I've been delivered

The Wallflowers I've been delivered Breach (2000)

In many ways, this lyrically rich song is an anthem for Jurisdynamics. From the opening lines — nothing's hard as / getting free from places / I've already been — to the closing — I can't fix / something this complex / any more than I can build a rose — I've been delivered expresses some of the core principles of complexity theory.

I could break free from the wood of a coffin if I need But nothing's hard as getting free from places I've already been I've been waste-deep in the burning meadows of my mind In the engine In cold December shooting fire from the hose Now turn off your lights 'cause I'm not coming home 'til I'm delivered for the first time I was first-born to a parade that follows in rows down a narrow cold black river faceless shadows moving slow I would move swift when the sounds of a trumpet would blow I've been the puppet I've been the strings I know the vacant face it brings Now the bells of curfew They may ring before I'm through But soon I'll be delivered for the first time You might keep clean in the back of an angel motorcade It doesn't matter who walks in you know, the joke is still the same You'll just wake up like a disposable lover decomposed I've been gone I've been remembered I've been alive I've been a ghost So now, if downtown explodes I'll still be on this road 'til I'm delivered for the first time

I have drawn blood from the neckline when vampires were in fashion You know I'd even learn to cut my throat If I thought I could fit in 'Cause I, I once heard that you gotta learn how to blend in to this mess Where nothing's hard nothing's precious and nothing's smooth or flawless Now, no more amused just screaming to be delivered for the first time Now I'm ten miles in the deep and mighty blue sea Looking back, towards a long white beach burning up into yellow flames And I just wave back like a little boy up on a pony in a show 'cause I can't fix something this complex any more than I can build a rose So just keep on letting go 'cause I must be close to being delivered for the first time Now I'd rather bleed out a long stream from being lonely and feel blessed Well than drown, laying face down in a puddle of respect I was once lost in the corridors of the arena in blindfolds I've been the bull I've been the whip I just pulled down the matador So now, turn on your lights 'cause I'm coming home I've been delivered for the first time

The wives and times of William O. Douglas

A warm and welcome e-mail message from Thomas E. Baker showed the error of my ways. In The Mystery and the Mastery of the Judicial Power, 59 Mo. L. Rev. 281 (1994), I asserted that William O. Douglas is the only Supreme Court Justice ever to marry a law clerk. That assertion was wrong, and I apologize.

The research I performed to resolve Tom's question, however, revealed some fascinating details about the wives and times and Justice Douglas. I now share those details with the readers of Jurisdynamics and Ratio Juris.

1. A Sequel to Springtime, Time (August 16, 1963):

It was a lovely day in 1961, and in a springtime mood the students at Pennsylvania's little Allegheny College waited for their distinguished guest speaker, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Orville Douglas. A slender, brown-haired Kappa Kappa Gamma named Joan Carol Martin was especially anxious. After all, Joan was a political science major, an honor student who was deeply interested in juridical philosophy—particularly as expounded by Justice Douglas. Introduced to Douglas by an Allegheny professor, Joan escorted him about the campus. She was duly impressed, and charmed.

The next year Joan titled her senior thesis "Testimonies and Concepts of William O. Douglas," and after graduation she headed for Washington. There, she called Douglas and asked for an appointment to see him. Joan was looking for work. Douglas, as it happened, needed someone to type notes for a book he was writing. Joan qualified and she got the job. . . .

That fall Douglas separated from his second wife and moved to a bachelor apartment. A precociously distinguished jurist and an outdoorsman of rare dedication, Douglas had in 1923 married Mildred Riddle, a girl he had met while both taught at Yakima, Wash., high school. Mildred worked to help him through Columbia University Law School, bore him a son and daughter. But after 30 years of marriage, in 1953, she divorced him, charging that he left her "abandoned and alone" while working and traveling "to remote places in the world."

