Dems Stand Up to Obama — for the Wrong Thing

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Obama CopeLast week I reported, Congressional Democrats Plot to Kill Iran Deal. It included a picture of the ever slappable Chuck Schumer. Well, now it has come to pass, although it isn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. According to Reuters, In Setback, Obama Concedes Congress Role on Iran Deal. Before I get to the deal, let me just note how annoying this is. There are all kinds of things that the Congressional Democrats could have decided to stand up to Obama on: drones, NSA, Libya. But this is what they care about: a deal that is shaping up to be great for the west — far better than could have been expected. And this is what they stand up for. Let’s hope they show similar steel when it comes to fast tracking the TPP.

So this little law will give Congress 30 days to look over the deal. During that time, Obama will not be able to stop some portion of the sanctions against Iran. And the administration will be mandated to send regular “detailed” reports about “Iran’s support for terrorism, ballistic missiles, and nuclear program.” So really, all this law is doing is messing around with the administration. It is a symbolic vote for these idiots to say, “We’re strong! We only believe in bombing campaigns! Heil Netanyahu!”

A lot of people are talking about the fact that if a Republican wins the presidential election in 2016, all this will come to an end on 20 January 2017. But there is just one thing. The rest of the world isn’t as crazy and spiteful as the Republican Party specifically and the American people more broadly. Germany, France, and the rest are still going to lift sanctions. All the United States is doing by acting so stupidly is isolating itself. I’ve long maintained that the day is coming — perhaps even in my lifetime when the rest of the world is going to have to go to war against a fascist United States. And make no mistake: that is what this is about. For the Republicans and many of the Democrats, this is about thinking that America can have anything it wants by sending troops and dropping bombs.

But this latest bit of “legislating” just hammers home the point that Congress can’t do anything. This is just another symbolic measure. It also shows that the only time that the Republicans and the Democrats can get along with each other is when they acting stupidly and making things worse. I still expect the Iran deal to go through. But according to Reuters, “European officials have said that worries about a possible spoiler role for Congress have undermined the US delegation’s credibility in the talks and raised questions about the Obama administration’s ability to deliver on commitments.” So there is no doubt that this is making things harder.

Where are the Democrats and the Republicans demanding to know what is in the TPP? Where is the outrage about even considering allowing it to be rammed through Congress? Could it be that Chuck Schumer has a whole bunch of Wall Street funders who really want this deal? Could it be that Schumer is not alone? Could it be that our government is bought and paid for by corporate interests? Does voting even matter? We will find out very soon. And I’m not hopeful.

Morning Music: Percy Sledge

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Take Time to Know HerAs I’m sure you’ve heard, Percy Sledge has died. He had liver cancer and was 74 years old. Not a bad run, but sad just the same. I’ve always liked him for two reasons. First: he has a really distinctive voice. Second: he was a really ugly man. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Actually, I mean it just the opposite. Being a short and ugly man, I have a great admiration for other short and ugly men. I can’t really be objective, but I think I’m slightly more attractive than Sledge, but he was slightly taller than I am. So that’s a wash. And he was, of course, ridiculously talented.

He is best known for the song, “When a Man Loves a Woman.” But I think it isn’t that great a song. What makes it work is his performance. I think this is why the song hasn’t been covered that much. It’s hard to make it work and no one is ever going to make it work the way he did. But ever since The Big Chill, no one needs to listen to the song.

Back in 1968, Percy Sledge released an album, Take Time to Know Her. The title song was one of the first by the legendary songwriter Stephen Allen Davis. And it is a great song. So let’s listen to Sledge perform it live back in 2006:

Anniversary Post: Charlie Chaplin

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Charlie ChaplinOn this day in 1889, Charlie Chaplin was born. I remember reading a quote from Woody Allen talking about how he preferred Chaplin’s films to Buster Keaton’s. And he admitted that Keaton made the better films. This is true. Chaplin’s films really do suck in terms of cinematic art. Basically, he just set up a camera and shot the whole scene in a medium shot. In other words: he was filming plays.

