Ghettos in Chicago and Warsaw

A while ago I mentioned proposals that have come from some quarters to cordon off high-crime neighborhoods of Chicago like Englewood. 

Here is a much more personal, insightful reflection on what proposals like this imply about the value of black lives.

Cool new polling technique

This is an article about "deliberative polling", a way of gauging public opinion that relies on educating a group about the facts of a given issue, and then asking them what they would propose or how they would prefer to react to it.  I've heard of similar things in the US where they bring a group of people from across the political spectrum in the same room, then give them the basic facts around a thorny political issue, and they can often reach a consensus way forward after a few hours of deliberation.

Best spy movies

This is a fun (subjective) rundown of the best spy movies.




The 2011 movie version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy figures high on the list, though many LeCarre devotees say the 2011 movie doesn't bear a candle to the BBC's 1979 seven-part miniseries of the same work.  Here is the BBC's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (condensed to six parts on Youtube).




And for anyone else who's a huge fan of spy fiction, John LeCarre is coming out with a new book in a few months.  I'm excited!

Rwanda opting for national production and not importation of leftovers

This is an interesting article about Rwanda and other East African countries' attempts to limit the importation of secondhand clothes from the US.  In many developing countries much of their clothing comes from this source, imports of secondhand stuff from the States.  Whatever Goodwill or other, for-profit thrift shops can't sell in the US, and whatever you put in those weird bins in parking lots with a picture of the Earth or something on them, get vacuum-sealed into massive bales and sent in shipping containers to the Third World.  There is an entire economic sector in these countries based on these bales of used clothes.  There are stores in the big cities that wholesale the bales, then there are smaller operators that buy the bales from the wholesalers and take them back to their retail boutiques in the city or in the provincial villages, where they open the bales, sort the clothes (there's everything from wedding dresses to Little League uniforms to women's work pumps), and sell them to the locals.  So you can see that there is a whole value chain, with different levels of operators, built up around this trade.  A similar "value chain" exists in many countries around imported used cars, or even imported junkers for parts.  In many countries there is no longer much domestic production of clothes, because the secondhand imports provide most of the clothes for the populace, and the few wealthier people buy expensive imported brand names new.

By limiting or banning these imports of used clothes, what Rwanda is trying to do is to upgrade from an economy based on import and consumption of the throwaways of the world economy, to an economy based on domestic production for an internal market and even for export.  I'm sure many economists would label this a misled type of import substitution, but every developed country that I know of got that way in large part by taking active measures to upgrade from lower-value to higher-value products for export, and replacing imports of high-value, finished products with imports of raw materials and other low-value products.  In this case a purist might then insist that Rwanda should keep importing used clothes for its local consumption (a low-value import) and produce high-value finished apparel for export.  But I imagine that it's hard to jump-start an economy without first focusing on the domestic market, especially for something as basic as apparel, which can represent a big part of a family's basket of purchases.  So I wish Rwanda and the other countries luck.  Yeah, US rag exporters might take a hit, but I'm sure they can recover and move into other, more productive sectors.  In the long run, it behooves the US to have a world of more advanced, prosperous economies that we can trade with, as opposed to a bunch of basketcase countries consuming our garbage and benefiting only a few US exporters of said garbage.

My faith is from Central America

A few nights ago I watched the movie "Salvador" from Oliver Stone.  It's well-shot and entertaining, and I forgive it its broad use of artistic license to juke around the events as they really happened.  More specifically, I will inform my readers that the Salvadoran Civil War did not in fact center on a single US reporter who was heavy into drug use and prostitutes and spoke very rickety Spanish.

Beyond the cinematic merit of the movie, it reminded me how central the war in El Salvador has been to my personal formation.  Ever since learning about it in a Bible study class that my friend's mother organized for us when we were teenagers, the Salvadoran conflict, and more specifically the role of Archbishop Romero and the Catholic Church, shaped what I wanted to do in my professional life, how I saw the world, and how I live my faith to this day.

I don't know if I had long-term professional plans at aage 15.  I'm sure that whatever I was thinking might well have involved travel, the Third World, helping others.  But learning about El Salvador, about a conflict so clearly rooted in inequality and unfairness, left me dreaming of working on the side of the people and taking a dramatic stand against the greedy and the oppressors.

