Mishri.someshwar

I suppose all children love their mothers.  She represents everything that is decent, unwavering and solid in an otherwise changing world.  A fountain of unconditional love.  My mother was all that and much more.

Lalita started life in Dharwar, a small town in the state of Karnataka India, in an affluent joint family where parents, aunts, uncles and cousins lived together as one, presided over by a grandfather and grandmother.  She was the eldest of four siblings; A tom boy who played cricket with the boys, rode bikes and later played badminton like a champ.   She started life on a tumultuous note surviving a bizarre and  horrific car accident, brought on by the new family car being left unattended on a slope with the motor running and four children ( my mom and her cousins) jumping and squabbling on the seats.  The car moved slowly down the slope gathering momentum and then speeding furiously down, landed below on the railway track wheels up,  and here’s the highlight, an approaching train had to be flagged and, yes, it was mercifully  brought to a halt. Her cousins were thrown out and escaped with minor cuts and bruises but my mother was horrifically injured with broken glass embedded in her skull. Mercifully she survived and recovered.  Sounds like something out of the movies?  Yes, that’s how it all started.

The family business went bankrupt and the joint family disintegrated.  The uncles went to Bombay with their families, in search of opportunity,  and settled there.  My grandfather went too, but left his family behind, with the intention of returning and collecting them later.  My mother who was in college at the time,  dropped out for lack of funds ,and after waiting for a few months for her father to return and no communication from him, decided to follow him to Bombay.  She left alone, leaving her mother and siblings behind.  She stayed with relatives and after a long search finally found him.  He had found a place to live and was going to send for his family, when his daughter arrived.  My grandfather a die hard businessman started a new business as a cotton merchant and brought his family over to Bombay.

The Second World War was upon them.  Amidst the din of sirens, and the ominous gloom of blackouts the family began a new life in Bombay.  My mother started work at the Central Telegraph Office which was kept very busy indeed during the years of the war.  She later joined the RAF,  the Royal Air Force as one of its ground support staff.  She had many interesting anecdotes about her years here.  The stern discipline; she once forgot her identification pass.  The guard (Tommy as she referred to him) at the door, who saw her everyday refused to let her in and demanded she go right back home and return with the pass.  Home was several stations away by train but he wouldn’t be persuaded.  Finally, she did just that but out of that experience was born a new respect for discipline.  She also recalled the ‘Christmas Ball’at the RAF with a twinkle in her eye.  One that she stubbornly insisted on going to, leaving the parents, relatives  and neighbors flabbergasted.  What could a chaste Hindu girl be doing at a ball, amidst the foreigners who were known to have ‘lax morals?’  She had a wonderful time.  The foreigners, her colleagues, as it turned out were perfect gentlemen.  I have not mentioned that my mother was a beautiful woman but completely unaware of it, as beautiful in those days meant being fair and she was dusky and was always made to feel unattractive.  That was the way things worked back then.  Indians still have a hang up about fairness as is evident from the huge popularity of the cream ‘Fair and Lovely’.

My dad was a journalist and worked as an Assistant Editor for an English Weekly  “The Illustrated Weekly of India” based in Mumbai owned by the Times of India.  He was a brilliant writer and scholar and had been nominated as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts back in 1937.  Besides writing and books, his other passion was Indian Classical music. He was a member of many music clubs that regularly featured talented artists who later became famous.  My grandfather besides being a businessman was also a keen lover of Indian Classical music, and played the dilruba ( an instrument like a violin, but bigger and more strings), like a pro.  It was at one of these soirees that the two met.  From then on they became good friends and my father visited him often to discuss music and hear him play.  That’s how he met my mom.  My dad’s previous wife had died a few years prior when she was given a penicillin shot in the hospital where she was being treated for an infection, being allergic to penicillin.  It was a clear cut case of criminal negligence where the hospital should have been prosecuted, but my father, devastated, had neither the will nor the inclination to pursue legal action.  He also had a seven year old son from his first marriage, and the child was living with his maternal grandparents.

After a brief courtship my dad proposed and the two married on November 3rd, 1945.  The war was almost over, but the ‘Quit India’ movement which had been simmering for many years gathered momentum.  It was led by Mahatma Gandhi and political leaders were regularly jailed for defiance, making inflammatory speeches and other activities.  People started weaving their own cloth after calls by Gandhi to boycott foreign cloth.  Those were troubled times but the beacon of freedom glowed in the distance,  the British tired from the war, and the determination of the freedom fighters  relented and finally it seemed that India would be free at last.  My brother was born in August of  1946.  There was hope and optimism and joy but it seems all good things come with a price tag.  Jinnah demanded a separate homeland for Muslims and hate and suspicion replaced trust and friendship.  There were deep rumblings of discontent, an ominous gloom in the air and the feeling of calm before a storm. India became free on August 15, 1947 in a solemn ceremony presided over by the Vice Roy, Mountbatten and then all hell broke lose.  The storm when it came, was of horrendous proportions.  Millions of innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in the division of India in a display of violence and hate unparalleled in history.  The Hindu far right RSS or the Rashtriya Sevak Sangh blamed Gandhi for being too indulgent towards the Muslims.  On January 30th, 1948, at a prayer meeting, Gandhi was assassinated by a RSS member Nathuram Godse, a Maharashtrian Brahmin.  India was in shock.

My dad’s career was considerably influenced by his personality.  He bowed to no one and refused to compromise on his principles.  He had deep contempt for opportunists and “careerists” who posed as journalists and quite often was at odds with those who owned the journal or newspaper.  He had the naivete of a child in some ways and could see no evil intent or malice anywhere.  He lived in his world of books and optimism with the result that he found himself changing jobs frequently and moving his family often.  My mother was the foundation, the practical down to earth, solid pillar that the family relied on.  She did everything that mothers do, but much much more. She became the center of our hearth, the strong practical no nonsense planner and organizer. The anchor and emotional support of our family.

She remained the same courageous, optimistic, calm and supportive parent right until her death  on January 7th 2015 on a cold wintry afternoon, when I left her in the hospital to take a lunch break.  I have never forgiven myself for that and probably never will.

Two months later there was a strange incident.  I have never believed in the Supernatural, and it could just be a coincidence, but it set me thinking.  My husband and I were leaving mom’s apartment the next day. I was in the bedroom packing my suitcase when suddenly a Sunbird showed up at a most unlikely place on the verandah. There was absolutely nothing there to attract it. No flowers for the nectar, nothing.  It seemed agitated. It fluttered up and down with loud clucks almost as if it were trying to tell me something.  I was amused at first and didn’t pay much attention and then it flew away.  The next day it came again. Again the same agitated clucks. Each time I was alone. My husband had gone on some errands. When I mentioned this to him he jokingly replied “it’s probably your mom come to say goodbye”. It struck me at the time that this is exactly what she might do knowing her personality.

