The 10th Justice

My blogsite is named for a great judge, who was never nominated to the Supreme Court, Learned Hand. The reason he was not nominated was that he was completely neutral in his opinions. No president could rely on Judge Hand to taint his judgments with ideology. From this, it follows, that biased judges are routinely nominated to the court, hence not always the fairest or best. I don't know enough about Judge Kavanaugh's opinions from the bench to judge his bias myself, but the fact that Trump nominated him implies he is bent rightward. When I heard the first reports of a high school party that resulted in a sexual encounter, possibly not consensual, I thought that it was probably just bad judgement by a young, testosterone and alcohol fueled, teenager. But after reading the press reports and hearing the testimony, it feels like something different. Thinking back to my time in high school and college, 25 years before Judge Kavanaugh, only once did I have a beer and never, unfo...

I grew up in a union household. My dad was union electrician. He was elected president of his local, Local 48 of the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electical Workers). When he got older and had arthritis in his ankle that made it difficult for him to climb around the buildings he was working on, he went to work for the union as a representative. His career included becoming a labor negotiator for the City of Portland Employees, a organizer for unions in the Portland shipyards, a board member and founder of a Credit Union for union members, and began an inter-union coordinating body called the Metal Trades Council, as well as representing the electricians with whom he had worked. He negotiated better wages and benefits for union members. He did this because he knew they deserved it. Workers create. Bosses organize, finance and take. During my childhood, my mother was a housewife. When I was in college she worked for a few years for the county cemetery. They gave her a headstone wh...

When the laughter at Trump's bragging to the UN General Assembly died down, a faint droning began - deficit...deficit...deficit - it got louder and louder than faded into silence as profound as Paul Ryan on the subject. Where are the deficit hawks now? Where were they when the tax cuts were voted into law? If the states are supposed to be laboratories for policy experiments, what happened to the results of the Kansas experiment? In the Kansas experiment, once again, massive tax cuts caused no massive increase in business but an implosion of school and public service funding. Every time tax cuts have been tried as a stimulus to the economy, it has failed. Reagan was the biggest example until Trump. Reagan, like all decent Republicans, couldn't bring himself to make any spending cuts that would harm anyone.  This year the interest on America's debt will be $390 billion. The deficit this year will be close to a trillion dollars. Once again the national debt and the annual bu...

Many human illnesses are caused by memories. If this sounds crazy I think it will become clearer once we think more carefully about what a memory really is. For a long and beautifully written review of the physical nature of memory, please read Eric Kandel's wonderful memoir In Search of Memory . Dr. Kandel won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering the biologic correlates of memory. He discovered the synaptic buds that are generated by experience and go on to become the actually physical memory of that experience. There is not a one-to-one correlation between a neuronal synapse and a memory but a series of these synapses together can produce those glorious or horrendous or routine thoughts that we human are able to dredge up in our brain and relive in our mind as memories. Experiences lead to anatomic changes that lead to memories. The same can be said for a whole variety human illnesses. Let's start with our memories of past lives. Don't stop reading! I am not talk...

Otto is my son's family's dog. He was rescued after 3 other families returned him to the shelter. My daughter-in-law, a good Catholic as well as a good dog person, has kept Otto for 10 years. The Pope has recommended her for saint-hood for this achievement. There is something wrong with Otto. He can't learn. He had no concern for the needs of others, he barks, he attacks other dogs, he will eat anything that resembles food if he can get to it, and he jumps up on people continuously. The only thing positive to say about him is that he doesn't bite people he knows. On Wednesdays I take my grand-daughter Frances to her piano lessons. In the hour before her lesson we get a snack and talk. Frances is in the 3rd grade but our conversations are equivalent to talking to a 14 year old. A couple days ago we had what Frances calls an argument. She was defending Otto. She knows I don't like him and she does. We didn't yell at each other, we just stated the things about Ot...

