Chris Hedges wrote an update about his case Hedges v Obama, which challenged the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA). The law allows the government to detain anyone (including US citizens) for indefinite periods of time as long as the government believes that they are terrorists. Of course, “terrorist” is meant in the Patriot Act sense where the government knows a terrorist when it sees one because a terrorist is someone the government wants to detain indefinitely.

If this sounds like circular reasoning, it shouldn’t be surprising. After a lower court found this part of the law unconstitutional, the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit overturned it. Of course, they didn’t do it on its merits. That would be too much like an actual legal system. It said that Hedges had no standing because he did not know that the government was targeting him. Of course, he can’t know because that information is classified. And so we get into the usual catch-22 where the government can’t be forced to reveal its unconstitutional surveillance because the people can’t prove the the government is in engaged in unconstitutional surveillance.

Last September, Hedges asked the Supreme Court to force the lower court to reevaluate the case, given that the Snowden revelations showed that Hedges did in fact have standing. And a week ago the Supreme Court came back and said no. And interestingly, all it said was no. According to SCOTUSblog, “The Court made no comment as it denied review of Hedges v Obama.” I find it interesting that people like Scalia and Alito who were so concerned about government overreach in the matter of Obamacare leading to forced broccoli consumption don’t seem to be the least bit concerned about the government effectively making US citizens disappear.

For his part, Hedges sounds more desperate than I’ve ever heard him—and that’s saying a lot. He seems to think that nothing short of a popular uprising will save the country and the constitution that supposedly supports it. He explains what the ruling (such as it is) means:

He’s threading a needle here. His point is that the problem is not the government. That’s an important distinction because people like Hedges are not like the supposed “constitutional conservatives” who seem only to want to overthrow the government so they can stop paying taxes and set up a theocracy. The problem is that we really don’t live in a democracy anymore. The government does the bidding of the oligarchs and not much more.

But when I look out on this country of ours, I don’t see people ready to demand their power back. In fact, I don’t even see many people who will bother to vote to keep things from getting much worse.[1] And at this point, voting is of limited power even if we could get politicians who would support the people. The judicial system has been thoroughly corrupted. Just today, Cecily McMillan was found guilty of assaulting a police officer while she was being arrested during an Occupy protest. She faces up to seven years in jail for allegedly elbowing the officer. (I find it amusing how cops claim to be so tough and whine about how hard their jobs are, but when a young woman elbows one, they run to the authorities.) And the judge wouldn’t even let her free for the two weeks until her sentencing.

The power elites own everything and everyone who matters. The rest of us are too busy scraping by to do anything about it. I don’t see much hope.

[1] Let me be clear. The candidates we get are bad. But if all the people showed up at the polls, all the time, we would get much better candidates. But instead, we get a government that is far more conservative on economic issues than the people. And one of the long-term results of this is that we have a ridiculously conservative judicial system where what was once considered conservative is now labeled “liberal.”

As a general rule, I don’t watch the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The truth is that I think it’s dangerous. What the event says is that the media and the political world are just one happy family that puts on a hell of a show for the American people. Well I think that’s bunk. The politicians are supposed to be doing the work of the people. And the media are supposed to be reporting on and probing that work. You want to know why Benghazi is so big in the right wing world? Because it’s entertainment. It is no different than Finding Bigfoot or similar shows based upon nothing but the delusions of kooks.

But I heard all weekend just what a terrible job Joel McHale did at the dinner so I had to check it out. I’ll admit, I went into it as an iconoclast: I wanted to disagree. I wanted to say everyone just didn’t get him. And I think that is largely true. The material was quite strong. But there is no doubt that his performance was weak. He blew a number of otherwise good jokes. But above all, he spent 70% of his time looking down at his cards. I went back and watched Stephen Colbert’s 2006 performance, just to make sure this was not how it was done. And it was not. I’m not sure what was wrong with him.