We returned home to Michigan and I thought often about my mother.  One summer day I was sitting at my patio table on the deck thinking about my mother when three birds hopped on to the railing of the deck, close to me. One hopped on to the table, dangerously close.  These were not sparrows. Rather colored like sparrows but much bigger.  The other two waited. Then they all flew away.  I wondered if it could be my mother, grandmother whom I adored and my dad who I was also close to.  I’ll never know.  I like to think people live on and visit us from time to time.  I see her in my dreams often and she is young and beautiful.  I feel her presence in my heart and I know she is close.  Love you mummy. Happy Mother’s Day !

I’ve tried to avoid the Clinton book tour bullshit this past month or so. Not good for my blood pressure. When I checked in occasionally, it was to discover that nothing much has changed. The Clintons are still self-pitying money-grubbers – $12 million in speaking fees since she left the State Department? – and now their offspring, exploiting her nepotistic advantage with all the scrupulous ethics of her parents, is continuing the grift. If you ask of Clinton what she’s fighting for, what she believes in, if you want to get her to disagree with you on something, good luck. Any actual politics right now would tarnish the inevitability of a resume-led coronation. That the resume has little of any substance in her four years as secretary of state does not concern her. She was making “hard choices”, and if we cannot appreciate that, tant pis.

I’d like to find a reason to believe she’s a political force who stands for something in an era when there is a real appetite for serious change. She could, after all, decide to campaign vociferously in favor of the ACA this summer and fall (universal healthcare is, after all, one of her positions), but that might siphon money away from her foundation and candidacy. She could get out there and start framing a foreign policy vision. But, again, too risky. I see nothing that suggests a real passion for getting on with the fight – just the usual presumptions of a super-elite, super-rich and super-cocooned politician of the gilded age.

So I did watch the Daily Show interview last week, and was not surprised. As in most of her softball media appearances, she was both unctuous and vapid. But even I was aghast at the sheer emptiness and datedness of her one attempt to articulate a future for American foreign policy. She actually said that our main problem is that we haven’t been celebrating America enough, that we “have not been telling our story very well” and that if we just “get back to telling” that story about how America stands for freedom and opportunity, we can rebuild our diminished international stature. One obvious retort: wasn’t she, as secretary of state, you know, responsible for telling that tale – so isn’t she actually criticizing herself?

Next up: could she say something more vacuous and anodyne? Or something more out of tune with a post-Iraq, post-torture, post- Afghanistan world? Peter Beinart had the same reaction: “As a vision for America’s relations with the world,” he wrote, “this isn’t just unconvincing. It’s downright disturbing”:

It’s true that young people overseas don’t remember the Cold War. But even if they did, they still wouldn’t be inspired by America’s “great story about [promoting] human freedom, human rights, human opportunity.” That’s because in the developing world—where most of humanity lives—barely anyone believes that American foreign policy during the Cold War actually promoted those things. What they mostly remember is that in anticommunism’s name, from Pakistan to Guatemala to Iran to Congo, America funded dictators and fueled civil wars.

Larison piles on:

Changing the substance of policies is never seriously considered, because there is little or no recognition that these policies need correction or reversal. This takes for granted that opposition to U.S. policies is mostly the product of misunderstanding or miscommunication rather than an expression of genuinely divergent interests and grievances. I don’t know that Clinton is naive or oblivious enough to believe this (I doubt it), but it’s instructive that she thinks this is a good argument to make publicly. She is more or less saying that there is nothing wrong with U.S. foreign policy that can’t be fixed by better marketing and salesmanship, and that’s just profoundly wrong. It’s also what we should expect from someone as conventionally hawkish and “centrist” on foreign policy as Clinton is.

My fear is that she doesn’t actually mean any of this. She just needed to say something, and so came out with a stream of consciousness that is completely platitudinous and immune to Fox News attacks. It’s a defensive crouch that is always her first instinct. Think of the Terry Gross interview – and her discomfort in grappling with actual disagreement, from her own base that time. Her goal is always safety. And safety won’t cut it in a populist age.

So if she runs, my guess is she’ll wrap herself tightly in the maximalist concept of American exceptionalism and make this her appeal as a post-Obama presidency. See? she’ll say to the same voting groups she went for last time. I’m a real American, and I believe in America. And yay America!

Maybe this is merely a function that she isn’t running yet (and still may not). Why stir the pot if your goal at this point is merely selling books and raking in more corporate, Goldman Sacks dough? But when, I wonder, has she been otherwise? She remains scarred by the 1990s, understandably so. But the country has moved on in a way she seems to find hard to comprehend.

(Photo: Hillary Rodham Clinton, former United States Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, and First Lady of the United States, speaks during the presentation of the German translation of her book ‘Hard Choices’ (‘Entscheidungen’ in German) at the Staatsoper in the Schiller Theater on July 6, 2014 in Berlin, Germany. By Adam Berry/Getty Images.)

Yannick Nihangaza, the Burundi student who is lying comatose for more than two years in a Patiala nursing home after a brutal attack, can finally go home.

After Harvard revealed that the most commonly awarded grade there is an “A”, Conor defends the practice of grade inflation, at least at elite schools:

A rigorous system of inflation-free grading might benefit any graduate schools or employers interested in using the transcripts of applicants while evaluating them. But Harvard College shouldn’t tailor its grading system to fulfill their needs, and needn’t worry about its students being overlooked regardless of their grading approach. Being admitted to Harvard and graduating is itself a strong signal. There’s also the argument that grade inflation is unfair. Students who do exceptional work are given the very same “reward” as students who do mediocre work. But it’s wrong to conceive of grades as the reward for acquiring more knowledge than other people. The reward is coming away with a better education.

Eleanor Barkhorn pushes back:

Midway through my time at Princeton … the school adopted new grading standards. Starting my junior fall, professors could give out only a limited number of A-range grades. The change prompted lots of anxiety and indignation from the student body—and now, nine years later, it may be rolled back. But for me, “grade deflation” was a much-needed kick in the pants. I started reading more carefully, taking more diligent notes, developing relationships with my professors and their teaching assistants. I ended up learning a lot more and enjoying my classes in a much deeper way. Yes, hard-working students should be rewarded with good grades. But a very good way to inspire students to work hard in the first place is to make good grades worth something.