But I’m with Allen. I admire Keaton. But I almost never watch his films anymore. But I own both The Gold Rush and Modern Times. And just recently, I watched The Kid. And City Lights is an outstanding film. It’s not even that they are funny — even though they still make me laugh from time to time. They are just so sweet at the same time that they are subversive. The Little Tramp is not exactly a believer in the American Dream. He’s just trying to get by. America would do better if it stopped believing in the “American Dream,” because it’s pretty tattered at this point — more the American Myth.

Anyway, I don’t have much to say about Chaplin the man; the films are enough. And here is the whole 1971 re-released cut of The Kid, which is 15 minutes shorter than the original cut. I don’t know the film well enough to say what’s different. But I got twenty minutes into watching the video before I managed to pry myself away to finish this article.

Happy birthday Charlie Chaplin!

New Horizons for Pluto

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Pluto and CharonThere is exciting Pluto news. Joseph Stromberg over at Vox reported, NASA’s New Horizons Probe Is Visiting Pluto — and Just Sent Back Its First Color Photos. New Horizons left Earth in 2006 and will come within one Earth diameter to Pluto on 14 July. This is very cool, because we really know almost nothing about this bit of solar system debris that many people like to call a planet. In fact, that image on the left is the best picture we’ve ever taken of the little bugger and its biggest moon, Charon. But over the next three months, the images are going to get better and better.

I’ve long been of the opinion that we make far too big a deal of Pluto. When I used to teach astronomy, I would compare it to asteroids and show that there was really nothing that distinguished it from asteroids. But now it just seems to be a notable object in the Kuiper belt — although not even the most massive of the ones we know about. As I said: solar system debris. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t cool. I now find the little stuff orbiting the sun to be the most interesting part of astronomy. It really does allow us to look way back in time.

Of course, the bigger of space debris are less interesting. Anything large enough to become spherical — Eris, 2060 Chiron, 1 Ceres — have their own internal environments. In fact, it is speculated that Pluto might have volcanic activity. I’m sure that (as is usual for these things) there will be complete surprises. As I said, we know so little about this dwarf planet that it could hardly be otherwise. But over the past forty years of unmanned space exploration, we’ve really had to change how we look at the solar system. It is not as we once thought. But that’s even true of the Earth itself.

In addition to imaging devices, New Horizons has other equipment. In particular, the probe will be looking at the gases escaping from the surface of Pluto. The planet is ridiculously cold: between 33 K and 55 K. Even at that upper temperature, nitrogen is a solid. But small amounts of it sublimates to create an incredibly thin atmosphere (roughly one-half-millionth of the Earth’s surface pressure). This atmosphere also contains methane and carbon monoxide. Methane has long been thought to be a marker of life, but we’ve found so much of it in the solar system, I’m not sure what that means anymore. Regardless, it would be hard to imagine life on Pluto, but I wouldn’t rule anything out. Regardless, we should know a lot more in the coming months.

After it flies by Pluto, New Horizons is going to continue on further out into the Kuiper belt. The investigators have not settled on which object they are going to head toward. But this is a very exciting time. In fact, this is certainly the best time yet for astronomy. The advances in our knowledge brought on by terrestrial telescopes really don’t compare to what we are learning today. And it just gets all the more amazing. We know so much more today than we knew just twenty years ago when I was teaching this stuff. Stay tuned!

The Loving Christian Take on Hillary Clinton

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Don FederThink Evita after Botox treatments. Think Madame Defarge on a bad hair day. Think Lady Macbeth with serious issues (“Out, out, damned bimbo!”).

To listen to the babbling heads, you’d think the Goldwater girl-turned-Alinsky-disciple could start preparing her acceptance speech (maybe Eleanor Roosevelt will help her write it). “Ooh, she’ll raise so much money.” “Ooh, women want a woman president.” In the immortal words of General Anthony McAuliffe: “Nuts!”

Win the White House? Hillary couldn’t win a popularity contest if she was the only contestant.

The Hideousness Factor — Lyndon Baines Johnson was the last profoundly ugly candidate to be elected president, and he was a legacy of the martyred JFK. Voters don’t want a leader who looks frazzled or frumpy. We’re told that Lincoln was too homely to be elected president in an age of television and paparazzi. But Lincoln’s homely face had a dignity, a gravitas. If nothing else, we want a face that reassures us, not one that scares us, a la Night of the Living Alinskyites.

—Don Feder, World Congress of Families Communications Director
Quoted in Another White Knight

Is Paul Krugman the Thumb of Bad Economics?