This framing of the world between oppressors and victims--I guess I'd thought about it before with regards to the gentrification that was going on in my neighborhood and many others in Chicago, but in that case my reading of the situation didn't find much outside support or reaffirmation among the 1990s intellectual climate of neoliberalism that defined my generation.  Learning about Romero gave me a real, vindicated example of a place where underdevelopment was clearly intentional and malicious, not just a temporary state for the unfortunate nations that hadn't yet partaken of the post-Cold War, End-of-History banquet of prosperity that would surely bless us all with its bounty in just a matter of time.  I've since seen many more nuanced, subtle manifestations of this, of very clear human intent perpetuating suffering and underdevelopment.  And I have also seen plenty of cases where there isn't a single clear bad guy, but where instead underdevelopment is the unfortunate result of lots of impersonal factors, or ill-guided but not ill-intended decisions.

But the Salvadoran conflict was a good first primer for me, for it presented a clear, black-and-white case study that was easy for my adolescent mind to understand.  When we are learning about the myriad realities and diversities and facts of the world, and especially as teens, when we are trying to categorize and make sense of things that are usually not easily categorizable, an all-or-nothing case like the Salvadoran war is a first introduction such that we may gradually begin to understand other cases that do or don't bear elements of what happened in El Salvador.  Later in my life Colombia taught me many more lessons along these lines, but it is a much larger, sprawling, more complex situation.  El Salvador was small and neat and clear-cut enough for a first primer.

Studying the Salvadoran Civil War as a teen didn't only influence my future professional plans, but also, and especially, my faith.  Seeing the movie of Romero when I was 15 or 16 showed me a true Catholicism that sided with the poor and the marginalized, the Catholicism I'd assumed as a young child that everyone believed in, since Christ is pretty clear on that point, and my parents seemed to stress the option for the poor (without callling it that) and the solidarity of Christianity.  In fact, as a kid I was always a bit puzzled when I'd hear in Sunday school (and even in my public Kindergarten)  that we were supposed to share and not be attached to material things, and then at the same time I heard a chorus of voices from my Cold War surroundings decrying the Communists for...making everyone share stuff and not be rich or greedy.

Anyway, by adolescence I'd seen that most Catholics weren't too moved by the idea of radical solidarity, of siding with the poor in their struggles, and I felt alone in clinging to a progressive vision of the Faith.  Alone, that is, with my enlightened family and a few close Catholic Leftist friends.  Only much later I'd realize that Chicago white ethnic inner-city Catholicism in general, even beyond my close friends and family, is in fact tinged much more by these progressive tendencies than the religiosity of many other parts of the country.  At the time though, seeing Romero showed me that others in the Church had thought that way, so it validated my vision, strengthened my conviction, and codified it.  I don't think I picked up the term "liberation theology" at that point, but I had become a believer in its fundamental tenets of recognizing Christ in each person, and working for worldly justice as a way to bring closer the Kingdom of God.  Later on, in college, I had liberation theology named for me, and I was inspired by the writings of Aristide on similar struggles in Haiti.  But it was El  Salvador that had initially lit the spark for me.

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In the past two or three years I've been exposed to a number of resources about the Church and labor history in Honduras, which is funny, since Honduras has notoriously been a US pawn for most of its history and, unique among its neighbors, never had an armed uprising (or a gory civil war).  I would highly recommend any of the things I'm about to cite.

One is a book called "A Camera in the Garden of Eden", which is a detailed photographic history of the 1954 banana workers' strike in northern Honduras.  It is a remarkable book for a number of reasons--its use of and critical examination of photographs as historic primary sources, not just adornments or companions to textual sources; its analysis of the complexities of culture, race, and identity among Salvadorans, Arabs, Chinese, Americans, and Hondurans in a mid-century Honduran town; and its account of a turning point for the American Jesuits in Honduras in which they stopped being a tool of US neo-imperialism and started to be a radical voice for the Honduran poor and workers.  And it ties the turbulent events of 1954 to the realities of present-day Honduras.

The next source is the autobiography of a Midwestern Catholic boy turned WWII soldier turned radical Jesuit priest in Honduras.  It's called To Be a Revolutionary, by Jim Carney, and captures very well the more radical Leftist strain of Cold-War-era Catholicism in Latin America.