Yglesias thinks the problem is inflation of another kind:

Also on the subject of grades, Alice Robb informs us that robots can now accurately score essay tests. She proposes nixing multiple-choice exams, which research suggests measure students’ understanding poorly:

A group of researchers, led by Elizabeth Beggrow at the Ohio State University, assessed science students’ understanding of key ideas about evolution using four methods: multiple-choice tests, human-scored written explanations, computer-scored written explanations, and clinical oral interviews. Clinical interviews—which allow professors to ask follow-up questions and engage students in dialogue—are considered ideal, but would be an impractical drain on teachers’ time; in this study, the clinical interviews lasted 14 minutes on average, and some took nearly half an hour. Machines, on the other hand, could generate a score in less than five seconds, though they took a few minutes to set up. The researchers “taught” the software to mark essays by feeding it examples of human-scored essays until it learned to recognize patterns in what the human scorers were looking for …

When Beggrow and her team analyzed the data, they found that professors’ and computers’ scores of students’ short essays were almost identical—the correlation was 0.96 to 1.

(Chart from a 2012 study (pdf) on grade inflation)

A little boy wanders on stage with Francis and won’t let him go.

I’m struck by a simple fact: this happened to Jesus a lot, and his response – even more revolutionary in his day  – was Francis’: “Let the children come to me and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

From raping children to seating them on the papal chair. Know hope.

Responding to Hanna Rosin’s recent declaration that the patriarchy is dead, Ann Friedman opines that “America is finally getting around to having the conversation about what it means to be a man that, decades ago, feminism forced us to have about womanhood”:

Women still face social consequences when they don’t conform neatly to gender norms, but many of even the most ideologically progressive men are just now starting to talk about how to break with masculine stereotypes and still hang onto a sense of gender identity. [Bryan] Goldberg and [Hanna] Rosin, in using traditional definitions of manhood (the simple, stoic breadwinner), declare him dead, or at least less marketable to advertisers. Men’s magazines, which now peddle facial moisturizers but still often shy away from heartfelt confessionals, have spotted how hard it is for men to balance both embracing and rethinking masculine stereotypes — and they’ve made some attempts to address it, but mostly ended up documenting the confusion.

For her part, Stephanie Cootz dismisses the idea that men have historically served as the “stoic breadwinner.” She calls it “a late-arriving, short-lived aberration in the history of the world, and it’s over”:

It wasn’t until the 1920s that a bare majority of American children came to live in a family where the husband earned the income, the wife was not working beside him in a small business or on a farm or earning income herself, and the children were either at home or in school and not working in a factory on in the fields. That family form then grew less common during the Great Depression and WWII, but reappeared in the 1950s thanks to an unusual economic and political situation where real wages were rising steadily and a government flush with cash was paying veterans benefits for 44 percent of young men starting families. This was a period when your average 30 year old man could buy a home on 15 to 18 percent of his own salary, not needing his wife’s.

That era is gone—for good. And yet America formulated its work policies, school hours, and social support programs on the assumption that this kind of family would last forever, that there would always be someone at home to take care of the children and manage the household.

A reader writes:

Don’t you think Steve Jobs is to blame for some of this animosity? Jobs was deified by lefty middle- and upper-class white people for his aesthetic design and streamlined interface. But his actions as head of Apple were almost exactly antithetical to the professed social/economic concerns of those same people. He cancelled all of Apple’s philanthropic programs, farmed all of their labor out to Chinese hellholes, and accumulated enormous, static piles of cash exactly when enormous, static piles of cash were a serious problem for the economy.

Meanwhile, while Gates was derided for his products, he was actually doing the things that those same lefty middle- and upper-class white people claimed that they cared about. ”But, but, but … brushed aluminum!”

It’s good that the public is starting to figure out that we need to hold these guys to the same standards to that we claim to hold other wealthy entrepreneurs/businessmen. But frankly, I think this is Jobs’ fault, and the Cult of Apple was the midwife to the birth of this new obscene vortex of conspicuous consumption about which we are all now so happy to complain.

Another points to Zuckerberg:

My biggest gripe about the tech sector is their unabashed ageist mentality.

Mark Zuckerberg comes right out and says “younger people are just smarter than older people”. Forget about the virtues of wisdom and experience. Forget about modern brain science that says that the brain can expand its capabilities well into adulthood. That’s not it. Zuckerberg wants employees with no lives, who are willing to put in 80-hour weeks in hope of lucrative stock options. Top-notch programmers who have families and will only work normal hours are in unemployment lines. As an employer in a brick-and-mortar business, I have to pay my guys time-and-a-half if they work more than an 8-hour day, and double time under certain circumstances. Zuckerberg and his ilk live in a happy place where the rules that apply to most industries are off the table.

Another zooms out:

I think one of the big problems for the worsening perception of the tech industry is a general lifting of a lot of the mystique of the computers/Internet that initially blinded everyone else from the fact that so much consumer technology was utter crap. There was so much low hanging fruit, so many quick new capabilities, immediate productivity gains, that despite the fact that your computer crashed five times a day and was probably infested with eighteen types of malware that it still felt like an upgrade to your life. It was all so new, most people had grown up never seeing anything like it, and it seemed almost magical.

Today, not so much. Adults have had well over a decade of computers/Internet to get comfortable with it. People graduating from college today can’t really remember a time before they had Internet. It’s not magic anymore; it’s just everyday life.

We’re not as easily impressed anymore. So the tech industry is going to increasingly be judged by the same basic standards as everyone else. Sure, you’ve got a bunch of smart and hardworking people who would love to make people’s lives better, but so does every other profession on the planet. And the market/society/government actually punishes those fields for releasing crap onto the world. If I designed a building that was as unreliable as Twitter has been, the only articles being written about my company would be to mention how we got sued into the ground.

The tech industry isn’t any smarter or harder working than everyone else; they just lucked into being the next big thing, which is why giant piles of money have fallen into their lap, even when what they’re producing isn’t always particularly well made. People outside of the industry might be realizing that more quickly than many people within the industry.

“Had we rolled out something that was very smooth and disciplined and linear, they would have graded it well, even if it was a disastrous policy. We know that, because that’s exactly how they graded the Iraq war,” – president Obama.

Oh, snap!