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Paul KrugmanThis is funny. Moisés Naím over at The Atlantic wrote, Economists Still Think Economics Is the Best. It is about a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP), The Superiority of Economists. It seems that economists think very highly of themselves. They think they are the most “scientific” of the social sciences and they tend not to reference other social sciences in their academic work. Even worse, the disciplines that they do tend to align closely with are really not good: finance and business.

None of this should come as a surprise. Dean Baker has spent the last two decades pointing out what gas bags economists are. That’s one of the reasons he’s my favorite economist. But in the Naím article, the picture that went along with it was a smiling Paul Krugman. He was not pleased and responded with a brief post, I Am Not a Generic Economist. He pointed out that he had written favorably about the JEP paper, “I guess I hope that these things are outliers. But if you feel cynical about economics after reading Fourcade, you may be right.” He asked, “So how, exactly, do I become the face of bad economics here?”

Here is the Face of Bad Economics:

Face of Bad Economics: Paul Krugman

Well, I guess someone noticed that Krugman was a bit angry. Or maybe they noticed that Krugman is not even mentioned in the article. So today, they changed the image in a way that will doubtless please the Nobel Prize winning economist. Now the article not only doesn’t have his face — it doesn’t have anyone’s face. Now it has thumbs:

The Thumbs of Bad Economics

That looks like an image taken at the stock exchange. But could one of those thumbs be Paul Krugman’s? We’ll probably never know. I doubt he cares if The Atlantic wants to make him the thumb of bad economics.

Original image taken from Archive.org.

Miscegenation Laws and Wedding Cakes

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Ross DouthatGod’s older brother, Ross Douthat, was at The New York Times last week to explain why it is that laws against same sex marriage aren’t the same as miscegenation laws of the past. And the reason is, “This isn’t a structural system of oppression, a society-wide conspiracy like Jim Crow; we’re talking about a handful of shops across the country.” As you may be aware, Douthat has given up the culture war and just wants to be allowed to sit in his room praying and cursing the godless sinners who will burn in hell. Oh wait! He already has that right. He wants to be able to talk about this stuff in public and still get invited to Ezra Klein’s parties.

But I have to say, I really don’t understand Douthat’s reasoning here. He’s saying that discrimination should be allowed because not that many people would actually discriminate. Since the question is no longer whether same sex couples should be able to marry but rather whether bigot bakers should be able to refuse to put two male figures on the top of a wedding cake, the state has no right to interfere. But let’s suppose that a same sex couple lives in a small town where there is only one baker and she hates her some homos. To this couple, it doesn’t matter that there are thousands of bakers elsewhere who have no problem with same sex marriage.

Let’s think back to the miscegenation laws. It didn’t matter in 1966 that a mixed race couple in Mississippi could marry in New York. In fact, in 1966, mixed racial couples could marry in 33 states. By Douthat’s logic, Loving v Virginia — that case that found miscegenation laws unconstitutional — was not necessary. What’s more, we could get rid of the public accommodations clause in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, since at this point there wouldn’t be that many hotels that would discriminate.

But is this all just about a “handful of shops across the country”? Is it really true that this isn’t part of a “society-wide conspiracy like Jim Crow”? Well, it is certainly the case that the states that are now doing everything they can to oppress the LGBT community are the same ones that were enforcing miscegenation laws. Check out the interactive map of miscegenation laws. Through 1964, Indiana still enforced these laws. And the entire south enforced them until Loving in 1967. What’s more, members of the LGBT community are murdered at an alarming rate. In 2011, 30 were murdered. Being gay is not just a matter of being refused wedding cakes.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR provided a good overview of LGBT oppression in this country, A Non-Conspiracy of Douthat’s. To Douthat’s contention that there is not a “structural system of oppression,” he responded:

In 29 states, it is legal to fire, refuse to promote or harass someone on the job because of their sexual orientation. The same states allow landlords to refuse to rent to gay or lesbian tenants.

Fourteen states still have amendments in effect in their constitutions that deny their citizens the basic civil right of marriage on the basis of orientation.

