via:
Monday, November 9, 2020
What to Know as ACA Heads to Supreme Court — Again
The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear oral arguments in a case that, for the third time in eight years, could result in the justices striking down the Affordable Care Act.
The case, California v. Texas, is the result of a change to the health law made by Congress in 2017. As part of a major tax bill, Congress reduced to zero the penalty for not having health insurance. But it was that penalty — a tax — that the high court ruled made the law constitutional in a 2012 decision, argues a group of Republican state attorneys general. Without the tax, they say in their suit, the rest of the law must fall, too.
After originally contending that the entire law should not be struck down when the suit was filed in 2018, the Trump administration changed course in 2019 and joined the GOP officials who brought the case.
Here are some key questions and answers about the case:
What Are the Possibilities for How the Court Could Rule?
There is a long list of ways this could play out.
The justices could declare the entire law unconstitutional — which is what a federal district judge in Texas ruled in December 2018. But legal experts say that’s not the most likely outcome of this case.
First, the court may avoid deciding the case on its merits entirely, by ruling that the plaintiffs do not have “standing” to sue. The central issue in the case is whether the requirement in the law to have insurance — which remains even though Congress eliminated the penalty or tax — is constitutional. But states are not subject to the so-called individual mandate, so some analysts suggest the Republican officials have no standing. In addition, questions have been raised about the individual plaintiffs in the case, two consultants from Texas who argue that they felt compelled to buy insurance even without a possible penalty.
The court could also rule that by eliminating the penalty but not the rest of the mandate (which Congress could not do in that 2017 tax bill for procedural reasons), lawmakers “didn’t mean to coerce anyone to do anything, and so there’s no constitutional problem,” University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley said in a recent webinar for the NIHCM Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund and the University of Southern California’s Center for Health Journalism.
Or, said Bagley, the court could rule that, without the tax, the requirement to have health insurance is unconstitutional, but the rest of the law is not. In that case, the justices might strike the mandate only, which would have basically no impact.
It gets more complicated if the court decides that, as the plaintiffs argue, the individual mandate language without the penalty is unconstitutional and so closely tied to other parts of the law that some of them must fall as well.
Even there the court has choices. One option would be, as the Trump administration originally argued, to strike down the mandate and just the pieces of the law most closely related to it — which happen to be the insurance protections for people with preexisting conditions, an extremely popular provision of the law. The two parts are connected because the original purpose of the mandate was to make sure enough healthy people sign up for insurance to offset the added costs to insurers of sicker people.
Another option, of course, would be for the court to follow the lead of the Texas judge and strike down the entire law.
While that’s not the most likely outcome, said Bagley, if it happens it could be “a hot mess” for the nation’s entire health care system. As just one example, he said, “every hospital is getting paid pursuant to changes made by the ACA. How do you even go about making payments if the thing that you are looking to guide what those payments ought to be is itself invalid?”
What Impact Will New Justice Amy Coney Barrett Have?
Perhaps a lot. Before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, most court observers thought the case was highly unlikely to result in the entire law being struck down. That’s because Chief Justice John Roberts voted to uphold the law in 2012, and again when it was challenged in a less sweeping way in 2015.
But with Barrett replacing Ginsburg, even if Roberts joined the court’s remaining three liberals they could still be outvoted by the other five conservatives. Barrett was coy about her views on the Affordable Care Act during her confirmation hearings in October. But she has written that she thinks Roberts was wrong to uphold the law in 2012.
Could a New President and Congress Make the Case Go Away?
Many have suggested that, if Joe Biden assumes the presidency, his Justice Department could simply drop the case. But the administration did not bring the case; the GOP state officials did. And while normally the Justice Department’s job is to defend existing laws in court, in this case the ACA is being defended by a group of Democratic state attorneys general. A new administration could change that position, but that’s not the same as dropping the case.
Congress, on the other hand, could easily make the case moot. It could add back even a nominal financial penalty for not having insurance. It could eliminate the mandate altogether, although that would require 60 votes in the Senate under current rules. Congress could also pass a “severability” provision, saying that, if any portion of the law is struck down, the rest should remain.
“The problem is not technical,” said Bagley. “It’s political.”
The case, California v. Texas, is the result of a change to the health law made by Congress in 2017. As part of a major tax bill, Congress reduced to zero the penalty for not having health insurance. But it was that penalty — a tax — that the high court ruled made the law constitutional in a 2012 decision, argues a group of Republican state attorneys general. Without the tax, they say in their suit, the rest of the law must fall, too.
After originally contending that the entire law should not be struck down when the suit was filed in 2018, the Trump administration changed course in 2019 and joined the GOP officials who brought the case.
Here are some key questions and answers about the case:
What Are the Possibilities for How the Court Could Rule?
There is a long list of ways this could play out.
The justices could declare the entire law unconstitutional — which is what a federal district judge in Texas ruled in December 2018. But legal experts say that’s not the most likely outcome of this case.
The court could also rule that by eliminating the penalty but not the rest of the mandate (which Congress could not do in that 2017 tax bill for procedural reasons), lawmakers “didn’t mean to coerce anyone to do anything, and so there’s no constitutional problem,” University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley said in a recent webinar for the NIHCM Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund and the University of Southern California’s Center for Health Journalism.
Or, said Bagley, the court could rule that, without the tax, the requirement to have health insurance is unconstitutional, but the rest of the law is not. In that case, the justices might strike the mandate only, which would have basically no impact.
It gets more complicated if the court decides that, as the plaintiffs argue, the individual mandate language without the penalty is unconstitutional and so closely tied to other parts of the law that some of them must fall as well.
Even there the court has choices. One option would be, as the Trump administration originally argued, to strike down the mandate and just the pieces of the law most closely related to it — which happen to be the insurance protections for people with preexisting conditions, an extremely popular provision of the law. The two parts are connected because the original purpose of the mandate was to make sure enough healthy people sign up for insurance to offset the added costs to insurers of sicker people.
Another option, of course, would be for the court to follow the lead of the Texas judge and strike down the entire law.
While that’s not the most likely outcome, said Bagley, if it happens it could be “a hot mess” for the nation’s entire health care system. As just one example, he said, “every hospital is getting paid pursuant to changes made by the ACA. How do you even go about making payments if the thing that you are looking to guide what those payments ought to be is itself invalid?”
What Impact Will New Justice Amy Coney Barrett Have?
Perhaps a lot. Before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, most court observers thought the case was highly unlikely to result in the entire law being struck down. That’s because Chief Justice John Roberts voted to uphold the law in 2012, and again when it was challenged in a less sweeping way in 2015.
But with Barrett replacing Ginsburg, even if Roberts joined the court’s remaining three liberals they could still be outvoted by the other five conservatives. Barrett was coy about her views on the Affordable Care Act during her confirmation hearings in October. But she has written that she thinks Roberts was wrong to uphold the law in 2012.
Could a New President and Congress Make the Case Go Away?
Many have suggested that, if Joe Biden assumes the presidency, his Justice Department could simply drop the case. But the administration did not bring the case; the GOP state officials did. And while normally the Justice Department’s job is to defend existing laws in court, in this case the ACA is being defended by a group of Democratic state attorneys general. A new administration could change that position, but that’s not the same as dropping the case.
Congress, on the other hand, could easily make the case moot. It could add back even a nominal financial penalty for not having insurance. It could eliminate the mandate altogether, although that would require 60 votes in the Senate under current rules. Congress could also pass a “severability” provision, saying that, if any portion of the law is struck down, the rest should remain.
