 2010 POSTS GODS TARZAN KRUGMAN LOGIC BONDS

Friday, August 20, 2010

RE APPEASING THE BOND GODS EDITORIAL: KRUGMAN TURNS OUT TO HAVE CARTOON WRITING POTENTIAL: LETS TALK ENDGAME

I had no idea there was this kind of latent talent lurking beneath the surface.

EVEN THOUGH MY LAST POST DISCUSSED INFLATION/DEFLATION TALK AS RED HERRINGS, AND PREVIOUS POSTS WENT INTO MISES EN SCENE FOR A ILIADIAN MYTHOLOGICAL MORTON'S FORK ODYSSEUAN SITUATION, FOR BERNANKE,

This turn of Krugman's, toward cruder, tribal, paradigms,

reminiscent of discussions one might have had back in London at King's, with Professor Winch, who wrote so insightfully regarding foibles of the then social sciences, and especially sociology and anthropology,

is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Never mind the truth of what he says, of which there no doubt is some, here in America; just let the images take over.

One can refer to old Tarzan films to capture a glimpse of some of those 'rites'.

If you read some accounts of, say, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande you get a flavor for how witches were handled by the Azande.

Winch wrote an important article, as philosophers' articles go, called "Understanding a Primitive Society", in which he discussed the concept of rationality 'comparatively', so to speak.

Perhaps Krugman will get to an explanation of the tribal 'rationality' of economic human sacrifice, in post industrial societies, and other less fortunate ones.

This was not that far beyond the pale for 'political-economists' of the 19th Century, at the time when these 'disciplines' were considered, quite properly, institutionally closer together.

RE END GAME: One of the lurking problems, for the old, Collingwoodian absolute presupposition 'greatest good for the greatest numbers' is that, with increasing labor saving techniques, ever increasing productivity technology, resource scarcity, smart weapons replacing soldiers, national and civilizational rivalries, etc., the 'greatest numbers' seems likely to be a rapidly shrinking number, globally.

The question then is, where will the sacrificial ax of 'economic tribal rationality' fall hardest, on excess superfluous populations, 'harmful much more than helpful' for future regimes, ('excess labor capacity') seemingly everywhere?

One difficulty, which always seems to lurk in the background, for anyone trying to articulate some more general 'insight' within a nevertheless particular specialized field,

while also, implicitly, inferentially, analogically, anecdotally even, being called upon, somehow, to grapple with some larger framework, perhaps merely illustrative, for understanding the course of 'politics', 'current events', or 'current history', but technically only why things are happening in the way they are in this field, while coming from usually only that one field, often strictly academic,

is the woeful inadequacy of that background to comprehend other entire dimensions lost on members of only one specialized field.

Leaving the endgame discussion:

Mise en scene, a propos Krugman's editorial, why not the Bond Gods as Cyclops?
One could depict the one harrassing Odysseus, who exacts a crewman every time he comes back to the cave, as a great cartoon.

Cyclops were not very smart, eg "'No man' is hurting me," Odysseus' 'name', told to other cyclops re why he was in pain.

Cyclops were also, like the current Bond Gods, as a group, real meanies!

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

A 'HOBSON'S CHOICE': PRIVATE VERSUS PUBLIC ENTERPRISE

Actually a 'Morton's Fork', but who understands the fine distinctions? (See the famous Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs litigation, for a judicial example.)

Americans have often been told, usually by politicians, who need to pay back private corporate political supporters, that a good way to handle such and such a problem is to return it to the private sector, or to give a tax break, incentive, or credit, etc., to the private sector, which is more efficient and virtuous than government.

On the other hand, Americans have been told by other politicians, who are catering to a different but equally deluded patronage, that a certain initiative needs to be undertaken by government, that a new government agency, department, or blue ribbon committee, is necessary or merely very beneficial in this case.

