I flatter myself as having a fairly good knack for empathy, the ability to emotionally identify with others. That’s not to say I’m necessarily motivated to act on that understanding. My tendency toward sympathy is more limited. However, I’ve notice that, in matters of faith, my capacity for empathy is diminishing (that doesn’t mean my sympathy toward believers is necessarily moving one way or another). I just have a hard time getting into a believer’s head and seeing the subject of religion and God from their perspective. For my part, the supernatural beliefs of humanity over the millenia have been so varied and at odds, I don’t grok the mind that is so certain any of them are right – let alone one of them in particular – that one ought to conform their life’s behavior to that belief.

Ed Brayton has a blog post entitled Scholars Study Secularism. Apparently, there may be cognitive differences between the minds of believers and unbelievers.

Boston University’s Catherine Caldwell-Harris is researching the differences between the secular and religious minds. “Humans have two cognitive styles,” the psychologist says. “One type finds deeper meaning in everything; even bad weather can be framed as fate. The other type is neurologically predisposed to be skeptical, and they don’t put much weight in beliefs and agency detection.”

Caldwell-Harris is currently testing her hypothesis through simple experiments. Test subjects watch a film in which triangles move about. One group experiences the film as a humanized drama, in which the larger triangles are attacking the smaller ones. The other group describes the scene mechanically, simply stating the manner in which the geometric shapes are moving. Those who do not anthropomorphize the triangles, she suspects, are unlikely to ascribe much importance to beliefs. “There have always been two cognitive comfort zones,” she says, “but skeptics used to keep quiet in order to stay out of trouble.”

That last bit about keeping quiet struck me as an interesting line. I think the cultural status quo remains in place by socially isolating views outside of the mainstream. The weakness of those non-conforming views is probably out of proportion to its actual prevalence. The Internet is probably changing that; where holders of even the most marginal viewpoints can find a like minded community. Anyway, defined broadly enough, nonbelievers appear to be a non-trivial segment of the population:

But the most significant target of Kosmin’s research is the consumer group most likely to shy away from such commercial products: secularists. “The non-religious, or Nones, hold the fastest-growing world view in the market,” says Kosmin. “In the past 20 years, their numbers in the United States have doubled to 15 percent.”

. . .
This umbrella [of non-believers] covers various groups including atheists, agnostics and humanists, as well as those who are simply indifferent to religion.

Secularists make up some 15 percent of the global population, or about 1 billion people. As a group, this puts them third in size behind Christians (2.3 billion) and Muslims (1.6 billion).

One of the fun parts, they tend to know more about the God they don’t believe in than believers. “Even when the higher education levels of the unreligious were factored out, they proved to be better informed in matters of faith, followed by Jewish and Mormon believers.”

This kind of thing will do nothing to rest the minds of those who feel like the country is going to hell because of our decadent culture.

I’m not sure it’s anything more than he said in his order at the time of the Chrysler bankruptcy, but the Chrysler bankruptcy judge, now retired, spoke with ABC News.

He reiterated that there was no other funding for Chrysler. It was either the government’s deal or liquidate. Mourdock had no basis for spending $2 million in what looked like a politically motivated legal challenge. Secured creditors got more out of the government deal than they would have out of the only other available deal, liquidation. Mourdock’s challenge, in effect, was demanding that Indiana and secured creditors get less so that auto worker pensions and other unsecured creditors would get nothing.

Anyway, the judge:

[Chrysler] could not have survived without taxpayer money. “The record before the Court was clear that there were no other sources of lending,” said Arthur J. Gonzalez, who served as chief judge of the U.S. bankruptcy court for the Southern District of New York.
. . .
“One thing is clear, without government support in one fashion or another, there were no sources of funding.” Gonzalez, now a law professor at New York University, said Chrysler — then the weakest of the Big 3 automakers — did not have the ability to secure financing on its own and “it was not generating sufficient cash to operate without an outside source of financing.”
. . .
The former chief judge also denied that the speedy bankruptcy hearing somehow prevented private investors from stepping up, pointing out that the government and Chrysler’s creditors had been seeking a solution for 18 months, to no avail.

