zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — folks you might not entrust with your secrets ]
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I was on my way to DoubleQuote two Presidential candidates that some people wouldn’t want to entrust with secret briefings from the Intelligence Community — Trump & Clinton — citing Shane Harris‘ Spies Worry Candidate Trump Will Spill Secrets piece from The Beast and Brent Scher‘s Former White House Counsel: Hillary Clinton Should Not Get Intelligence Briefings at the Washington Free Beacon — old stories, both of them, but they just now clicked together for me —

But why worry, when Kristina Wong at The Hill has done it for me?

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This is all old hat, of course — Wong’s piece was posted more than a month ago — but still, as she said..

Some U.S. intelligence officials are worried about providing a routine intelligence briefing to Donald Trump once he becomes the official Republican presidential nominee, according to a report.

Eight senior security officials told Reuters they were concerned that Trump’s “shoot from the hip” style could pose national security risks, as they prepare to give him a routine pre-election briefing for presidential nominees.

They also cited his lack of foreign policy experience, and his little known team of foreign policy advisers.
“People are very nervous,” one senior U.S. security official said.

However, the officials, who requested anonymity to discuss a political domestic issue, said they would not deviate from the usual “Top Secret” briefing format, to avoid any appearance of bias.

Current and formal officials also expressed concern over briefing Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, according to Reuters.

They cited the scandal over her use of emails when she was secretary of State and her handling of sensitive information. She is currently facing an FBI probe over whether she compromised security and broke laws over her use of a private email server for government work at State.

“The only candidate who has proven incapable of handling sensitive information is Hillary Clinton,” Michael Short, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, told Reuters. “If there is anyone they should be worried about it is Hillary Clinton.”

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And all of this brings me to my Totally Impractical Question — which if anything gets more interesting as the weeks go by:

If someone has loose enough lips — or email servers — to be unworthy to receive Top Secret briefings as a candidate, do they really suddenly get a whole lot more reliable, once they’re elected?

[ by Charles Cameron — and what about straw men & sovereign citizens? ]
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I have long appreciated Mr Justice Douglas‘ dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972), and Christopher Stone‘s comment on the same, Should Trees Have Standing? — presented along with other essays in Stone’s book of the same name [upper panel, above].

That takes care of the trees in my title. Parks and rivers are covered by the New York Times piece today, In New Zealand, Lands and Rivers Can Be People (Legally Speaking).

Whales and apes get added to our list, as you can see, in Brighter Green‘s Nature’s Rights: Rivers, Trees, Whales, and Apes — which mentions that under Ecuador’s constitution enshrining the legal rights of nature as a whole::

Ecuador stepped to the forefront of the nature’s rights movement when it became the first country to include the rights of Mother Earth (Pachamama) in its constitution, which was ratified in 2008. The document states, “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions, and its processes in evolution.” Nature is a “rights-bearing entity that should be treated with parity under the law.” Citizens are given the power to sue on behalf of nature, now a legal entity

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And corporations?

The irony here, of course, is that those who would like to see Nature get a word in edgewise in the courts as a legal Person, tend to be unhappy with corporations having the same rights as chimpanzees. Eric Posner in Slate, Stop Fussing Over Personhood, catches the irony nicely:

From a legal standpoint, there is nothing remarkable about a chimpanzee claiming to be a person. Indeed, there are a number of cases that have been brought by animals—including a palila, a marbled murrelet, and a spotted owl. All of these animals sought to enforce their rights under the Endangered Species Act, under a provision that gives “persons” the right to bring suit.

In none of these cases was a judge fooled into thinking that an animal possesses all the rights of human beings. The lawyers bringing them were simply ensuring that a judicial remedy was available to address the harm that Congress sought to fix. If the spotted owl had also asked for the right to vote, the request would have been denied. A judge wouldn’t give a hoot that an earlier court had deemed the owl a “person” under the Endangered Species Act. A person for one legal purpose is not necessarily a person for another.

The law also treats various nonhuman, nonsentient entities as “persons” for certain legal purposes. Corporations, estates, trusts, partnerships, and government entities are often defined this way. Walmart, Illinois, and the California Pension Fund can sue, for example, without anyone asking if they have a right to abortion.

The classic case here is the famous and infamous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, 558 U.S. 310 (2010).