The next year Douglas married Mercedes Hester Davidson, divorced wife of a former Assistant Secretary of the Interior. Mercedes had been his research assistant, even attended auto mechanics school to learn how to change tires and spark plugs on their faraway trips. But for all of that, something was amiss. Two weeks ago, Mercedes won an uncontested divorce on grounds of cruelty. Five days later, Bill Douglas, 64, and Joan Martin, 23, were married; the following day, Mercedes married her third husband, Washington Lawyer Robert B. Eichholz. . . .

For months, the rumor has persisted Washington that Douglas chatted with President Kennedy last spring, hinted that he might resign from the Supreme Court Douglas denies this — and there seems little likelihood that he would conceivably step down before Oct. 16, his 65th birthday, when he will be eligible to retire at his full salary of $35,000 a year for life.

Last week, while the Douglas newlyweds were honeymooning on Washington State's lonely Olympic Peninsula, Joan's mother reported that she had received some "nasty telephone calls about the marriage. Said she to newsmen: "I'd like to give this an aura of good taste. He is an extraordinary man, and I think my daughter is a very unusual girl. They are, neither of them, ordinary people."


2. September Song, Time (July 29, 1966)

"Oo, la, la!" exclaimed Oliver Wendell Holmes to a startled aide who was attending him in his study one wintry day. "Young man," explained Mr. Justice Holmes, then a redoubtable 93, "I was thinking about walking down the street with a pretty lady and holding her hand behind her husband's back." And oo, la, la, generally speaking, was Washington's reaction last week to news that one of Holmes's most libertarian successors on the Supreme Court, William O. Douglas, 67, had taken as his fourth bride blonde, blue-eyed Cathleen Heffernan, a 23-year-old senior at Portland's all-girl Marylhurst College.

Within hours of the week's first session, members of the House had introduced four resolutions calling for an investigation of the thrice-divorced Justice's "moral character." Kansas Republican Robert Dole charged that Douglas had not only used "bad judgment from a matrimonial standpoint, but also in a number of 5-to-4 decisions of the Supreme Court." Democrat Byron Rogers of Colorado suggested that the romantic Justice might be retired under a law allowing for the removal of a judge "permanently disabled from performing his duties."

The resolutions and half a dozen floor speeches probably were an embarrassment to Douglas, but were hardly likely to lead to an investigation, let alone the first successful impeachment of a Supreme Court Justice in the nation's history. Nor were they likely to persuade the ruggedly individualistic Douglas — who has served 27 years on the court — to repeat a half-serious offer to resign from the bench, tendered to President Kennedy after his second divorce in 1963. His first marriage, to Mildred Riddle, ended in 1953 after 30 years and two children; his second, to Divorcee Mercedes Hester Davidson, lasted nine years; his third, to Joan Carol Martin, 26, broke up last December after two years, four months.

On to Peking. Douglas met his latest, the boyishly bobbed Cathleen, at a party in Portland last summer, and on a return visit in December asked the host for "the name, telephone number and address of that terrific gal I met at your party." In May, he stopped in Portland again — to see Cathy and his dentist, "in that order of importance" — and later invited her to join a party at Prairie Lodge, his remote cabin in Gooseprairie, Wash., in the heart of the Cascade Mountains. Invited to a banquet in Los Angeles earlier this month, Douglas once again invited Cathy along, just in time for her to be stranded by the airline strike. Said Cathy: "I stayed over three days and I got married."

Back at Prairie Lodge last week, under the peaks of Baldy and Old Scab, Douglas and his bride appeared blissfully unconcerned by the headshaking on the Potomac. "We don't get much news around here," drawled Douglas. "On the short-wave radio we can listen to the broadcasts from the Bureau of Reclamation and Peking." The latter, at least, should be worth listening to if Peking approves the Justice's plans, sanctioned last week by the State Department, to visit Red China with Cathy this September.


3. David J. Garrow, The Tragedy of William O. Douglas, The Nation (April 14, 2003):

The William O. Douglas Wilderness

In 1961 Douglas began pursuing a young Allegheny College student, Joan Martin, who was writing her senior thesis on him, and once Martin moved to Washington the affair became public. "Other Justices at the time had mistresses," [said] Douglas's utterly loyal Court messenger, Harry Datcher . . . , "but they would employ them as secretaries or keep them away from the Court building. Douglas, though, did what he did in the open. He didn't give a damn what people thought of him."