“The notion that the speed of the process may have missed a potential buyer has no basis in the record,” he said.

Former Indiana Secretary of State, Charlie White was sentenced yesterday. The judge left his felony convictions in place and sentenced him to serve multiple terms of home detention concurrently, with the upshot being he got one year of home detention and a $1,000 fine. While the fairest sentence under the circumstances would probably be to make him serve that home detention in his ex-wife’s basement, I’m reasonably satisfied that the sentence fits the offense.

I suppose my sense of retribution would be more satisfied by some jail time. The fact that no jail time was imposed makes it feel like upper class criminals get nicer treatment than your average drug user. And, maybe that’s true, but that speaks more to the deficiencies of the criminal justice system in other areas than the sentencing in this case. He’s not a threat to society. He’s not going to do this again. His sentence is significant enough to provide a deterrent effect to others in his position.

Going forward, it will be interesting to see how the Supreme Court resolves the replacement issue. There has been some argument that, because he has been convicted and replaced by the Governor, that should trump the action against his eligibility. As a matter of logic, I don’t think that holds up. If he was never eligible to be a candidate, then his election was void ab initio. In a sense, it never happened. So, I don’t think Vop Osili supporters have a problem from that angle.

What could cause problems is if you wind up with the Supreme Court insisting on the inconsistent factual backgrounds from the two hearings — he lived at the townhouse with his fiance and was lying about living with his ex-wife in the criminal matter; but was telling the truth in the election board matter. On top of the latter, the Supreme Court could determine that the trial court got the law wrong based on the underlying facts (even while the result would’ve been correct, and White an ineligible candidate, if that judge had been working with the facts found by the jury in the criminal matter.)

So, it’s possible, we could end up with White being an eligible candidate because he was telling the truth about where he lived but properly removed from office because he was lying about where he lived.

It’s Presidents Day. I’ll just throw out there that my two favorites are Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Lincoln because he saved the Union and seemed sharp as a whip and possessed of a genuinely good nature and deep sense of humor. Roosevelt just because of his sheer energy. He was full of himself and had not a few contradictions, but looking at all he accomplished and how quickly, it’s hard to read any biography of him without feeling like an unaccomplished layabout.

I like James K. Polk because he kept his campaign promises and got us a bunch of territory I happen to enjoy. (Though, I probably wouldn’t vote for him today for approximately the same reasons I am glad to have had him in our nation’s past.) And Dwight Eisenhower gets a special mention just because he’s a cousin (albeit several times removed.)

Wikipedia has a grid with a bunch of “best president” surveys and one column for the aggregate results.

Top ten: Lincoln, FDR, Washington, Jefferson, TR, Wilson, Truman, Jackson, Ike, Polk.

Second ten: JFK, John Adams, James Madison, Monroe, LBJ, Obama*, Reagan*, Quincy Adams, Cleveland, McKinley.

Third ten: Clinton*, Taft, HW Bush*, Van Buren, Hayes, Ford, Carter, Arthur, Garfield, Hoover.

Fourth ten: Coolidge, Nixon, Benjamin Harrison, GeeDubya Bush*, Taylor, Tyler, Grant, Fillmore, William Henry Harrison, Pierce.

Last: Andrew Johnson, Buchanan, Harding.

*In my subjective opinion, Reagan and beyond are too recent for these lists to reflect good, historical evaluations of their Presidencies.

Great question & answer between State Impact’s Kyle Stokes and Matt Tully entitled, appropriately enough, Q&A with Matthew Tully: How ‘Apathy’ Is Hurting Poor, ‘Failing’ Schools. Tully did a series where he embedded at Manual High School; Stokes asks him about his experience there and what he thinks schools need to succeed.