Americans need to be advised that American, federal, state, and local, publicly administered programs are generally matched in ineffeciency, ineptitude, and corruption, by American private sector business enterprises, small, medium, and MNC sized, regardless of the private industry or sector. There are well founded reasons for this, based on the history of the structures and relations between the public and private sectors. Aug 17, 2010

DAVOS, BABY DUMB DUMBER IMMIGRATION HISTORY

Thursday, January 25, 2018

DAVOS, BABY DUMB DUMBER IMMIGRATION HISTORY

Thursday, September 1, 2016

RE TRUMP WALL SALINAS CAME UP WITH NAFTA AT DAVOS QUITE FITTING

He said something to the effect, if you don't do it, we'll flood your country with illegals.
Well, Clinton did NAFTA, and the country is still being flooded with illegals of course.
What would happen with, say, a Venezuela type total political and economic meltdown, in Mexico? Even a wall might not be enough.
Or do we say something like, "so sorry your country is having so many economic problems, sure we'll take 20,000,000, of your 120,000,000 destitute Mexicans, and we'll make our Economic partners in Europe take all the rest"?

CHINA HANDS MCCARTHY DULLES OTEPKA DUMB DUMBER

Friday, January 26, 2018

CHINA HANDS MCCARTHY DULLES OTEPKA DUMB DUMBER

Kahn, re Fulton Freeman, p. 21:

 

How come you speak Cantonese?

(Married to a Chinese.)

Is he an American citizen?

No, but we never discuss secret information.

PAUL PERRY FOREIGN POLICY FEUD

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

PAUL PERRY FOREIGN POLICY FEUD

'Although the 2016 presidential election is still a long way off, the back-and-forth over foreign policy between Mr Paul's libertarian wing of the Republican Party and Mr Perry's internationalists reveals an ideological fault line that likely will be on full display in the days ahead.'

Perry is trying to paint Paul as an isolationist, it seems.
While conservatives have often been ' isolationist ', in the context of the alliances and conflicts of the 19th and early to mid 20 century, it meant something to Americans more like pacifism, and nationalism; it did not so much have an economic aspect, although it opposed certain ostensibly lucrative sectional proposals. 
Isolationism was opposed to military adventurism (Cuba was a good example), colonial expansionism (Phillipines), interventionism, and subjugation to entangling military alliances, back then.
Wilsonian activist internationalism, call it globalist democratism with a military component, was what that earlier nationalist pacifist 'isolationism' reacted against, especially re WWI. 
Wilson himself did not apparently have much economic internationalism, but he and his agenda were, however, nevertheless backed by the biggest banks, and dovetailed with their globalist financial and commercial interests.
Both libertarians and internationalists, in both parties, have internationalized, economicized, financialized, and institutionalized in private, NGO, and GO organs,  their agendas, since WWI. 
Human rights hawks on the left, ' left libertarians ' if you will, such as Power, are a legacy of Wilsonian internationalist activism, and going further back, Republican abolitionists; and they are matched, since at least Reagan's time, by globalist libertarians on the right, a species of modern day 'autocrat abolitionism ' similar to Wilson's, and before him, Lincoln's. 
Wilson's war aims included toppling autocrats to make the world safe for democracy, which if you flesh out its meaning, back then, really meant not just toppling the German emperor, but other allied combatant imperialist powers' crowned heads as well. 
It was similar in some ways to the globalist, nominally democratic globalist populist, position of the Bolsheviki, whose revolution helped justify US intervention in the conflict.
Wilson's war aims and his ideals were totally in conflict with those of the Entente, and even of the West at that time.  
The United States continued to grind on, quite oblivious even in the 20th Century, to the ideological Western civilizational betrayal it had first fomented back in 1776, and quite bewildered by the accusations, from other civilizations, of it role after WWII as the inheritor of a Western imperialist legacy it had long claimed to have repudiated, but had nevertheless taken advantage of, but, ironically, both against its own interests and those of the West,  when the opportunity arose to economically globalize during the Cold War by booming other civilizations to the ultimate disadvantage of the West.

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CHINA TRADE DEAL GOOD COP KIM NUCLEAR DEAL BAD COP TRUMP STOOGE FOR ASIAN TEAM

RUMPOLE'S TENNYSON

"...By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,Ulysses
That hoard and feed and sleep and know not me..."

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king, 

By this still hearth, among these barren crags, 

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole 

Unequal laws unto a savage race, 

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. 