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I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention here also the curious notions of personhood invoked by members of the Sovereign Citizens movement. From JM Berger‘s recent report, Without Prejudice: What Sovereign Citizens Believe:

Fictitious Person

Because the UCC provides an interstate standard for things such as driver’s licenses, property ownership, and bank accounts, many sovereigns believe that these documents (and associated laws and financial obligations) do not apply to them, but instead to a fictitious person created by the illegitimate law, sometimes referred to as a “straw man.” Some believe a fictitious person is denoted in legal documents by listing his or her name in all capital letters. The fictitious person is a legal entity akin to a company with the same name as the citizen, sovereigns believe.

Some sovereigns create their own driver’s licenses and license plates because they believe the state-issued documents are inauthentic, as they refer to the fictitious person, and that using or signing these documents exposes them to vulnerabilities under the illegitimate and tyrannical commercial laws, including debt collection, arrest, and prosecution.

The correct use of certain phrases or legal citations can reduce or eliminate these vulnerabilities, however. For instance, some believe that documents used by the illegitimate system, such as contracts or court documents, can be signed safely if the citizen appends the phrase “Without Prejudice UCC 1-308” to the signature, which they believe preserves the sovereign citizen’s common law rights and privileges.

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Let’s return to sanity.

The final word in Sierra Club vs Morton is given to Mr Justice Douglas: in a footnote, he cites John Donne, poet — and thus according to Shelley, one of the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”:

“No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Devotions XVII.

And by way of comparison, here’s a Maori expression of the same sense of extended personhood, in context from the NYT article I cited above:

A former national park has been granted personhood, and a river system is expected to receive the same soon.

The unusual designations, something like the legal status that corporations possess, came out of agreements between New Zealand’s government and Maori groups. The two sides have argued for years over guardianship of the country’s natural features.

Chris Finlayson, New Zealand’s attorney general, said the issue was resolved by taking the Maori mind-set into account. “In their worldview, ‘I am the river and the river is me,’” he said. “Their geographic region is part and parcel of who they are.”

[Mark Safranski / “zen“]

High Towers and Strong Places: A Political History of Middle-Earth by Timothy R. Furnish

The hundredth anniversary of the terrifying and tragic Battle of the Somme seems a fitting time to review a new book about Middle-Earth, as it was born at the Somme  from the imagination of a young British officer who survived it, J.R.R. Tolkien. From the death and destruction of the Western Front, Tolkien wrought a deep and elegant mythology that has entertained and fascinated hundreds of millions of readers for decades, spawned a sword and sorcery genre of popular fiction, major motion pictures, video games and even an academic field, “Tolkien Studies“. It is to the latter that High Towers and Strong Places by Dr. Timothy Furnish belongs and it represents a major analytic contribution; Furnish takes that which is well-known and widely read and breaks new ground.

Departing from the tradition of analyzing Tolkien’s works as literature, poetry, linguistics, mythology, culture and even roots in Christian theology, Furnish applies the disciplinary lens of political science and opens up into view the geopolitics of Middle-Earth; Sauron as tyrannical theocrat, Gondor as hegemon and Gandalf as the grand strategist of the West. Furnish, a former Arabic linguist and Army chaplain with a PhD in Islamic history, emphasizes that J.R.R. Tolkien, as a scholar and “subcreator” was deeply concerned with history and historical realism as a substantive basis for his fictional world that he took to “amazing lengths” of detail. This makes Middle-Earth a prime candidate, Furnish argues, to be analyzed in “real-world fashion”:

….The Silmarillion and LotR are both shot through with politics – whether about the intrigues of noldorin princes of the First Age, the even more byzantine plots of the Second Age Numenorean kings, or the dynastic struggles of the rulers of Arnor and Gondor in the Third Age. But the latter two are in even larger measure books about wars, while even The Hobbit contains a major, and important, battle before its end.

Furnish looks at Middle-Earth from the wars of Beleriand to the War of the Ring in the Third Age in terms of “Races and Realms” all demonstrating three basic “Types of Rule” from which flows politics, policies and to some instances, strategy, manifesting in “The Physical, Cultural-Political and Economic Aspects of Middle-Earth Warfare”. To some degree, the early part of the text is a review of the major components of Tolkien’s legendarium, enjoyably familiar to the rabid Tolkien fan but absolutely useful to the more casual reader, who has read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings but not The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, the more recent The Children of Hurin,  or the twelve volume The History of Middle-Earth by Christopher Tolkien. Having laid the groundwork, Furnish then begins to examine Middle-Earth with the disciplinary lens of political science and IR.

