The following is not defending Davis per se, but rather defending following state procedure.
All of those things may well happen, but Kentucky has procedures for elected officials. The legislature could impeach her [1], but seems disinclined to do so. The remarks I've seen from legislative leaders suggest that they would like to have a special session for the purpose of modifying statute to reach some accommodation [2], but not impeachment. The governor has declined to allow that. The county attorney has referred a charge of official misconduct to the state attorney general. In Kentucky, official misconduct is a misdemeanor, which might cost her the office (the legislative staff's summaries on county officials aren't clear on that, and I've already spent too much time skimming Kentucky statutes this AM), but probably not her pension [3]. A felony conviction would cost her both, but Kentucky statute seems to require that elected officials mishandle money for misconduct to reach felony level.
[1] Based on my time hanging around legislators, they tend to be very, very protective of their privileges about removing elected officials. The governor is probably out of the loop entirely, and Kentucky is not a recall state. Nor is it clear that even if it were put to a vote by the people of Rowan County, Kentucky, Davis would be recalled.
[2] With my former legislative staff hat on, Davis's problem appears to be that she is required to put her personal signature on the documents -- no one else's signature will do (well, the county judge/executive, but only if the clerk's position is vacant). One alternative might be the use of an anonymous official "Seal of the County Clerk's Office" but that requires a statutory change.
[3] She has pension credit accumulated over 27 years as an employee before she was elected to office. Taking her pension away over something that Kentucky state law treats as a misdemeanor -- a level of criminal act that wouldn't cost anyone else their pension -- strikes me as improperly savage, and probably wouldn't stand up in court.
Excellent! Some questions about reality, as opposed to drama, though.
I believe Kim Davis was elected running as a Democrat. "Red state" is usually used to mean Republican rather than a more non-partisan conservative. Perhaps the governor should be saying something about a big tent not being an excuse to fail to do your job.
The Kentucky constitution appears to me to make counties creatures of the legislature. I suspect that Mr. Shaver is correct in the sense that when the Governor's action here reaches the Kentucky supreme court, the court would reject the notion that the governor can take over the functions of the county clerk's office (eg, he appears to have claimed that he, or a designated person from his office, is now the chair of the Rowan County election board, which must meet at least monthly).
Mr. Moore and Mr. Ermold and their attorneys clearly understand "mootness". They could have gotten a license and been married weeks ago by simply driving to an adjacent county and getting a license, with no question about the legality. Now they have a license of perhaps questionable legality (I certainly think there's room for doubt) and have failed in their goal of forcing the elected Rowan County Clerk to issue a marriage license. I would think they would be unhappy with this outcome.
Not that I'm fond of despots, even the benevolent dictator sort (which may, admittedly, be outside the way you use the term), but there are times when I feel like a variation on Zakaria is the general rule -- you need some combination of a big-enough rich-enough middle class and a moderately-functional bureaucracy in order to get democracy to work.
Do you feel the same way about alcohol? That anyone should be allowed to distill spirits, and sell to anyone regardless of age? Or should there be at least minimum regulation? Honest questions -- I know that I had strong feelings about my 16-year-olds' access to alcohol outside our home.
Anecdotes are not data, but consider the case used as the example in this Slate story. Four pounds in the car; selling to people to whom he delivers pizza. Folks, that behavior is still a felony post-Amendment 64, with a maximum penalty of six years and a $500,000 fine. He got off with probation; why should he get clemency?
...and there’s NOTHING TO DO HERE! FUCK SMALL TOWN AMERICA!
I can hear my kids' generation saying something similar (to which I was known to respond, "You have no idea what an actual backside-of-nowhere small town is like"). It will be interesting to see what the next generation in this suburb says; for them, it'll be an 18-minute train ride to downtown Denver -- faster access than a lot of people who live in Denver have.
The one that always got me was that I could start from our house in Freehold Township, drive to the Metropark at Iselin, ride the train to Manhattan, maybe 50 miles total, and never be "out of town". Then think, "Yeah, I could go at least as far beyond Manhattan the other way and still not be out of town.