Tully doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but suggests that the school district is creating more problems for well-intentioned principals than it solves; that there is a great deal of apathy in the system; and that it’s going to take some hard, hard work to get energy back into these places and raised expectations.

One of my fears is that, too often, (and I want to be clear that I’m not lumping Tully into this group), the “solution” for failing schools seems to be some variation of spending less of rich people’s money on poor people. Once that piece of the “solution” is in place, the rest will presumably be put on the back burner.

WRTV6 had an interview with the jury foreman in Charlie White’s criminal case. The interview makes it seem as if White stood a chance of acquittal if he had testified or if the defense had put on evidence of its own.

Speaking for the first time since White was convicted of six felony charges early Saturday, foreman Gregg Weidman said it was a shock when White’s attorney, former Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi, rested his case without calling any witnesses.
“I don’t know if you saw the reaction when Mr. Brizzi said he wasn’t going to call anybody, but I looked around the jury, and everybody’s eyes were about this big, like, you have to be kidding,” Weidman told RTV6’s Derrik Thomas.

Inevitably, folks are second guessing White’s lawyer, Carl Brizzi. I wouldn’t be so fast. Maybe he made a poor decision, but we don’t know what information he was working on when he made the call. Perhaps one of White’s witnesses in the Recount civil matter was not going to be willing to give such helpful testimony in the criminal matter. Maybe he knew that White’s own testimony was likely to fall apart under cross-examination or to simply reinforce the evidence that the defense had put on. Maybe he feels like, on appeal, there is some critical deficiency that will go in his favor but which could have been remedied by the prosecution while White or other defense witnesses were on the stand.

I’m not a criminal lawyer, and maybe it was simply a bad gamble on the part of Brizzi, but I think the possibility exists that he did the best he could with what he had to work with.

Update The Indiana Law Blog has an entry noting some differences between the WRTV6 write up of the interview and the video itself. Per ILB:

So I just watched the video that is available online, and have a third version — about 1:23 into the video, the juror says instead, when asked if testimony would have made a difference, and noting it would have added 3 or 4 hours to the deliberations: “It would have made his case a lot stronger.”

The Thicket at State Legislatures has a blog post entitled Prohibition Era Laws Falling by the Wayside. Connecticut, the last state in the Union besides Indiana to still prohibit Sunday alcohol sales, is considering a repeal of that ban.

Since 2002, fifteen states have repealed bans on Sunday sales: Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington. Georgia is the most recent state to loosen its alcohol laws, passing local control just last year.
. . .
Thirteen states restrict Sunday sales, but only Connecticut and Indiana ban selling all alcohol, including beer and wine, on Sundays. But if lawmakers in Connecticut have their way, the so-called blue law policy, a relic of the Prohibition era, could soon be no more.

Carrie Ritchie, writing for the Indianapolis Star, has an article entitled Jury finds Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White guilty on 6 of 7 felony charges. (Ritchie, by the way, did a phenomenal job reporting on the trial as it happened via Twitter. Really a great mix of the old media using the new media, in my ever so humble opinion.)

White was convicted of three counts of voter fraud, two counts of perjury, and one count of theft. He was acquitted of committing fraud on a financial institution. Basically, he lied about his residence and registered to vote at a place where he wasn’t living. He did so because he had moved out of the precinct where he had been elected to the Fishers Town Council and, had he been honest about where he lived, would have no longer been eligible to continue serving and get a paycheck. He claimed he was living in his ex-wife’s basement when, in reality, it appears he was living with his fiance in the town home they’d bought. One of the most telling pieces of evidence Ritchie tweeted about was that cell phone towers near the town home picked up something like 400 (or maybe it was 600) calls from White’s cell phone after business hours versus only something like 60 from the tower near his ex-wife’s home.

