Today in Supreme Court History: September 2, 1819

9/2/1819: James Madison writes letter to Judge Spencer Roane criticizing McCulloch v. Maryland.

Comments

[BravoCharlieDelta]

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1697760498958442831

The guy with the mask and earpiece in the video breaking out a Capitol window seems to have gotten away with it.

Anyone recognize him?

[Dr. Ed 2]

What amazes me is that some of the windows were/are mere lanimated glass like this, while others have been upgraded to be "blastproof" -- probably Lexan in a frame of something other than rotting wood.

I wouldn't know which was which -- would you?

So how did these perps know which windows COULD break? That't either a major breach of what should be classified security information, or people who had legitimate access to it.

Jan 6th was -- at best -- itself a major breach of basic security (where were all the uniformed cops) but I like to think that my government isn't quite incompetent enough to hand out lists of which windows in the Capitol *can* be broken.

Hence it was government agents running amuck -- it's the lesser of two evils because to think that the government is nonchalantly handing out lists of security vulnerabilities in government buildings is unthinkable...

[Magister]

Dr. Ed 2 has broken the case open; it was an inside job! But who could have done it. Hmm, there were reports of Republicans in Congress conducting tours of the Capitol not long before January 6th.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/january-6-barry-loudermilk-capitol-complex-tour/

I also have no idea whether the more robust glass could be identified on sight. But the upgraded windows had different frames: "The original wooden frames and glass were covered with a second metal frame containing bomb-resistant glass."
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-04/jan-6-rioters-exploited-little-known-capitol-weak-spots-a-handful-of-unreinforced-windows

[BravoCharlieDelta]

Why aren't you upset that a Domestic MAGA Terrorist Insurrectionist isn't even being pursued by the DOJ?

[Magister]

The FBI is continuing to investigate; there seem to be a number of people who are not identified yet shown on an FBI website. Maybe your picture is there!

The "suspicious actor" that your conspiracy guy claims is dressed like a federal agent looks to be dressed similarly to Eric Munchel (the Zip Tie Guy, already prosecuted), so that inference is a huge overreach. Nor does he seem to be avoiding being caught on video, despite the narration. I am not overly surprised that somebody in a mask and undistinctive clothing hasn't been identified. I'm more upset over the lack of progress in the pipe bombing case.

I have no doubt there were people present who wanted others to lead the way; agent of chaos is not the same as federal agent. It's the reason that Dr. Ed 2's civil war won't happen; not enough crazies to lead the way.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

When he blamed and attacked that other guy for breaking the window that he broke?

[Magister]

That does not appear to be what was happening.

[David Nieporent]

I am not overly surprised that somebody in a mask and undistinctive clothing hasn’t been identified.

How does BCD know that the guy hasn’t already been prosecuted? Did he search all the court dockets for “U.S. vs. Guy in Mask” and not find that caption?

[Dr. Ed 2]

Leadership will PREVENT a Civil War -- its the lack of clear leadership that enables one. It was a lack of leadership that got us into the prior two (the Revolution was also a civil war).

The British botched the Revolution in just about every way possible, and then James Buchanan's incompetence, utter incompetence...

[Dr. Ed 2]

I've been outside the Capitol and I couldn't tell that ANY of the windows weren't original -- they did a good job. Yes, you could probably tell if you were standing outside the windows, but it's a big building with LOTS of windows and which ones do you go to?

That's where someone knew....

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

First comment of the day is a link to a QAnon account.

The distinctions among FreeRepublic, the Volokh Conspiracy, Gateway Pundit, Stormfront, Instapundit, and 4chan diminish daily.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

Did you watch the video? Maybe you'll recognize the perp? He probably spoke at one of your Bootlicking the Federal Boot training courses.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Kirkland, even though you are a Federal Employee, I'll bet you don't know which windows in the Capitol are breakable and which ones aren't.

So how would a random perp know?!?

That's the first question any competent police officer would have asked.... It's like knowing where a dead body is -- HOW do you know that???

[David Nieporent]

Where did you get the idea that Kirkland was a federal employee? And who were the police going to be asking this question to?

[BravoCharlieDelta]

Well he licks the boots of the elites as reflexively as people like you, Sarcastr0 and other Federals.

[David Nieporent]

I don't know what a "Federal" is, but I am not a federal employee. I am better than you, but that's not really a high bar so I don't think it makes me an elite.