“The problem is not technical,” said Bagley. “It’s political.”
by Julie Rovner, Kaiser Health News | Read more:
Image: Yegor Aleyev/TASS via Getty Images
Halalu and Sharks at Kaimana Beach (Waikiki)
[ed. For whatever reasons, there seem to be larger than usual runs of halalu (akule - or juvenile scad) and sardines in Hawaii this year. Here's Kaimana Beach at the south end of Waikiki. Everyone seems to want a piece of the action. See also: The Fish — And Fishermen — Are Back At Ala Moana Beach. Swimmers Are Not Happy (Honolulu Civil Beat).]
Sunday, November 8, 2020
Alex Trebek (July, 1940 - November, 2020)
Image: Sony
[ed. What can one say? I'm sure we'll see many tributes in the days to follow. Alex Trebek transformed a mostly trivial medium (game shows) into an intelligent and transfixing art form, and in the process became a cultural touchstone for generations.]
Saturday, November 7, 2020
What Did We Learn?
[ed. At long last, at least a part of our national nightmare appears to be over. But what did we learn?]
The Electoral College Is Close. The Popular Vote Isn’t.
As the presidential race inches agonizingly toward a conclusion, it might be easy to miss the fact that the results are not really close.
With many ballots still left to count in heavily Democratic cities, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was leading President Trump on Friday by more than 4.1 million votes. Amid all the anxiety over the counts in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and despite Americans’ intense ideological divisions, there was no question that — for the fourth presidential election in a row, and the seventh of the past eight — more people had chosen a Democrat than a Republican.
Only once in the past 30 years have more Americans voted for a Republican: in 2004, when President George W. Bush beat John Kerry by about three million votes. But three times, a Republican has been elected.
Mr. Biden is very likely to win the Electoral College, avoiding another split with the popular vote. But the prolonged uncertainty in spite of the public’s fairly decisive preference — Mr. Biden’s current vote margin is larger than the populations of more than 20 states, and larger than Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016 — has intensified some Americans’ anger at a system in which a minority of people can often claim a majority of power.
“We look at a map of so-called red and blue states and treat that map as land and not people,” said Carol Anderson, a professor of African-American studies at Emory University who researches voter suppression. “Why, when somebody has won millions more votes than their opponent, are we still deliberating over 10,000 votes here, 5,000 votes there?”
In principle, the Electoral College could benefit either party depending on the geographic distribution of its supporters. As recently as four years ago, it looked like it would help Democrats, and in 2004, if Mr. Kerry had won just 119,000 more votes in Ohio out of more than 5.6 million cast there, he would have won the presidency despite losing the popular vote.
But in practice, it has overwhelmingly benefited Republicans in recent years despite the national electorate tilting the other way. And the potential for the Electoral College to diverge from the popular vote has only grown as more Americans have come to live in urban areas and many communities have become more ideologically homogeneous.
With many ballots still left to count in heavily Democratic cities, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was leading President Trump on Friday by more than 4.1 million votes. Amid all the anxiety over the counts in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and despite Americans’ intense ideological divisions, there was no question that — for the fourth presidential election in a row, and the seventh of the past eight — more people had chosen a Democrat than a Republican.
Only once in the past 30 years have more Americans voted for a Republican: in 2004, when President George W. Bush beat John Kerry by about three million votes. But three times, a Republican has been elected.
“We look at a map of so-called red and blue states and treat that map as land and not people,” said Carol Anderson, a professor of African-American studies at Emory University who researches voter suppression. “Why, when somebody has won millions more votes than their opponent, are we still deliberating over 10,000 votes here, 5,000 votes there?”
In principle, the Electoral College could benefit either party depending on the geographic distribution of its supporters. As recently as four years ago, it looked like it would help Democrats, and in 2004, if Mr. Kerry had won just 119,000 more votes in Ohio out of more than 5.6 million cast there, he would have won the presidency despite losing the popular vote.
But in practice, it has overwhelmingly benefited Republicans in recent years despite the national electorate tilting the other way. And the potential for the Electoral College to diverge from the popular vote has only grown as more Americans have come to live in urban areas and many communities have become more ideologically homogeneous.
In 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote by about 550,000 votes but Mr. Bush won the Electoral College, such a split hadn’t happened in more than a century. Now, it has happened twice in 20 years and come close to happening a third time, despite much larger popular-vote margins. What used to be an extreme rarity has begun to feel common.
Therein lies a more serious concern than partisan politics: the potential delegitimization of the United States’ democratic systems in the eyes of its citizens.
“The more this happens, the more you get the sense that voters don’t have a say in the choice of their leaders,” said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “And you cannot have a democracy over a period of time that survives if a majority of people believe that their franchise is meaningless.”
The United States, as supporters of the Electoral College often note, is a republic, meaning decisions are made through elected representatives rather than by direct vote. But “the fundamental of a republican form of democracy,” Dr. Ornstein said, “is that voters choose their representatives, who then make decisions on their behalf.”
The prospect of minority rule is certainly not new, and the fact that the Constitution allows it is by design, not accident. Most obvious, the Constitution originally allowed only white men to vote, and most states required voters to own property, too, disenfranchising most Americans.
The three-fifths clause, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of congressional apportionment, gave Southern states more representation on the backs of people who couldn’t vote for and weren’t represented by their ostensible representatives. By 1820, Dr. Anderson said, the South had 18 to 20 extra seats in the House as a result.
The framers also consciously made the Senate unrepresentative, giving each state two seats regardless of population and leaving it to state legislators to fill them. The intent was for the Senate to serve as a check on the will of the people, which was to be represented in the House.
But the 17th Amendment established direct election of senators in 1913, and the difference in population between the largest and smallest states has vastly increased since the Constitution was written. The current Democratic minority in the Senate was elected with more votes than the Republican majority, and by 2040, based on population projections, about 70 percent of Americans will be represented by 30 percent of senators. (...)
John Koza, the chairman of National Popular Vote Inc., said his group — which has been pushing state legislatures for years to sign on to a compact in which states would pledge to award their electors to the winner of the national popular vote — planned to lobby intensively next year in states including Arizona, Minnesota, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The compact has already been signed by states, mainly blue, totaling 196 electoral votes, but it will not take effect unless that number reaches 270.
by Maggie Astor, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Adriana ZehbrauskasTherein lies a more serious concern than partisan politics: the potential delegitimization of the United States’ democratic systems in the eyes of its citizens.
“The more this happens, the more you get the sense that voters don’t have a say in the choice of their leaders,” said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “And you cannot have a democracy over a period of time that survives if a majority of people believe that their franchise is meaningless.”
The United States, as supporters of the Electoral College often note, is a republic, meaning decisions are made through elected representatives rather than by direct vote. But “the fundamental of a republican form of democracy,” Dr. Ornstein said, “is that voters choose their representatives, who then make decisions on their behalf.”
The prospect of minority rule is certainly not new, and the fact that the Constitution allows it is by design, not accident. Most obvious, the Constitution originally allowed only white men to vote, and most states required voters to own property, too, disenfranchising most Americans.
The three-fifths clause, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of congressional apportionment, gave Southern states more representation on the backs of people who couldn’t vote for and weren’t represented by their ostensible representatives. By 1820, Dr. Anderson said, the South had 18 to 20 extra seats in the House as a result.
The framers also consciously made the Senate unrepresentative, giving each state two seats regardless of population and leaving it to state legislators to fill them. The intent was for the Senate to serve as a check on the will of the people, which was to be represented in the House.
But the 17th Amendment established direct election of senators in 1913, and the difference in population between the largest and smallest states has vastly increased since the Constitution was written. The current Democratic minority in the Senate was elected with more votes than the Republican majority, and by 2040, based on population projections, about 70 percent of Americans will be represented by 30 percent of senators. (...)