Last is a radio station that I enjoy listening to when I'm in Honduras for work, called Radio Progreso.  It is the radio station of the Honduran Jesuits, and broadcasts an interesting mix of pop music (reggaeton most of the day, rancheros in the evening, etc.), revolutionary 70s-style folk music, student-run university talk shows, very incisive news, all punctuated by occasional messages like, "It is Christmas time, and we await the birth of Christ and His bringing of light to the world.  But with Juan Orlando Hernandez [president of Honduras] seeking to concentrate power in the Executive Branch and establish a neoliberal de facto dictatorship, we must fight to make a reality Christ's promise of light and liberation."  It's trippy

Perhaps most fascinating of all is that all of these things--the banana workers' strike, the Jesuits in Honduras, and their radio station--are all centered in a third-tier town called El Progreso, which I'd never heard of until my work started bringing me to Honduras.  It has played an outsized role in the nation's last century or so.  I was really excited in the run-up to the 2016 US election that Tim Kaine had in fact spent some time in El Progreso, and was profoundly shaped by what he saw with the Jesuits there.  I was psyched about the possibility of having a fellow Liberation Theology Catholic in the White House.

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Now my family and I are lucky enough to live in Central America, to experience firsthand the little joys and frustrations that so infuse a society that is at once so opulent and so poor.  The Mass that we regularly attend is the children's Mass at our middle-class neighborhood church.  The music is radical, bordering on revolutionary, and the preaching calls for human dignity, justice, and mercy for those who suffer.  One of my favorite songs perfectly captures my vision of a Church in solidarity with the working people.  The lyrics read as follows:

Este pan y este vino, que en tu mesa te ofrecemos, Señor,
Son las ganas de construir una sociedad de hermanos,
El sudor de nuestra lucha.  Son los gritos de tu pueblo, óyenos.

Este pan y este vino, que en tu mesa compartimos, Señor,
Es la pena del obrero, es el llanto de sus hijos.
La esperanza fuerte y grande, de que haya vida para todos, óyenos.

Acéptalos, Señor y conviértelos, en tu Cuerpo y en tu Sangre, y que sean para siempre tu vida y tu fuerza, que nos haga caminar, que nos haga hoy vencer.

Este pan y este vino, que en tu mesa se reparten, Señor,
A los hombres que trabajan, que adelantan hoy tu reino
En los barrios y en las calles, en la fábrica y las plazas, óyenos, Señor.

Our Mass is presided by a Colombian priest from the Caribbean coast who, judging from little stories he's let slip, has had his brushes with the Colombian conflict.  I imagine him stuck in an impossible place, reviled by the Leftist insurgents for not being radical enough, at the same time he's being targeted for death by Right-wing paramilitaries unhappy with his protection of the displaced and the other victims of the war.  This, of course, is precisely where the faithful should be, risking our lives to defend the weak against all sides.

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At this point in my life, my faith resides almost solely in the so-called Little Church, the Church of the people.  I'm still moved by the songs and the shared rite in the Mass, but these things don't move me much the other 6 days of the week.  Neither does much of the more mystical theology, anymore.  But when I think of the Church as the collective of flawed people struggling for dignity and justice, when I think that I am looking at Christ when I look at my fellow humans, when I see injustice and suffering and oppression as sins to be purged by our own faithful labor, then I feel exalted in spirt, and I can wax poetic all day.  I might have left the Church by now were it not for the example of liberation theology, which is to say that the testimony of Central America probably saved my faith.

The most moving image of the Eucharist for me is to think that we all are the body and blood of Christ already.  In that sense, maybe the transubstantiated Host isn't sanctifying us, but rather as we come together and recognize Christ among us and in all of us, it is we who sanctify and transubstantiate the bread and wine, as we ingest it and incoporate it into our individual and collective body of Christ.  Anyway, I was reminded by the Salvador movie that much of who I am, much of my conviction, is in fact inspired by my learning the history of this tiny country I'd never set foot in until I was in my 30s.  Of course later experience added to and fleshed out this initial vision from my adolescence, but that was the initial seed.  It's so much a part of me that I'd forgotten about it, taken it for granted, and even thought of the Americas as a known quantity, something blase.  I've been dreaming about working in Africa for a long time.  But now I'm reminded that my formation, my inspiration, and my dreams of the future were long ccentered on working in the Americas.  When I recall that, I feel grateful to be living and working in Central America.