Heavily footnoted and charmingly illustrated by Anke Eissmann, where High Towers and Strong Places really shines is in Furnish’s detailed analysis of the realms of men and the critical role of the Edain and their descendants – the fierce Numenoreans and the Dunedain of Gondor and Arnor – play in Tolkien’s universe. It is conventional to interpret the history of Middle-Earth through an Elvish perspective given the events of The Silmarillion and the individual power of the greatest of the Eldar – Feanor, Luthien, Fingolfin, Finrod Felagund, Thingol, Galadriel, Celebrimbor, Elrond – which overshadow all but a heroic few men in Tolkien’s legendarium. Timothy Furnish is the first scholar to put the true scope and scale of the rise of Numenor and it’s armed might into perspective; Numenor was a true global empire and the mightiest military power of not only the Second Age, but perhaps of any age. The Numenoreans eclipsed the power of the Noldorin Elf-kingdoms of Beleriand, ruled the Seas and vast swaths of Middle-Earth and easily humbled Sauron at the pinnacle of his strength. It is an open question if Numenor at its height would have rivaled the power of Angband, but under Ar-Pharazon the Numenoreans invaded Valinor, a feat even Morgoth never dared to do. As Furnish writes:

Numenor was clearly modeled on the Atlantis myth, the importance and the centrality of which to Tolkien’s own view of his legendarium’s history having already been noted. For some 3300 years, these “Kings of men” dominated the political and military dimensions of Middle-Earth, because of their being “more like to the Firstborn [Elves] than any other of the kindred of men”. Elven aspects of these men included not only extremely long lifespans….but also great bodily stature, usually reaching 6 1/2 to 7 feet. In addition, the Numenoreans….became the most technologically advanced people in Middle-Earth – particularly in ship-building and as mariners and, eventually, in terms of military technology and weaponry

While there are many points of interest in High Towers and Strong Places, such as the nature of Orcs or the relationship between Hobbits and Men or the political characteristics of Elven lordships vs. kingdoms, another strength is Furnish’s examination of  “the realms of evil”, Angband and Mordor and their satellites and clients. While differentiating between the strategic ambitions of the dark lord Morgoth and his chief disciple and successor Sauron, Furnish characterizes them both as “theocratic tyrants”, albeit Sauron was the more rational and calculating of the two.  As incarnated evil, immortal in nature and possessed of immense personal powers, the dark lords were aspiring “god-kings” seeking not merely political rule imposed by military dominance, but “worship” and total domination of the wills of others and – in Morgoth’s case – over the very substance of Arda itself.

This supernatural despotism has no genuine analog in the real world, of course, but their mad striving for “unipolarity” and reaping the consequences of counter-balancing and downfall is a familiar pattern. Furnish does a thorough job with the waxing and waning of power between the “states” of the West (of Elves, Dwarves and Men but especially Numenor and Gondor) and Sauron’s eastern hegemony headquartered in Mordor. The flow and rhythm is one recognizable to anyone who has studied the Cold War or the empires of the ancient world. Furnish intends to build upon this political history with a second volume, a military history of Middle-Earth that will delve deeply into how Tolkien conceived of war and warfare in his legendarium.

High Towers and Strong Places is a must-have tome on the shelf for every dedicated fan of J.R.R. Tolkien.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

The Storm of Creativity, by Kyna Leski

2017 War With Russia, by General Sir Richard Shirreff

The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough

Serendipities, Language and Lunacy, by Umberto Eco

Paradise, Dante Alighieri, translated by Mark Musa

Undertow, by Stanton S. Coerr

The White Horse Cometh, by Rich Parks

Washington The Indispensable Man, by John Thomas Flexner

This list starts the first week of May, so perhaps the title should be Spring/Summer. Most of these books are quick reads and all are recommended.

I picked up Ms. Leski’s book at an MIT bookshop on a business trip in early May and read on the train ride home. Books on creativity are ubiquitous, but Ms. Leski takes an interesting approach by describing the creative process using the metaphor of a storm. Several ZP readers will find of interest.

2017 was recommended by a friend. The author was the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the book focuses on a Europe/NATO response to a Russian invasion of the Baltics. Written in a Tom Clancy-like style, the plot is fast-paced even though the good general provides sometimes provides detailed insights into the inner workings of NATA and the North Atlantic Council (this is one of the values of the book—bureaucracy writ-large).

David McCullough’s Wright Brothers delivers an approachable and human accounting of the first men of powered flight. Some reviews on Amazon complain McCullough lifts and uses too many quotes to tell the story. At times the quotes were distracting, but not enough to prevent the enjoyment of the story of two brothers who changed the world. This book was a gift otherwise I probably would not have read.