It’s been awesome to watch today as all the jerking knees quieted a little and all the instant judgments of the past month ceded to a deeper acknowledgment (even among Republicans) of what had actually been substantively achieved: something that, if it pans out, might be truly called a breakthrough – not just in terms of Syria, but also in terms of a better international system, and in terms of Iran.

Obama has managed to insist on his red line on Syria’s chemical weapons, forcing the world to grapple with a new breach of international law, while also avoiding being dragged into Syria’s civil war. But he has also strengthened the impression that he will risk a great deal to stop the advance of WMDs (which presumably includes Iran’s nukes). After all, his announcement of an intent to strike Assad was a real risk to him and to the US. Now, there’s a chance that he can use that basic understanding of his Syria policy – and existing agreement on chemical weapons – to forge a potential grand bargain with Iran’s regime. If that is the eventual end-game, it would be historic.

To put it plainly: Syria is the proof of principle for an agreement with Iran. And an agreement with Iran – that keeps its nuclear program reliably civil and lifts sanctions – is the Holy Grail for this administration, and for American foreign policy in the 21st Century.

As for the role of Putin, I argued last week that it was the Russian leader who had blinked, the Russian leader who had agreed to enforce Washington’s policy, and that the best response was to welcome it with open arms. So it was another treat to hear the president say, in tones that are unmistakable:

“I welcome him being involved. I welcome him saying, ‘I will take responsibility for pushing my client, the Assad regime, to deal with these chemical weapons.’ ”

Meep meep.

(Photo: President Barack Obama in the Oval Office on September 13, 2013. By Dennis Brack-Pool/Getty Images.)

Upon the release of a new singles collection, Jack Hamilton pays much-merited tribute to Otis Redding:

Like all of the greatest singers, Otis Redding was utterly unique. He lacked the technical virtuosity of his idol, Sam Cooke–another ’60s musician whose death came much too early–but made up for it with flawless taste and musical intellect. Despite his well-earned reputation for incendiary live performances–most famously on display in his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival [seen above], six months before his death–Redding was never the frenzied pyrotechnician of later “soul man” parodies. In fact, his greatest gift may have been his command of restraint and understatement.

The best singers are also masters of silence: The moments that Ray Charles doesn’t sing–when he’s just about to sing, just finished singing, or taking a breath (especially when he’s taking a breath)–can be as electrifying as any notes coming out of his mouth. Otis Redding understood and used this power as well as anyone. Critic Dave Marsh once wrote that Redding’s performance of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)” sounds “as though each line is coming to him only the instant before he sings it, quavering notes as if in the grip of an undeniably exquisite passion that must be consummated–now!” a description that itself dwells in pauses, anticipation, the thrill of ensuing discovery.

Stephen M. Deusner likewise attests to the power of Redding’s voice:

“The Glory of Love” is not a very good song. … With its twin melodic lines—“That’s the story of, that’s the glory of love”—and its oppressively chipper tempo, it’s certainly catchy in a nursery rhyme sort of way, yet it’s supremely saccharine and just plain dopey. So why would someone like Otis Redding, at the height of his esteem, choose to cover this song out of the thousands in the American pop canon? It’s hard to imagine anyone save [songwriter Billy] Hill himself thinking it was worth the great singer’s time, even if they didn’t know how limited his time was.

But here’s the catch:

Otis Redding absolutely kills it. He transforms “The Glory of Love” into something moving and even sublime. As Steve Cropper’s guitar traces tears down your cheek, as Isaac Hayes and Al Jackson Jr.’s snare clicks out a tempo about twice as fast as the song demands, and as the horns offer sympathetic punctuation, Redding testifies mightily to the glory of love. It’s soul music, but the process of repetition, variation and elaboration is more akin to jazz. He teases out the song’s central ideas, however corny they may be, until they yield something meaningful, but as the song builds and builds, it never reaches a climax or epiphany. Rather than cut loose, the musicians hold back.

This is why Redding was such an immense figure in pop music in the 1960s and why his death was such a tragedy: He could plumb even the fluffiest pop song and locate a kernel of honest-to-God wisdom.

Heard here:

Tim Challies thinks evangelicals are making a mistake in obsessing over virginity:

The obsession manifests itself in the pre-marriage course where the young man who burned up his teens and early twenties staring at tens of thousands of pornographic images somehow thinks he holds the moral high ground over the young woman who had sex one time with one boyfriend. After all, he is a virgin and she is not. She is the one who ought to seek his forgiveness for giving to someone else what was rightly his.

It manifests itself in young people who ask questions about “technical virginity” like doing these sexual acts, which stop short of full-on sexual intercourse, are somehow less serious or less morally significant than going all the way. “It’s okay, I’m still a virgin!”

This obsession with virginity measures so many of the wrong things, asks so many of the wrong questions, delivers so many of the wrong answers.

Burmese refugee Ahamed Jarmal, who fled to Bangladesh last year to escape mounting violence, warns that his country is on the verge of genocide:

In Burma, ethnic cleansing is happening. We have seen more human rights violations and attacks on Rohingya minorities in the past two years than in the last 20. Organized in monasteries and on Facebook, a wave of hate is being broadcast against the Muslim Rohingya community in Burma and a new apartheid system is being introduced. My family regularly get called “dogs” or worse when they walk down the street. The government continues to deny us citizenship, telling us this isn’t our home. …

[T]he situation is getting really desperate. Mobs have attacked our villages, driving us from our homes, children have been hacked to death, and hundreds of my people have been killed by members of the majority. Thugs are distributing leaflets threatening to “wipe us out” and children in schools are being taught that the Rohingya are different.

He begs world leaders not to repeat the mistakes of the 1990s:

The only way to stop genocide is to prevent it from happening in the first place. World leaders failed to act 20 years ago in Rwanda, then promised they would never let such horrors happen again. My people are praying they meant it.

Recent Dish on Ashin Wirathu, the Buddhist monk and self-proclaimed “Burmese bin Laden,” here.

Zimmerman and Martin with the races changed, from the Tumblr “While Seated” by Michael David Murphy.

The effect of race on acquittals in self-defense cases and with “Stand Your Ground” laws, can be seen here.

He ruined German music, according to Terry Teachout’s review of Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis:

The extent to which Hitler and his cultural commissars sought to control and shape European musical life has been chronicled in detail. But most of these books have dealt primarily or exclusively with German-speaking performers and those performing artists from other countries, France in particular, who collaborated with the Nazis. Yet the unswerving determination of the Nazis to rid Europe of what they called entartete musik (degenerate music) may well have had an even more far-reaching effect on postwar European musical culture. After all, many well-known Jewish classical performers—Fritz Kreisler, Artur Schnabel and Bruno Walter among them—managed to emigrate to America and other countries where they continued their careers without significant interruption. Not so the Jewish composers whose music was banned by the Nazis. Some of them were killed in the Holocaust, and none of those who survived succeeded in fully reconstituting their professional lives after the war.