[Magister]

They could (and ultimately the January 6th committee did) ask Republican Congress members like Representative Loudermilk about reconnaissance tours just before the insurrection. They could also note that the unreinforced windows had obviously different frames, and that some reinforced windows were attacked but remained intact.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

I am not a federal employee, or a Federal Employee, but I would not expect the average Volokh Conspiracy fan to know or care about the truth.

Carry on, clingers. But only so far as your betters (the liberal-libertarian mainstream) permit, as the modern American culture war continues to advance toward its predictable, glorious, conservatism-stomping conclusion.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, 463 U.S. 1323 (decided September 2, 1983): Rehnquist denies stay of Circuit Court order recalling an earlier decision as to whether Hawaii Land Reform Act violated Fifth Amendment “takings clause” and enjoining housing authority from pursuing any state administrative or judicial proceedings under the Act; possible Younger abstention but notes that Circuit Court will shortly revise its decision (the Court eventually held no Fifth Amendment violation because land would be taken for “public use”, 467 U.S. 229, 1984) (Hawaii, aware of ownership of Oahu being in so few hands, bought the land at issue from a trustee of the traditional monarchy; it consisted of many little leaseholds, which it sold to the tenants at market value; this attempt at land redistribution was thwarted when Japanese investors came in, though they bought at a high markup, so the tenants ended up o.k.)

[Dr. Ed 2]

Isn't it interesting how Japan was the evil empire in the '80s only to crash in the '90s and never really recover.

Everything I see on China is that it is about to crash and it won't recover for many of the same reasons, including demographics.

Japan was productive 1965-80 because we'd killed much of older generation in the war, and hence the bulk of their workforce was in its most productive age -- but didn't have children.

China killed all its children during it's one child era -- and now has serious shortages of young people. Throw in some other stuff and its gonna crash.

What happened to the Hawaiian land in the '90s, though?

[David Nieporent]

Editor's note: at no point was Japan the evil empire; that term always referred to the Soviet Union. Or, alternatively, the New York Yankees.

[Magister]

Not the evil empire, nor in the axis of evil (despite being part of the original WWII Axis), but Japan was viewed as an economic threat for a while. One of the jokes in one of the Back to the Future movies had Dr. Emmett Brown concluding that of course something electronic failed because it was made in Japan, and 1980s Marty telling him that all the best stuff is made in Japan, which astonished 1950s Doc Brown.

Dropping birth rates in Japan were not the cause of the Lost Decade.

[Dr. Ed 2]

I was thinking of the first Die Hard movie and the Nakatomi building.

[Dan Schiavetta]

today’s movie review: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968

The first thing to say about this Stanley Kubrick film is that it is visually stunning. Its outer space scenes were leaps and bounds over prior science fiction and every sci-fi film after it had to be this good — though later on computers made it much easier to do. Bowman’s voyage through dimensions towards the end, I heard, was considered equal to an LSD trip (years later I tried LSD and noticed some similarities, though slight). Kubrick’s inspiration supposedly was the Canadian special “Universe”, which Bozo the Clown announced on his show (we had one TV and I was forced to watch a lot of kiddie stuff). When the time came I commandeered the TV, threw everyone out of the room, and was as transfixed by this hour-long show as Kubrick might have been. The version I saw was narrated by Burgess Meredith. The original version was narrated by Douglas Rain, who in 2001 did the voice of HAL 9000, the faceless computer who runs the spaceship. I assume that wasn’t a coincidence.

Even the initial scenes with the apes seemed to me convincing.

With Kubrick’s movies, as has been noted, the stunning visuals tended to drain out the humanity. Here we see it might have been a conscious choice. The warmest, familiar scenes are in the space station with Heywood Floyd and the Russian diplomats. Floyd’s speech at the lunar base, praised afterward by a colleague, was waffling bureaucratic mush which of course is quintessentially human, if anything is.

(Why does Floyd, an American, have a British-sounding daughter? The film betrays its 1968 creation by showing females as subservient stewardesses in 2001. Also if you’re my age you remember when first names were called “Christian names” no matter what the religion. Then there is the joke with the zero-gravity toilet with long, complicated instructions.)

But when we get to the astronauts, they’re almost like automatons. They’re expressionless as they watch the BBC, do their exercises, play chess with HAL (and of course lose). Most disturbingly, Frank Poole doesn’t even smile as he watches his parents’ birthday message. The music adds to the sterile loneliness.