Douthat is a smart guy. But reading him over the past couple of years has been very much like reading racist apologists from the 1960s. It starts with claims that the common good is to deprive rights. Then it shifts to claims that it is all just a matter of opinion and sincere people should be allowed to differ. I don’t think that Douthat will ever evolve past this point. As with the bigots of the past, he will just be passed by. But he’ll never lose his post at The New York Times because there aren’t many social conservatives who can communicate in full sentences.

Morning Music: Bessie Smith

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St Louis BluesSince it is Bessie Smith’s birthday today, I figured we would listen to her do her hit “St Louis Blues,” written by blues legend W C Handy. For these Morning Music posts, I like to do live performances — and certainly avoid videos that simply include a single image. The problem with Smith is that she was only ever in one film, St Louis Blues — based on the song and produced by Handy himself.

The plot involves Smith catching her boyfriend (tap dancer Jimmy Mordecai) with another woman. Smith beats up the woman and then begs the boyfriend to stay. He leaves and Smith goes to a speakeasy to drown her sorrows. There she sings “St Louis Blues.” Afterward, her boyfriend comes back and they apparently reunite. But as they dance, he steals all her money and leaves. The film ends with Smith again at the bar sad and alone.

I remember once hearing Holly Near saying that she had never liked the blues, but eventually learned that it wasn’t the music she didn’t like. She didn’t like the tradition of “beat me, abuse me, I still love you” songs. That is definitely the nature of this movie, although not so much the song itself. I’ve set the video to start at the song because I don’t think the rest of it is all that interesting:

Anniversary Post: Teapot Dome Scandal

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Albert FallOn this day in 1922, the Senate investigation of the Teapot Dome scandal started. I probably wouldn’t even bring it up, except for the fact that two years ago, 74% of Republicans polled said that the Benghazi “scandal” was worse than the Teapot Dome scandal. I’m pretty sure that almost none of those Republicans even knew what the Teapot Dome scandal was. And really, how could it ever be worse? There was no television at that time and thus no talking points to get wrong. Remember: the Benghazi “scandal” had nothing to do with the attack itself; it was all about what Susan Rice said on the Sunday morning political talk shows. That is the extent of Republican thinking on such matters. (It was only later that things were added as it became obvious that the Republicans were just scandal mongering and didn’t actually care about the attack.)

The scandal itself is nothing that special. Teapot Dome in Wyoming was one of several oil reserves held by the US Navy. When Warren Harding became president, he issued an executive order transferring control to the Department of the Interior. Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, leased the oil rights to a couple of different oil companies for great prices. There was no bidding — it was typical corruption. What is interesting is that this was not illegal.

What was illegal was that the oil companies gave Fall a few million dollars (in today’s currency). He was eventually jailed for a year. Interestingly, however, the man he was convicted of getting a bribe from, Edward Doheny, was found not guilty of bribing a public official. Sort of typical American justice, if you ask me.

What I think is very interesting in this case is that this 1922 act of public corruption is still the only thing that Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts thinks constitutes bribery. And of course, this isn’t how it works at all today. In general, these oil tycoons wouldn’t have to write checks to politicians; they would just write checks to super PACs who support the politicians. So John Roberts and the other crooks on the Supreme Court have simply defined corruption out of existence.

So there will be no more Teapot Dome scandals. We’ve sold honest government away so we can have anti-choice justices on the Supreme Court. Until they’re born, American humans will be the best protected in the world. After they are born, who cares? Certainly not the Supreme Court. Certainly not our politicians. Certainly not most of the American people. But at least the Teapot Dome scandal makes a good polling question. Is the Iran deal worse than the Teapot Dome scandal? I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet 74% of Republicans would say yes.

Happy anniversary Teapot Dome scandal!

Blogroll With Most Recent Post in WordPress

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WordPressThere is this thing on other blogs that I really like. If you go over to Ramona’s Voices, for example, you will see a list of blogs on the sidebar. But it isn’t just a list of the blogs, it also includes the most recent article that has been published at the site. This is very cool — especially for blogs like Frankly Curious that generate a lot of content. I’ve found that I get a lot more clicks from websites that list my most recent article than those that just list the website. And I’ve wanted to return the favor.