Granted, what with the Denver area's insane growth for the last 25 years, I could drive from Boulder to Parker, also about 50 miles, and never be out of town.
@will-truman
This settlement heirarchy divides villages and towns at 1K, towns and large towns at 20K. I'm probably cutting "small town" off somewhere between 5K and 10K -- the point where, based on my experience, it stops being walkable for a majority of the population much of the time. To @leeesq 's comment, it's certainly possible to build a town that size that's walkable. Towns that grew to that size organically tend to be too spread out for various reasons. I suspect there are some rather marked regional contrasts, though.
@stillwater
Another metric involves "degree of isolation" or some such. When I lived in NJ, people talked about living in a "town" with a population of <10K -- which met the definition of what I would call a town, possibly even a small town -- but neglected that there were a dozen towns that abutted one another, with no recognizable buffers between them. In effect, it was a multi-centered small city of 120K or more.
Nor should you be forced to. OTOH, Denver and its inner-ring suburbs are still growing but the cost of additional lane-miles to carry the traffic has gotten prohibitive. So light-rail to take up some of the traffic makes sense. And light rail is driving denser housing everywhere it runs for people who prefer that but didn't have the option before.
Even today there are advantages to concentrating services and specialized goods inventory into a central location -- the bank, the farm implement dealer, the licensed welder, etc. Those support a second tier of services -- the doctor, the dentist, the public school, a laundromat, a drug store, a grocery, and so on. There are limits to the size of the town, dictated largely by the underlying ag industry (or resource extraction, or whatever). The small Iowa town where I spent my childhood in the 1960s had some other things that let it grow somewhat larger -- a Presbyterian-associated college, the county seat, a meat-packing plant. But those things came at the expense of walkability for most of the population.
This brief paragraph is full of contradictions. Small-town America has been dying slowly for well over a hundred years. No one knows how to put together a small town that is successful and walkable in any meaningful sense that works in an economy providing a contemporary set of goods and services.
A couple weeks ago I was leaving my neighborhood and had to stop behind a bus at the nearby railroad tracks. One of the railroad company's service trucks -- the pickups that have drop-down steel wheels that fit the rails -- was parked on the tracks a ways past the crossing. Between the service truck and and the crossing there was a guy with what was clearly a pair of wire dowsing rods.
FWIW I think the urban and transit wonks are probably right that it is better (from an environmental standpoint and some psychological standpoints) if we lived in denser communities and used public transit instead of cars.
So do I. Where I differ from most of those wonks is that I think it's a very, very complex nuanced problem. For the 25% of the US population living in rural areas and small towns, density and public transit are largely unworkable options. Cities have to sit at the center of large transportation webs for commercial and industrial purposes that aren't going to go away. There are different end-state goals (eg, is it just low-energy no matter how dirty, or is it low-carbon?). The time frame over which goals are to be accomplished matters. It's a classic complaint, but too many of the wonks let "perfect be the enemy of better".
It can also be a simple matter of having to choose between having to correct people on the pronunciation of tour name every day of your life and not having to do that.
And people of all sorts of heritage make the decision for that, and other obvious reasons. My grandfather Vernon Milford Cain, white small-town Iowa boy, went by "Bill" for most of his life.
I liked the whole post, Vikram. One of the things I often say about myself after study, research, etc: "I don't have any answers; but the quality of my questions is greatly improved." "Why do objects have inertia?" is a good enough question to last a lifetime.
One of the interesting things is that before the contemporary ninja/Highlander sorts of myths, both the katana and the longsword were heavy infantry weapons: stand here, armored and shielded, shoulder to shoulder, and hold this piece of land; alternatively, go take that piece of land from similarly-equipped men. Individual combat with both weapons was an afterthought.
The only place where steel got cheap enough for civilians was in Western Europe. The rapier and later the small sword were the weapons of choice when it was one-on-one sans armor. Thrusting weapons that were small, light, fast, capable of attack from odd angles. Weapons suited for an urban setting, largely worthless to the military. The kings in both France and England worked hard to stop the use of those, as they were too damned lethal and both countries were losing too many of the nobility.