I don’t have to describe the famous lobotomy performed on HAL. And then the surprise announcement by Floyd as to the finding of the monolith on the Moon — the first sign of extraterrestrial life. This can’t be explained in the movie, but in the book it’s speculated that HAL’s neurotic behavior was caused by knowing this secret but being instructed not to divulge it. In an early scene with Bowman HAL hints at what he knows when he expresses puzzlement at the secrecy which descended on the project in the time before launch. In fact the mission started out as a standard exploration but plans were changed when they found the monolith.

In the ending, we see the new “star child” being born. This film made a great impression on me — I made my poor mother bring me to see it 11 times. In the car we would talk about what this “monolith” was — I tended to believe it was God. My grandfather had an old lead pipe on his workbench. I was impressed with how heavy it was and how soft. I filed it down to a monolith with the dimensions 1:4:9 (which is in the book, which I read of course, though in the movie it’s more like 1:8:27). At night in bed I would turn it over and over above my head, imagining it in space.

Outer space was one of my interests as a kid. The others were dinosaurs and chemistry. (I could draw and describe 128 species of dinosaurs, and memorized all 102 elements — little kids can do that.) I gradually fell out of interest because I had read all the books in the village library (it wasn’t exactly the Library of Congress) except for a few that had weird symbols I didn’t understand (of course I didn’t know about trigonometry or calculus). I wrote and wrote in class but at some point there was no more to write; my district had no “gifted” program. That kind of dying-on-the-vine wouldn’t happen today, with the internet available.

Anyway, back to the “star child”. Arthur C. Clarke wrote the accompanying novel and it was based on his short story, “The Sentinel”. He was called “the colossus of science fiction” but I don’t think his mindset was scientific. Sudden change to a new form of being is not how science works. Real life is stepwise Darwinian evolution. Clarke’s sensibility was that of a Christian apocalypticist.

Finally there was Mad Magazine’s sendup (“201 Min. of Space Idiocy”). After Moon Watcher has triumphantly flung his bone/weapon up in the air, in the next panel, Heywood Floyd says to the stewardess, “Call me crazy, but I can swear this ship was just hit by a bone!“

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

Clarke's mindset was very much scientific. He was a physicist and mathematician. He was involved in the early development of radar. He was also an atheist, although he wrote about how fascinated he was by the concept of God. As a writer, he enjoyed throwing curveballs, which is what he did with 'The Sentinel.' and other stories like 'The Star.' But most of his stuff is definitely hard SF. Very science based.

[SRG2]

More "god interest" in the short story “Nine Billion Names of God” - and as "everyone" has noted, the ending violates relativity theory.

The soundtrack of 2001 is a fantastic use of classical music – particularly of course Also Sprach Zarathustra. (It also got me interested in Ligeti.)

2001 also has one of my two favourite film cuts – the falling bone cutting to the space ship. (The other is in Predator II, where we cut from King Willie’s face as he’s about to charge the predator to King Willie’s head being carried away by the predator It is altogether dread.)

[Dan Schiavetta]

The cut from the bone to the spaceship — one tool of man to another — is genius. More effective because there’s no sound, leaving it more to the viewer to make the connection. Kubrick knew how to use music but knew how to use silence too.

Another good cut is at the end, from the other dimension to the Moon, so that we see we are “home” again, and back to where the message was transmitted from.

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

Relativity is a thorn in the side of a good amount of sf. Asimov wrote a few good essays about the problem, and how some writers would try to "science" around it, and others would just ignore it. In his short fiction like "Nine Billion Names of God," Clarke ignored.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Perhaps space can be “warped”.

“Scotty! Warp Factor Nine!”

[Dan Schiavetta]

Clarke obviously had an inventive mind. To give a small example, in the 2001 book we read about a tanker on flex-wheels “which had proved one of the best all-purpose ways of getting around on the Moon. A series of flat plates arranged in a circle, each plate independently mounted and sprung, the flex-wheel had many of the advantages of the caterpillar track from which it had evolved. It would adapt its shape and diameter to the terrain over which it was moving, and unlike a caterpillar track, would continue to function even if a few sections were missing.” I wonder if this was his own conception?

The movie doesn’t have much of a plot so a lot of the book is Clarke chatting about various topics, which is enjoyable because he’s such good company. For example, his chapter “Concerning E.T.’s”. It reminded me of “Worlds Without End” by A.N. Berrill (1964), another book about extraterrestrial life which I read in my precocious years. I don’t think our speculations as to the nature of E.T.’s have gotten any more knowledgeable in the years since, except for the discovery of exo-planets capable of sustaining life (or at least life as we know it), something that had been predicted by Clarke and Berrill and by just about every astronomer.