The best joke of the night was not about politics at all. McHale noted that Robert De Niro was in the audience. He said that he couldn’t do a De Niro impression, but that he did De Niro’s agent. So he reached out and grabbed a pretend telephone and put it to his ear. Then he said very excitedly, “He’ll do it!” That goes along with what seems to have happened to his career. At one time he took great roles. Now he’s just making money.

But the show was filled with some sharp attacks. For example, he said, “Julia Pierson, the new director of the Secret Service, is here tonight. Under her leadership Secret Service agents can no longer consort with prostitutes thanks to their new ‘too drunk to make it to the brothel’ program.” And then there was this, “CNN is desperately searching for something they’ve been missing for months: their dignity.” This elicited boos, to which McHale responded, “Totally!” He continued, “At this point, CNN is like the Radio Shack in a small strip mall: you don’t know how it stayed in business this long, you don’t know anyone that shops there, and they just fired Piers Morgan.”

He made a number of what I thought were cruel jokes about Chris Christie, and that’s saying something because I despise the man. But he did pay it off with what was the high point of his performance, satirizing Christie’s 9 January press conference:

The best part of the evening was not McHale, however. Nor was it Obama, who I thought was rather stilted. It was this fun Veep sort of parody with Joe Biden and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I’ve actually never seen the show, but I loved to see Joe Biden playing a cleaned up version of his super-cool character in The Onion:

But for the record, this is the real Joe Biden:

So it’s all kind of silly and bad for the country. But it has its moments.

Afterword

Here is the whole thing, if you dare:

When the first planet outside our solar system, an exoplanet, was discovered, I was amazed. I think most people think of astronomy as being about building bigger and bigger telescopes, just like blowing up a photograph. But just like in the movie, it doesn’t work that way. Just in the most basic sense, imagine looking into a very bright light and how difficult it would be to see a small dark object right next to it. That ought to give you some idea of the problems.

The first confirmed exoplanet discovered was orbiting around Gamma Cephei. It was detected the same way about half of all exoplanets have been detected: Doppler spectroscopy. This is an amazing bit of science. But there are actually too many things to explain it all like centers of mass (stars aren’t stationary in their solar systems) and Doppler shifting of light (the color of light from objects moving towards or away from us gets changed). But the main thing is that the star sends out visible light and the planet sends out infrared light. Based upon the shifts, we can find out a certain amount about the planetary mechanics of the system.

A more obvious technique for locating exoplanets is the transit method. This is very simple, but it doesn’t always apply. If the planet crosses between the star and us, it blocks out some of the light. By seeing the difference, we can determine what the radius of the star must be. For example, the exoplanet that circles the romantically named HD 209458 star was first discovered with Doppler spectroscopy. But then other scientists went back and measured the brightness of the star and found that it decreased by a tad less than 2% every 3.5 days. Thus they could determine its radius to be about 30% greater than Jupiter.

This is all amazing stuff, but I read something today that shocked me, Length of Exoplanet Day Measured for First Time. I couldn’t imagine how they managed that feat. The reason it is possible to measure this value is because the planet, Beta Pictoris b, is one of the few exoplanets that we have managed to take direct pictures of. It’s a huge planet, of course: 65% larger radius than Jupiter’s and a mass between 5 and 10 times. Plus, it orbits about twice the distance from Beta Pictoris than Jupiter does from the sun. All of these things make it easier to see.

And now we know it rotates about twice as fast as Jupiter: about 100,000 km/hr at its equator. It likely spins so fast because it is a very young planet: just 20 million years old. The rotations of planets slow over time because of the gravitational pull on them by the sun, which eventually locks them so that the same side always faces the sun. This has happened to Mercury. And the same mechanism explains why the same side of the moon always faces the earth.

I’m not clear on exactly how they determined the rotation speed. I know the basics: they looked at the star light reflected of the planet. Since the planet has a lot of carbon monoxide in its atmosphere, they looked at the band of light that wasn’t there: the CO absorption line. But that band was broadened, again because of Doppler shifting. Based upon that, they could determine how fast the CO molecules were moving when they were reflecting the light.