Trump biggest lie is his repeated use of the term 'fake news' to refute negative stories about him. I have written about this previously but two items that I saw today need to be shared with my readers. First, the front page story in the New York Times that chronicles and simplifies the story of the Russian interference with the 2016 election. Trump has called this story a fake repeatedly. He has called the investigation of the story a witch hunt. He has presented no evidence that either of these allegations are true. He uses an old technique; if you say it often and loud enough people start thinking its true - until you go to court. The New York Times article can be found at:  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage This article is long. Most of the names we have read about in the ongoing coverage of this issue appear and their roles explained. Begin...

When I read that yesterday Trump said, ‘I don’t have an attorney general’ I was torn between the laughing and recoiling in horror. The humorous take on this statement asks: Does Donald finally realize that winning the election did not mean that he won America as his prize? Perhaps he thought that winning America meant he would have his own Attorney General as well as his own House of Representatives and his own Senate. Did he finally have realized his error? Did you ever wonder why he never said, "I don't have an Intelligence Community?" Because it sounds too much like "I don't have intelligence." The reason he disagrees with the intelligence community so often is because they are just what their name implies: an intelligence community, in contrast to an ignorance community. Or a community of greedy bigots. Trump belongs to both those communities as well as the community of liars: himself, Manafort, Gates, Kelly, Sanders, et al. The Intelligence Commun...

This blog post is not an essay but a comment on my morning reading. If you want something more substantive read something else. Here goes... Not watching television has altered my view of America. I read newspapers, books, and an occasional  magazine. Every morning I read online the New York Times, Fox News, the Washington Post, Bloomberg and a bunch of technology websites. This morning I got a good laugh from one of the articles in the Times and was once again surprised at the foolishness of Fox news. If you want to get an idea of the difference between Fox News and the New York Times, just look at their online front pages. Today Fox had an article about Kavanaugh and his accuser, an article about Keith Ellison and the accusations of domestic violence, then articles about a murdered golfer, wooly mammoths, and the Emmys. So two sexual abuse charged cases, murder, mammoths, and the Emmys. On the New York Times front page one finds Kavanaugh, new tariffs on China, hurricane Floren...

As with all band wagons the opiate epidemic has poisoned public opinion about one of the most useful class of drugs ever discovered: opiates. When John's Hopkins Medical school opened the chief of medicine was Dr. William Osler would not allow any medications to be used in the hospital until they were approved by the pharmacy committee after considering all the scientific evidence of effectiveness, except one - morphine - which he called God's Own Medicine. Morphine was humane. It relieved the suffering of patients in pain no matter what the cause, treatable or not. And it and its cousins still have that ability today. The increased deaths from opiates over the last two decades is a direct result of over prescribing by physicians and the policies of institutions that influenced this prescribing. Beginning in the early 90s hospitals and health care organizations, not physicians, began a program to ensure the humane relief of pain for all patients. Every patient who came into m...

How can America have elected a president who is a liar? My blog, as I have said several times, is named for Judge Learned Hand. He said in his Spirit of Liberty speech that freedom means never being too sure you are right. Freedom is being able to change, to do new things based on new information, to think rationally about the world and one's own circumstances and use information to make things better for yourself and those around you. Trump takes no information into consideration when making decision. The George Washington University School of Public Health did an independent survey of deaths in Puerto Rico after and hurricane  found that the 3000 people died as a direct result of the hurricane. Here is Trump's tweet: Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump  3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time lat...

Corporations are not people. Just as no one has ever heard a dollar bill speak and no one has ever heard a corporation speak. Nor can corporations vote since they are not citizens. Yet in this era many large corporations are more like foreign countries, being intertwined with businesses in other nations. Today we are investigating the influence of Russian on our elections. We have seen the Mueller Commission indict Russians for election tampering and everyone is wondering if Trump will be indicted for the conspiring with these anti-democratic forces. Who is investigating corporations? Take a minute and read about General Electric on Wikipedia. Count how many foreign banks and business are wholly or partly owned by GE. During the 2008 recession, our Federal Bank loaned billions, maybe trillions, of dollars to foreign central banks and in some cases directly to foreign financial institutions who where deeply intertwined with American business. They did this to keep the financial market...