One of the reasons why? It turns out the Fürhrer was a devotee of Wagner, in more than one sense of the word:

It is in no way surprising that Hitler should have paid close attention to Germany’s musical establishment, since he was an aesthete manqué with a passion for classical music. His ideas, moreover, about music and musicians had been shaped by Richard Wagner. “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner,” he declared. Hitler read Wagner’s writings closely and took them seriously, declaring Wagner to be his favorite “political” writer and describing him as one of “the great reformers” in Mein Kampf. “Beside Frederick the Great we have such men as Martin Luther and Richard Wagner.”

Wagner’s pathological anti-Semitism was the insane root of the Third Reich’s suppression of Jewish composers. But one of the most striking aspects of this policy was the fact that even though Hitler promulgated a staunchly anti-modernist doctrine, it was not absolute in practice. Except for Hitler himself, Nazi leaders were comparatively indifferent to whether a given composer was a traditionalist or a modernist, so long as he played ball with them. What mattered to them—and to Hitler—was blood. If you were Jewish, it was irrelevant whether you were assimilated or observant, much less whether you were an atonal modernist or a Brahmsian conservative: Either way, you threatened the racial purity of German culture.

TPM Reader DD writes in from Wisconsin. Going on the below, I'd be curious to hear from lawyers in other jurisdictions how distinct Florida law seems from how a case with a similar set of facts would have been adjudicated in their jurisdictions ...

I'm a criminal defense lawyer in Wisconsin, but I'll tell you my reaction to the Zimmerman verdict today. I've had friends in Florida asking for my take. I haven't watched the trial very closely (it seems like an ordinary criminal case to me in many respects). But I was astounded that the defense would put on a "self-defense" argument without the defendant testifying. In most civilized jurisdictions, the burden is on the defense to prove, at least more likely than not, that the law breaking was done for reasons of self-defense. I couldn't figure out how they could do this without the defendant's testimony.

I got curious and read the jury instructions Friday night and, I was wrong. In Florida, if self-defense is even suggested, it's the states obligation to prove it's absence beyond a reasonable doubt(!). That's crazy. But 'not guilty' was certainly a reasonable result in this case. As I told in friend in Tampa today though, if you're ever in a heated argument with anyone, and you're pretty sure there aren't any witnesses, it's always best to kill the other person. They can't testify, you don't have to testify, no one else has any idea what happened; how can the state ever prove beyond a doubt is wasn't self-defense? Holy crap! What kind of system is that?

Following up on the conversation, Eugene Volokh suggests that the law of self-defense is actually the same in Florida as it is throughout the country, with the single exception of Ohio.

Angela Serratore revisits a curious chapter in America’s sexual history. In 1862, Nashville’s population of sex workers had risen more than sevenfold over the past two years, and gonorrhea and syphilis were on the rise among Union soldiers. After unsuccessfully trying to expel the prostitutes from the city, George Spalding, provost marshal of Nashville, legalized the profession:

Resigning himself to the fact that prostitutes would ply their trade and soldiers would engage them, he reasoned that the women might as well sell sex safely, and so out of sheer desperation, Spalding and the Union Army created in Nashville’s the country’s first system of legalized prostitution.

Spalding’s proposal was simple: Each prostitute would register herself, obtaining for $5 a license entitling her to work as she pleased. A doctor approved by the Army would be charged with examining prostitutes each week, a service for which each woman would pay a 50 cent fee. Women found to have venereal diseases would be sent to a hospital established (in the home of the former Catholic bishop) for the treatment of such ailments, paid for in part by the weekly fees. Engaging in prostitution without a license, or failing to appear for scheduled examinations, would result in arrest and a jail term of 30 days.

The prospect of participating in the sex trade without fear of arrest or prosecution was instantly attractive to most of Nashville’s prostitutes, and by early 1864 some 352 women were on record as being licensed, and another hundred had been successfully treated for syphilis and other conditions hazardous to their industry. In the summer of 1864, one doctor at the hospital remarked on a “marked improvement” in the licensed prostitutes’ physical and mental health, noting that at the beginning of the initiative the women had been characterized by use of crude language and little care for personal hygiene, but were soon virtual models of “cleanliness and propriety.”

(Image: Case Western Reserve University’s Dittrick Medical History Center)

“People take a very realistic approach to it. They’re not frustrated or upset. It’s more, ‘This is just the way things are and this is how we’ll deal with it.’ The strategy always comes to ‘What gives us the best chance to get something passed?’ If it looks like there’s a path to something passing, then, as in immigration reform, he’s got to step back. All of our immigration speeches have been very toned down,” – Jon Favreau, on how no-drama Obama manages his nihilist gerrymandered opposition.

Robert Long highlights the endemic abuse:

The State Department has called bacha baazi a “widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape.” For instance, one military intelligence reservist related a story about an Afghan colonel who stood before a judge after he hurt a chai boy by violently raping him: “His defense was, ‘Honestly, who hasn’t raped a chai boy? Ha ha ha.’ The judge responds, ‘You’re right. Case dismissed.’”

Cracking down on this practice is nearly impossible, as the main culprits are often the very law enforcement and military personnel that the U.S. works alongside. In the documentary “The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan” (2010), police officials insist that sex traffickers of young boys will be arrested; later that day, two of the same officers are filmed at a bacha baazi party.

The words of a deputy police chief:

“If they don’t f–k the asses of those boys, what should they f–k?” he asks at one point. “The p—–s of their own grandmothers? Their asses were used before, and now they want to get what they are owed.”

Previous Dish on the subject here.

David Brooks proffers the most succinct rebuttal to the nihilist partisanship – and civic cowardice – of Lowry and Kristol. He’s right on the substance, but also, critically, on the politics. Money quote:

The final conservative point of opposition is a political one. Republicans should not try to win back lower-middle-class voters with immigration reform; they should do it with a working-class agenda.

This argument would be slightly plausible if Republicans had even a hint of such an agenda, but they don’t. Even then it would fail. Before Asians, Hispanics and all the other groups can be won with economic plans, they need to feel respected and understood by the G.O.P. They need to feel that Republicans respect their ethnic and cultural identity. If Republicans reject immigration reform, that will be a giant sign of disrespect, and nothing else Republicans say will even be heard.