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink 

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd 

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those 

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when 

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; 

For always roaming with a hungry heart 

Much have I seen and known; cities of men 

And manners, climates, councils, governments, 

Myself not least, but honour'd of them all; 

And drunk delight of battle with my peers, 

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. 

I am a part of all that I have met; 

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades 

For ever and forever when I move. 

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! 

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life 

Were all too little, and of one to me 

Little remains: but every hour is saved 

From that eternal silence, something more, 

A bringer of new things; and vile it were 

For some three suns to store and hoard myself, 

And this gray spirit yearning in desire 

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 

         This is my son, mine own Telemachus, 

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,— 

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil 

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild 

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees 

Subdue them to the useful and the good. 

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere 

Of common duties, decent not to fail 

In offices of tenderness, and pay 

Meet adoration to my household gods, 

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine. 

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: 

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, 

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me— 

That ever with a frolic welcome took 

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old; 

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; 

Death closes all: but something ere the end, 

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, 

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. 

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: 

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep 

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, 

'T is not too late to seek a newer world. 

Push off, and sitting well in order smite 

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 

Of all the western stars, until I die. 

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: 

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' 

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; 

One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

SEE RANDALL COLLINS' NOVEMBER 2017 POST

Friday, February 23, 2018

SEE RANDALL COLLINS' NOVEMBER 2017 POST

Friday, November 24, 2017

HEFNER’S PLAYBOY: SPINOFF OF ESQUIRE’S NICHE

 

Compare Collins' discussions, here and elsewhere, of fame, innovation, and creativity, with, say, Randy Fertel's discussion of improvisation in literature music and other things.

RE TAKING HARDER STANCE TOWARD CHINA EDITORIAL NYT G20 AMERICA SHOULD HAVE SMELLED THE COFFEE 50 YEARS AGO NO EMBARGO NO CURRENCY OPTIONS OPEN

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

RE TAKING HARDER STANCE TOWARD CHINA EDITORIAL NYT G20 AMERICA SHOULD HAVE SMELLED THE COFFEE 50 YEARS AGO NO EMBARGO NO CURRENCY OPTIONS OPEN

"This administration came in with one dominant idea: make China a global partner in facing global challenges,” said David Shambaugh, director of the China policy program at George Washington University. “China failed to step up and play that role. Now, they realize they’re dealing with an increasingly narrow-minded, self-interested, truculent, hyper-nationalist and powerful country.”

In 2010, 2010, they realize the're dealing with.........

Ridiculous, really. Anyone with just a smidgen of history can see what a truly pathetic situation this is, and will be.

The US off shored most if its bric a brac and much other manufacturing over there, to its 'strategic' partner.

What could make anyone think that other Asian spaghetti republics would be closer to the US? Only a delusional diplomatic mind set.

And when one reads such as:

'this administration came in with one dominant idea............................'

it says something about the simplicity, paucity, and narrowness, of ideas at the diplomatic and political top.

Hello: guess what America also is:

'a narrow-minded, self-interested, truculent, hyper-nationalist and powerful country'.

All that Cobdenist peace loving free trade development, throughout Asia, is now coming home to roost.

Who do you think their new economic and military rival will be; might it be their favorite erstwhile peaceful trading partner?

Wonder how that happened, not enough open markets for them? Not enough technology transfer, or joint projects? Not enuf lazy fare?

What is a 'harder stance', imposing 'sanctions', e.g. say reducing the ENORMOUS trade deficit with China by, say .5%?

Embargo? How do you embargo your major source of goods?

Another good question:

How do you slap the hand that is feeding you?

What military options are open to a country which has blithely placed its manufacturing sources in the home of its new enemy?

See some prior posts re fattening things up, Trading Places, Trading American Interests, Japan Who Governs, Thurston Robert Macaire Howell, lazy fare, laissez faire, CIVILIZATIONAL ADVANTAGE, and various cartoon mises en scene, etc.

Things may be heating up, as I had poetically taken a wild guess, along with Rumpole, ..........no birds,

No vember.

In geopolitical, civilizational, terms, which I have used before, which even many Americans can kindof understand,

'Game Over'.