Peppa Pig and race consciousness

My littlest boy is a big fan of Peppa Pig.  We don't watch much TV, but when we do, he often wants to see Peppa.  Only recently have I become aware that Peppa is a bit of a sore subject with lots of parents, because she and everyone in her family are pretty naughty.  I'll admit that I usually don't watch with my kids, so I am not sure of the extent to which Peppa acts like a little asshole.  On the other hand, I don't let them watch much of Peppa or any other one thing, and we certainly don't surround them with purchased merchandise of Peppa or anyone else.  Now that this is on my radar, I'll make it a point to watch Peppa with my boy every now and again, and comment when she's being naughty.  But in general I think the key isn't necessary sheltering your kids entirely from noxious influences, but rather being aware and present and calling out when someone's doing wrong.  And vary their diet--not too much of Peppa or Power Rangers or anything.  I won't bother banning Peppa entirely from our house, just as I would never have had 55+ episodes of Peppa on hand in the first place.  So as in many things in childrearing, I'll lean on common sense and moderation as opposed to any radical pronouncements or abrupt changes.

On that note, I recently came across this guide for parents on how to raise children that are conscious of racial injustice and inequalities, and also empowered to fight them in their own little way.  Again it seems that, more than radical, noble or romantic actions, just a bit of committed effort, common sense, and honesty can go a long way in raising kids that are part of the solution to our nation's racial problems.  I especially like the spiderweb/ball of yarn exercise to communicate to kids how racial injustice has been forged over centuries, and how it will take a lot of continued effort to untangle that web.

It's hard to be a decent capitalist

This is an article that claims that Whole Foods' recent economic woes signal that its brand of "conscious capitalism" (capitalism that tries to be easy on the environment and on workers) is not viable.  I don't know if the author is using airtight logic, but I do think that it is hard for companies to maintain certain basic values (fair pay, environmental stewardship, favoring local business) if they aren't obligated to by laws, regulations, and pressure from workers and consumers.  I linked a while ago to an entrepreneur that made a similar point--"good actor" companies end up losing out to "bad actors", because the latter cut costs by doing wrong, and even get subsidized by the good guys' taxes. In particular, it appears from the first article that Whole Foods' management was ardently opposed to organized labor, and to government regulations.  So I don't see how Whole Foods could ever do right by labor and the planet, if its only "consciousness" was just an idiosyncracy of its ownership, and unenforceable by any outside law.

Refugees admitted again, and then not

This is an article from about a month ago, explaining that the effective limits on the total numbers of refugees entering the US have been lifted, and that we would be reclaiming our role again as the main destination country for third-country resettlement of refugees, at least for 2017.  This is the decent and the correct way to do things, fitting of such a great and powerful country as ours.

But it seems that this has changed since the article was written, in light of the Supreme Court's go-ahead to tentatively allow key parts of the Trump administration's Muslim ban to remain in effect.  So it looks like, until the Supreme Court definitively pronounces itself on the Muslim ban, no refugees will be admitted to the US anymore after July 12.

The Constitutional margins (in honor of July 4th)

I recently read a fascinating article about state and local governments' willful non-compliance with attempts by federal immigration officials to arrest and deported undocumented immigrants.  Far from decrying the disobedience of these local jurisdictions, the author applauds them as upholding the very spirit of our Federalist system.  If a federal law goes against the will of the states or their people, then part of the essence of Federalism is for states to fight against such law, either through explicit challenges in court, or simply by making the law impossible for the Feds to enforce.

This all made me curious about the group that published the article, and its website devoted to the Tenth Amendment.  They are initially hard to categorize politically, and I think they keep their language intentionally ambiguous, not explicitly partisan, in order not to repel first-time readers.  I'm fine with this--I welcome thinkers that don't fall into an easy Democrat-Republican dichotomy.  But as you dig a bit more, you see that their seemingly neutral call for more power for states and people tends to skew libertarian, if not farther Right and outright antagonistic to progressive causes.  Why do I say this?  Let's check out the campaigns/issues they're promoting.  They seem to be into legalization of marijuana at the state level.  Okay, pretty center-libertarian thus far.  Their calls to undo police militarization, fight common core standards in education, and hamper NSA spying can also count on a pretty wide bipartisan base.  But their attempts to "resist" Obamacare at the state level ring clearly partisan, and their campaign to avoid any federal gun control legislation is straight out of the Right-wing looney bin.  Most viable gun legislation that I can recall from the federal government, not just from Trump but even from the Obama-era Republican Congress, has in fact attempted to weaken the controls that states and cities put on guns, not the other way around.  And given that, why would a supposedly neutral group dedicated to states' rights and the power of the people be pushing for less gun control and less medical care?  They could just as easily (and just as coherently, within their Tenth Amendment convictions) try to drive people-led campaigns to institute state-based healthcare systems that expand coverage, or to put common-sense controls on gun ownership and sales.  A true Tenther should applaud actions by states and people to make the local laws they desire.  But these guys don't applaud progressive local campaigns, just anti-progressive ones, which knocks them down a number of notches in my estimation.  Once again, what is presented as a nonpartisan, objective call for greater adherence to the Constitution, is just as partisan as anything else, but with the added sin that they try to deny the subjectivity inherent to any human endeavor, and decry any opposing position as being irrational and partisan.