But when Frankly Curious was running on Nucleus, there was nothing around to allow me to do that. Almost everything I did that was special on Nucleus was hand coded by me. That was one of the exciting things about moving over to WordPress. But once here, I found that there was no easy way to do what I wanted. There is an RSS widget, but it is more for creating a whole section. Like over there on the right, you will see the “Category” section that lists the 17 categories that we use here. So I could great a “Ramona’s Voices” section and list the last five to ten articles. But I couldn’t create a section with all my blog friends and their most recent articles. At least not directly.

I searched online for ways to do what I wanted. And there were lots of articles. But they all depended upon widgets that WordPress no longer includes. It still amazes me that I never found what I was looking for, because clearly this is something that a lot of people would want to do. Well, after installing any number of plugins, I decided that I would have to do it on my own. Or not at all, because it wasn’t that important to me. But it turned out, it wasn’t all that difficult.

Individual Items

When an RSS widget is created, it is displayed as a list item (li tag) with the class “widget_rss.” So I starting mucking about with it. The main title — things like “Search” and “Calendar” and “Recent Posts” — are displayed with h3 tags. So that was the first thing I changed. I didn’t want hulking big letters with white on green. I also didn’t want the text too far separated from that above and below. So I changed it to what you will now see under “Friends”:

li.widget_rss h3 {
background: #ddd;
padding-bottom: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
padding-top: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
}

Another problem was that this header included an RSS image, so I got rid of it:

li.widget_rss img {
width: 0px;
height: 0px;
visibility: hidden;
}

And finally, I had to make the header link the right color and size. I’m not sure if I quite like this, but it works well enough:

li.widget_rss h3 a {
color: #333;
font-size: 12px;
}

The RSS feed itself is put in yet another list item — this is because you can put multiple articles under it. But I didn’t want any bullets. And again, I wanted to reduce the spacing between items:

li.widget_rss ul {
list-style-type: none;
padding-top: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
}
li.widget_rss li {
padding-top: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
}

The Header

Of course, in doing all this, I had no header. Thus, I had to add a fake header. For this, I just added a Widget Custom Menu with a menu that was empty. And what you get is the “Friends” section there on the right. Like most things, it isn’t too complicated after you know how to do it. There really ought to be some simple way to do it, and maybe there is. But I didn’t find it. So I figured that I would post my solution in case anyone else out there is trying to do the same.

Yes, Hillary Clinton Is Likely the Next President

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Hillary ClintonJonathan Chait wrote a really interesting article yesterday, Why Hillary Clinton Is Probably Going to Win the 2016 Election. He goes after six arguments that people make for why Clinton is not a strong candidate. I think it is kind of interesting that we are even discussing such matters. The truth is that the people claiming that Clinton is a weak candidate are almost exclusively Republicans. They aren’t exactly the most objective sources of information. It reminds me of Brer Rabbit, “Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch!” In this case it is, “You’re making a big mistake running Hillary Clinton against us!” Yeah, right. I think we are a bit smarter than Brer Fox.

The one point I want to discuss is Chait’s fifth, “Is it time for a change?” This is the idea that the electorate gets tired of having the same party in power. I’ve never found this to be a very compelling argument. For one thing, FDR won four terms in office. But let’s just look at recent history. George Bush managed to win a third straight term for the Republicans in 1988. And then, right after that, Al Gore won a third straight term for the Democrats in 2000. (The fact that the Supreme Court decided the election doesn’t change the fact of which party the people voted for.) So the last three times there has been a chance for three consecutive terms for the same party, it happened twice.

What’s more, people are pretty predictable in their voting. I have a hard time thinking that people are really going to be swayed by which party has been in the White House for the previous eight years. And that’s especially true when you consider that Constitutionally, that third term will have to be held by someone new. So people may be tired of Barack Obama (I know I am), but they won’t be voting for Barack Obama.

In his article, Chait pointed out the one thing that would kill a Clinton candidacy, “Unless the economy goes into a recession over the next year and a half, Hillary Clinton is probably going to win the presidential election.” And that is about it. In fact, if we look back at the candidacy of Al Gore, we learn something interesting. The unemployment rate was flat. In fact, from April to August, it was going up. The fact that Gore won that election is an indication Democrats really do have an edge in presidential elections. Yet Gore won that election 291-246 — not a bad margin — roughly the margin Carter beat Ford with.

