Stanislaw Lem Has Died
Posted by Kevin

He was 84, and we still lost him much, much too young.

Via Bookslut.

March 27th, 2006 | Writing, Media, Books | no comments

Divided Kingdom
Posted by Kevin

Taking the advice of Matt Cheney, I picked up Divided Kingdomby Rupert Thompson. This is an interesting book whose power and pleasure is more in the execution than the theme or the plot. The premise of the book is that the United Kingdom has been split into four kingdoms, with the people reassigned to live in a give land based upon their personalities. The kingdoms are color coded based upon the ancient conceit of humors. Greens are melancholy, Yellows are aggressive, Blues are emotional and Reds are even-tempered and optimistic. There are also people who fit into no class and are free to roam through all the countries. they are referred to as the White People and they are completely outside of society.

The story is simple enough. It follows the journey of one Red sector government official as he first decides to abandon his country for the Blue sector and then tries desperately to get back home, requiring travels through all the sectors and, eventually, with the White People. It will come as no surprise to learn that the protagonist discovers within himself each of the primary emotions that defines each of the individual sector, nor that when he joins the almost animal like White People, the process of abandoning all emotions turns him, well, animal like. As I said, there is no unusual or unexpected theme in this aspect of the book, but there is considerable pleasure in the experience. There is enough tension regarding the physical safety of the hero and his companions to keep the story flowing and the writing is superb. Thomson layers detail upon detail that are both dreamlike and unmistakably human. The process by which the protagonist becomes a full fledged member of the nation he currently inhabits is entirely believable, with each past personality sliding inevitably and clearly into the next. The interactions between people of different nations are tinged with a completely believable level of bigotry and contempt, flowing in all directions. Some characters are aware of that bigotry but even they have a hard time escaping the trap of other people’s expectations. Despite the outlandishness of the central conceit and the gaping flaws in the explanations of how the society now functions, everything feels emotionally true.

In some respects, the fact that Thompson hasn’t bothered to try to make all the aspects of his new society believable adds to the emotional power of the book. It reads almost like a dream in some respects, and that quality allows Thompson to use everything from the shape of the land to the politics of the rather implausibly drawn “resistance” to the physical manifestations of national grief — monuments and museums — to construct his tale. It isn’t a page turned in the classical sense, and people looking for a traditional dystopia in the manner of Huxley or Orwell are going to be disappointed. But if you are interested in people, and how they deal with lose and the processes by which they become fully human, Divided Kingdom should be on your reading list.

March 27th, 2006 | Reviews, Books | no comments

An Elected King
Posted by Kevin

I don’t understand why this is not getting more attention:

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and any statutes inconsistent with the Constitution must yield. The basic principle of our system of government means that no President, merely by assenting to a piece of legislation, can diminish the scope of the President’s constitutional power. . . .

Just as one President may not, through signing legislation, eliminate the Executive Branch’s inherent constitutional powers, Congress may not renounce inherent presidential authority. The Constitution grants the President the inherent power to protect the nation from foreign attack, and Congress may not impede the President’s ability to perform his constitutional duty.“ (citations omitted).

This is an unapologetic brief for allowing the Executive the powers of a King. They are claiming for themselves the right to make or disregard laws, meaning that the Legislature is no longer relevant, and they claim for themselves the right to determine when a law is constitutional or not, relegating the Judiciary to irrelevancy. They intend to make the laws, they intend to interpret the laws, and they already execute the laws. They want, in a literal sense, to return to a mode of government that existed prior to the Magna Carta. If they are allowed to get away with this, and every sign is that they will, as the GOP Senators cannot seem to run away from their constitutional obligations fast enough, then it is the effective end of the constitutional system of government. One branch will have been allowed to slip free of the checks and balances that where designed to protect the country from tyrants. The Executive Branch will have absolute authority, able to do as it wishes without check or oversight. Since it will determine what is and is not Constitutional, it is the final arbitrator of what rights you already have. This Administration, just as a reminder, has already decided that it has the right to hold American citizens indefinitely without charge, trial, or access to the outside world.

More importantly, once this has been established, this principle will lay there, waiting for the next President whose sense of entitlement is larger than his common sense and understanding of the Constitution. In the next couple of years, we are going to decide if we are citizens with rights and a functioning system of checks and balances or serfs who merely get to choose who the King will be every four years. Since the GOP shows no sign of doing anything to stop this dangerous nonsense, the only real hope is a Democratic controlled Congress willing to hold the Administration accountable.

We pardoned Nixon and now thirty years later, his disciples and heirs are back. They don’t believe in limits on the power of the Office of President and they obviously won’t give up trying to achieve their dreams, so they are going to have to be stopped. And that means a Congress unwilling to look away as they pretend that the Constitution does not actually contain any checks and balances.

UPDATE: Ted, in the comments, asks why I think the Justice Department is claiming the right to interperate the laws and whether or not they are Constitutional. It is in the link, but I should have explicitely quoted it. This is from the same set of answers the Justice Department provided the Senators:

n order to execute the laws and defend the Constitution, the President must be able to interpret them. The interpretation of law, both statutory and constitutional, is therefore an indispensable and well established government function. . . .

The President’s power to interpret the law is particularly important when he is engaged in a task — such as the direction of the operations of an armed conflict — that falls within the special and unique competence of the Executive Branch.

I should have been more explicit in my argument and I apologize for that.

March 27th, 2006 | Politics, Legal Issues, Privacy, Terrorism, Media | 10 comments

Stoning the Good Samaritan
Posted by Kevin

The House GOP has passed a bill that would severely punish people who provide any help to illegal immigrants that could be construed as helping them “come or remain” in the country. The language is pretty broad, and I don’t notice a medical or legal exemption. In other words, if you give a glass of water to a dehydrated little girl as she crosses the border; if you are a church that allows illegal aliens into your homeless shelter; if you help a battered woman avoid her abusers; if you transport people out of the desert to a hospital or homeless shelter; if you treat illegal aliens with compassion or simple human decency, this bill makes you a felon and gives you a mandatory five year prison term.

This bill is viciously and needlessly cruel. It creates a situation in which people have to put their freedom at risk to treat illegal aliens as if they where human beings. It creates a class of untouchables in this country — people that law abiding citizens cannot aide, no matter how dire their circumstances, without becoming criminals. This bill is vicious for the sake of being vicious. The sponsors and heir supporters hate illegal immigrants and they hate the people who would help them, so they turn the latter into unpersons as far as the law is concerned (the bill also allows indefinite detention, removes judicial review of visa decisions, and empowers federal agents to deport anyone they find within a hundred miles of the border that they suspect is in the country illegally) and do everything they can to punish the decent people who try to help these people when they need help to survive. It is hateful, mean, and unchristian.

There was an enormous rally in Los Angeles over the weekend to oppose this bill. The police — whose estimates are generally low — estimated at least 500,000 people demonstrated. Several of them had signs displaying some version of the sentiment “Republicans Hate Latinos”. At least for the case of the Republicans who support this bill (which does not include, to his credit, George Bush), it is hard to argue with that sentiment.

March 27th, 2006 | Politics | 20 comments