This is what so many on the right just don’t understand. Their very arguments against universal healthcare and gay marriage and immigration reform are all made as if the working poor, gays, and illegal Latino immigrants were not in the room. You think we don’t hear that in the tone and content of what they are saying? It’s the way in which people who desperately need healthcare are dismissed as abstractions, or in which gays are never offered any actual policy but avoidance and disdain, or in which hard-working immigrants – living in a kind of radical insecurity no white native-born Republican has ever fully experienced or imagined – are simply told to hang around for a few more years, or “self-deport”. That bespeaks a disconnect that obscures any capacity to govern this country as it actually is – rather than as they would like it to be.

Like David, I think this is a crucial moment. Actual conservatism should not be averse to an imperfect compromise to resolve a festering and difficult socio-economic problem. Actual conservatives should see the essentially conservative case for reform that Brooks outlines. But, alas, we are not dealing with actual conservatives, prepared to negotiate or reform the bill for the better. We are dealing with what Richard Hofstadter called “pseudoconservatives” – alienated, paranoid, visceral loathers of any concession to the party that just won popular vote majorities for House, Senate and the presidency.

You cannot reason people out of something they did not reason into. But I admire Brooks for trying.

The House Republicans just pushed through a farm bill with extremely generous farm subsidies while scrapping the usual corollary food stamp aid. It doesn’t get clearer than that. There’s no small government consistency here – just an embrace of subsidizing Big Ag and a contempt for the needy in a long, protracted growth recession. Are they trying to make themselves look like total douchebags? Chait is unsurprised:

It’s no longer novel that conservative Republicans have positioned themselves to Obama’s left on domestic spending that benefits their own constituencies. We have seen three years of Republicans attacking Obama for robbing Grandma’s Medicare. But at least Medicare is a justifiable program. The existence of farm subsidies is insane, and the fact that a party that hates government so much it engages in a continuous guerilla war of shutdowns, manufactured currency crises, and outright sabotage can’t eliminate it may be the most telling indicator of the GOP’s venality. They only hate necessary government spending. Totally unjustifiable spending is fine with them.

Or they are simply acting out on deeper cultural fears and biases? Even Douthat takes the GOP to task this time:

This is egregious whatever you think of the food stamp program, and it’s indicative of why the endless, often-esoteric debates about the Republican future actually matter to our politics. Practically any conception of the common good, libertarian or communitarian or anywhere in between, would produce better policy than a factionally-driven approach of further subsidizing the rich while cutting programs for the poor. The compassionate-conservative G.O.P. of George W. Bush combined various forms of corporate welfare with expanded spending on social programs, which was obviously deeply problematic in various ways … but not as absurd and self-dealing as only doing welfare for the rich.

Bernstein wonders if Boehner should have killed the bill:

What’s not clear to me is whether John Boehner is better off with this thing passing. As Ed Kilgore notes, it’s not real likely that anything can come out of conference that can pass. It’s not really clear, right now, if the separate nutrition bill can pass. It’s not clear what Boehner had to promise to conservatives about conference to get them to stick on this vote. It’s not clear what the next step is.

It seems to me that Boehner did have another choice. If the GOP-only farm-only Farm Bill fails, then maybe he can push the mainstream of his conference to support a bipartisan bill, leaving the conservative fringe out entirely. It won’t work on everything, but on the Farm Bill, it really might. Maybe. And if it works on the Farm Bill and there’s little fallout, that might strengthen Boehner’s ability to gather different coalitions on the next tough one that comes up.

Good luck with that. Plumer foresees gridlock:

The Senate and House could try to reconcile their two very different bills in conference — and the final version could well include food-stamp money. But any reconciled bill would still need to pass the House again — and conservatives there don’t want to vote for the Senate’s food-stamp formula, which would cut spending by just $3.9 billion over the next 10 years. The House could pass its own food-stamp bill later this month. Alternatively, the House could approve its own separate bill to reauthorize the food-stamp program. Indeed, Robert Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities thinks the GOP will eventually come up with “a still harsher SNAP bill designed to pass solely with Republican votes.”

What does he mean? Recall that the previous House farm bill would have cut food-stamp funding by $20.5 billion over 10 years. That legislation failed to pass because the cuts were too steep for many House Democrats and not steep enough for many House Republicans. If the next food-stamp bill made even sharper cuts, then Republicans might be able to pass it on their own. But, again, the final product would still have to get through the Democratic Senate. There’d still be an impasse.

(Photo: House Speaker John Boehner speaks to the media during his weekly news conference on Capitol Hill, July 11, 2013 in Washington, DC. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

I have a strong liberal arts background. In high school, I read Alexander Pope, Camus, and Sartre; I watched movies by Bergman and Kurosawa. In college I majored in philosophy at one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. And if I hear another advocate of the liberal arts proclaim the glories of the humanities, and wax oh-so-eloquent about how enlightening and inspiring it is to read the Great Books, I am going to scream.

First, about those stereotypes about philosophy majors who can’t get jobs. Guess what, they’re true. I have spent many years trying to figure out what to do with my life, and treading water financially, to the detriment not only of my own bank account and well-being, but that of my family, as well. The faculty and administration at my college bent over backwards emphasizing the social justice aspect of the education we were receiving. But the first requirement for being a socially responsible member of this – or any – society is being able to support yourself.

Second, there is far too much emphasis in the liberal arts on teaching people to write.

I’m a very good writer. But, again, guess what – that’s irrelevant for most jobs. Very few jobs – even jobs that require an advanced degree – actually involve writing. What they do require is the ability to organize information and communicate well. Writing is a form of organizing information and communicating – but it’s just one form of either. It’s entirely possible for someone to be very good at organizing information and communicating, but not have to write anything more complicated than an email. Look at the credits of any movie. That’s a list of hundreds of well-paid, highly competent professionals. And at best a handful are being paid for their ability to write.

Third, I was told that getting into a great college was key to getting a good job: the better the college/university you attended, the better the chance you would land a solid, well-paying job. Um, no. I have had dozens of job interviews over the years. I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning the college where I got my Bachelor’s degree. I don’t see a dramatic difference between the people I know who went to elite colleges and those who went to good state universities. Actually, I don’t see much of a difference at all.