Because theatrical needs are different, all of these fights are unrealistic in two ways. Trivially, the footwork sucks -- I don't think there are any martial arts where coaches don't complain about the students' footwork. The more important is that the distance is far too short to be realistic. Exercise for the student -- go find clips of Chuck Norris fighting full contact in competition; compare the distance between Chuck and his opponent there to the distance between fighters in Chuck's movies and TV shows.
There are some moves across lines that would make me nervous if I were trying them with a cross-guard that could cut my hand(s) off. I'm not pinning my hopes on getting more than we did with Darth Maul's two-ended light staff, which people loved at first glimpse -- one fight sequence and that's it. Given the apparent properties of the light blades -- very little mass, highly selective inertia, ability to cut through anything but another light blade -- I wouldn't opt for a weapon styled on either a Japanese katana or a northern European long sword. Give me a Renaissance rapier and dagger combination.
This strikes me as more of the East-West divide rather than D v R.
Precisely.
They can’t just keep letting the west burn every year.
Would you care to make a small wager on how long they're willing to let the West burn? This is one of the things that some people predicted when the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act passed Congress without a single "aye" vote from the western states -- that the non-West, having taken permanent charge of the federal lands in western states, would neglect them.
Tangentially related to the sentencing part, in Denver this week. Dexter Louis, found guilty of stabbing five people to death, was sentenced to life without parole. The prosecutor was seeking the death sentence.
We can hope. The Congress critters from the western states have introduced a steady stream of bills with (western) bipartisan support over the last few years. Rep. Paul Ryan, chair of the House budget committee, shot all of them down. Rep. Ryan appears to have it in for the Forest Service generally. He's moved on to Ways and Means, but I don't have much expectation that things will change -- of 22 Republicans on the House budget committee, there's only one from any of the states west of the Great Plains.
B1: As summer winds down, Denver and its western suburbs are getting a rash of bear visits. A sequence of unusual weather events have resulted in reduced natural food supplies up in the foothills, so the bears are foraging farther afield.
Seems like the response to Trump is a collective “Right Arm!” “Yeah!” “You tell ’em, Donald!” stuff like that. And that’s why I keep on thinking that eventually this is going to go away.
A problem the other candidates have is that their message is "You ought to be angry about X, which I'm angry about!" Each of those candidates gets a part of the angry base, those who have bothered to think about why they're angry and agree it's X. Trump tells them "You're angry! And you deserve to be angry!" But he doesn't tell them what they're angry about, leaving it up to the people in the audience to decide for themselves. Some of them know, but many of them can't articulate it and will settle for a candidate that does a "I feel your anger!" shtick.
A larger problem in multiple ways is that there's a significant number of really angry voters out there, who don't know exactly what they're angry about. They're not going to go away, and they're not going to be satisfied, and they are going to put a some people in the Senate, more in the House, and a whole bunch in state legislatures. I expect the ugliness to get much worse before it gets better.
One of the things I noticed was that the reading suggestion you got was from the A&S school, not from the university. I have been unable to determine if the Duke reading went to all incoming freshmen, or only to their A&S freshmen (Duke has two schools, one A&S and one engineering). While this particular debate is about conservative students who find the material offensive, it is quite common to find similar complaints from engineering students who find such material irrelevant. Those arguments are, IMO, largely the result of confusion about universities that are doing two different things: there's the traditional "college education" thing, and then there's the four-year trade-school "engineering" thing. When the latter was becoming a thing, it looked enough like what colleges already did, and was so obviously lucrative, that universities went into that business.
I'd be inclined to have incoming engineering students read Sobel's Longitude, but that's just me.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Breaking Vexillological News”
How could a kiwi with a laser beam shooting out of its eye not make the final cut?
On “Une Vignette Fantastique du Kentucky”
The following is not defending Davis per se, but rather defending following state procedure.