So I’m with Chait: the 2016 election is not even at this point. It is Hillary Clinton’s to lose. And about the only way that she does lose is if the economy tanks. And that isn’t a question of tanking at any time. We could go into recession now, and as long as we were coming out of it by this time next year, she would be fine. Of course, that doesn’t make me feel good, because anything could happen in that time frame.

Will sent me the current odds on different candidates. Clinton’s were by far the best: 13/10. And the odds of the Democrats keeping the White House are -200 and the odds of the Republicans taking it are +160. If I understand odds correctly (and it has been a long time), that means you would have to risk $200 on the Democrats to win $100; and you would have to risk $100 on the Republicans to win $160. In other words, the gambling community is about correct on the state of the race right now. Hillary Clinton is sitting in a very good place.

Another Senseless Systemic Police Killing

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Robert Charles BatesAn unarmed black man was shot and killed by the police. I guess I could write that as an opening for an article every day. This one occurred on 2 April when 73 year old “reserve deputy” Robert Charles Bates mistook his gun for his taser and killed 44 year old Eric Harris. Bates is a rich insurance executive who apparently gets to ride around with the real officers just like a kid from the Make a Wish Foundation. It’s not my intention to be mean, but it seems to me that Bates could spend his twilight years doing something more appropriate and positive than playing cops and robbers.

I don’t doubt that Bates did sincerely mistake his gun for his taser. But I know from my own life that as I’ve gotten older, these are precisely the kinds of errors that I increasingly make. So maybe having a 73-year old who is, after all not a professional, carrying a loaded death cannon is not the smartest thing in world. Of course, these mix-ups happen all the time with professional officers. They are doubtless the result of high anxiety situations. People don’t make the best decisions when under pressure and I think that law enforcement officers should be given more training with regard to this. Drawing a gun means there is a high likelihood of death. Roughly the same thing can be said about drawing a taser.

More important in this situation is why Bates felt the need to use his taser anyway. As you can see in the video, Harris was fleeing from the police. They caught him and tackled him. He was on the ground with various officers on top of him. They were, as usual, spewing out profanities as fast as they could because apparently that is what they learn at professional crime fighting school. (That, or they are just a bunch of thugs in uniform.) It was in this context that Bates saved the day by attempting to tase Harris.

Once he realized what he had done, Bates said, “I shot him; I’m sorry.” Harris complained, saying, “Oh man, he shot me!” One of the officers responded by showing his humanity, yelling, “You fucking ran! Shut the fuck up!” At that point, the video cuts out. According to the officials, it was not turned off by the officer, but I seriously doubt that. There is just way too much of this sort of thing. Police officers know that if there is no video, judges and juries will believe whatever they say.

Later, Tulsa County Sheriff’s Major Shannon Clark claimed that the officers did not hear the gun shot and so didn’t know that Harris had been shot. This is why they acted so abominably toward Harris. This absolutely can’t be the case. Guns are extremely loud and this one went off just a couple of feet from them. What’s more, I’m pretty sure I see blood on Harris’ shirt. I’m sure that they were pumped up on adrenaline and had all their attention focused on the “bad guy” who they probably would have summarily executed if they had been able to get away with it.

Yesterday, German Lopez reported, Tulsa Reserve Deputy Charged With Manslaughter for Shooting Eric Harris. I doubt very seriously that he will be convicted. For on thing, he is nominally a police officer. In that regard, it is shocking that he was even charged. For another thing, he’s rich. So he will get the best representation available. And finally, there will be an endless line of officers who will testify in court that he’s a great guy. What? You gonna destroy his life for one little mistake? On the other side of things, they will vilify Harris. In The Los Angeles Times article on the shooting, a whole paragraph was spent painting a picture of Harris as only slightly less terrible than Al Capone.

To me, none of it matters. The problem is not Bates. The problem is our policing. As it was, I don’t see the need for the big chase. But police officers love these kinds of adrenaline fueled confrontations. This is why we now have SWAT teams used for regulatory inspections. And none of this is going to change just because some doddering old fool who likes to play cops and robbers gets charged with manslaughter.

Afterword

For the record, I don’t think that Robert Charles Bates ought to be convicted of this crime. The problem is systemic. I don’t doubt for a moment that this was an honest error and that Bates feels terrible about it. Our society has a habit of using the punishment of people like Bates as a way of not dealing with the larger problems that are literally killing us.