A 1962-63 law clerk recalled Joan Martin once hiding in an office closet to avoid Mercedes, but the following summer the 64-year-old Douglas divorced Mercedes and married 23-year-old Joan. But Douglas's behavior toward women did not improve. One old Douglas friend remembered how Joan "just sat down and cried all night because he never paid any attention to her," and more than once Joan complained to a former Douglas clerk that "he beats me up all the time." Less than two years later Douglas dismissed Joan from his life, took up with an old Washington State girlfriend, Elena Leonardo, and then met a 22-year-old Oregon waitress, Cathleen Heffernan, who became his fourth wife in mid-1966.

---

The upshot: Douglas experienced the first, second, and third divorces by a sitting Supreme Court Justice.

Trouble in bear country

As rising temperatures change life on a global scale, we should not be surprised that Ursus maritimus, the eponymous bear of the far north, has now come under the aegis of the Endangered Species Act.

Threatened

Sugar, sugar

Memorandum   Fellow members of the Barack Obama campaign, we're about to seal the deal. We just scored endorsements from NARAL and John Edwards. One little matter does warrant our attention: In addition to bitter and cling, please remind Senator Obama to drop the word sweetie from his vocabulary: Our candidate is the smoothest orator in the recent history of American politics. Hillary Clinton is usually the one who misspeaks. We're giving bloggers and newspapers too much ammunition. Especially when this is the second time he's called a woman sweetie on the campaign trail. Striking sweetie from our candidate's vocabulary is an admittedly modest measure, but this is linguistic change we can believe in.

Just do it: Obama's victory lap in Eugene, Orgeon

Above: a brilliant piece of political photography by Bruce Ely of the Associated Press, published in connection with the Washington Post's coverage of Barack Obama's campaign stop in Eugene, Oregon.

Almost heaven

John Denver, Country Roads Almost heaven, West Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains Shenandoah River — Life is old there Older than the trees Younger than the mountains Growing like a breeze Country roads, take me home To the place I belong West Virginia, mountain mama Take me home, country roads All my memories gather round her Miners' lady, stranger to blue water Dark and dusty, painted on the sky Misty taste of moonshine Teardrops in my eye Country roads, take me home To the place I belong West Virginia, mountain mama Take me home, country roads I hear her voice In the morning hour she calls me The radio reminds me of my home far away And driving down the road I get a feeling That I should have been home yesterday, yesterday Country roads, take me home To the place I belong West Virginia, mountain mama Take me home, country roads Country roads, take me home To the place I belong West Virginia, mountain mama Take me home, country roads Take me home, now country roads Take me home, now country roads

Hillary's last great hope

From Hillary Clinton's explosive interview staking claim to a "broader base" among "hard-working Americans, white Americans":

West Virginia and Kentucky are the next battleground for swing, working-class voters. These are the people you have to win if you're a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that. And I think it's important that I won this group decisively in Texas, and Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and even North Carolina. We've got to appeal to those voters if we're going to win in November. . . .

[T]here was just an AP article posted that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how . . . whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. And in independents I was running even with him and doing even better with Democratic-leaning independents. I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.

Herewith two additional images. Their relevance to this post is left as an exercise for the reader. If you remain befuddled, roll your mouse over each image, or click through:

The platypus genome

The platypus genome has been sequenced. Some of the cooler details:

1. Sex determination. It has been known that platypuses have not one but five (!) pairs of sex chromosomes. Male platypuses exhibit an XYXYXYXYXY genotype. And those sex chromosomes bear some connection to the ZW sex determination system found in birds. But what the newly sequenced genome reveals is that the platypus's male-determining gene, the monotreme equivalent of primates' SRY gene, is not located on any of those five pairs of sex chromosomes. Instead, it resides on an altogether different chromosome, one with no apparent connection with sex determination.