The book is also padded with scenes which I wish were in the movie, such as this from his top-secret flight to the Moon, where he is the only passenger: “Only the charming little stewardess seemed completely at ease in his presence. As Floyd quickly discovered, she came from Bali, and had carried beyond the atmosphere some of the grace and mystery of that still largely unspoiled island. One of his strangest, and most enchanting, memories of the entire trip was her zero-gravity demonstration of some classical Balinese dance movements, with the lovely, blue-green crescent of the waning Earth as a backdrop.”

But . . . if you’re going to tell a story about the progress of humanity, you need something dramatic. Evolution is boring.

[Dr. Ed 2]

The USAF developed some interesting snow vehicles in the 1950s to service Arctic radar installations before helicopters had the range and lift capacity to do it. If he were into radar, he might have drawn the idea from there, although they wound up going with balloon tires.

[Frank Drackman]

Fuck, we got more snow at Minot AFB North Dakota (we have both Dakotas, North & South!) than the North Pole.

Frank

[Dr. Ed 2]

And Loring AFB got even more -- and you cleared down to bare pavement. But your runway was only a couple of miles long.

It wasn't the amount of snow in the Arctic but traveling hundreds of miles over it that was the problem.

[Noscitur a sociis]

It is certainly a visually stunning movie, and a technical wonder, particularly in light of the state of human space exploration at the time. It’s also incredibly boring, and I have pretty much zero interest in ever sitting through it again. It’s also interesting how the book is explicit in explaining elements (like the ending) that are incomprehensible in the movie.

This can’t be explained in the movie, but in the book it’s speculated that HAL’s neurotic behavior was caused by knowing this secret but being instructed not to divulge it.

My recollection is that this is outright stated in the book, and it certainly is in the sequels (and the 2010 movie, I think, although it’s been a while since I watched it).

[Nige]

Sequel is under-rated and has a great cast, but is hampered by actually explaining to the viewer what's going on and having a comprehensible payoff that's pure sensawunda sf.

[Magister]

I thought the movie implied the motivation for HAL's actions; the other astronauts, who knew about the transmission to Jupiter, were put on the ship in suspended animation, and HAL killed them rather than let the other crew wake them and find out about it. At that point, it continued to act to maintain the coverup. Very much an Isaac Asimov robotics plot, where some vague or misguided instruction to a robot results in inconvenient interpretation (although never killing people, given the Laws of Robotics).

Kubrick's films were visually spectacular but the people in them are rarely sympathetic. The last surviving astronaut here is an interesting exception, but he gets swallowed up by the ending.

[Dan Schiavetta]

I just looked at the clip of HAL’s conversation with Dave that I mentioned earlier (it’s on youtube), and you are correct. The viewer is given a clear idea that the astronauts in hibernation know something Dave and Frank don’t. HAL plays dumb but we find out that he knew it too.

HAL is the most interesting character in the movie. As someone pointed out, the astronauts are more robotic than he is.

[Syd Henderson]

“Kubrick’s inspiration supposedly was the Canadian special “Universe”, which Bozo the Clown announced on his show.” Now we know why he didn’t show the aliens.

(Or they could have looked like the aliens in "Childhood's End.") He does have a spiritual sense in a lot of his books. I remember the sort of miracle that gets the monks off the mountain in "The Fountains of Paradise" which is mostly hard science fiction.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

We had to wait for Stephen King for that.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Speaking of space toilets, one of the things that freaked out the early astronauts were the occasional “Golden Showers” outside the spacecraft. They eventually figured out that was sunlight reflecting/refracting off the droplets of frozen urine that they had just expelled.

I'm guessing -- just guessing here -- that in a near vacuum, it would form very small particles as it froze, which like the contrail of a high flying plane, would be soon but not immediate.

[Frank Drackman]

Get Dr. Ed 2 trying to pretend he doesn't know about "Golden Showers"

Frank

[BravoCharlieDelta]

Did you watch the video?

[Dr. Ed 2]

Queen, answer my question: Do YOU know which Capitol windows are blastproof and which ones can still be broken?

I don"t.

So please explain how a random thug *would* know....

[Dr. Ed 2]

The moon landing was real. All of the transmissions from the moon were in analog and I'm sure the Soviets were monitoring them. And good enough at math to both triangulate the source and calculate the proper delay for transmission.

They would have been in the UN the next day if they could prove any of this was faked, QED it wasn't...

[Frank Drackman]

Thanks for clearing that up!