All of those things may well happen, but Kentucky has procedures for elected officials. The legislature could impeach her [1], but seems disinclined to do so. The remarks I've seen from legislative leaders suggest that they would like to have a special session for the purpose of modifying statute to reach some accommodation [2], but not impeachment. The governor has declined to allow that. The county attorney has referred a charge of official misconduct to the state attorney general. In Kentucky, official misconduct is a misdemeanor, which might cost her the office (the legislative staff's summaries on county officials aren't clear on that, and I've already spent too much time skimming Kentucky statutes this AM), but probably not her pension [3]. A felony conviction would cost her both, but Kentucky statute seems to require that elected officials mishandle money for misconduct to reach felony level.
[1] Based on my time hanging around legislators, they tend to be very, very protective of their privileges about removing elected officials. The governor is probably out of the loop entirely, and Kentucky is not a recall state. Nor is it clear that even if it were put to a vote by the people of Rowan County, Kentucky, Davis would be recalled.
[2] With my former legislative staff hat on, Davis's problem appears to be that she is required to put her personal signature on the documents -- no one else's signature will do (well, the county judge/executive, but only if the clerk's position is vacant). One alternative might be the use of an anonymous official "Seal of the County Clerk's Office" but that requires a statutory change.
[3] She has pension credit accumulated over 27 years as an employee before she was elected to office. Taking her pension away over something that Kentucky state law treats as a misdemeanor -- a level of criminal act that wouldn't cost anyone else their pension -- strikes me as improperly savage, and probably wouldn't stand up in court.
"
Excellent! Some questions about reality, as opposed to drama, though.
I believe Kim Davis was elected running as a Democrat. "Red state" is usually used to mean Republican rather than a more non-partisan conservative. Perhaps the governor should be saying something about a big tent not being an excuse to fail to do your job.
The Kentucky constitution appears to me to make counties creatures of the legislature. I suspect that Mr. Shaver is correct in the sense that when the Governor's action here reaches the Kentucky supreme court, the court would reject the notion that the governor can take over the functions of the county clerk's office (eg, he appears to have claimed that he, or a designated person from his office, is now the chair of the Rowan County election board, which must meet at least monthly).
Mr. Moore and Mr. Ermold and their attorneys clearly understand "mootness". They could have gotten a license and been married weeks ago by simply driving to an adjacent county and getting a license, with no question about the legality. Now they have a license of perhaps questionable legality (I certainly think there's room for doubt) and have failed in their goal of forcing the elected Rowan County Clerk to issue a marriage license. I would think they would be unhappy with this outcome.
On “Whoa”
Not that I'm fond of despots, even the benevolent dictator sort (which may, admittedly, be outside the way you use the term), but there are times when I feel like a variation on Zakaria is the general rule -- you need some combination of a big-enough rich-enough middle class and a moderately-functional bureaucracy in order to get democracy to work.
On ““Why do we continue to trust these [people]?””
Do you feel the same way about alcohol? That anyone should be allowed to distill spirits, and sell to anyone regardless of age? Or should there be at least minimum regulation? Honest questions -- I know that I had strong feelings about my 16-year-olds' access to alcohol outside our home.
"
Anecdotes are not data, but consider the case used as the example in this Slate story. Four pounds in the car; selling to people to whom he delivers pizza. Folks, that behavior is still a felony post-Amendment 64, with a maximum penalty of six years and a $500,000 fine. He got off with probation; why should he get clemency?
On “Playing the Trump Card: The Party Elite, Wonks, the Rest of Us”
...and there’s NOTHING TO DO HERE! FUCK SMALL TOWN AMERICA!
I can hear my kids' generation saying something similar (to which I was known to respond, "You have no idea what an actual backside-of-nowhere small town is like"). It will be interesting to see what the next generation in this suburb says; for them, it'll be an 18-minute train ride to downtown Denver -- faster access than a lot of people who live in Denver have.
"
Various places in Monmouth County.
The one that always got me was that I could start from our house in Freehold Township, drive to the Metropark at Iselin, ride the train to Manhattan, maybe 50 miles total, and never be "out of town". Then think, "Yeah, I could go at least as far beyond Manhattan the other way and still not be out of town.
Granted, what with the Denver area's insane growth for the last 25 years, I could drive from Boulder to Parker, also about 50 miles, and never be out of town.