This morning, for the first time in a long time, I began to feel optimistic about the upcoming election. In Lawrence Wright's book God Save Texas he says that according to the polling Texas is a blue state where folks don't vote. He means that the Republicans, partly because of greater turn out at the polls and some gerrymandering, elect more candidates than Democrats. If everyone in Texas voted the Democrats would win. Maybe in this upcoming election that will happen. I feel optimistic partly because I watched Beto O'Rourke on Stephen Colbert. He is running for the senate in Texas against Ted Cruz. O'Rourke, in case you haven't kept up with Texas politics, is a congressman from El Paso and an ex-punk rocker. He has visited every one of Texas' 254 countries in his campaign. His feeling about the people of Texas echos the feelings of Lawrence Wright, also a native Texan. Texas is the most diverse state in the country, led by Houston the most diverse city. The ...

I just spent a lovely four days with my wife at our small cabin in the mountains of central Oregon. We built this place almost 40 years ago now and have been working on it all that time. Two years ago we finally finished it, as much an any house is ever finished. We were forced to finish it because the windows had lost their seals and needed to be replaced so we did all the final things we had been wanting to do for a long time. Without the internet we were pretty much separated from the news until we bought a Saturday New York Times, along with the groceries. Obama had given a speech attacking Trump. Trump replied that the speech put him to sleep. Big words do that to children. But I read Obama's speech and when I got to "The biggest threat to our democracy is cynicism - a cynicism that's led too many people to turn away from politics and stay home on Election Day,"  I started to feel guilty. Here I was sitting in the woods, enjoying my retirement with my wife, ...

An Outline of the Problem 1. The more educated a person is, the more likely they are to be a Democrat. According to the Pew Research Center in 1994 of those Americans who identified with the Republican party or leaned Republican, 54% had a four year college education compared to 39% of those who identified with the Democratic party or leaned Democratic. In 2018 those numbers were exactly reversed with 54% of Democratic leaners had a college education compared to 39% of Republican leaners. In 1994 those voters with post-graduate experience was split evenly between Republicans and Democrats. In 2018 63% of Democrats have postgraduate experience compared to 31% of Republicans. This does not mean that Democrats became more educated. This means that those people who became educated became Democrats.  As people become more educated they become more Democratic because the facts support the liberal view. World history, economics, political science, law, government, medicine, all thin...

My blog is named The 10th Justice, after my hero Judge Learned Hand, just to remind those who haven't read all my essays. Judge Learned Hand was called the 10th Supreme Court Justice even though he was never on the court. Many of his legal opinions are our laws in America still. He was never nominated to the court because he was neutral. His only ideology was fairness. He  always looked at both side of the issue as objectively as he could, and decided cases based on the best facts and not on unsupportable opinions. His opinions were driven by no other ideology. And so we look at Brett Kavanaugh who has apparently demonstrated clearly that he will bring his ideology into the courtroom and add it to the stream of evidence and argument, when making his decisions. This does not sound like fair judgement. This makes everyone less respectful of the law. Decisions are no longer being made by the blind justice holding the scales, balancing the evidence fairly, because the justice has put...

The death of John McCain and his funeral have restored some dignity and depth to our government. The 6000 word obituary in the New York Times was overwhelming. I had not read about the severity of the torture McCain had undergone while a captive of the Vietcong. McCain's suffering as a prisoner certainly gave me respect for his strength of character. His service to America both in war and in peace have been lifelong. If anyone deserves to lie in state in our countries capital it is McCain. Perhaps his death will change the dialogue in America. Perhaps now we will start to talk about how to solve some of the problems we have ignored in favor of focusing our attention on beating our adversaries, on holding on to power, and upholding our ideology. Perhaps the death of John McCain will remind everyone in congress, in the executive, and judicial branches of government that many people have dedicated their lives to making America the great country it is. Just as I had written the abo...