Fourth, I can define the “crisis” in the humanities in one four-letter word: Dish. The Dish represents the crisis in the humanities. Why? Because it epitomizes a problem for the humanities for which the humanities themselves are responsible: they have created their own competition. When I read the Dish (which I usually do several times a day), I read articles about a wide variety of topics, almost all of which fall under the traditional definition of the humanities/liberal arts. Reading the Dish is, in effect, a way of continuing my liberal arts education. And yet I do so without coming anywhere near a liberal arts faculty member. I don’t think you even quote professors all that often. There are myriad examples of this. I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable about art, but I never took an art history class in college. Instead, I have spent lots of time in museums and galleries, and have read lots of newspaper and magazine articles about artists I like. If you want to develop an appreciation for Shakespeare, you can take a class in the English department of some university. Or you can watch any of the hundreds of movies that have been made based on the Bard’s plays.

The humanities are alive and well. They’re just not necessarily alive and well in the humanities departments of American colleges and universities. THAT is the crisis of the humanities.

Correction appended: July 8, 2013, 11:18 p.m. E.T. The President gave a speech about his management of the federal bureaucracy today. I’ve been critical of this aspect of his presidency in the past, so it’s only right that I respond to his effort, even though I know this is a topic that only a few of us, really weird wonkomoids, find scintillating. It was an O.K. speech. The best part was a review of some of the good things he’s done since taking office. The best example is FEMA — the Federal Emergency Management Agency — which was a latrine during the George W. Bush presidency and has now become a very effective, results-oriented, consumer-friendly redoubt of excellence; so good, in fact, that Republican governors, in New Jersey and Oklahoma recently, have praised it. FEMA is actually moving in the direction that the rest of the government should — it is taking its services direct to consumers, via phone apps and door-to-door reporting from disaster areas. (As I wrote in my “Can Service Save Us?” cover story a few weeks ago, Team Rubicon — the disaster-relief organization staffed by veterans — has been going house to house with handheld devices provided by Palantir, sending work orders to FEMA as well as the local governments in Oklahoma City after the tornadoes, and New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy.) FEMA has not only welcomed local not-for-profits into disaster-relief efforts, it has also launched a volunteer FEMA Corps, for civilians who want to help out. The President noted that he’d hired some private-sector hotshots to help nudge the government into the 21st century and even was optimistic about the health care exchanges — the online supermarkets for health insurance — that will open for business in October. I certainly hope he’s right. But. He neglected to mention the most vexing problem facing the federal bureaucracy (and the state and local governments as well): our antiquated civil service system. It is 130 years old this year, invented by Chester Alan Arthur to counter

A Financial Times article spotlights Amazon’s shipping warehouse in the former coal-mining town of Rugeley, England. John Brownlee follows up:

The issue at Rugeley is not that workers are ungrateful for the jobs Amazon has given them, or even that they find these jobs unpleasant. Most of Rugeley’s workers come from mining families, a stock not exactly known for its weak-livered dandyism. It doesn’t matter that these jobs are hard. It’s that they have no future. … The jobs in the Rugeley fulfillment center are almost always temporary positions handed out by agencies on zero-hour contracts. Nothing is guaranteed, and a fulfillment associate’s job can completely disappear between one day and the next. As such, the local economy is not recovering as locals hoped. Amazon is not investing in the town’s people; instead, it’s mechanizing them.

Brownlee talks to Ben Roberts, whose photo series Amazon Unpacked documents Rugeley’s “vast” and “shockingly quiet” shipping center:

“The workers at Rugeley are effectively human robots,” Roberts says. “And the only reason Amazon doesn’t actually replace them with robots is they’ve yet to find a machine that can handle so many different sized packages.” … ”When you buy something from an independent retailer, you might pay more than Amazon, but that extra bit is an investment,” Roberts explains. “When you pay it, you’re investing in the quality of not only your own life but the life of the community around you.”

Dustin Kurtz reacts:

The same panicked grasping by local governments at jobs, no matter how temporary or poorly paid, that led to the placement of the warehouse in Rugeley is how Amazon managed to place packing plants in other locations as well. Amazon (a company that receives more money from the UK government than it pays in taxes, remember) currently has other UK “fulfillment centers” in Hemel Hempsted, Hertfordshire; Swansea, Wales; Doncaster, South Yorkshire and Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, former mining towns all. At what point will those communities be forced to ask what, in fact, Amazon is giving back to them, if anything?

If Jupiter was as close to Earth as the moon, what would it look like in the evening sky? Take a look.

Dave Brunn, who worked for twenty years translating the Bible for the Lamogai people of Papua New Guinea, describes what the process taught him about supposed “literal” renderings of scripture:

When I first went to Papua New Guinea, I was committed to translating God’s Word as faithfully and as accurately as possible. I thought I had a good idea of what that meant, but I quickly realized that I had oversimplified the actual task of Bible translation. I heard people articulate proposed standards for faithfulness and accuracy. But I found that many of those standards are based on English grammatical features that do not exist in Lamogai or many other languages. So, if those standards are really God’s universal standards, then Lamogai would automatically be disqualified from having a faithful and accurate translation.

A lot of people don’t realize that since English and Koine Greek are both Indo-European languages, the degree of accuracy that we have in our English New Testaments is largely due to the fact that the translators were working with languages that are part of the same family, albeit as distant cousins. Translation into English is not easy, but there are many more difficulties faced by those translating into unrelated languages—difficulties that those translating into English would never imagine.

Why every translation involves the interpretation of the translator:

As I approached a passage to translate into Lamogai, I looked at the original, and then I would compare as many English versions as I could. I thought I understood what “literal” translations were in English. But I found that every literal version frequently breaks its own rules of literalness and word-for-word translation—and not only when the grammar or other specific constraints force them to. Often it’s just a judgment call for the translators. It really surprised me to find out that the supposedly “literal” versions are often not literal in places where they could have been. There is also a surprising number of places where the intentionally nonliteral versions actually end up closer to a word-for word rendering.

A reader writes:

Apropos of your coverage of “Hi” as distinctively American, I thought you might be amused by this anecdote. Many years ago, while touring New Orleans, I decided to go to a service at the Catholic cathedral in Jackson Square, in the heart of the French Quarter.  I’d been raised a Lutheran, though I was a lapsed one at the time, and I had never attended a Catholic service before.  At the end of it, the priest asked the congregation to something or other (I forget his exact words), at which point the immaculately dressed elderly lady in front of me turned around and said to me, “May the peace of God be with you.”  I was so discombobulated by this completely unexpected turn of liturgical events that all I found myself blurting out to her was “Hi!”