2. The beginnings of a transition from oviparous to viviparous reproduction. Whereas some birds (such as chickens) have as many as three genes affecting the production of egg yolk protein, platypuses have just one. The platypus genome evidently exhibits some sort of transition from egg-laying, which requires the delivery of nutrition during incubation, toward providing more nutrition after hatching.


3. Platypus milk. And that nutrition takes the form of milk, which female platypuses deliver without the benefit of nipples. Secreted from "milk patches" on the abdomen, platypus milk appears to be a modified version of a moisturizing fluid originally developed for keeping eggs from drying out during incubation. At least five distinct genes direct the progressively growth of nutritional complexity in platypus milk.


4. Detecting chemicals under water. Platypuses have an impressive arsenal of "vomeronasal" genes that help them detect pheromones under water. Platypuses can thereby detect mates and prey even as they close their eyes and nostrils while diving.


5. Venom. Male platypuses deliver venom from spurs their rear legs. The only mammal to make venom, platypuses generate chemicals that are very similar to some snake venoms. Apparently these similarities are the product of evolutionary convergence rather than genetic descent. Although platypuses and snakes built venoms from the same starter molecule in their immune systems, they evolved venom independently and by different genetic routes.

If moving from (mono)treme dreams to 'treme genes leaves you hungry for more information on Ornithorhynchus anatinus, reread this old Jurisdynamics post, Monotremata.

Loving

By way of The Daily Kos and Pharyngula, I've learned that Mildred Jeter Loving died on May 2, 2008.

Mildred Loving and her husband, Richard, were the subject of Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1. (1967), the Supreme Court case that invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriages. Loving was decided June 12, 1967, well within the lifetime of many Americans alive today. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to bring its laws in line with Loving by repealing its antimiscegenation statute.

On the occasion of Mildred Loving's death, I present a statement that she made on the 40th anniversary of the Loving decision in 2007. I also embed audio of the oral argument in Loving.

Statement on the 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia
By Mildred Loving

When my late husband, Richard, and I got married in Washington, DC in 1958, it wasn’t to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married.

Oral argument, Loving v. Virginia  (April 10, 1967)

We didn’t get married in Washington because we wanted to marry there. We did it there because the government wouldn’t allow us to marry back home in Virginia where we grew up, where we met, where we fell in love, and where we wanted to be together and build our family. You see, I am a woman of color and Richard was white, and at that time people believed it was okay to keep us from marrying because of their ideas of who should marry whom.

When Richard and I came back to our home in Virginia, happily married, we had no intention of battling over the law. We made a commitment to each other in our love and lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn’t that what marriage is?

Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the "crime" of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.

We left, and got a lawyer. Richard and I had to fight, but still were not fighting for a cause. We were fighting for our love.

Though it turned out we had to fight, happily Richard and I didn’t have to fight alone. Thanks to groups like the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, and so many good people around the country willing to speak up, we took our case for the freedom to marry all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men," a "basic civil right."

My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the "wrong kind of person" for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.

Are administrative patent judges unconstitutional?

Apparently, yes:

As amended in 1999, 35 U.S.C. § 6 authorizes the Director of the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to appoint all administrative patent judges of the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences [BPIA]. That method of appointment is almost certainly unconstitutional, and the administrative patent judges serving under such appointments are likely to be viewed by the courts as having no constitutionally valid governmental authority. The full extent of the problem was revealed in a recent statement to the press by a PTO spokeswoman, who disclosed that nearly two-thirds of the agency's administrative patent judges were appointed under the new statute. If administrative patent judges are being randomly assigned to three-judge panels, then a simple probability calculation shows that more than 95% of Board panels are likely to include at least one unconstitutionally appointed judge.

And with that conclusion, John F. Duffy has cast serious constitutional doubt on 46 administrative patent judges and millions of dollars in patent litigation conducted during the past decade.