John Koza, the chairman of National Popular Vote Inc., said his group — which has been pushing state legislatures for years to sign on to a compact in which states would pledge to award their electors to the winner of the national popular vote — planned to lobby intensively next year in states including Arizona, Minnesota, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The compact has already been signed by states, mainly blue, totaling 196 electoral votes, but it will not take effect unless that number reaches 270.
by Maggie Astor, NY Times | Read more:
[ed. See also: Victory for Joe Biden, at Last (NYT Editorial Board).]
Friday, November 6, 2020
U.S. Shattered Records For New Coronavirus Cases This Week As Hospitalizations Climb
Image: via:
[ed. 100,000/day. Coronavirus? Yawn... that's so yesterday. See also: U.S. infections are breaking records day after day, and deaths are rising in more than half the country. (NY Times); and, US confirms over 126,000 Covid cases on Friday, third daily record in a row (The Guardian).]
Stressed? Pick a Color
As with so many things, the pandemic has altered the way we see color, and specifically, what colors we do — and do not — want to surround ourselves with while bunkered down at home. Some color trends have accelerated during the pandemic. Other long-popular shades are suddenly all wrong.
“There is a huge wave away from gray,” said Joa Studholme, the color curator for Farrow & Ball, the fancy English paint company. “There’s nothing about gray that evokes wellness.”
by Steven Kurutz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Benjamin Moore
No Refs, No Teams, Few Rules
In the Forty-Niners Hockey Club, friendships matter more than championships.
“It’s the ultimate pond hockey,” said Steve Carlson of Anchorage.
He should know. The 69-year-old lifelong Alaskan got on the ice when he was 6, played at Dimond High in the late 1960s and hasn’t stopped chasing the puck with his buddies since.
Created for men over the age of 49, the club has no teams, few rules and no refs. The icing on the cake?
“We don’t keep score,” said 82-year-old Jimmy Reese.
But they do keep skating.
“Hockey’s a good workout,” said Reese, a retired truck driver.
The club was created in 2000 so aging players — the average age is about 65 — wouldn’t have to skate with young hotheads who don’t play well with others.
Its members come from all walks of life — plenty of blue-collar workers, city and state employees, coaches, a doctor, fisherman, dentist, lawyer, pilot, judge, teacher and one guy who allegedly wore a skate over his ankle bracelet for a while.
“We don’t do background checks,” Doug Webster said while pulling on his gear in the locker room at the O’Malley Sports Complex.
The experience and maturity of the players means respect for the game takes precedence over egos. Games feel like old-time hockey at its best, the way kids play when there are no adults around.
With teams determined by the traditional method of throwing sticks in the middle of the ice and dividing them equally at random, games begin quietly, without whistle-blowing refs.
Offsides and icing are called by participants. With no faceoffs, perpetual motion is the norm.
Since the club has enough members for two games simultaneously, it rents both sheets of ice. One rink is for the guys feeling their oats. The other is for the fellas who are feeling their age. Careers are extended by allowing players to age gracefully while not slowing down the action for everyone.
There’s a waiting list to get in, and there’s more to it than just waiting your turn. Hopefuls have to pay their dues.
Sweat equity is the currency. Dedication is noted as well.
For those who want to be considered, pickup games in the summer and general reputation weigh heavily in being invited. Regulars in the summer who are deemed a good fit maintain their eligibility.
When someone decides to step away from the club, a wait-lister gets the call.
The 49ers have a committee that considers prospective members. It doesn’t matter if you’re the mayor or a millionaire. How you handle yourself on the ice has more to do with acceptance than who you are or how you stickhandle.
The number fluctuates, but about 75 players are on the club roster.
Carlson, one of the club’s founders, said the group doesn’t take itself too seriously, as illustrated by an email used to welcome new members:
“With diminished skills and/or speed, you have demonstrated your ability to play down to our level. You are age-appropriate and marginal competence is all that we are looking for. That being said, the membership committee has selected you in the 1st round of the supplemental draft.”
by Casey Brogan, ADN | Read more:
Image: Emily Mesner / ADN
“It’s the ultimate pond hockey,” said Steve Carlson of Anchorage.
He should know. The 69-year-old lifelong Alaskan got on the ice when he was 6, played at Dimond High in the late 1960s and hasn’t stopped chasing the puck with his buddies since.
Created for men over the age of 49, the club has no teams, few rules and no refs. The icing on the cake?
But they do keep skating.
“Hockey’s a good workout,” said Reese, a retired truck driver.
The club was created in 2000 so aging players — the average age is about 65 — wouldn’t have to skate with young hotheads who don’t play well with others.
Its members come from all walks of life — plenty of blue-collar workers, city and state employees, coaches, a doctor, fisherman, dentist, lawyer, pilot, judge, teacher and one guy who allegedly wore a skate over his ankle bracelet for a while.
“We don’t do background checks,” Doug Webster said while pulling on his gear in the locker room at the O’Malley Sports Complex.
The experience and maturity of the players means respect for the game takes precedence over egos. Games feel like old-time hockey at its best, the way kids play when there are no adults around.
With teams determined by the traditional method of throwing sticks in the middle of the ice and dividing them equally at random, games begin quietly, without whistle-blowing refs.
Offsides and icing are called by participants. With no faceoffs, perpetual motion is the norm.
Since the club has enough members for two games simultaneously, it rents both sheets of ice. One rink is for the guys feeling their oats. The other is for the fellas who are feeling their age. Careers are extended by allowing players to age gracefully while not slowing down the action for everyone.
There’s a waiting list to get in, and there’s more to it than just waiting your turn. Hopefuls have to pay their dues.
Sweat equity is the currency. Dedication is noted as well.
For those who want to be considered, pickup games in the summer and general reputation weigh heavily in being invited. Regulars in the summer who are deemed a good fit maintain their eligibility.
When someone decides to step away from the club, a wait-lister gets the call.
The 49ers have a committee that considers prospective members. It doesn’t matter if you’re the mayor or a millionaire. How you handle yourself on the ice has more to do with acceptance than who you are or how you stickhandle.
The number fluctuates, but about 75 players are on the club roster.
Carlson, one of the club’s founders, said the group doesn’t take itself too seriously, as illustrated by an email used to welcome new members:
“With diminished skills and/or speed, you have demonstrated your ability to play down to our level. You are age-appropriate and marginal competence is all that we are looking for. That being said, the membership committee has selected you in the 1st round of the supplemental draft.”
by Casey Brogan, ADN | Read more:
Image: Emily Mesner / ADN
Thursday, November 5, 2020
Psilocybin Relieves Major Depression, Study Shows
In a small study of adults with major depression, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers report that two doses of the psychedelic substance psilocybin, given with supportive psychotherapy, produced rapid and large reductions in depressive symptoms, with most participants showing improvement and half of study participants achieving remission through the four-week follow-up.
A compound found in so-called magic mushrooms, psilocybin produces visual and auditory hallucinations and profound changes in consciousness over a few hours after ingestion. In 2016, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers first reported that treatment with psilocybin under psychologically supported conditions significantly relieved existential anxiety and depression in people with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis.
Now, the findings from the new study, published Nov. 4 in JAMA Psychiatry, suggest that psilocybin may be effective in the much wider population of patients who suffer from major depression than previously appreciated.
"The magnitude of the effect we saw was about four times larger than what clinical trials have shown for traditional antidepressants on the market," says Alan Davis, Ph.D., adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "Because most other depression treatments take weeks or months to work and may have undesirable effects, this could be a game changer if these findings hold up in future 'gold-standard' placebo-controlled clinical trials." The published findings cover only a four-week follow-up in 24 participants, all of whom underwent two five-hour psilocybin sessions under the direction of the researchers.