Another reader:

“Hi!” was my first, and for a long time, only, word, as a baby.  It is for many American kids.  ”Hi!” “Hi!”  They hear it all around.

Another:

We have neighbors who moved in last year from Burma. They are part of the Karen ethnic group. They have two small kids, maybe 4 and 5. Their family and ours have struggled with the language barrier, but whenever the kids see me they say “HI!”. I finally got a chance to talk to an English-speaking family member, and asked what the normal Karen greeting was. Like many languages, it depends on the time of day, and the relative station each speaker occupies. But the kids have found a great new toy – greeting someone without worrying about any of that stuff. “Hi!”

Someone should start a new blog about democracy in America. Call it “Hi Times.”

His Jesuit roots are showing.

It’s not just the American right that’s having trouble reaching younger generations. The Euroskeptic Tories face an increasingly Europe-friendly generation. A young UK Independence Party member wrings his hands:

Those of us who want to leave the EU face a stark reality: we face a generational time bomb which we must start doing all we can to defuse.

YouGov’s most recent EU poll demonstrated once again how voters were split on the EU by age. Forty-five per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds want to stay in the EU, compared to just 32 per cent who want to leave; similarly, those between 25 and 39 favoured staying in, by 47 per cent to 27. Older generations feel differently: 43 per cent of those between 40 and 59 want out, against 38 per cent, and among the over-60s a massive 56 per cent want to leave, compared to just 33 per cent wanting to stay in.

Without the euro, with huge trade benefits, and with easy travel, I can see why younger Brits see no reason to embark on such a radical change. Britain has been in the EU since 1975. Why do Tories want to rip up a relationship that is now entrenched for almost half a century? Can’t they just do what they’ve always done: grumble loudly and muddle through?

Yesterday marked the 150th anniversary of the denouement to the Battle of Gettsyburg, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War and by most accounts its turning point. Reviewing Allen Guelzo’s new history of those three days in July, Gettysburg, Stu Seidel emphasizes that the battle lines began to be drawn before the armies ever met on the fields of Pennsylvania:

Long before taking readers to the battle, Guelzo details the chess pieces who will oppose one another on the first three days of July in 1863. He enumerates the underlying political and military forces at play on Lee as he planned the invasion: Lee’s desire to force a negotiated settlement to the war by invading a Northern state and the challenges Lee faced in reconfiguring command of the Army of Northern Virginia following the death of Stonewall Jackson, Lee’s trusted and accomplished field commander, in the closing hours of the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. On the Union side, Guelzo sets out the political and military challenges of simply finding a suitable commander for the Army of the Potomac. Not a single corps commander at the time of the Battle of Gettysburg had held a comparable post a year earlier. In an army so politicized that Lincoln’s choices to command were limited to Democrats who sympathized more with the president’s principal nemesis, former Army of the Potomac commander Gen. George McClellan, than with the president himself.

Anne Kelly Knowles uses an awesome interactive map to shed light on Robert E. Lee’s losing hand:

Altogether, our mapping reveals that Lee never had a clear view of enemy forces; the terrain itself hid portions of the Union Army throughout the battle. In addition, Lee did not grasp – or acknowledge – just how advantageous the Union’s position was. In a reversal of the Battle of Fredericksburg, where Lee’s forces held the high ground and won a great victory, Union General George Meade held the high ground at Gettysburg. Lee’s forces were spread over an arc of seven miles, while the Union’s compact position, anchored on several hills, facilitated communication and quick troop deployment. Meade also received much better information, more quickly, from his subordinates. Realizing the limits of what Lee could see makes his decisions appear even bolder, and more likely to fail, than we knew.

Relatedly, Kate Pais lists 10 items most don’t know about the battle, including the academic past of one of its central figures:

Renowned war hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who is sometimes credited as the most influential figure in the Battle of Gettysburg, wasn’t even going to enlist in the service originally; he hesitated because he was supposed to take a sabbatical from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine to study in Europe for two years. He was struck with a pang of patriotism and instead used his sabbatical to grant leave from the school and become lieutenant colonel in the 20th Maine Infantry.

And Pete Wehner summarizes the meaning that endured beyond Gettysburg’s carnage:

[T]hese horrific losses were hardly in vain. The Civil War, after all, achieved two monumentally important things: It ended slavery and it preserved the Union, which meant it preserved and extended liberty in America and the world. George Will refers to the Battle of Gettysburg as “the hinge of American, and hence world, history.” That seems to me to be a fair judgment–and today is a good day not only to remember the annihilation that began 150 years ago but also to give thanks for the courage and purpose that was on display on the grassy hills, the consecrated ground, of Gettysburg. If the North had lost instead of won at Gettysburg, America, as we know it, would have ended. And everything would be different. Instead this nation experienced a new birth of freedom–and a government of the people, by the people and for the people did not perish from the earth.

You know where this man is coming from when he dismissed the organization SNAP – Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests – as having “no credibility“. The records from his old diocese in Milwaukee show he authorized pay-offs to child-rapist priests to encourage them to leave the ministry. (In the Catholic hierarchy, you don’t report rapists to the police; you eventually offer them financial incentives to leave.) Nonetheless, at the time, Dolan insisted that these charges were “false, preposterous and unjust,” whatever the records or even the spokesman for his old diocese said. Now, in another piece of stellar reporting, Laurie Goodstein, adds more context to this man’s record:

Files released by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee on Monday reveal that in 2007, Cardinal Timothy F. Dolan, then the archbishop there, requested permission from the Vatican to move nearly $57 million into a cemetery trust fund to protect the assets from victims of clergy sexual abuse who were demanding compensation.

Cardinal Dolan, now the archbishop of New York, has emphatically denied seeking to shield church funds as the archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009. He reiterated in a statement Monday that these were “old and discredited attacks.”

However, the files contain a 2007 letter to the Vatican in which he explains that by transferring the assets, “I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.” The Vatican approved the request in five weeks, the files show.

So, twice now, we have been forced to choose between his words and our lyin’ eyes, when it comes to questions of how he handled and cosseted child-rapists under his jurisdiction in Milwaukee. We now know he deliberately sequestered church assets so he could argue he had no more funds to compensate those raped by his subordinates. He was once again putting the institutional church’s interests above those of the raped. And he seems to be able to lie about all of it – in the face of massive evidence – with nary a flicker of hesitation.

(Photo: New cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan, Archbishop of New York, receives the biretta cap from Pope Benedict XVI in Saint Peter’s Basilica on February 18, 2012 in Vatican City, Vatican. By Franco Origlia/Getty Images.)