John Duffy's paper represents a masterful stroke in legal scholarship. He has identified a significant constitutional flaw in an important piece of legislation. His analysis seems airtight under the most directly applicable Supreme Court precedent, Freytag v. Commissioner, 501 U.S. 868 (1991). The administrative judges of the BPIA, at a minimum, are surely "inferior Officers" of the United States, not mere employees. If so, the appointments clause of the Constitution, art. II, § 2, cl. 2, requires that they be appointed by the President, by the "Head[]" of a "Department," or by a "Court[] of Law." The Director of the PTO is none of those things.

John Duffy's achievement also marks the triumph of what I have called Law 2.0. He has moved the law, in profoundly important ways, by resorting directly to electronic media and without waiting for the conventional distribution networks for legal scholarship to complete their important but often excruciatingly slow work. Are Administrative Patent Judges Unconstitutional? originally appeared on a patent law blog. The SSRN version of this paper is so fresh that as of this writing, it has yet to clear SSRN's internal review process and thereby to appear on Professor Duffy's SSRN author page. Even in this raw form, it has already caught the eye of the New York Times and undoubtedly will draw more attention as the controversy deepens. This paper epitomizes the legal academy at its best: making sound, persuasive arguments on issues that matter and thereby changing the world through law.

Benediction

In response to Red Lion Reports' exam-inspired "Prayer for a busy day," Jurisdynamics offers yet another benediction. Herewith Numbers 6:24-26: 24 The Lord bless you and keep you: 25 The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you: 26 The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. Image at left: Revisionary Glassworks, Benediction (2000) (installed at Highlander Elementary School, Renton, Washington).

Jazzfest 2008

The New York Times took note of New Orleans' annual Jazz and Heritage Festival, a.k.a. Jazzfest:

Like the city it celebrates, the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is steeped in local memory. . . .

At this year’s Jazzfest it was clear that New Orleans performances have added a new and possibly permanent custom: an acknowledgment of the scars left by [Hurricane Katrina].

When Stevie Wonder headlined Friday’s lineup, he brought onstage the New Orleans R&B stalwart Irma Thomas to sing his song “Shelter in the Rain,” which she recorded after losing her home and club to the flood. The New Orleans trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, leading the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra on Saturday, ended his set with a hymnlike elegy to his father, who drowned in the flooding after the storm. As Randy Newman performed his song about an earlier flood, “Louisiana 1927,” he drew a heartfelt sing-along on the chorus: “Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away.” Another New Orleans trumpeter, Kermit Ruffins, doing his version of the optimistic “O-o-h Child,” rapped about growing up in the devastated Lower Ninth Ward, and urged, “Clean up this mess,” while the Dirty Dozen Brass Band added a few words about Katrina to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.”

But musicians at Jazzfest didn’t linger over grief. They created a New Orleans party, the kind that simultaneously defies sorrow, affirms continuity, heartens the locals and draws eager tourists.

A campaign picture worth a thousand words

The above image is what Fox News used to illustrate Hillary Clinton's announcement that she had challenged Barack Obama to a Lincoln-Douglas debate. A tip of the stove-top hat to The Faculty Lounge, Feminist Law Professors, and Bitch Ph.D..

And in the interest of preventing that image from becoming too strongly associated with the real Lincoln-Douglas debates, the ones that took place 150 years ago and involved a Democratic Senator from Illinois who would go on to win his party's nomination for President, I offer this image from 1858:

The Law of Rock

By way of the Daily Californian, Jurisdynamics and MoneyLaw have learned a matter of earthshaking importance in legal education:

Josh Keesan, a law student at the University of California-Berkeley, has recorded The Law of Rock, Volume 1. To the best of my knowledge, this album represents the first, full-length, studio-recorded effort to express legal doctrines as works of rock 'n' roll. Simply awesome!

To hear samples of Josh Keesan's new album, you can visit the Daily Californian's podcast page or Josh's own album page. But why not stick around here and listen to the concert in the comfort of this blogspace? And if you're impressed, as I am, be sure to buy his album.