"
@will-truman
This settlement heirarchy divides villages and towns at 1K, towns and large towns at 20K. I'm probably cutting "small town" off somewhere between 5K and 10K -- the point where, based on my experience, it stops being walkable for a majority of the population much of the time. To @leeesq 's comment, it's certainly possible to build a town that size that's walkable. Towns that grew to that size organically tend to be too spread out for various reasons. I suspect there are some rather marked regional contrasts, though.
@stillwater
Another metric involves "degree of isolation" or some such. When I lived in NJ, people talked about living in a "town" with a population of <10K -- which met the definition of what I would call a town, possibly even a small town -- but neglected that there were a dozen towns that abutted one another, with no recognizable buffers between them. In effect, it was a multi-centered small city of 120K or more.
"
Nor should you be forced to. OTOH, Denver and its inner-ring suburbs are still growing but the cost of additional lane-miles to carry the traffic has gotten prohibitive. So light-rail to take up some of the traffic makes sense. And light rail is driving denser housing everywhere it runs for people who prefer that but didn't have the option before.
"
Even today there are advantages to concentrating services and specialized goods inventory into a central location -- the bank, the farm implement dealer, the licensed welder, etc. Those support a second tier of services -- the doctor, the dentist, the public school, a laundromat, a drug store, a grocery, and so on. There are limits to the size of the town, dictated largely by the underlying ag industry (or resource extraction, or whatever). The small Iowa town where I spent my childhood in the 1960s had some other things that let it grow somewhat larger -- a Presbyterian-associated college, the county seat, a meat-packing plant. But those things came at the expense of walkability for most of the population.
"
This brief paragraph is full of contradictions. Small-town America has been dying slowly for well over a hundred years. No one knows how to put together a small town that is successful and walkable in any meaningful sense that works in an economy providing a contemporary set of goods and services.
On “Lesson in Hedgewitchery”
A couple weeks ago I was leaving my neighborhood and had to stop behind a bus at the nearby railroad tracks. One of the railroad company's service trucks -- the pickups that have drop-down steel wheels that fit the rails -- was parked on the tracks a ways past the crossing. Between the service truck and and the crossing there was a guy with what was clearly a pair of wire dowsing rods.
On “Playing the Trump Card: The Party Elite, Wonks, the Rest of Us”
FWIW I think the urban and transit wonks are probably right that it is better (from an environmental standpoint and some psychological standpoints) if we lived in denser communities and used public transit instead of cars.
So do I. Where I differ from most of those wonks is that I think it's a very, very complex nuanced problem. For the 25% of the US population living in rural areas and small towns, density and public transit are largely unworkable options. Cities have to sit at the center of large transportation webs for commercial and industrial purposes that aren't going to go away. There are different end-state goals (eg, is it just low-energy no matter how dirty, or is it low-carbon?). The time frame over which goals are to be accomplished matters. It's a classic complaint, but too many of the wonks let "perfect be the enemy of better".
On “Weekend!”
No political intent, just an observation from this AM's bicycle ride: there are Bernie! yard signs out.
On “Donald Trump Is More Important — and Dangerous — than You Think”
It can also be a simple matter of having to choose between having to correct people on the pronunciation of tour name every day of your life and not having to do that.
And people of all sorts of heritage make the decision for that, and other obvious reasons. My grandfather Vernon Milford Cain, white small-town Iowa boy, went by "Bill" for most of his life.
On “The Richard Feynman Guide to Parenting”
I liked the whole post, Vikram. One of the things I often say about myself after study, research, etc: "I don't have any answers; but the quality of my questions is greatly improved." "Why do objects have inertia?" is a good enough question to last a lifetime.
On “Weekend!”
One of the interesting things is that before the contemporary ninja/Highlander sorts of myths, both the katana and the longsword were heavy infantry weapons: stand here, armored and shielded, shoulder to shoulder, and hold this piece of land; alternatively, go take that piece of land from similarly-equipped men. Individual combat with both weapons was an afterthought.