GREAT QUESTION FOR ALL YOU CONSTITUTIONAL LAWYERS

Sunday, September 11, 2016

GREAT QUESTION FOR ALL YOU CONSTITUTIONAL LAWYERS

The principles of civil disobedience, and even legitimate revolution, are written into our founding documents, and certainly were carried out in our actions. 

You might then want to ask yourself: "What really is 'the rule of law' in such a political system?"

You can flounce around, toss around at each other, or at me, 'fine points of law' (as Rumpole put it), or jurisprudential history from, say, Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Grotius, Locke, Milton, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Bentham, Burke, Smith, Hegel, Proudhon, Mill, Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Hart, Rawls, Dworkin, Fuller, Raz, Kelsen, Austin, Bobbitt, etc., talk about the original position, state of nature, sovereignty, legal realism, positivism, utilitarianism, laws of war, punishment and responsibility, etc., until you tire of it, but still, the question is there. 

A more modern example, of just one aspect: What if a so called market imperative Trumps all else, including what has been called the rule of law? Isn't that, after all, one of the things Bobbitt implies in his account of the Market State inShield?

DK SEXUAL HARASSMENT POST REPRISE SINCE THIS IS NOW EPIDEMIC MY COMMENT FOLLOWS

Saturday, February 3, 2018

DK SEXUAL HARASSMENT POST REPRISE SINCE THIS IS NOW EPIDEMIC MY COMMENT FOLLOWS

Last week I know I raised some eyebrows when I suggested that Betsy DeVos and the Education Department might do some good by changing the Obama Administration's Title IX guidelines for university handling of sexual harassment charges on campus.  I based that comment largely on a remarkable book I had read a couple of months back,Unwanted Advances, by Laura Kipnis, a professor of media studies at Northwestern University.

To make the long story of how the book came to be written rather short, Kipnis became interested the case of a colleague (broadly defined) or hers, a philosophy professor named Peter Ludlow, who had lost his job an his livelihood thanks to accusations by an undergraduate whom Kipnis chooses to refer to pseudonymously as Eunice Cho, and a graduate student she calls Nola Hartley.  Cho, who was only a freshman at the time she got to know Ludlow, never accused him of having sex with her, although she claimed he had spooned against her while they spent one night in hsi apartment after they had been out having drinks together.  Hartley on the other had had a substantial and very well-documented relationship (this is the age of texts) with Ludlow, obviously based upon mutual affection, but had subsequently decided that he had used his power as a professor (even though he was not her professor at the time) to coerce her into the relationship.  What evidently struck Kipnis, a younger baby boomer who is now about 60, was that both cases were based on an idea she had learned to reject in her youth: the idea that women of 18 or older were fully capable of making, and living with, their own decisions about whom to have sex with.  Kipnis, a heterosexual herself, has continued to take advantage of that freedom all her life, she lets us know, and even admits to occasionally having had sex with students.  She wrote an article making this argument for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and was soon informed that she was the subject of a Title IX complaint brought by some women at Northwestern who accused her of creating an unfriendly environment.  Rather than back down, she got more deeply involved in the whole subject.  Meanwhile, university officials had found Ludlow guilty of sexual assault and ended his career.

Kipnis discusses the two accusations and how they were adjudicated at great length with the help of the files on the investigation that Ludlow gave her. I will confine myself to some observations of my own.  The most important thing to understand about the new campus doctrine and procedures, in my opinion, is that they are totally contrary to Anglo-American legal traditions as they have evolved at least since Magna Carta in 1215.  To begin with, there is no presumption of innocence for men accused of sexual harassment.  The women who bring accusations are routinely referred to not as accusers, but as survivors, implying that the question of whether a crime took place has already been resolved.  That is connected to a second principle of the new procedures: the survivors, not impartial third parties, decide whether a crime has been committed, based on their own feelings.  That is how Hartley, the grad student, could get a finding against Ludlow despite reams of texts showing that she had been not only a consensual but a very enthusiastic and lovestruck participant in their relationship.  She had subsequently decided that his superior power had coerced her (without the slightest indication that he had tried in any way to use it to force her into bed), and that was that.  That in turn leads us to the whole question of reasonable doubt, one of the standards of proof that the Obama Administration told colleges not to use in sexual assault cases.