Josh Keesan rocks the law

Contributory Negligence  Promissory Estoppel  Mens Rea

Rhapsodizing further on insects

Elaborating further on Rhapsody in iridescent blue: A quartet from "The Theater of Insects," in Jurisdynamics' preferred variation on the theme of synesthesia:

I. The Theater of Insects Revisited

Images from Jo Whaley, The Theater of Insects, © 2000-2007. Left to right: 19: Coleoptera, 17: Meganuera.

Jo Whaley's visual tour de force, The Theater of Insects, is heavy on butterflies and moths, on the order Lepidoptera. As these images demonstrate, though, Ms. Whaley does not altogether neglect the extremes of the insect world. She pays homage to Coleoptera, the most diverse extant order of insects, and to Meganuera monyi, perhaps the largest insect ever. A member of the order Protodonata, Meganuera closely resembles and is related to modern dragonflies (Anisoptera) and damselflies (Zygoptera).

Ms. Whaley, to my knowledge, hasn't trained her considerable talent on Hymenoptera, typified by the three big taxa of strikingly eusocial insects: bees, wasps, and ants. We'll just have to wait for her book.

II. A Musical Interlude

Herewith three versions of George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue (1924):

A. The original 1924 recording of Rhapsody in Blue (parts 1 and 2)

George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue (Part 1)  (1924) George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue (Part 2)  (1924)

B. An upbeat, one-file version, courtesy of Imeem.com

C. Leonard Bernstein plays Rhapsody in Blue in 1976 (parts 1 and 2)

III. A Modest Scientific Observation

What precisely should we make of Meganuera monyi, the Carboniferous giant portrayed at the top of this post? Gigantism, in insects and other organisms, may depend on atmospheric conditions. See Gauthier Chapelle & Lloyd S. Peck, Polar gigantism dictated by oxygen availability, 399 Nature 114-15 (May 1999) (doi:10.1038/20099):

The tendency of some animals to be larger at higher latitudes ('polar gigantism') has not been explained, although it has often been attributed to low temperature and metabolism. Investigation of gigantism requires widely distributed taxa with extensive species representation at many well-studied sites. We have analysed length data for 1,853 species of benthic amphipod crustaceans from 12 sites worldwide, from polar to tropical and marine (continental shelf) to freshwater environments. We find that maximum potential size (MPS) is limited by oxygen availability.

This study's specific discussion of insect gigantism offers further insight into the vulnerability of giant species to changes in global temperatures and/or oxygen levels, as well as the heightened vulnerability of such species' to extinction over geological time:

Oxygen supply may also have led to insect gigantism in the Carboniferous period, because atmospheric oxygen was 30-35% . . . . The demise of these insects when oxygen content fell indicates that large species may be susceptible to such change. Giant amphipods may therefore be among the first species to disappear if global temperatures are increased or global oxygen levels decline. Being close to the critical MPS limit may be seen as a specialization that makes giant species more prone to extinction over geological time.

Couple this environmentally driven evolutionary constraint with the tendency of megafauna to be K-strategists — which is to say that they have long lifespans, low death rates, slow reproductive rates, and few or no natural predators (at least against adults) — and you have a recipe for extermination through human exploitation. So it was when humanity began to colonize the earth. Imagine how much more lethal our species will become as climate change compounds the sixth great extinction spasm of the Phanerozoic Eon.

Rhapsody in iridescent blue: A quartet from "The Theater of Insects"

Images from Jo Whaley, The Theater of Insects, © 2000-2007. Top — 47: Doxocopa cherubina and 8: Papilio ulysses. Bottom — 60: Anaea cyanae and 102: Morpho deidamia.

From the introductory essay accompanying Jo Whaley's forthcoming book, The Theater of Insects (2008):

Like moths attracted to the light of a flame only to perish in that flight, I wonder if we, too, are tied to self-destruction through a drive toward greater technological heights. Conversely, we may be able to use technology and our creativity to become more integrated with nature. As always, the future is uncertain. Art and science are not so diametrically opposed. The practice of both begins with the intense observation of nature, which in turn sparks the imagination toward action. Just pause long enough to look. There is a flicker of hope fluttering in the collective peripheral vision.

