History bit: Bring on the lawyers
Owlcation writes:
Arabella Mansfield accepted a position at Simpson College during the 1860s to teach. The college was located in Indianola, Iowa. After a year of teaching at Simpson College, she went to Mount Pleasant to attend Iowa Wesleyan and get her master's degree. This was a time when Arabella would spend hours in her brother's law office reading cases and legal publications. She had a desire to take the Iowa bar exam. There was a state law limiting those who could take the bar exam to only white males. Arabella took it anyway. She got high scores. After winning a court case on the matter, Arabella Mansfield became the first female in the United States to be a lawyer. As a result of this case, Iowa amended its attorney licensing statutes. It was the first state to accept the right of women and minorities to practice law as members of its bar.
From the fall of democracy files:
Sheriffs won't enforce laws they dislike
Another Challenge to New York’s Gun Law: Sheriffs Who Won’t Enforce It
Some say the measure, which was passed after a Supreme Court opinion, ignores common sense, the Second Amendment and the way people live outside big cities.
Robert Milby, Wayne County’s new sheriff, has been in law enforcement most of his adult life, earning praise and promotions for conscientious service. But recently, Sheriff Milby has attracted attention for a different approach to the law: ignoring it.
Sheriff Milby is among at least a half-dozen sheriffs in upstate New York who have said they have no intention of aggressively enforcing gun regulations that state lawmakers passed last summer, forbidding concealed weapons in so-called sensitive areas — a long list of public spaces including, but not limited to, government buildings and religious centers, health facilities and homeless shelters, schools and subways, stadiums and state parks, and, of course, Times Square.
“It’s basically everywhere,” said Sheriff Milby, in a recent interview in his office in Wayne County, east of Rochester. “If anyone thinks we’re going to go out and take a proactive stance against this, that’s not going to happen.”
On Thursday, a U.S. District Court judge blocked large portions of the law, dealing a major blow to lawmakers in Albany who had sought to blaze a trail for other states after the Supreme Court in June struck down a century-old New York law that had strictly limited the carrying of weapons in public. Between the court challenge and the hostility of many law enforcement officers, New York’s ambitious effort could be teetering.
One question that raises is why is it possible for a civilized country, e.g., Canada, the UK, Japan or Australia, to survive with gun laws and a whole lot less gun violence, but not in the US? My guess most of it is caused by political corruption by the gun industry and the rigid, radical right gun dogma that has grown out of decades of pro-gun propaganda and lies.
Climate change and monsoons
Now, however, across South Asia, climate change is making the monsoon more erratic, less dependable and even dangerous, with more violent rainfall as well as worsening dry spells. For a region home to nearly one-quarter of the world’s population, the consequences are dire.
Areas in blue show the current historical monsoon pattern and pink is the pattern emerging from climate change.
The affected areas are huge. Hundreds of millions of people are going to be displaced and hundreds of millions more will see their standard of living fall. This is going to destabilize that entire region of the planet.
Those feisty Libertarians - in a pickle again
Trump’s poison politics spreads and kills
Only a few years after its greatest triumph, the Libertarian Party is collapsing, torn apart by an insurgency of alt-right sympathizers with racist tendencies. Libertarianism, the idea that state power must be absolutely minimized, relies on ideas of individual rights that seem flatly inconsistent with racism. And yet libertarian rhetoric has always had powerful attractions for those who wanted to resist racial equality. How is that possible?
There is in fact a connection, but it is one of psychology and political history rather than logic.
In May, the party was taken over at its national convention by the so-called Mises Caucus, a far-right group, some of whose members have been associated with racist and antisemitic ideas. The caucus is named after the libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises, whose philosophy was pretty crude but who firmly condemned racism.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire
tweeted (in a later deleted post) that “America isn’t in debt to black people. If anything it’s the other way around.” Caucus members
have called for violent repression of antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters. The new leadership’s first and most prominent decision was
to remove from the party platform language declaring, “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.”
The crackup is in part the result of crass political machinations. The insurgents are funded by donors who have been close to former President Trump, suggesting that the takeover is part of a coordinated Republican stratagem to destroy a party that has been draining away Republican votes. If Trump had gotten every Libertarian vote in 2020, he would have won. The chairman of the New Mexico Libertarian Party wrote that the leadership has “adopted messaging and communications hostile to the principles for which the Libertarian Party was founded, serving no purpose other than to antagonize and embarrass.” That may indeed be the purpose. Battles for control of the state party are also happening in Virginia and Massachusetts.
One can just see the poison creeping into all corners of American conservatism. This is another warning about what is happening to conservative American politics. Radical right bigotry, hate, mendacity and intolerance are killing civility, inconvenient truth and tolerance. America is moving toward its own corrupt, radical right theocratic version of fascism.