I feel a little bad for White, not because I believe he made some kind of honest mistake or because I feel like the jury got the facts wrong. Rather, at some level, voter registration laws don’t seem like “real” laws. I know they are, and I know we don’t get to pick and choose our laws, but at a gut level, the voter registration requirements feel like just so much bureaucratic paperwork.

For the state, the bigger question is for the office of Secretary of State. The suit before the Recount Commission resulted in a reviewing trial court determining that White was not a properly registered voter at the time of the election and, therefore, was never an eligible candidate. (As a matter of fact, this jury verdict helps support that determination — though, I’m not brushed up enough on my collateral estoppel rules to recall whether this criminal jury verdict could be used at some point in the legal proceedings to bolster the claim in that civil matter). The upshot of that Recount case is that White was never an eligible candidate and, therefore, the eligible candidate that received the most votes gets the job — Vop Osili (Democrat). The felony conviction, on the other hand, results in an officeholder’s removal from office; with a replacement appointed by the Governor (Republican).

Political parties being what they are; the matter of whether the Governor’s appointment as replacement or Vop Osili as highest eligible vote recipient gets to keep the job will be litigated three ways from Sunday. Conceptually, I’m pretty firm on the idea that this is Osili’s. Someone could run me through the law to show me why I’m wrong; but right now I’m fairly certain that White’s election was void ab initio. He was never the valid winner because he never was an eligible candidate. As such, the later conviction is of someone who never legally held the office in the first place. Under IC 3-12-11-25, Vop Osili was entitled to a certificate of election.

[W]henever the [recount] commission makes a final determination under section 18 of this chapter that the candidate who is subject to a contest proceeding is not eligible to serve in the office to which the candidate is nominated or elected, the candidate who received the second highest number of votes for the office is entitled to a certificate of nomination or certificate of election even though a certificate may have been issued to another candidate upon the tabulation of the votes.

Under that statute, Osili was entitled to a certificate of election. Just as a thief can’t pass legal title to property to someone else; White’s actions can’t serve as the basis for conveying the office to someone else. The property rights still belong to the original owner; and the right to the office, by virtue of the certificate of election, still belongs to the eligible candidate that received the most votes. Even if I’m correct about that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Governor’s replacement is allowed to occupy the office through the 2012 elections which could, potentially have consequences for those elections.

Just came across this page entitled Letters of Note: To My Old Master (h/t Mike Godwin). It’s a letter from a former slave to his old master in August 1865. Because the Northerners aggressively stopped southerners from exercising their state’s rights to allow one person to own another, Jourdan Anderson had been emancipated and moved to Ohio. His former owner, a Col. Anderson, apparently wrote to him, requesting that he return to work on the colonel’s farm.

The whole thing is worth a read, but I like where Jourdan pretends to consider it, but asks for a token of the colonel’s good faith. He figures if the colonel isn’t willing to pay back wages, he has no assurance of future wages. Calculating past wages based on what he’d been able to land work for in Ohio, he asked for $11,680 (about $161,125 in current dollars) plus interest less deduction for clothing and a few other items.

No wonder guys like Col. Anderson was fighting for the Confederacy and that the Confederacy was so reluctant to give up slavery. The colonel had been legally allowed to steal $160k from Jourdan and his family.

But, sure, the Lost Cause apologists will tell you it was all about tariffs or some nonsense.

Update Apropos of this someone brought to my attention that the Tea Party of Tennessee wants to, among other things, change how we educate kids about the history of slavery in the U.S.

“My biggest concern is that important information is being omitted, which creates a negative light on our Founding Fathers,” said Tea Party activist Brian Rieck.

Many members of the group are asking Tennessee lawmakers to tweak textbooks so that doesn’t happen. Notably, they’re hoping to make changes in how slavery and encroachment on Native Americans are portrayed to students. “Slavery is of course portrayed in the textbooks nowadays I’m sure as a totally negative thing. Had there not been slavery in the South, the economy would’ve fallen,” Rieck said.

The Southern economy just couldn’t survive without rich white people stealing labor from poor black people.