The only place where steel got cheap enough for civilians was in Western Europe. The rapier and later the small sword were the weapons of choice when it was one-on-one sans armor. Thrusting weapons that were small, light, fast, capable of attack from odd angles. Weapons suited for an urban setting, largely worthless to the military. The kings in both France and England worked hard to stop the use of those, as they were too damned lethal and both countries were losing too many of the nobility.
Because theatrical needs are different, all of these fights are unrealistic in two ways. Trivially, the footwork sucks -- I don't think there are any martial arts where coaches don't complain about the students' footwork. The more important is that the distance is far too short to be realistic. Exercise for the student -- go find clips of Chuck Norris fighting full contact in competition; compare the distance between Chuck and his opponent there to the distance between fighters in Chuck's movies and TV shows.
"
There are some moves across lines that would make me nervous if I were trying them with a cross-guard that could cut my hand(s) off. I'm not pinning my hopes on getting more than we did with Darth Maul's two-ended light staff, which people loved at first glimpse -- one fight sequence and that's it. Given the apparent properties of the light blades -- very little mass, highly selective inertia, ability to cut through anything but another light blade -- I wouldn't opt for a weapon styled on either a Japanese katana or a northern European long sword. Give me a Renaissance rapier and dagger combination.
On “Linky Friday #129: Scary Things”
This strikes me as more of the East-West divide rather than D v R.
Precisely.
They can’t just keep letting the west burn every year.
Would you care to make a small wager on how long they're willing to let the West burn? This is one of the things that some people predicted when the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act passed Congress without a single "aye" vote from the western states -- that the non-West, having taken permanent charge of the federal lands in western states, would neglect them.
"
Tangentially related to the sentencing part, in Denver this week. Dexter Louis, found guilty of stabbing five people to death, was sentenced to life without parole. The prosecutor was seeking the death sentence.
"
We can hope. The Congress critters from the western states have introduced a steady stream of bills with (western) bipartisan support over the last few years. Rep. Paul Ryan, chair of the House budget committee, shot all of them down. Rep. Ryan appears to have it in for the Forest Service generally. He's moved on to Ways and Means, but I don't have much expectation that things will change -- of 22 Republicans on the House budget committee, there's only one from any of the states west of the Great Plains.
"
B1: As summer winds down, Denver and its western suburbs are getting a rash of bear visits. A sequence of unusual weather events have resulted in reduced natural food supplies up in the foothills, so the bears are foraging farther afield.
On “Donald Trump Is More Important — and Dangerous — than You Think”
Seems like the response to Trump is a collective “Right Arm!” “Yeah!” “You tell ’em, Donald!” stuff like that. And that’s why I keep on thinking that eventually this is going to go away.
A problem the other candidates have is that their message is "You ought to be angry about X, which I'm angry about!" Each of those candidates gets a part of the angry base, those who have bothered to think about why they're angry and agree it's X. Trump tells them "You're angry! And you deserve to be angry!" But he doesn't tell them what they're angry about, leaving it up to the people in the audience to decide for themselves. Some of them know, but many of them can't articulate it and will settle for a candidate that does a "I feel your anger!" shtick.
A larger problem in multiple ways is that there's a significant number of really angry voters out there, who don't know exactly what they're angry about. They're not going to go away, and they're not going to be satisfied, and they are going to put a some people in the Senate, more in the House, and a whole bunch in state legislatures. I expect the ugliness to get much worse before it gets better.
On “Skipping The Summer Reading”
This is really outstanding, Burt.
One of the things I noticed was that the reading suggestion you got was from the A&S school, not from the university. I have been unable to determine if the Duke reading went to all incoming freshmen, or only to their A&S freshmen (Duke has two schools, one A&S and one engineering). While this particular debate is about conservative students who find the material offensive, it is quite common to find similar complaints from engineering students who find such material irrelevant. Those arguments are, IMO, largely the result of confusion about universities that are doing two different things: there's the traditional "college education" thing, and then there's the four-year trade-school "engineering" thing. When the latter was becoming a thing, it looked enough like what colleges already did, and was so obviously lucrative, that universities went into that business.
I'd be inclined to have incoming engineering students read Sobel's Longitude, but that's just me.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.