So I started reading up on this movement in favor of the Tenth Amendment, and confirmed my gut feeling that their selectively literal (and thus very narrow) reading of the Tenth Amendment, their ardent quoting of "Judge" Andrew Napolitano, and their insistence on the legal nonstarter doctrine of nullification, all sound a bit too much like the Posse Comitatus and sovereign citizen movements.  These latter go one step (or many steps) further than the Tenthers in their claims that not just some of the federal government, but in fact all of it and even state governments, are illegitimate, and that the only valid government is that which I concede to myself, or at best to the county sheriff as the highest level of legitimate government authority.

The thing is that all of these movements, the Tenthers a bit less so than the cuckoos, start to get into almost magical, incantational thinking about the Constitution and about government in general.  I'm not just talking about the sovereign citizen belief that the US government has since some specific date in its history entered in thrall to the worldwide Zionist conspiracy, and that to free yourself from the talons of the Matrix-like totalitarian federal or state government you have to file a specific sequence of magical documents that will somehow sever your ties and your slavery to that government.  No, I'm talking in general about an awed reverence for the exact words of the Constitution, and a childish insistence on some pure definition of government, the individual, and sovereignty that is totally internally coherent but also totally unworkable in a real world of interdependent human beings (which is to say the world that has existed since the first human beings and even protohumans, who all lived in small, largely autonomous groups).

First let's talk about the exact words of the Tenth Amendment, which say that powers not delegated to the federal government will be reserved to the states.  But the main power delegated to the federal government is to make, execute, and enforce laws, so that pretty much covers anything the federal government lays out in those laws.  Thus most of what a Tenther might decry as the federal government overreaching its powers, really isn't, if the government makes a law enabling it to do something.

But more importantly than this specific point, I want to talk about a purist, infantile streak we seem to have in the US when it comes to our Constitution in general.  I think a lot of people believe that, if the Constitution does or doesn't say something, then that is somehow sacred, even if it goes against our common sense.  In this vein, a Tenther could (and many do) argue that a nationwide program like Social Security is unconstitutional.  But the thing is, if the elected officials propose and approve something, and it is widely popular among the people, and neither the states nor subsequent federal decisionmakers want to undo it, and it doesn't suppress but rather amplifies human rights, then it's fine.  Of course it's not in the Constitution.  The Constitution is a short document set up to be more of an operating system than anything else, and it sure as hell didn't know about a 20th-century welfare state.  But if that's what we the people, through our elected officials and the laws they make and we approve of, want, and we've made the law and the entities to carry out the Social Security system through the general guidelines laid out by the Constitution, then what's the problem?  On a different note, if the Constitution explicitly approves of an abhorrent practice like slavery, who in their right mind would want to preserve slavery, even if ending slavery goes against the will of a lot of the Southern populace and states?  I guess in summary, my position is that if something promotes human rights (even if it goes against majority rule), or if it meets with majority approval and doesn't violate someone's human rights, then I'm not too concerned with what the Constitution does or doesn't say regarding it.

The converse side of an absurdly rigid insistence on the wording of the Constitution is something I've long suffered from, which is an almost divine-gift conception of rights.  I guess it makes sense--the document that founded our nation speaks of rights being endowed on us by God, and much American thought has revolved around the idea of natural rights.  But in the end, no right is natural--they're all social.  I think if we understood this, as I have come to as I've learned and thought more about rights, then we could avoid a lot of the problems that arise from an overly romantic notion of the genesis of rights.  Lots of conservative discourse seems to center on the idea that God or the Constitution (or really the Declaration of Independence, though we tend to get them all sort of mixed up) has only endowed us with a few rights (explicitly life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but maybe also free speech and the right to arms and some other Bill of Rights stuff), which are sort of natural or "hands-off".  I mean by this that, in the conservative conception, you are born with these rights, and the only obstacle to your exercising them is a meddling or oppressive government.  In this vision, other rights like the right to food or education are not valid--they reek of European-style socialism or Napoleonic constitutions or something--because a person born in the wilderness (a la Rousseau or Hobbes) wouldn't be born with education or food or be able to obtain these things except through the intervention of others, or at least of his own work.  Life and liberty are passive rights, requiring not exertion but rather the lack of exertion of adversaries who would take them from you, while education or food require action to obtain, most likely the action of an activist government.  Which to conservatives is bad.