"Because there are several types of major depressive disorders that may result in variation in how people respond to treatment, I was surprised that most of our study participants found the psilocybin treatment to be effective," says Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., the Oliver Lee McCabe III Professor in the Neuropsychopharmacology of Consciousness at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. He says the major depression treated in the new study may have been different than the "reactive" form of depression in patients they studied in the 2016 cancer trial. Griffiths says his team was encouraged by public health officials to explore psilocybin's effects in the broader population of those with major depressive disorder because of the much larger potential public health impact.
by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, MedicalXPress | Read more:
Image: Eskymaks/Shutterstock via:
Now, the findings from the new study, published Nov. 4 in JAMA Psychiatry, suggest that psilocybin may be effective in the much wider population of patients who suffer from major depression than previously appreciated.
"The magnitude of the effect we saw was about four times larger than what clinical trials have shown for traditional antidepressants on the market," says Alan Davis, Ph.D., adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "Because most other depression treatments take weeks or months to work and may have undesirable effects, this could be a game changer if these findings hold up in future 'gold-standard' placebo-controlled clinical trials." The published findings cover only a four-week follow-up in 24 participants, all of whom underwent two five-hour psilocybin sessions under the direction of the researchers.
"Because there are several types of major depressive disorders that may result in variation in how people respond to treatment, I was surprised that most of our study participants found the psilocybin treatment to be effective," says Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., the Oliver Lee McCabe III Professor in the Neuropsychopharmacology of Consciousness at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. He says the major depression treated in the new study may have been different than the "reactive" form of depression in patients they studied in the 2016 cancer trial. Griffiths says his team was encouraged by public health officials to explore psilocybin's effects in the broader population of those with major depressive disorder because of the much larger potential public health impact.
by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, MedicalXPress | Read more:
Image: Eskymaks/Shutterstock via:
[ed. See also: Oregon leads the way in decriminalizing hard drugs (Rolling Stone/Yahoo)
The End of History and the Fast Man
By early 1967, just months after Ronald Reagan’s election as governor, James Q. Wilson had already tired of East-Coasters’ new favorite pastime, “Explaining California.” So the California-born Harvard professor penned a firsthand account of growing up in Long Beach, “to try to explain what it was like at least in general terms, and how what it was like is relevant to what is happening there today.” As Wilson explained in “A Guide to Reagan Country,” Reaganism reflected a southern Californian individualism focused not on changing the world but on improving your own small part of it — your home, your yard, and, before you were old enough for any of that, your car.
“Driving. Driving everywhere, over great distances, with scarcely any thought to the enormous mileages they were logging. A car was the absolutely essential piece of social overhead capital,” he recalled. You needed the car to “get a job, meet a girl, hang around with the boys,” go to the movies, to the beach, to Hollywood.
In the decades after writing that essay for Commentary, Wilson became the nation’s most insightful political scientist. From his early essays on city politics, to his studies of bureaucracy and police behavior, to his writings on morality and character in American life, Wilson saw more keenly than anyone else the relationships between American character and American institutions. And throughout his career, he returned time and again to cars — in California, in America, and in the crosshairs of progressive technocrats.*
His consideration of cars was more than academic. The son of an auto-parts dealer, Wilson loved to drive “very fast,” Christopher DeMuth remembered, “preferably with his wife Roberta at his side to share the thrill.” In Cambridge he shunned the standard-issue Harvard-prof Volvo — as a 1970s protester’s sign once complained, “James Q. Wilson Drives a Porsche.”
But for Wilson, owning a car meant not only enjoying the thrill of driving it, but also shouldering the responsibility for maintaining it, repairing it, improving it. Wilson knew this in his own life — his friend Shep Melnick recalled to me that Wilson once missed a Harvard meeting because his Porsche broke down en route, and he insisted on fixing it himself — but he also saw that it was central to the car’s importance in American life generally. The importance of a car was in gaining true ownership of it, and in the process gaining true ownership of one’s self.
Of course, a young man growing up in southern California wanted a car because of the pleasures it could deliver. “But the hedonistic purposes to which the car might be put did not detract from its power to create and sustain a very conventional and bourgeois sense of property and responsibility, for in the last analysis the car was not a means to an end but an end in itself.” If New York or Philadelphia neighborhoods raised boys with a sense of “territory,” Californians raised them with “a feeling of property.” And that feeling of ownership was nourished in the driveway, or the garage, or the alley, coaxing the power and beauty out of old Fords.
Today the young American who wants to tinker with his car faces an entirely different set of challenges. Matthew B. Crawford, a political philosopher and motorcycle mechanic (and a fellow contributing editor to this journal), writes in his 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft, “Lift the hood on some cars now and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the proto-humans in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood.” We’ve traded genuine ownership and mastery for a combination of aesthetics and access to expert help.
Crawford’s first book (and the 2006 New Atlantis essay upon which it was based) was an appeal for more of us to get underneath modern life’s hoods: to study, to struggle with, and to master the machinery under our world’s slick outer shells. From cars and motorcycles, to appliances, to the rest of our day’s infrastructure and technology, Crawford urged us to roll up our sleeves. For only by moving from superficial abstractions to the brutal reality of working imperfect materials with imperfect tools can we appreciate what is necessary for “self-government” in both senses of the term.
Crawford returns to these themes once more in his new book Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. Those who enjoyed Shop Class will no doubt enjoy his latest volley, which once again benefits from Crawford’s autobiographical and biographical sketches, not to mention his hand-drawn sketches of the crankshafts and other gear that he’s writing about. And those who enjoyed his second book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (2015), will appreciate his argument that self-driving cars will bring not more freedom but more captivity. (...)
This is the crucial message of Crawford’s book. “Virtue is more like a skill,” he writes, “acquired through long practice in the art of living.” And that practice depends upon the choices we make, and the choices we make about which choices we make. When we choose to delegate choice to rational control outside our immediate involvement, we choose wittingly or unwittingly to shape ourselves accordingly. We “become a certain kind of person,” Crawford emphasizes. “As embodied practical skills, the virtues have to be exercised or they atrophy.” And so when we drive autonomous vehicles, or cede control to other forms of automatic convenience, “it is we who are being automated, in the sense that we are vacated of that existential involvement that distinguishes human action from mere dumb events.”
“Driving. Driving everywhere, over great distances, with scarcely any thought to the enormous mileages they were logging. A car was the absolutely essential piece of social overhead capital,” he recalled. You needed the car to “get a job, meet a girl, hang around with the boys,” go to the movies, to the beach, to Hollywood.
His consideration of cars was more than academic. The son of an auto-parts dealer, Wilson loved to drive “very fast,” Christopher DeMuth remembered, “preferably with his wife Roberta at his side to share the thrill.” In Cambridge he shunned the standard-issue Harvard-prof Volvo — as a 1970s protester’s sign once complained, “James Q. Wilson Drives a Porsche.”
But for Wilson, owning a car meant not only enjoying the thrill of driving it, but also shouldering the responsibility for maintaining it, repairing it, improving it. Wilson knew this in his own life — his friend Shep Melnick recalled to me that Wilson once missed a Harvard meeting because his Porsche broke down en route, and he insisted on fixing it himself — but he also saw that it was central to the car’s importance in American life generally. The importance of a car was in gaining true ownership of it, and in the process gaining true ownership of one’s self.
Of course, a young man growing up in southern California wanted a car because of the pleasures it could deliver. “But the hedonistic purposes to which the car might be put did not detract from its power to create and sustain a very conventional and bourgeois sense of property and responsibility, for in the last analysis the car was not a means to an end but an end in itself.” If New York or Philadelphia neighborhoods raised boys with a sense of “territory,” Californians raised them with “a feeling of property.” And that feeling of ownership was nourished in the driveway, or the garage, or the alley, coaxing the power and beauty out of old Fords.