This stuff amazes me. We little humans on our little planet are able to determine what is happening 63 light-years away. Of course, it’s still true that when it comes to terrestrial matters, we aren’t any more evolved than chimpanzees. But when we gaze at the stars or doodle our ideas, we are at our best.

Last year I highlighted Bartolomeo Cristofori for the birthday post. He was the inventor of the piano, and so I discussed how it was different from the harpsicode and the clavichord. It’s quite interesting. If you haven’t read it, I recommend checking it out.

On this day in 1825, the great biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was born. He was a comparative anatomist—someone who looks at similarities and differences in species. What has long fascinated me is how people like Huxley were able to classify different species so accurately. When we started doing genetic work, it didn’t much upset what we already knew about species’ relationships.

Huxley was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” because of his public support for evolution. He was a prominent part of the 1860 Oxford evolution debate. So prominent, in fact, that it is often referred to as the Huxley–Wilberforce debate. Wilberforce was Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, arguing for the Bible. In the most famous exchange, Wilberforce asked Huxley if he descended from monkeys on his mother’s side or his father’s. According to Isabella Sidgwick some time afterward, “He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous.” Booyah!

What is perhaps most interesting about Huxley is that he was skeptical of natural selection as the mechanism for evolution. Note that natural selection is what is important about Darwin’s work; the idea of species’ evolution was not new to him. But Huxley’s skepticism was scientifically based. He was an empiricist and rather typical in not accepting anything until it was fully proven. And just like now, the religious zealots who would not accept evolution under any circumstances grabbed onto his doubts.

It is clear that Huxley and the others won this debate. And indeed, in the United Kingdom they did where roughly 80% of the people accept evolution through natural selection. But in the United States that number is only 40%. That is so embarrassing. Check out this graph:

And now we have people like Ken Ham who dress up their religious dogma in the clothes of science. But they don’t do science. Their entire effort is meant to stop debate—to stop science. And I’m not at all convinced that they won’t be successful. Certainly we need Huxley today more than ever.

Happy birthday Thomas Henry Huxley!

I am not one to claim that catastrophe is “opportunity!” Bad things happen and they suck. But that shouldn’t stop us from relishing inspiring stories that come out of catastrophe. And so it won’t stop me from related two stories of wonderful pet rescues. Being kind to pets is probably the only thing we all agree on. For example, even Nazis were nice to pets. They put “undesirables” to death but they saved their pets. At least, I assume they did. It doesn’t matter how evil you are, you still take care of pets. Or so I want to believe. Jesus! This is getting depressing. Let’s get onto the stories!

Chuck and Elicia James are a nice young couple who live in New Jersey with their three children. After Hurricane Sandy, their dog Reckless escaped from their backyard. They looked and looked, but they could not find him. Of course, they were somewhat limited. Because of the damage to their home, they’ve been living in a hotel since then—for 18 months! Well, their eldest daughter’s tenth birthday is coming up so they went to the local SPCA looking for a new dog. And the first dog they were shown was… Reckless! You can read all about it at New York, Dog Lost in Hurricane Sandy Miraculously Reunited With Owners 18 Months Later.

Chuck James said, “The dog was licking us to death, he was jumping three feet in the air. He was home. He knew the ordeal was over.” Of course, they are still a family of five living in a hotel room. But clearly New Jersey is stronger than the storm. But that means a whole lot more for Reckless and the whole James family than it does for Chris Christie and his family.

In a story totally unrelated to Hurricane Sandy but related in regards to the fact that it is about a catastrophe and a pet, we move across the border to Crown Heights, Brooklyn where, Two Garages Collapse after Retention Wall Fails. It was a big crash, but no humans were around to be harmed or even trapped. But such was not the luck for the Felis silvestris catus community. An unidentified cat was caught beneath the debris. Fortunately, the Fire Department, City of New York was on the job. They spotted the cat and released it. One of the firemen tried to carry the cat to safety, but clearly, the cat was better able to navigate the rubble than mere humans. Watch the video:

So a little good news to get you through the weekend!