The rainbow as refracted truth

By arc or by whole, the rainbow reveals refracted truth. Nearby rain and distant mist have equal power to vaporize visible light into bands of color. A single sheet of water, slicing through sunlight, projects the full spectrum against the sky's inverted bowl. If you are lucky enough to be standing far enough from the point where solar brilliance meets suspended water, you will see sunlight scattered into a full ring of color.

Like metaphorical truth, visible light rarely reveals its constituent parts so regularly and so predictably. Depart ever so modestly from the axis on which truth or light turns, and your eyes will no longer honor one focus. And if you should look instead at an object propelled through the sky, gravity's rainbow will no longer appear to you in closed form. It will rise — and fall — according to a trajectory that will never connect the beginning of truth with its end.

Pivotal events therefore mark the sections of our lives, slicing at particular points of time through the whole of the truth and leaving us no more enlightened than the objects we trace as they travel at speeds below that of light across our field of vision. Catch them, and you will be rewarded momentarily by the mirage of control. Miss them altogether, and you will rue forever the path that both of you, protagonist and projectile, must follow.

Scalia on Bush v. Gore: "Get over it"

In his 60 Minutes interview, expected to air on April 27, 2008, Justice Antonin Scalia has this to say about Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000):

Get over it. It’s so old by now.

Hat tip: ABA Journal Online.

Toxic inaction, in humans and their pets

Mark Schapiro, Toxic Inaction Greenpeace U.K. released a study in 2005 that found numerous toxic chemicals in the umbilical-cord blood of European infants. That same year, World Wildlife Fund International tested the blood of three generations of women from 12 European countries. The largest number of chemicals — 63 — was found in the group of grandmothers. Given the number of years they had had to accumulate exposure, this result was perhaps not surprising. But the next-highest level was among their grandchildren, aged 12 to 28, who in their short lifetimes had amassed 59 different toxic chemicals . . . . Bio-monitoring tests in the United States have revealed the same dangerous chemicals making their way into the blood of Americans. In 2005, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention completed screening for the presence of 148 toxic chemicals in the blood of a broad cross section of Americans; it found that the vast majority of subjects harbored almost all the toxins.

Tara Parker-Pope, Toxic Cats and Dogs [A toxicity] analysis, released by the Washington-based Environmental Working Group, used blood and urine samples from 35 dogs and 37 cats collected at Hanover Animal Hospital in Mechanicsville, Va. The study found high levels of numerous chemicals in dogs and cats, including chemicals used in the making of furniture, fabrics and electronics. Mercury was also detected at high levels, likely from fish used in pet food.

Pyrrhus of Epirus, campaign manager

Obama, Osama, and one hot kitchen Alternate video source

New York Times editorial, The Low Road to Victory (April 23, 2008) Ferdinand Bol, Fabritius and Pyrrhus (1656). Read more about Pyrrhus of Epirus. The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it. . . . On the eve of this crucial primary, [Senator Hillary Rodham] Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned. If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.” . . . Mr. Obama is not blameless when it comes to the negative and vapid nature of this campaign. He is increasingly rising to Mrs. Clinton’s bait, undercutting his own claims that he is offering a higher more inclusive form of politics. When she criticized his comments about “bitter” voters, Mr. Obama mocked her as an Annie Oakley wannabe. All that does is remind Americans who are on the fence about his relative youth and inexperience.

Annie Oakley

Literary Warrant [29]

Fred is dancing on a tilting dance floor on the ocean floor
In a sunken ocean liner
In 1934—lighter than air!—Fred Astaire!—
In the depths of the Great Depression.

From Frederick Seidel, "Dick and Fred," in Ooga-Booga (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)

• Bill Baue & Jackie Cook, Ceres, Mutual Funds and Climate Change: Opposition to Climate Change Resolutions Begins to Thaw (April 2008)
  

  "This report is the fourth by Ceres examining the mutual fund industry’s proxy voting practices on climate change shareholder resolutions. This new analysis of the voting records of 1,285 mutual funds from 62 leading mutual fund firms indicates