In 1913, Joe Knowles decided to return to the wild. He lived to tell the tale:
There were an estimated 200,000 people on hand to greet the world’s most unkempt celebrity, Joe Knowles, who was arriving from Portland on October 9, 1913. … Joe Knowles emerged from the train, wearing a crude bearskin robe and grimy bearskin trousers. It wasn’t a costume, exactly—Knowles had established himself as the Nature Man. Two months earlier, he had stepped into the woods of Maine wearing nothing but a white cotton jockstrap, to live sans tools and without any human contact. His aim? To answer questions gnawing at a society that was modernizing at a dizzying rate, endowed suddenly with the motor car, the elevator, and the telephone. Could modern man, in all his softness, ever regain the hardihood of his primitive forebears? Could he still rub two sticks together to make fire? Could he spear fish in secluded lakes and kill game with his bare hands? Knowles had just returned from the woods, and his answer to each of these questions was a triumphant yes. In time, he would parlay his Nature Man fame into a five-month run on the vaudeville circuit, where he would earn a reported $1,200 a week billed as a “Master of Woodcraft.” He would publish a memoir, Alone in the Wilderness, that would sell some 30,000 copies. He would even have his moment in Hollywood, playing the lead in a spine-tingling 1914 nature drama also called Alone in the Wilderness.
Too bad it was a hoax:
He wasn’t gutting fish and weaving bark shoes, as the Post’s dispatches suggested. Rather, he was lounging about in a log cabin at the foot of Spencer Lake and also occasionally entertaining a lady friend at a nearby cabin.
John Sides points out the bleeding obvious – the GOP could easily win the presidency in 2016:
The GOP will … benefit from what political scientist Alan Abramowitz calls the “time for a change” factor: only once since the 22nd Amendment limited the president to two consecutive terms has a party held the White House for more than two terms in a row.
If that happens, perhaps we’ll realize that all this talk of a “liberal majority” or “Obama’s mandate” or even a “Democratic realignment” was overblown. And perhaps we’ll even remember that the exact opposite argument was made in 2004, when evil genius Karl Rove was supposed to have ushered in a Republican realignment and Democrats would never win another election unless they could appeal to “values voters.” Those predictions of a Republican majority were soon proved false. This is why it’s premature to make similar predictions about a Democratic majority or write the GOP’s epitaph.
If, through some act of God, Republicans nominate a relative moderate like Chris Christie in 2016, a Republican victory could move the party back towards the center. An ideologue with amnesia of the Bush presidency, i.e. the majority of the other Republican presidential hopefuls, is unlikely to do the same. For Democrats to get from Carter’s loss to Clinton’s win took three failed elections. For Republicans to get from Hoover to Eisenhower took significantly longer. The GOP could easily win in 2016, but, if the party is going to modernize itself, another loss or two may be required.
As a lawyer who used to include criminal defense (including indigent defense) among my practice areas, I will agree with the original post: there is a huge, huge disparity between the resources of the state and the resources of the criminal defendant. You should include in that disparity not only the budget of the prosecutor’s office, but that of every law enforcement agency that investigates and enforces the law, including the police and sheriffs departments, state police, regional drug task forces, federal and state bureaus of investigation, and the like. The State provides very limited resources to indigent defendants, when itself has practically unlimited resources available to prosecute. It is not a fair fight, but criminal defense attorneys do the best they can with what they are given to work with.
Another goes into more detail:
When a prosecutor needs something checked or needs a witness, a staffer places a call to the police and it’s taken care of; when a public defender wants something checked, s/he pays for the investigator out of the office budget. When a prosecutor in an arson case wants an expert, he calls the fire marshall’s office, and there’s no budget impact; the public defender has to find and pay for any help out of their budget. How about a multiple-defendant case? One prosecutor, but each defendant requires a separate attorney, most of which have to be hired outside the agency, at the agency’s expense, to prevent conflicts of interest.
The list goes on, but the important point is that if you segregated out all the government expense post-arrest and compared it to the public defender’s budget, the resource gap would be even more shockingly large.
Another reader:
“It should come as no surprise, then, that you’re more likely to wind up in jail if represented by a taxpayer-financed lawyer than by one you hire yourself.” I am a public defender in Florida and I have to push back against this.