H/T (dog): JoyfulA
H/T (cat): Digby

A more factual synopsis of the Reagan presidency might read like this: that Reagan was a transformative figure in American history, but his real revolution was one of public relations-meets-politics and not one of policy. He combined his small-town heartland upbringing with a skill for storytelling that was honed on the back lots of Hollywood into a personal narrative that resonated with a majority of voters, but only after it tapped into something darker, which was white middle-class resentment of 1960s unrest. His story arc did become more optimistic and peaked at just the right moment, when Americans were tired of the “malaise” of the Jimmy Carter years and wanted someone who promised to make the nation feel good about itself again. But his positive legacy as president today hangs on events that most historians say were to some great measure out of his control: an economic recovery that was inevitable, especially when world oil prices returned to normal levels, and an end to the Cold War that was more driven by internal events in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe than Americans want to acknowledge. His 1981 tax cut was followed quickly by tax hikes that you rarely hear about, and Reagan’s real lasting achievement on that front was slashing marginal rates for the wealthy—even as rising payroll taxes socked the working class. His promise to shrink government was uttered so often that many acolytes believe it really happened, but in fact Reagan expanded the federal payroll, added a new cabinet post, and created a huge debt that ultimately tripped up his handpicked successor, George H W Bush. What he did shrink was government regulation and oversight, which critics have linked to a series of unfortunate events from the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s to the subprime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 helped paper over some less noble moments in foreign policy, from trading arms for Middle East hostages to an embarrassing retreat from his muddled engagement in Lebanon to unpopular adventurism in Center America. The Iran-Contra scandal that stemmed from those policies not only weakened Reagan’s presidency when it happened, but it arguably undermined the respect for future presidents for the Constitution because he essentially got away with it. Over the course of eight years, the president that some want to enshrine on Mount Rushmore rated just barely above average for modern presidents in public popularity. He left on a high note—but only after two years of shifting his policy back to the center, seeking peace with the Soviets rather than confrontation, reaching a balanced new tax deal with Democrats, and naming a moderate justice to the Supreme Court. It was not the Reaganism invoked by today’s conservatives.

On this day in 1469, the great political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli was born. I’ve been amazed over a very long time that a lot of people seem to be under the impression that he was some kind of bad guy like Vlad the Impaler. I’ve always found The Prince to be the work of a wise older man just explaining how the world works. We tend to think of the recent history of the British monarchy where power (such as it is) flows peacefully from father to son. But in Machiavelli’s time, a monarch was much more likely to be someone who stole the throne. It is the first important contribution to realpolitik.

There is most likely another side to The Prince. Machiavelli was an important government official in the Florentine republic up into his forties. Even though he had much success after that (most notably as a comedic playwright), he saw those earlier times as the best of his life. The Prince was likely intended as an implicit argument in favor of republicanism. So maybe it is all of us who are the cynical ones and to him it was obvious that he was lampooning the monarchy by showing the best case for the latter.

What Machiavelli brings to my mind is the duty of citizenship. Here in America, we mostly think our republic is something that we are entitled to. It simply is and we get the benefits of it. But that’s not true. It is something we constantly have to fight for. And if we don’t, it will devolve into an oligarchy, as it pretty much has. As Chris Hedges discussed in Death of the Liberal Class, it used to be that the upper classes (minus the rich) paid for their privilege by managing the state and not letting the oligarchs take over. But they have really fallen down on the job and now have almost no more power than the lower classes. Now our only hope is that all the citizens will bind together and use their democratic power, although even if that happened (doubtful), I’m not sure the oligarchs would allow it. Things haven’t changed much since Machiavelli was writing. He sees America today as clearly as he saw Medici Florence then.

Happy birthday Niccolo Machiavelli!