MAY 28TH, 2009
By MSH
By MSH
Change We Can Believe In: A Racist on the Supreme Court
Sonia Sotomayer in context.
Tags: Obama, racism, sonia sotomayor, supreme court
MAY 26TH, 2009
By MSH
By MSH
Obama Compares His Supreme Court Nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, to Liberal Progressive Supreme Court Justice Who Favored Eugenics
Just file this under “news about Sonia Sotomayor that you won’t read or hear in the mainstream media.”
Today President Obama introduced Ms. Sotomayor to the public as his nominee to the Supreme Court. A big part of the PR push that the fawning media will dutifully report is how she’s empathetic because of her poor, Latino background. In praising this presumed quality, President Obama feted her with a quotation about the judicial philosophy of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Here’s what President Obama said:
First and foremost is a rigorous intellect, a mastery of the law, an ability to hone in on the key issues and provide clear answers to complex legal questions.
Second is a recognition of the limits of the judicial role, an understanding that a judge’s job is to interpret, not make law, to approach decisions without any particular ideology or agenda, but rather a commitment to impartial justice, a respect for precedent, and a determination to faithfully apply the law to the facts at hand.
These two qualities are essential, I believe, for anyone who would sit on our nation’s highest court. And yet these qualities alone are insufficient. We need something more.
For as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience; experience being tested by obstacles and barriers, by hardship and misfortune; experience insisting, persisting, and ultimately overcoming those barriers. It is experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion, an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.
And that is why it is a necessary ingredient in the kind of justice we need on the Supreme Court.
So what’s the problem? Am I just an uptight, non-Latino white male? No . . . I just don’t like judges who use their position to make policy, NOT merely interpet the Constitution, an approach Ms. Sotomayor sarcastically defends here. (Better watch it now while it’s still on the web). I also don’t like the kind of compassion Oliver Wendell Holmes showed in defending eugenics in 1927–an opinion adopted later by the Nazis. Here’s what Justice Holmes said:
“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
As this article points out:
This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes’s words in their own defense.
Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German official and scientists.
Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti-Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. While Hitler’s race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.
All this born of empathy. I wonder what other sorts of empathy we’ll see in the future. The cover image from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
MAY 23RD, 2009
By MSH
By MSH
Roswell “Memory Metal” in the News
Those of you familiar with the tale of an alleged UFO crash in Roswell, NM, in 1947 (and of course you are if you’ve read The Facade!) will be interested in this item. One of the elements of the Roswell story concerned the recovery of metal fragments by Col. Jesse Marcel, the central figure in the controversy. Marcel reported that he had recovered pieces of metal that, when scratched or crumpled (they were very light) returned to their original form — as thought it “remembered” its original form. There have been suggestions (other than alien material) as to what this “memory metal” was. One of the more plausible is that it was an unusual nickel-titanium alloy developed here on earth as far back as 1932 called Nitinol. Well, nitinol and Roswell are back in the news with the appearance of this article in Sarasota’s Herald Tribune, by Billy Cos, with whom I had the privilege of sharing a room at the lone X-Conference I was invited to speak at. It seems certain files on nitinol are missing from the two places that should have them: the U.S. Air Force and the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, OH, where a number of experiments on nitinol were undertaken.
For those who read the article, there are several interesting things about it. FIrst, here’s a summary of the problem:
At issue are some missing reports from Battelle’s study of a nickel/titanium alloy called Nitinol, renowed for its resilience as a “memory metal.” Contracted by the U.S. Air Force to assess and exploit its compelling properties in the late 1940s, Battelle participates in or manages six national laboratories for the U.S. Department of Energy, including Oak Ridge, Lawrence Livermore, and Brookhaven.
The problem is, neither Battelle nor the USAF can produce copies of what the scientific literature refers to as the “Second Progress Report on Contract AF33 (038)-3736.”
Billy goes on to write, “Bragalia suspects that’s because the data is still highly classified due to its source — a flying disc that crashed outside Roswell, N.M., in 1947.” So, Mr. Bragalia thinks that the crashed disc of Roswell fame/lore was (at least in part) composed of nitinol. Could be.