Today the young American who wants to tinker with his car faces an entirely different set of challenges. Matthew B. Crawford, a political philosopher and motorcycle mechanic (and a fellow contributing editor to this journal), writes in his 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft, “Lift the hood on some cars now and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the proto-humans in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood.” We’ve traded genuine ownership and mastery for a combination of aesthetics and access to expert help.
Crawford’s first book (and the 2006 New Atlantis essay upon which it was based) was an appeal for more of us to get underneath modern life’s hoods: to study, to struggle with, and to master the machinery under our world’s slick outer shells. From cars and motorcycles, to appliances, to the rest of our day’s infrastructure and technology, Crawford urged us to roll up our sleeves. For only by moving from superficial abstractions to the brutal reality of working imperfect materials with imperfect tools can we appreciate what is necessary for “self-government” in both senses of the term.
Crawford returns to these themes once more in his new book Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. Those who enjoyed Shop Class will no doubt enjoy his latest volley, which once again benefits from Crawford’s autobiographical and biographical sketches, not to mention his hand-drawn sketches of the crankshafts and other gear that he’s writing about. And those who enjoyed his second book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (2015), will appreciate his argument that self-driving cars will bring not more freedom but more captivity. (...)
This is the crucial message of Crawford’s book. “Virtue is more like a skill,” he writes, “acquired through long practice in the art of living.” And that practice depends upon the choices we make, and the choices we make about which choices we make. When we choose to delegate choice to rational control outside our immediate involvement, we choose wittingly or unwittingly to shape ourselves accordingly. We “become a certain kind of person,” Crawford emphasizes. “As embodied practical skills, the virtues have to be exercised or they atrophy.” And so when we drive autonomous vehicles, or cede control to other forms of automatic convenience, “it is we who are being automated, in the sense that we are vacated of that existential involvement that distinguishes human action from mere dumb events.”
by Adam J. White, The New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Monterey Historic Races Laguna Seca, California, 1986 / Alamy
Michael Moore On the 2020 Election, Trump’s Brain, and What We Can Do Next
Filmmaker Michael Moore recently joined Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson for a conversation about Trump, Biden, and the election. Follow Michael Moore @MMFlint. This interview has been edited lightly for grammar and clarity and reduced in length. The full version can be viewed here on YouTube or listened to on the Current Affairs podcast.
NJR: ...The reason I wanted to talk to you—we’re recording this on a Thursday [10/29]. The United States presidential election is on Tuesday. I wanted to talk to you specifically because I think by the end of the cycle in 2016, you were almost the only person in the country saying that Donald Trump was going to be the president of the United States. That turned out to be true. So, how are you feeling now?
NJR: You’ve used this phrase before, “evil genius,” to describe him, and I agree with that. But I think that probably most people you say that to think you’re crazy. Because the consensus about Donald Trump is that he’s an idiot. He’s incompetent. He’s a horrible president. He has no idea what he’s doing. And I think I share with you the view that actually it is a real mistaken understanding of Donald Trump to just see him as a buffoon and a clown. He is those things, but that is a lack of a particular type of intelligence. And there is another type of intelligence, which is the intelligence of the con man. And that is a kind of smarts that he has.
by Michael Moore and Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
NJR: ...The reason I wanted to talk to you—we’re recording this on a Thursday [10/29]. The United States presidential election is on Tuesday. I wanted to talk to you specifically because I think by the end of the cycle in 2016, you were almost the only person in the country saying that Donald Trump was going to be the president of the United States. That turned out to be true. So, how are you feeling now?
MM: Hmm, it’s a good question. Because this is not 2016. Funny, at the time, I didn’t think I was making a prediction. I was just commenting on what I saw in Michigan and I didn’t see much support for Hillary. And she lost the state by an average of two votes per precinct. So, now I have been virtually around the country every day, in some kind of Zoom. I’m always giving a speech somewhere over the internet, going on an MSNBC show or somebody’s podcast. I am of two minds and I don’t have a gray zone. I think it’s going to be one or the other. I think it is very possible Trump is going to be buried in a tsunami of ballots. I think that is actually something that can happen. I also believe that he is an evil genius and I put nothing past him. And I think that he’s smarter in this sort of way than all of us.
MM: He and I are members of the same organization. It’s called the Screen Actors Guild. He’s the only sitting president I believe we’ve ever had that is still an active union member while he was president. Reagan was the president of the Screen Actors Guild back in the day, but not when he was in the White House. This guy is still a member of our union. So I think just as you could say “That Jim Carrey, he’s crazy,” some of the craziest people in show business have been some of the smartest people and some of the most—not in Jim Carrey’s case, but I’m thinking of others—some of the most devious and some of the worst human beings that people have run across.
The fact that [Trump] had 14 seasons on NBC with that show of his—they’re not a charity. They just don’t let anybody on TV. They kept him on because he had an audience of millions and millions and millions of Americans. And millions and millions—60 to 70 million—are going to vote for him this week. That’s how many people we share the country with that love Donald Trump. So this is a problem. This is a problem because the enthusiasm level amongst his supporters is amazing. And the enthusiasm level for Joe Biden—no offense to Joe Biden…
The fact that [Trump] had 14 seasons on NBC with that show of his—they’re not a charity. They just don’t let anybody on TV. They kept him on because he had an audience of millions and millions and millions of Americans. And millions and millions—60 to 70 million—are going to vote for him this week. That’s how many people we share the country with that love Donald Trump. So this is a problem. This is a problem because the enthusiasm level amongst his supporters is amazing. And the enthusiasm level for Joe Biden—no offense to Joe Biden…
NJR: Even to talk of an “enthusiasm level” for Joe Biden…
MM: Yes. So, exactly. That’s a problem. Why is the Republican in Michigan running for Senate, John James, almost in a virtual tie with our incumbent Democrat? What does that tell you about Michigan? Maybe not so solid blue. Maybe we should take nothing for granted in these last four or five days. So that’s why I think it’s better that we be game face on, all of us on our toes. Take nothing for granted and understand that if he did it once he could do it again.
NJR: Yeah. People would make fun of Trump every time he brags about his ratings on The Apprentice. But he has a real skill as an entertainer. And if you watch his long speeches, the guy has energy. You watch him for 90 minutes—
MM: And he’s still standing up straight! Watch it when he goes up the stairs or down the stairs of Air Force One, he’s not grabbing [the rail]. I’m going to be grabbing it when I’m 74… it’s amazing. There’s something. And I can’t explain it… He does not eat a single vegetable.
NJR: He’s a miracle of medical science.
MM: Well, he’s proof. He’s proof that the human body wants to live, no matter what abuse we do it. (...)
NJR: It’s maddening, but there is something incredible about it because he seems to have more energy than I do. And I watched these speeches. And the other thing is, he’s funny. He is compelling in a real way. His speeches are not boring. He makes fun of his opponents and it makes people laugh. And he says things that are often kind of true… And I think we have to understand what the source of his appeal is. And it’s not just that people are crazy. You can’t just blame the idiot voters, right? He’s a manipulator.
MM: Yes. But all art is manipulation. Right? All acting. A reality show is not a reality show. It’s a manipulation. Everything’s being manipulated with performance and with timing. And he has great timing. It’s amazing when he knows how to switch it up. And then he goes off onto some—he starts talking about semi-trucks for no reason, you know? And then about Biden’s sheets and pillowcases, and you’re just left gobsmacked. And for the next minute or two, he’s moved on, but you’re still with pillows and sheets that he’s just talking about Biden having. And what does that mean? What’s the coded message there?