Serendipities is a short book, but was a long read for me. Eco explains how language and the pursuit of the perfect language has confounded thinkers since time immemorial. He refers to Marco Polo’s unicorn (also used in his Kant and the Platypus which is excellent) explaining how language is often twisted to meet a preconceived notion or idea. The first couple of chapters were quite good, chapters three and four did not hold my interest or were over my head. The closing chapter was good enough to convince me I’ll need to read this little book again. (My Eco anti-library has been growing of late.)

Eco’s book led me to reread Musa’s excellent translation of Paradise. My son gave me the deluxe edition with parallel Italian and English, plus commentary. Eco referenced Canto 26 and 27, and I enjoyed the break so much I read the whole thing!

Undertow is my good friend Stan Coerr’s second book of poetry.  His first book Rubicon was a moving collection of poetry of men at war. Undertow deals more with the heart and is quite good, too. You won’t be disappointed.

White Horse is also a book by an old friend, Rich Parks (we’ve known each other since the mid-80’s). White Horse is self-published and in places it shows, but the overall story is quite good for a first book (I’ve already told him his book would make an excellent screenplay.). The plot is quick and entertaining even if a bit unbelievable, but the story is fiction. Rich is following up with a sequel in August in 2016 and I’ll be reading it, too.

Mr. Flexner’s Washington was a gift, too. In this quick biography Washington is made approachable and human. And when I say “quick,” I mean quick…Trenton and Princeton took one chapter compared to David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing which took up a standalone book. If someone were looking for a first Washington biography, this would be a good place to start.

This isn’t the conclusion of my summer reading, but a pretty good start.What are  you reading this summer?

[by Lynn C. Rees]

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt;
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
Defiance flashed in Casey’s eye, a sneer curled Casey’s lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped—
“That ain’t my style,” said Casey. “Strike one!” the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore;
“Kill him! Kill the umpire!” shouted someone on the stand;
And it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey’s visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the dun sphere flew;
But Casey still ignored it and the umpire said, “Strike two!”

“Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered “Fraud!”
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn’t let that ball go by again.

The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

During my fifth grade year at mighty Ridgecrest Elementary, a student group I had selective engagement with launched an effort to put a statue of Philo Taylor Farnsworth in the National Statuary Hall found in the United States Capitol building in Washington, D.C. (a city built on a swamp). By act of Congress, each state of the Union could commission two statues of dead local notables to be placed in Statuary Hall. At the time, the great state of Utah had one statue there, a man blessed with the hand of great-great aunt Emeline. After a long process, where my own transient role primarily involved learning that legislative committees are the worst form of sleep aid (except for all the other sleep aids), the thing was done.

A statue of Brother Philo now stands in Statuary Hall, yet another reminder to visitors from the other 49 states of Utah’s innate superiority.

Born in Beaver, Utah but raised in parts northward in Utah irredenta, Brother Philo received a vision one day of how signals could be broadcast through the air and projected onto glass with a particle ray. It was inspired by the back and forth pat he traced when plowing the fields of his family ranch. From this, Brother Philo, later joined by his wife Pem, was led onward to develop the first versions of what would become cathode ray television, a technology only now passing from the scene in the First World. The first person to appear on TV was Sister Pem, who I met once selectively and transiently near the tail end of Brother Philo’s end in marble.

Like many technical innovators, at the beginning Brother Philo was optimistic that the impact of his invention on the condition of mankind would be positive. Like many technical innovators, at the end Brother Philo was optimistic that the impact of his invention on the condition of mankind would be negative. Instead of cultural touchstones like opera and the other fine culture that edified the Rigby set he originally envisioned, Brother Philo lived long enough to see TV bazooka mind-gnawing nonsense onto a humanity with little immunity from the spell of moving visuals in the home.

My grandma, who grew up in a suburb of the mighty metropolis of Salt Lake City, remembered being tormented by one of her family’s roosters when she was very young. This foul creature, spewed from hell, lived only to chase her. Livestock was still commonly raised even behind the homes of urban professionals like my great-grandfather, a general contractor and home builder. The world of her first decade in this life remained one with more obvious links to the experience of her ancestors than our own. It was one in which the human experience of visuals in motion and sound were still largely restricted to what Grandma might have seen if she’d been present with the Mudville ten thousand watching the Mudville nine fall.