I held this way of thinking for a long time.  Not that food and education are bad, but that they're not rights, or at least not in the way life and liberty are.  But as I've been exposed to lots of places without rights, or where people really have to fight to create their rights or gain recognition for them, I've come to realize that all rights are active, created, and none are just natural.  The potential obstacles preventing you from enjoying even the basic rights to liberty or free speech aren't just an oppressive government, but also any individual who would deny you your rights if you weren't protected by your neighbors or community (in other words, by your government).  Government is necessary to ensure your rights, just as it can potentially limit them.  There is no such thing as a Rousseauan or Hobbesian noble savage that would be just fine if only an oppressive government didn't come along.  All of us are social beings, and life and liberty require just as much "activist government" as do food and education.  In all of these cases you need a collective to protect and ensure your rights.  Conversely, even the hypothetical noble savage couldn't procure water and food for himself if someone else were screwing up his drinking water upstream, or overhunting game.  So let's just get rid once and for all of this silly idea that people would be just fine if they were allowed to be independent, self-sufficient, and free of government interference.  Even the hardest-core survivalist is stocking canned food, using modern technology, and relying on a situation of civil order and an intact ecosystem, all of which are made possible by a functioning modern state that allows invention and commerce, criminal justice and environmental protection.  There is no such thing as a sovereign citizen.  We all live in a country that we have to share with others.

All this said, I like the Tenthers' reclaiming of nullification.  Now, from my cursory wikipedia search, "nullification" describes a very specific legal doctrine that states can unilaterally reject any federal law they consider unconstitutional.  By this definition, nullification is a non-starter, as I've said above, because no court has ever upheld it as a legitimate legal principle.  But the Tenthers seem to focus on de facto nullification, meaning that states can make federal laws unenforceable by refusing to comply or even by making laws that contradict federal law.  An example of the former is state and local non-cooperation with federal immigration officials.  The latter would include states' legalizing marijuana despite its remaining illegal by federal law.  This type of nullification I can get on board with, since it is a sort of passive way of resisting laws that are unjust.  Frankly, it doesn't need to stop at the state level.  Even if a state or local government makes a law, communties or individuals could do a lot of things to hamstring it and make it unenforceable. 

One last comment on human rights (which as I've just demonstrated are a total social creation, but one that I wholeheartedly believe in and approve of).  The main disagreement I have with the Tenther sort of thinking is that, in hewing only to the language of the Constitution, the Tenthers seem to be agnostic or even antagonistic as to whether something promotes or violates human rights.  In fact, in my understanding of US history I have seen far more cases in which the states are the ones trying to oppress people, and the federal government comes in with a law to ensure individual rights against the depradations of state and local government.  I'm thinking of lots of Civil Rights issues, from slavery to Jim Crow to voting to marriage equality.  To me in fact this is part of the charm of a federal government--it is a big guy that can stand up for the little guy against the majority, whereas states seem to me to err more on the side of the tyranny of the majority (or even a powerful minority, as in Jim Crow-era Mississippi, or majority Democrat states today that elect mostly Republican US Congresspeople).  The UN and other multinational bodies can do something similar--they respect national sovereignty, but when a nation fails to guarantee or even actively violates human rights for its people, then the UN steps in to protect the weak.

To that end, something like Obamacare, which from what I gather seems abhorrent to Tenthers, most likely does overreach what the original wording of the Cosntitution grants to the Executive, but if it expands human rights and wellbeing, and above all if it is approved of by the states and their people, then that's totally fine with me.

Three Body Problem

I just finished The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu.  It is an amazing science fiction book, and now I'm afraid I simply must read the other two lenghty volumes in the series.  I am not that into science fiction, but after reading an interview with President Obama about his favorite books during his tenure, I put this book on my list, and it really hooked me.  I'd highly recommend it.