Granted, I came out of a top law school with a robust loan repayment assistance program and I practice in one of the best public defender offices in the country, so my experience may not be representative. However, I disagree with the contention that funding disparities are the primary reason my clients are more likely to be incarcerated than defendants with private attorneys.
All of my clients have one thing in common: they’re indigent. Otherwise, they would not be entitled to my services. What does that mean? For starters, they tend to be underemployed or unemployed. After any conviction there is a sentencing hearing, where the defense attorney proffers mitigation in order to get a better sentence. One common argument is “Your honor, my client has a job and if you jail him for even a month he’ll lose his job. He’ll become destitute. The family that relies on him will become destitute.” This is a powerful argument and judges respond to that.
My clients tend to be undereducated. They tend to have prior histories. They tend to be black or brown. Studies show that similarly situated minority defendants get harsher sentences than white defendants, even controlling for the nature of the crime and the defendant’s prior convictions.
The person who can hire a private attorney tends to be the accountant who got a DUI after a happy hour or the doctor who smacked around his wife in a fit of anger. It can cost more than $5,000 to defend a petty misdemeanor if a trial is involved. Defending a serious felony can typically only be afforded by the affluent.
Yes, I wish I had more funding. I wish I had a smaller case load and more investigators. But even for the smallest misdemeanor case, I can pay $2,000 to an expert witness without even requiring office approval. In fact, the prosecutors that I fight against have higher case loads and routinely complain to me about their inability to adequately prepare their cases. I am always better prepared than they are for a case. Literally always.
My clients are more likely to go to jail. This is true. It’s not because of my inability to match the prosecutor’s ability to investigate or prepare for trial. It’s because of their socioeconomic background coupled with draconian maximum sentences that result in plea deals for the vast majority of cases.
Another:
Allow a public defender to offer her perspective. But where to begin? With the fact that I have a law degree, two master’s degrees, and a PhD from an Ivy League university, but still make only $40,000 per year at my job as an appellate-level public defender? My colleagues doing similar work for the State with similar levels of legal experience make at least $25,000 more. The disparity is a function of the particular politics of my state, but there is some level of disparity in every state, even though both public defenders and prosecutors are paid by the state.
I wonder if the ADA who wrote about how difficult her/his job is as compared to the defense really believes this. Whether an indigent criminal defendant is represented by a public defender or a court-appointed private attorney, he or she is being represented by someone with a lot of education and little money. I make $40,000 a year four years out of law school. The most experienced person in my office makes $95,000 after 35 years of practice and a U.S. Supreme Court victory. Court appointed attorneys in my state are paid about $60 an hour for their work, and they are at the mercy of the judge who signs their fee statement. The same judge who just presided over the trial and likely got frustrated with their many objections gets to decide whether they actually should get paid for the number of hours they claim to have put into the case.
These attorneys go into court knowing that the judge is going to have every reason to rule for the State on every contested issue. It is true that the safest defense is often one which involves calling no witnesses, but that doesn’t mean that the defense attorney’s job is easier. The State starts with the moral high ground and always has more resources at its disposal: law enforcement officers to investigate and put pressure on witnesses, money for expert witnesses, discovery rules that can be bent to their advantage … the list is endless.
I understand that prosecutors and defense attorneys have chosen their lot, and I don’t begrudge prosecutors their higher pay and advantages in the courtroom. But for any prosector to claim that advocating for an indigent criminal defendant who has, by definition, been charged with a crime against the State is easier than being the champion of law and order and protector of public safety is just ludicrous.
One more:
As a public defender in Oregon, I’m paid for my work, but at a level far below that of the prosecutor. An entry level lawyer at my office starts out around $40,000 a year, and the senior staff here caps out at $75 or $80k. Across the street, the district attorney pays its staffers $45,000 a year on the low end, with pay capping off at beyond $100,000 for experienced attorneys. In other counties in Oregon, it’s common to have entry level prosecutor positions start at least $20,000 a year more than public defenders in the county. (Oregon is considering legislation this year, HB 3463, that would require public defenders to be paid at equivalent rates of prosecutors in their respective counties, by the way.)
Your reader who talks about all the other things prosecutors do that public defenders don’t? Please. First, the police officer who writes a report has done almost all the heavy lifting on a prosecutor’s case. A prosecutor rarely interviews witnesses on their own, because if they do, they have to discover any exculpatory information they write down under Brady v. Maryland. Most cases that I’ve taken to trial, I’ve spent countless hours tracking down witnesses, verifying my client’s statements and coming up with a theory of defense. All the prosecutor has to do is call each witness the police officer talked to and prove the elements of the crime, which is little more than checking the boxes. As for discovery, in most states, there are reciprocal discovery rules that require the defense to turn over evidence that they intend to use at trial. So both sides have to employ staff to produce discovery.