The way he did that—the other night with the senator from Arizona. He made her come up on the stage saying “Come on, get up here.” Come on, come on. Like she’s a dog. Just talked to her like she was a dog and the crowd was going crazy! They loved it. And then he booted her off! It was like, wow. And I think, especially now, speaking—I’m speaking inside of the white man’s head, because I have a white man’s head—a lot of guys, oh man. They look at him and they go, “Yeah, get up here now, get outta here. Now, get up here, get outta here.” They love that. We love that sense, whatever that is that he has.
But let me say, to that point of timing, that first debate, his timing was way off. I mean, he had to get COVID, then he had to have been on some kind of drugs or whatever. You go back and watch the debate now, it is so out of whack. For his history as an entertainer and a performer, he completely blew it. And I think the smart thing for the Biden people would have been after he refused to show up for debate number two, just say, “that’s the end, we’re not messing around with this.” That’s the end of the debates. Don’t give him another microphone. ‘Cause he will get it together at some point. And he did, I think, in that second, or what should have been the third debate.
The way he did that—the other night with the senator from Arizona. He made her come up on the stage saying “Come on, get up here.” Come on, come on. Like she’s a dog. Just talked to her like she was a dog and the crowd was going crazy! They loved it. And then he booted her off! It was like, wow. And I think, especially now, speaking—I’m speaking inside of the white man’s head, because I have a white man’s head—a lot of guys, oh man. They look at him and they go, “Yeah, get up here now, get outta here. Now, get up here, get outta here.” They love that. We love that sense, whatever that is that he has.
But let me say, to that point of timing, that first debate, his timing was way off. I mean, he had to get COVID, then he had to have been on some kind of drugs or whatever. You go back and watch the debate now, it is so out of whack. For his history as an entertainer and a performer, he completely blew it. And I think the smart thing for the Biden people would have been after he refused to show up for debate number two, just say, “that’s the end, we’re not messing around with this.” That’s the end of the debates. Don’t give him another microphone. ‘Cause he will get it together at some point. And he did, I think, in that second, or what should have been the third debate.
NJR: In 2016, I remember watching the debates with people who were saying Hillary was winning them. And I think it was kind of wishful thinking, because when I watched them, I was like, “My God, he’s actually scoring some points here.” Not intellectually, but points where I can see people at home cheering them on.
MM: Well, yeah. And especially like in Michigan—his rallies in Michigan, he was constantly talking about how he was going to tax those hedge fund guys on Wall Street. He hated Wall Street. He knew it was going to play well and it would sound believable because it is believable for him. He knows that the elites in New York hate him, the uber-rich hate him, Wall Street hates him, always hated him. And he’s always been treated like he came from the trailer park called Queens and that they are never going to let him into the elite of the elite… So when he would say, “Those hedge fund guys, they’re sitting there not paying their taxes… They’re going to pay more taxes.” All the cheers would go up in Ohio… But the reason it sounded like he meant it is because somewhere inside he wanted to really stick it to those guys. And that’s why it sounded so believable.
by Michael Moore and Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Current Affairs
Wednesday, November 4, 2020
Disinformation is a Bell That Can’t Be Unrung
Although the winner of the 2020 presidential contest is still unknown, one thing is clear: disinformation is becoming an endemic feature of U.S. politics.
Why it matters: Every nation is an "imagined community," political scientist Benedict Anderson said, bonded together by shared understandings, values and historical narratives. Disinformation cleaves those commonalities, making a country more dysfunctional, more divided and altogether weaker.
What's happening: In 2016, a defining story was how a foreign government, after correctly identifying long-running fractures in American society, perpetrated a covert action campaign using cyber espionage and other forms of malign online activity to heighten those political tensions. It worked spectacularly.
by Zach Dorfman, Axios | Read more:
Image: Eniola Odetunde/Axios
What's happening: In 2016, a defining story was how a foreign government, after correctly identifying long-running fractures in American society, perpetrated a covert action campaign using cyber espionage and other forms of malign online activity to heighten those political tensions. It worked spectacularly.
- This year, foreign campaigns have been quieter, seemingly limited to instances like crude pre-election shenanigans from Iran and Russia. Instead, the story of this election entails powerful U.S. actors, including the sitting president and some of his closest confidants, unleashing a torrent of domestic disinformation.
- Overnight following the election, Trump tweeted, "We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!"
- There is no evidence — none — of attempted large-scale election fraud. This is just the latest version of Trump’s claim that "the only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged," one that he continued to gesture at in further tweets Wednesday morning.
- Trump’s former acting director of National Intelligence posted a tweet Monday with photos of Joe Biden wearing a face mask outdoors and going maskless on an airplane, suggesting he only follows coronavirus safety protocols for show. In fact, the airplane photo was taken pre-pandemic, in 2019. The misleading tweet was shared more than 27,000 times.
- A senior adviser to the president falsely claimed that only ballots counted on Election Day itself should be considered valid — and that if the president appears ahead on election night, he is the rightful winner.
Between the lines: It matters that these messages have come from the White House and figures like a former top intelligence official. This brand of disinformation is far more pernicious than anything Russia's FSB or GRU could have dreamed up, because people in positions of authority and those in their orbit enjoy built-in credibility within American institutions and society.
- Foreign actors will likely soon move to amplify and seize on these American-made narratives. Already, U.S. officials worry that Russia and Iran are likely waiting until the immediate post-election period to execute their more fully realized online disinformation campaigns.
- Officials believe those will focus on discrediting the election results, no matter the winner.
by Zach Dorfman, Axios | Read more:
Image: Eniola Odetunde/Axios
This Nail-Biter Election Is Not A Repudiation Of Trump
Progressives hoping that the nation would be cleansed of President Trump and the GOP that enabled him in a mandate election Tuesday evening woke up to disappointment Wednesday morning.
Sure, Joe Biden is set to reap the largest popular vote total ever in U.S. electoral history. And of course, he’s likely taken Arizona and is seriously contesting Georgia, two states long considered part of the Republican firewall.
But after four years, Trumpism has not been repudiated.
Many progressives harbored high hopes that a landslide election in Biden’s favor, inaugurating a new Democratic Senate majority with him, would wash the past four years away — that the 230,000 COVID-19 deaths, Trump’s family separation policy, his administration’s obvious corruption, and his cozying up to white nationalists would seem like the death rattle of a spent and diseased political force in American politics.
“There’s a spiritual sickness that has still not been cleansed from the veins of American democracy,” said Rev. William Barber II, a North Carolina pastor and progressive political activist, on Sunday.
But if anything, the results have ratified Trumpism as an electoral force that will remain in our politics for years to come.
Ben Rhodes, a top Obama adviser, tweeted Wednesday morning that the problem with the election is that “this many Americans took a hard look at Trump and determined, ‘yeah, I want four more years of that.”
It’s an emotional loss for those who wanted to believe that President Trump was a simple aberration from American history, or that some invisible guard of Republicans were always waiting in the wings to come and help sweep him away in the name of democratic norms.
And even for others, who recognized that Trump’s worst impulses, intentionally or not, tap into deep currents in American history and our current politics, the results fail to suggest that those troubling trends of racial hatred and plutocracy have been put at bay.
by Josh Kovensky, TPM | Read more:
Sure, Joe Biden is set to reap the largest popular vote total ever in U.S. electoral history. And of course, he’s likely taken Arizona and is seriously contesting Georgia, two states long considered part of the Republican firewall.
But after four years, Trumpism has not been repudiated.
Many progressives harbored high hopes that a landslide election in Biden’s favor, inaugurating a new Democratic Senate majority with him, would wash the past four years away — that the 230,000 COVID-19 deaths, Trump’s family separation policy, his administration’s obvious corruption, and his cozying up to white nationalists would seem like the death rattle of a spent and diseased political force in American politics.