When sexual assault activists are asked why colleges cannot simply leave criminal accusations to the criminal justice system, they routinely reply that survivors (that is, accusers) do not want to undergo the ordeal that would result, and that it is very difficult to get convictions there.  That is true, and there are two reasons for it. The first is that much of what constitutes "sexual assault" on campus today, such as simple unwanted touching with clothes on, isn't illegal at all.  But the second is that our criminal justice system requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which by definition is most unlikely to be available in what is referred to as a "he said, she said" situation.  When the accused tells one story and the accuser another, and there is no very damning evidence ot undermine the credibility of either one, there is very little basis for a jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that one of them is telling the truth.  That in turn requires them to find the accused innocent.  That, for many sexual assault activists, is an unacceptable outcome.


The nature of the argument we are having is confirmed by an op-ed and a letter in the New York Times of Monday, September 18.  The op-ed by two grad students in sociology protests possible changes in the Department of Education's sexual assault policy. The article by Miriam Bleckman-Krut and Nicole Bedera begins as follows: "Who should have the right to define rape: survivors who have experienced sexual violence or those who are accused of perpetrating it?"  Later, they add that "accused men's pain does not excuse rape, and men shouldn't be the ones defining it."  We have never had a criminal justice system, as it happens, in which either the accused or the accuser gets to decide the case.  The question of whether a crime has been committed has always been the province of third parties, chosen to be as impartial as possible--that is, judges and juries.  A letter to the editor from an attorney, Marian E. Lindberg, makes the same argument: "Whether one agrees with a preponderance-of-evidence standard turns largely on whether one thinks that women are more likely to lie about sexual abuse, or men more likely to lie about consent."  Our whole legal system--which, to be sure, has never functioned perfectly--is designed to substitute the impartial judgment of third parties of the facts of a particular case for blanket rules such as "believe the woman."

The Obama administration advised campuses not only to ignore presumption of evidence, but also to discard another standard, one of "clear and convincing" evidence that charges were true.  Instead they ordered them to make judgments based on the "preponderance of evidence," the standard used in a civil suit.  Even that standard, obviously, isn't much help when the evidence consists of opposing statements by an accuser and the accused--unless one decides that in these situations, women are inherently more credible than men.  The files Kipnis quotes show that the college bureaucrats charged with investigating these cases and the lawyers whom colleges often hire to investigate them routinely believe the accuser and disbelieve the accused.  And they do this, often, because of preconceived notions of how men and women do, and do not act.  Here an analogy is in order.  Kipnis does refer frequently to witch trials, but she never mentions what is to me a much more apt analogy: the Stalinist justice of the 1930s and 1940s and Mao's justice during the cultural revolution.  In those days, any class enemy was automatically guilty of any accusation against him and her, by virtue of who he or she was, regardless of the specifics of what they had done, or not done.  Indeed, justice in those regimes wasn't even supposed to be impartial: it was a front in the class struggle.  Now unfortunately, for at least three decades, university humanities have been teaching that the history of mankind is the history of the oppression, by white males, of everyone else.  Thus, when Cho (whose credibility on many points was shredded by cross-examination) said that she had spent the night with Hartley spooning, while he said that he had put a pillow between them, the administrator simply decided to believe Cho and find him guilty.

It occurred to me, as it didn't to Kipnis, that the practice of hiring attorneys to conduct investigations and report their findings, upon which the university then acts, has another huge problem, which is also related to how our judicial system really works. Attorneys are not trained to investigate situations impartially; they are trained to represent the interests of their clients, and they instinctively slant every fact in favor of their client.  In these cases they seem to wind up representing the accuser. I raised this point with a very experienced attorney of my acquaintance. He agreed with me, but he added that there were two kinds of attorneys, mediators and arbitrators, who are accustomed to listening to both sides of the question, and who would do a better job.  Mediators and arbitrators, however, use impartial procedures--the only reason anyone would hire them--and colleges and universities, threatened with the loss of federal funds under title IX, aren't interested, clearly, in impartial procedures that respect traditional principles of American justice.