Lawyers should be paid comparably on both sides of the aisle. When you can’t pay public defenders as much as the prosecutor, it’s harder to keep and retain good lawyers. When you don’t have an effective lawyer fighting for an individual’s rights, it not only harms that individual but society as whole. Who do you think foots the bill for a new trial when a client’s underpaid lawyer missed some critical evidence or failed to investigate a key issue and the client is granted post-conviction relief?
Isn’t evolution the perfect metaphor for politicians changing their positions? Those who evolve on gay marriage, given the new political reality where opposition to gay marriage could threaten one’s political career, are better adapted to new selection pressures in their environment. Those who fail to evolve (e.g. patriarchs within the Republican party like Boehner and Chambliss) will fall to those same selection pressures – and they might bring down the entire party with them. It only takes small changes in an environment to render some organisms’s adaptive practices moot!
Here’s my cynicism on display. Regular people do change their minds, deliberate, and engage their practical reasons. Politicians, on the other hand, only care about survival – so like an ideal Darwinian entity, they’re only capable of evolution. And that’s precisely why regular people have to put the pressure on, with their voices and their votes.
When you ask people why they don’t read fantasy, they usually say something along the lines of, ‘because elves don’t exist’. This makes no sense as an objection. Huge swathes of imaginative literature concern things that don’t exist, and as it happens, things that don’t exist feature particularly prominently in the English literary tradition. We’re very good at things that don’t exist. The fantastic is central not just to the English canon – Spenser, Shakespeare, even Dickens – but also to our amazing parallel tradition of para-literary works, from Carroll to Conan Doyle to Stoker to Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Pullman. There’s no other body of literature quite like it: just consider the comparative absence of fantasy from the French and Russian traditions. And yet it’s perfectly normal for widely literate general readers to admit that they read no fantasy at all. I know, because I often ask. It’s as if there is some mysterious fantasy-reading switch that in many people is set to ‘off’.
Of course some of this is part of the general disdain for “genre” in all its forms that permeates the respectable literary world. But I also suspect that there is a particular obstacle with fantasy that doesn’t exist with, say, horror novels or murder mysteries: The sheer immensity of the standard-issue fantasy saga, and the fact that committing to a bestselling fantasy author takes much more, well, commitment than reading Dean Koontz or Peter Straub, Michael Connelly or Tana French.
As most of you have noticed with the multiple bylines today, Andrew is on blogcation this week. But he wanted to pass along this message to his long-time readers.
I’m uncomfortable with the term “gay rape”. Men who identify as straight rape other men. Rape is at least as much about power as it is about sex. I have a straight male friend who was raped while hitchhiking in 1991. His rapist gave no indication that he was gay and I’m guessing would not want others to identify him as gay. They met at a stadium concert, and traveled together for a few days while following the band from city to city. On the second or third day, his rapist followed him into a public bathroom at a gas station and raped him during a fill-up stop. Afterwards he refused to give my friend his belongings back (which were in his car), so my friend continued to ride with his rapist until the next stop at a concert venue. Preparing to run, he brought all of his belongings with him and made a dash for it.
I found out what happened to him when he got home. Most people he told didn’t believe him, or they told him “that’s what you get for hitchhiking”. I was surprised that our female friends were no more sympathetic than his male friends. One of our mutual friends was an anti-rape activist who trained women in self-defense techniques and rape prevention. I was astonished that she was totally unsympathetic, even going so far as to tell him that he shouldn’t tell people what happened to him, since it would make people less sympathetic to women who get raped.
I lost track of him a few years later, but during the time I knew him, he never really got over it. I never saw him in a sexual relationship again, and he was clearly traumatized not only by what happened to him, but by how what happened to him was received by his peers.
I’ve never laughed at a prison rape joke since.
Another:
First, I’m a subscriber, but this issue still freaks me out and so I am sending this to you anonymously. I just created this account for this email.