“There’s a spiritual sickness that has still not been cleansed from the veins of American democracy,” said Rev. William Barber II, a North Carolina pastor and progressive political activist, on Sunday.
But if anything, the results have ratified Trumpism as an electoral force that will remain in our politics for years to come.
Ben Rhodes, a top Obama adviser, tweeted Wednesday morning that the problem with the election is that “this many Americans took a hard look at Trump and determined, ‘yeah, I want four more years of that.”
It’s an emotional loss for those who wanted to believe that President Trump was a simple aberration from American history, or that some invisible guard of Republicans were always waiting in the wings to come and help sweep him away in the name of democratic norms.
And even for others, who recognized that Trump’s worst impulses, intentionally or not, tap into deep currents in American history and our current politics, the results fail to suggest that those troubling trends of racial hatred and plutocracy have been put at bay.
by Josh Kovensky, TPM | Read more:
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
Seattle City Council Mulls Law That Could Dismiss Many Misdemeanor Crimes
Seattle - The Seattle City Council is considering new legislation that would create a legal loophole that would make substance addiction, mental illness or poverty a valid legal defense for nearly all misdemeanor crimes committed in the city.
The council's consideration of the plan has occurred with virtually no public discussion about the proposal, which has been included in the municipal budgeting process. The council has not, so far, conducted a standalone meeting to discuss the idea.
Scott Lindsay, the former public safety advisor for the city, said Seattle would be in a class of its own if it ultimately enacted the ordinance.
"I'm not aware of any legislation like this anywhere in the United States (or) even globally," he said Monday. "All cities have criminal codes to protect their citizens from criminal acts. This would essentially create a legal loophole that swallows all those codes and creates a green light for crime."
The legislation was proposed by Seattle City Councilwoman Lisa Herbold last Wednesday.
The proposal would allow for the dismissal of crimes of poverty and it would do so by revising the definition of duress as a defense against prosecution.
Seattle police currently make about 12,000 arrests every year that are not DUI offenses or related to domestic violence. In 2019, charges were filed for just over 5,400 misdemeanor cases, not including DUI charges or domestic abuse allegations.
If approved, the ordinance would excuse and dismiss -- essentially legalizing -- almost all misdemeanor crimes committed in Seattle by offenders who could show either:
The offenses that would be covered by the Seattle ordinance would include just about any crime below the level of a felony while excluding charges of driving under the influence or domestic violence.
"This would absolutely open the floodgates for crime in Seattle, even worse than what we often currently struggle with," Lindsay said. "It's basically a blank check for anybody committing theft, assault, harassment (and) trespass to continue without disruption from our criminal justice system."
The council's consideration of the plan has occurred with virtually no public discussion about the proposal, which has been included in the municipal budgeting process. The council has not, so far, conducted a standalone meeting to discuss the idea.
Scott Lindsay, the former public safety advisor for the city, said Seattle would be in a class of its own if it ultimately enacted the ordinance.
The legislation was proposed by Seattle City Councilwoman Lisa Herbold last Wednesday.
The proposal would allow for the dismissal of crimes of poverty and it would do so by revising the definition of duress as a defense against prosecution.
Seattle police currently make about 12,000 arrests every year that are not DUI offenses or related to domestic violence. In 2019, charges were filed for just over 5,400 misdemeanor cases, not including DUI charges or domestic abuse allegations.
If approved, the ordinance would excuse and dismiss -- essentially legalizing -- almost all misdemeanor crimes committed in Seattle by offenders who could show either:
- Symptoms of addiction without being required to provide a medical diagnosis;
- Symptoms of a mental disorder; or
- Poverty and the crime was committed to meet an "immediate and basic need." For example, if a defendant argued they stole merchandise to sell for cash in order to purchase food, clothes or was trying to scrape together enough money for rent. The accused could not be convicted.
The offenses that would be covered by the Seattle ordinance would include just about any crime below the level of a felony while excluding charges of driving under the influence or domestic violence.
"This would absolutely open the floodgates for crime in Seattle, even worse than what we often currently struggle with," Lindsay said. "It's basically a blank check for anybody committing theft, assault, harassment (and) trespass to continue without disruption from our criminal justice system."
by Eric Johnson, KOMO News | Read more:
Image: KOMO News
[ed. This Council is just plain nuts. See also: A criminal defense for poverty, behavioral health? Seattle officials to weigh controversial proposal (Seattle Times).]
A Guide to Watching the Election Without Losing Your Mind
A Guide to Watching the Election Without Losing Your Mind (Rolling Stone)
[ed. Unless Trump wins, then kiss your mind goodbye.]
Image: Joe Rodriguez. Images in illustration:Maksym Yemelyanov/Adobe Stock (TVs); Luis Santana/Tampa Bay Times/AP Images(Biden); Bruce Kluckhohn(Trump)
Does Knowing God Just Take Practice?
I was nine or ten when my parents left their stolid Anglican church for one that was undergoing what was known as “charismatic renewal.” This was the mid-nineteen-seventies, in the northern English city of Durham, but the energies were all American. The young congregants—our church was popular with local university students—played guitars, gave testimonials, raised their hands in rhapsody, and “danced with the spirit” in the aisles. Sometimes, though not often, people spoke in tongues, a diabolical glossolalia that I found deeply fascinating. There was a church band—twelve-string guitars, tambourines, trumpet, and flute. We sang American hymns, songs I vaguely thought of as “Californian.” I grew to dread one of the most popular, “I Am the Bread of Life,” which had a chorus with the words “And I will raise him up.” As the chorus soared, earnest hands were raised heavenward—including the hands of my parents, who were always moved by this song to forgo their customary physical reticence. I would glance sideways at them and then quickly look away, as if I’d witnessed the throes of some primal scene.
The extremity of emotion that pulsed through the congregation every Sunday alarmed me. I came to think of that church as the place where grownups weep. Charismatic or evangelical churches are theatres of spiritual catharsis. You come to such places and lay your burdens before the Lord, open your soul to the Holy Spirit, and “let all the sadness and evil out” (as my mother once put it). This crisis of transformation was often physically arduous. People shuddered and their eyes filled with tears, while others who had already been through such experiences held their hands or prayed over them. “Free prayer” was encouraged; worshippers might blurt out their hopes, secrets, prophecies. The natural order of things was inverted: adults, spasming in emotion, appeared to need the calm intervention of the dry-eyed child. This was where perfectly ordinary English people seemed to lead a kind of double life, an existence that, in its strange abandon and abnormality, appeared almost criminally intense.
What was unsettling to the child, in other words, was probably what was so exciting to the adult convert: the drama of transferred authority. The believing adult, pulled toward the commanding Christ, felt the divine power of God’s call, and the divinely inspired power of the pastors and the elders who voiced that call: You must change your life. But the unbelieving or skeptical child, with no great desire to change his life, felt abandoned by those who should have been in charge, and wondered furtively at the authority of that divine command. Who was this God, this Jesus, this Holy Spirit? If he didn’t exist, then Sunday morning was a mass sickness, nothing more than the contagion of hallucination. That prospect seemed quite troubling. But the alternative scenario didn’t seem any better. Evangelical practice presumes a highly interventionist Jesus, a surveillance God who not only numbers the hairs on your head but cares about your job interview, whom you go out with, the house you want to buy. When my mother told the pastor that I had done well in a recent school exam, he gave me a hug and offered a hearty “Praise the Lord!” I thought that this God probably didn’t exist, but, if he did exist, he had all the scrutinizing powers of a meddlesome headmaster, always alert for the smallest failures and successes.