In The Facade I put forth the idea that the disc was man-made and derivative of Project: PAPERCLIP. Nick Redfern followed that trajectory (independently) in his important book, Body Snatchers in the Desert
Probably the main item of interest in Billy’s story is that, if nitinol is indeed the mystery “memory metal” from Roswell, then this argues very strongly against an alien craft. Why? Since nitinol was known here on earth since 1932. Billy details how Bragalia’s research uncovered a USAF vet named Ben Games, who “flew Gen. Laurence Craigie to Roswell during the furor over the alleged UFO recovery” and how Craigie had an office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1947, where everyone agrees the Roswell debris, whatever it was, wound up. BIlly then asks:
[I]f, as skeptics contend, the thing that went down in Roswell was simply a classified but hardly exotic balloon project, why did Craigie make a hurried flight to New Mexico from Washington?
Let me suggest an answer which doesn’t involve aliens, and which makes good sense in the context of what I suggested in the Facade and, more importantly, the work Nick Redfern has done: He went because he [Craigie] knew of a highly-classified project involving a disc-shaped craft that employed the use of nitinol, a metal that had the properties described by Col. Marcel. When Craigie heard the reports and did the math, he knew that the project had to be kept under wraps and attention diverted.
Moving on, Billy’s article notes that, although some key files (specifically the “Second Progress Report” are missing, Mr. Bragalia found “four references to [nitinol's] existence in 1952, 1965, 1972, and 1984.” I’m not sure where Mr. Bragalia was looking, but there are a lot more references to nitinol in military-related literature than this. A simple search of the NASA Technical Reports database reveals 38 documents that mention nitinol. Naturally, due to NASA’s own history, the earliest is only in 1969. Interestingly enough, after wading through one of them myself, I discovered nitinol is very radiation-resistant — something that was a focus point of the work at Oak Ridge and Redfern’s reconstruction of the marriage of the FUGO project to a PAPERCLIP flying disk project.
Lastly, this statement by Billy Cox got my attention:
Curiously, Braglia says military reports announcing the unveiling of Nitinol as a memory metal cite every year from 1959 to 1963 as its point of discovery. The last word from the U.S. Naval Ordnance Lab lists its debut as 1962 or 1963.
It may not look like much, but this item suggest something very important: that a number of people who we would think SHOULD have known about nitinol and its military application (it was around since the 1930s) simultaneously betray ignorance of it. What does that mean? It means that people you’d expect to know something about a material (or a project) were not privy to information that it would seem there was no way they wouldn’t have known. One of the objections to man-made UFOs related to Roswell or the late 1940s and 50s is that “surely these projects could not have been kept from highly-placed, important people working in military aircraft projects.” My answer is of course this is possible — PAPERCLIP is Exhibit A in that regard — a project kept secret (in its actual, operative form) from even the president. Here we have several military-industrial complex scientists thinking they’ve discovered something that’s existed for decades, known by others within the same military! My, how news doesn’t travel when certain people don’t want it to.
Tags: memory metal, nitinol, Roswell, UFOs, US military
MAY 21ST, 2009
By MSH
By MSH
Ida the Lemur: Missing Link or Misinformation?
Haven’t heard of Ida the lemur? Don’t worry, you will–over and over again.
Ida is the alleged “missing link” that the History Channel (yeah, the same channel that brough you the ancient aliens as history two hours special a few months back) will unveil on May 25 in what they are calling a “global event.”
Turns out that some people in the know about Ida feel the science is being misreported, resulting in manipulation of the gloabl audience. Who’s making such a claim? A wild-eyed creationist? Nope, just London Times science correspondent Mark Henderson. You can read about it here.
Tags: evolution, Ida the lemur, media, missing link
MAY 19TH, 2009
By MSH
By MSH
A Good UFO Video
No, they aren’t all grainy and undefined. This is a good video of what (in the “old days”) would likely have been filed under the “cigar shaped” UFO category.