Late in the book, Kipnis makes another critically important point about sexual assault on campus.  Many complaints, of course, involve situations in which both parties have consumed large amounts of alcohol.  Campus officials now argue routinely that no one can really consent to sex when under teh influence of alcohol (how much alcohol is required to deprive one of that power, I do not know), and therefore, sex with an inebriated woman is rape.  Leaving aside the question of whether this really makes any legal sense, what Kipnis argues--and she is clearly right--is that such rules criminalize what has become normal behavior on many campuses.  It is very clear that both young men and young women to go parties to get more or less drunk and "hook up."  They know they are going to drink, and that they may have sex, when they arrive.  But the adults who claim to supervise their lives have declared this behavior to be criminal--but only for the man, in a heterosexual encounter at least.  I do not think this is a healthy situation for anyone concerned.  For the record, if I had a daughter (which I never have), I would tell her in no uncertain terms never to get drunk with anyone she did not trust.

It is something of a miracle that Kipnis's book was ever written. The sex crimes bureaucracies on campus, she makes clear, also try to impose a high degree of secrecy on their proceedings, try to prevent the accused from keeping thorough records of them (for instance, by recording hearings or bringing attorneys with them), and say very little, normally, about how decisions were reached.  Publicity worked for Kipnis. Her acocunt of her own case suggests to me that the Northwestern hierarchy realized that it could do a lot of harm, and she was found innocent of creating a hostile environment rather quickly after she became nationally known.  Others, however, might not be so lucky.  There is not the slightest doubt that if I were still teaching on campus, this blog post could easily be cited by any member of the university as an actionable attempt to create an unfriendly environment.

I had planned this post for some time, but this morning I was delighted to find that I am not alone. The Boston Globe, whose coverage of campus sexual assault usually reflects the new orthodoxy, included a long story this very morningquoting a large number of liberals, many of them women, who, like me, believe that the Education Department does indeed have to reform its title IX guidelines.  I hope that readers here will be able to break through the firewall.  It's a good story, and it suggests that, thank heaven, reverence for our legal traditions is, even now, far from dead.  We still need a two-party system to remedy the excesses of both sides. This is one case where, even now, this might work.

                     . 

BUTTERFIELD TUDOR WHIG MAGNA CARTA RUMPOLE BROOKS AND US

Monday, May 1, 2017 

BUTTERFIELD TUDOR WHIG MAGNA CARTA RUMPOLE BROOKS AND US

"There is little sign of the importance of Magna Carta until the parliament of 1610, and the document had hardly saved Englishmen from the dangers of despotism in the time of the Tudors.  Since this was the case we must not imagine that the Charter itself was for all time an all-sufficient guarantee for our liberties, or that it ratified and sealed them for ever.  The history of England after the Tudors turnedMagna Carta once again into the effective cornerstone of our liberties; but the discovery of its importance, the revival of the popular memory of it, comes late, comes like an after-thought, and attains great significance in the 17th Century.  The Tudor Age would never have relished the idea that the king should be limited by feudal law--they remembered too well the over-mighty subject, the danger of private rights that menaced the state.  The glory of the Tudor age lay in the opposite movement in fact--the victory that the monarch had achieved over feudal limitations and over the whole realm of privilege."

One might say that there are few protections here, now, in this new feudal age, none from a crown, virtually none from a mere president, none from a Congress on the leash of enormous private rights patronage, from the immensely accrued private rights power and privilege of the top .1%, a faux aristocracy only of wealth, which now holds sway over everything here, behind the scenes.

Magna Carta, around 1600, by a Whig miracle of interpretation, became the founding document of what lately has become this top .1%.

The freedoms of the age of the democratic revolution, beginning in the 18th Century, have lately been appropriated by the top .1%, now, mainly for itself. It has been systematically impoverishing the lower income people of the West, joining in common cause with upper elites elsewhere. 

The only power now that can rise up against, or in alliance with, this power has been a gaggle of strong men, as Brooks now calls them, faux monarchs and barons, in an evil dark medieval world of rival civilizations, collapsed class systems.

LINDSEY GRAHAM GREAT STUFF

Queer as a three dollar bill.
Trump's pet queer. 
Rather like Lear's Fool!