I know how unbalanced this is. I’m sure I should have seen all the human goodness and decency—there was plenty of that around, too. I bring it up as a way of explaining my somewhat unbalanced interest in the work of the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, who has been studying American evangelical worship for at least twenty years. In 2012, Luhrmann published “When God Talks Back,” an account of her experiences in charismatic churches in Chicago and the San Francisco area. These were part of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a network of congregations founded in California in the nineteen-seventies. Curious about everything, open-eyed, endlessly patient, Luhrmann embedded herself like a military correspondent. Over several years, she interviewed more than fifty congregants, worshipped and prayed with them, joined Bible-study groups, and reported, with scrupulous neutrality, on their daily spiritual practice.
Her new book, “How God Becomes Real” (Princeton), represents a distillation of that deep work on American Evangelicalism, and expands her acute discussion of spiritual practice across other forms of religious devotion that she has studied or encountered over the years—charismatic Christian worship in Ghana and India, Santería (“a blend of Yoruba spirit possession and Catholicism that emerged among West African slaves in the Caribbean”), and British witchcraft (Luhrmann’s first book, “Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England,” from 1989, was the product of field work among apparently ordinary Londoners who practiced magic and witchcraft).
This comparative framework suits Luhrmann, precisely because she is not interested in the questions that so gripped me when I was young: what or who is God, and how can we know if this God exists? Luhrmann passes over questions of belief in search of questions of practice—the technologies of prayer. She wants to know how worshippers open themselves up to their experiences of God; how they communicate with gods and spirits and in turn hear those gods and spirits reply to them, and she is interested in the kind of therapeutic transformation that such prayerful conversation has on the worshipper. She calls this activity “real-making,” and adds that her new book is not a believer’s or an atheist’s, but an anthropologist’s work. “Rather than presuming that people worship because they believe, we ask instead whether people believe because they worship,” she writes. Thus “the puzzle of religion,” as she defines it, “is not the problem of false belief but the question of how gods and spirits become and remain real to people and what this real-making does for humans.” Whether these questions—of belief and of practice—can be separated quite as staunchly as she wishes is the “puzzle” that surely haunts her own work.
Readers without firsthand experience of evangelical communities were probably surprised by some of the day-to-day details in “When God Talks Back.” Luhrmann describes, at the Vineyard churches, a relationship with God of casual and remarkably friendly intimacy. She prepares us by cautioning that her evangelical subjects approach God in a way that, to traditional believers, might seem “vulgar, overemotional, or even psychotic.” Among her interviewees, Elaine prays for guidance about whether to take a roommate or move to a new apartment. Kate gets angry with God and “yells at him when things go wrong—when she organizes a trip for the church and the bus company is flaky or it rains.” Stacy prays for a good haircut, and Hannah asks God about whom to date, and sometimes feels he is pranking her in little ways: “I’ll trip and fall, and I’ll be like, Thanks, God.” Rachel asks for help with how to dress: “Like, God, what should I wear? . . . I think God cares about really, really little things in my life.” Other women speak of setting an evening aside for a “date night” with the Lord (men speak of “quiet time” with God, Luhrmann reports). They are perhaps encouraged in this thinking by their pastor, who suggests that his congregants should “set out a second cup of coffee for God in the morning—to pour God an actual cup of steaming coffee, to place it on an actual table, and to sit down at that table . . . to talk to God about the things on our minds.”
What was unsettling to the child, in other words, was probably what was so exciting to the adult convert: the drama of transferred authority. The believing adult, pulled toward the commanding Christ, felt the divine power of God’s call, and the divinely inspired power of the pastors and the elders who voiced that call: You must change your life. But the unbelieving or skeptical child, with no great desire to change his life, felt abandoned by those who should have been in charge, and wondered furtively at the authority of that divine command. Who was this God, this Jesus, this Holy Spirit? If he didn’t exist, then Sunday morning was a mass sickness, nothing more than the contagion of hallucination. That prospect seemed quite troubling. But the alternative scenario didn’t seem any better. Evangelical practice presumes a highly interventionist Jesus, a surveillance God who not only numbers the hairs on your head but cares about your job interview, whom you go out with, the house you want to buy. When my mother told the pastor that I had done well in a recent school exam, he gave me a hug and offered a hearty “Praise the Lord!” I thought that this God probably didn’t exist, but, if he did exist, he had all the scrutinizing powers of a meddlesome headmaster, always alert for the smallest failures and successes.
I know how unbalanced this is. I’m sure I should have seen all the human goodness and decency—there was plenty of that around, too. I bring it up as a way of explaining my somewhat unbalanced interest in the work of the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, who has been studying American evangelical worship for at least twenty years. In 2012, Luhrmann published “When God Talks Back,” an account of her experiences in charismatic churches in Chicago and the San Francisco area. These were part of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a network of congregations founded in California in the nineteen-seventies. Curious about everything, open-eyed, endlessly patient, Luhrmann embedded herself like a military correspondent. Over several years, she interviewed more than fifty congregants, worshipped and prayed with them, joined Bible-study groups, and reported, with scrupulous neutrality, on their daily spiritual practice.
Her new book, “How God Becomes Real” (Princeton), represents a distillation of that deep work on American Evangelicalism, and expands her acute discussion of spiritual practice across other forms of religious devotion that she has studied or encountered over the years—charismatic Christian worship in Ghana and India, Santería (“a blend of Yoruba spirit possession and Catholicism that emerged among West African slaves in the Caribbean”), and British witchcraft (Luhrmann’s first book, “Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England,” from 1989, was the product of field work among apparently ordinary Londoners who practiced magic and witchcraft).
This comparative framework suits Luhrmann, precisely because she is not interested in the questions that so gripped me when I was young: what or who is God, and how can we know if this God exists? Luhrmann passes over questions of belief in search of questions of practice—the technologies of prayer. She wants to know how worshippers open themselves up to their experiences of God; how they communicate with gods and spirits and in turn hear those gods and spirits reply to them, and she is interested in the kind of therapeutic transformation that such prayerful conversation has on the worshipper. She calls this activity “real-making,” and adds that her new book is not a believer’s or an atheist’s, but an anthropologist’s work. “Rather than presuming that people worship because they believe, we ask instead whether people believe because they worship,” she writes. Thus “the puzzle of religion,” as she defines it, “is not the problem of false belief but the question of how gods and spirits become and remain real to people and what this real-making does for humans.” Whether these questions—of belief and of practice—can be separated quite as staunchly as she wishes is the “puzzle” that surely haunts her own work.
Readers without firsthand experience of evangelical communities were probably surprised by some of the day-to-day details in “When God Talks Back.” Luhrmann describes, at the Vineyard churches, a relationship with God of casual and remarkably friendly intimacy. She prepares us by cautioning that her evangelical subjects approach God in a way that, to traditional believers, might seem “vulgar, overemotional, or even psychotic.” Among her interviewees, Elaine prays for guidance about whether to take a roommate or move to a new apartment. Kate gets angry with God and “yells at him when things go wrong—when she organizes a trip for the church and the bus company is flaky or it rains.” Stacy prays for a good haircut, and Hannah asks God about whom to date, and sometimes feels he is pranking her in little ways: “I’ll trip and fall, and I’ll be like, Thanks, God.” Rachel asks for help with how to dress: “Like, God, what should I wear? . . . I think God cares about really, really little things in my life.” Other women speak of setting an evening aside for a “date night” with the Lord (men speak of “quiet time” with God, Luhrmann reports). They are perhaps encouraged in this thinking by their pastor, who suggests that his congregants should “set out a second cup of coffee for God in the morning—to pour God an actual cup of steaming coffee, to place it on an actual table, and to sit down at that table . . . to talk to God about the things on our minds.”
by James Wood, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Grace J. Kim
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