The moving visual is hot wired into the brain, which can also be seen as an image processing extension of the eyes. It was originally hyperlocal, optimized to drive hyperlocal reaction in response to hyperlocal triggers.  The oldest image processing system humans have, inherited from amphibians, focuses entirely on reacting to movement. Michael Crichton used this system besmirched the honor of Tyrannosaurus rexs by turning this into a critical element in a pivotal scene in his novel Jurassic Park turned. 

Not Unix

When TV hit, minds optimized for hyperlocal responses to hyperlocal visual motion were suddenly hit by immediacy without localization. It went straight to the most lizardly of lizard brain parts. Children like myself born into a world of TV inundation were hooked from before conscious memory. Grandma, born into the ancient world, scheduled her day around The Price is Right at 9AM MST and Wheel of Fortune at 6PM. There were words of caution. I remember Grandma telling my brothers and I not to sit so close to her newfangled color TV because the color radiation would ruin our eyes (our black and white TV at home emanated no color radiation). I remember constant encouragements to go outside and breath that fresh outside Salt Lake City air (the city lies is a pollution bowl surrounded by mountains and a big salty pond). Until we turned 10 or so, we had to go to bed by 8PM despite the fact everything interesting that adults (defined as “those older than 10”) got to stay up and watch.

I suppose part of the toxicity of the 196os when sensible health measures such as aerial spraying to keep the hippie population curtailed were relaxed was that it was suddenly being seen in narcotic color. Many a silly hippie was prepped to light up and drop out because the color TV rays my Grandma warned me about were lighting up and dropping out their silly pre-hippy adolescent brains before they ever touched something harder. The transistor radio made the paths straight for American decadence. Color TV pushed it into the abyss. Lower-bound morality, best defined as the abolition of private space, was severely weakened as visual cancer metastasized.

A certain cynicism about TV has grown over my lifetime. It gradually dawned on many that immediacy did not equal truth and vividness did not equal reality. Many were convinced that visual motion was a tool that could be manipulated and the ancient peasant cunning designed to thwart the will of nominal betters revived in some places. The Legion of Stupid retained its legendary ability to man-sea the market for get rich schemes and chia pets. But some were developing increased resistance to the call of the cathode ray and watching TV from further and further away like Grandma warned.

Then came the Internet. Then came another wave and utopian fantasies. Then came the gradual discovery of how to bend these new 20 year old technologies to the old wheel of control, dominance, and exploitation.

The Internet took the illusion of immediacy and boosted its power. Instead of people being incited just by centralized bureaucracies far away, now they could incite each other directly. The distant was suddenly immediate, with more of a realtime “you are there” facade than even TV in its prime with three stations could reach. A sort of moral hazard was created: the seemingly frictionless feel of immediate data pumped over TCP/IP removed the constraints that actual immediacy and actual localism impose. Networked information subsidizes an epidemiology of constant realtime concern, optimized for packet switched networks.

The leaning pressure to magnify events of only local significance into a global contagion that must be dealt with NOW! NOW! NOW! has gathered force. The relevance of the irrelevant has been massively inflated. The availability intrinsic to any species of eternal now has made every itch everywhen into the paramecium that roared. The current president is THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER. Their policies are the WORST POLICIES EVER. A minor colonial conflict like the Iraq intervention is blown up into THE WORST FOREIGN POLICY DISASTER OF ALL TIME. And SO FORTH.

There is nothing new about the darkness that comes in from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. What is new is the tax on attention that constant blowing of pinpricks into galaxy-wide tears the fabric of space and time itself imposes. The small has acquired a largeness that it hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve. It now casts a formidable shadow over larger things that do matter, the darkness of its narcotic dazzle fueled by the false intimacy of data immediacy.

This is not a time with any substantial claim on unusual notoriety. It has no ownership on tragedy, no monopoly on ruin, no death grip on turbulence. What it does have is a new, sharper urgency in panic. The spring in the red button of crisis has been worn clean through by constant frantic pushing every time wolf is cried. Our time has its own pathologies. As in other ages, its wounds should be lanced and cauterized. But when every irritation is a world stopper and every paper cut is a global crisis, the only harvest will be frayed nerves and a growing insensitivity to things that actually matter.

When you can frictionlessly grow a burst pimple into a national ordeal, you live in a world where anything can reach outsized importance. In a world where everything is an unfolding apocalypse, then nothing is significant. You will virtually lynch the umpire over the injustice of that missed call. You will virtually damn the opposing team for thwarting your now, now, now. Casey’s enemies will be your enemies. And there will be no joy in this world because everyone everywhere will convince themselves (again) that they live in a global Mudville.