I am married. And mostly happily so, though I am in a utterly sexless marriage. We stay together mostly because we are best friends and have two beautiful children who’s lives don’t deserve to be impacted by their parents inadequacies. That of course, is important because like many married men I have in the past cruised anonymously for gay sex (that might be a worthy series of posts in their own right). For awhile, Squirt, Grinder, and other sites provided an easy and safe outlet. I was always oral and never had an inclination for anal (either giving or receiving). But whatever. The point of this email is that about four or five years ago, my wife was out of town and I decided to meet up with someone at the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington, VA.
He, in turn, had someone else he was chatting with who was also at the hotel. So we walked down to this other guys room and decided to get some group play going. After a while, the first guy left (he couldn’t keep it up), and the second guy who was literally twice the size of me (probably 6’6″ and 300 lbs of muscle – and as massive a dick as I’ve ever seen – compared to my 5’9 160 lbs) continued on with me.
After a bit, he became much more aggressive and soon pinned me down and was attempting to insert himself in me. He was on me, had my legs apart, a rubber visible on the nightstand but clearly no intention of using it, and he told me very calmly that “it was time to fuck my sissy ass.” I can still remember the smell of his breath as he calmly looked me in the eyes and told me how he was going to rape me. I told him no, struggling, and he just ignored me, spreading my legs further and attempting to enter me. Which was incredibly painful for me, but must have been so for him too. He continued to hold me down and proceeded to stick his fingers in me to loosen me up. Somehow, I managed to twist out from him. And, frankly, I have no idea how I escaped, but somehow I did. And I ran.
Luckily, being in Virginia, I can carry a gun. And I had one in my pants pocket. As I was running to the door, and as he was charging me (it seemed like forever but must have taken place over less than a second or two) I was able to grab my pants and my gun in the front pocket, where he didn’t know it was, and pull it on him (I’m still not sure how I did it so seamlessly). He didn’t expect this and the entire dynamic of the situation changed remarkably. He backed up, trying to calm me down, as I kept the gun square on him and calmly walked backwards to the door, unlocking it behind me and stepping into the hall where I put my pants on as I continued walked backwards to the elevator running through the lobby shirtless and shoeless.
Being married, and with a job in DC where I wasn’t sure how they would respond to publicity over me like that, I was petrified to report anything. And who would I have reported it to? Would they have believed me or simply told me what did I expect?
I’m lucky I didn’t have to use the gun. For one, that would have raised more than a few questions from my wife. But also, I didn’t have a bullet in the chamber. I’ll never make that mistake again. Screw the know-nothings who say guns should be unloaded. An unloaded gun is a paperweight. Had I not moved at the right moment, or not had a gun available, or had to pull the trigger on an empty chamber, I have no doubt he would have raped and assaulted me and left me in a terrible physical condition (and likely exposed to HIV and a surefire hospital visit).
I’ve significantly changed my behavior after that incident. But I still get traumatized over what happened. And of course, that’s both an attempted rape AND a defensive gun use that like so many others will never be officially tabulated. And it all makes me question how common this problem is, especially among the large segment of married men who seek to cruise anonymously.
In hindsight I set myself up for it with terribly risky behavior. And it’s a miracle I’ve not come down with HIV. But it’s not something I could ever ever report because of the impact it would have on my life and those I am closest too. I just pray that this monster was turned in by someone who was in a position to turn him in. Otherwise, he remains at large.
Tim Maly calls attention to a non-profit called ColaLife that is leveraging the popularity of Coke to deliver much-needed medical supplies to remote African villages:
You can buy a Coke pretty much anywhere on Earth. Thanks to a vast network of local suppliers, Coca-Cola has almost completely solved distribution, getting its product into every nook and cranny where commerce reaches. There are places in the world where it’s easier to get a Coke than clean water. In the 1980s, [ColaLife founder Simon] Berry was an aid worker in Zambia, and when he looked at Coke’s success, he saw an opportunity. …
The result of [ColaLife’s] efforts so far is the AidPod, a wedge-shaped container that fits between the necks of bottles in a Coca-Cola crate. For the pilot program, they are using the AidPods to distribute an anti-diarrhea kit, called “Kit Yamoyo” (“Kit of Life”).
The effort is helping local businesses as well:
By working with [Coca-Cola wholesalers], ColaLife gains a connection to locally trusted businesses. “They know about inventory control, security, how to store products properly, and retailers in the district know where they are,” says Berry. “We’ve created a desirable anti-diarrhea kit. We’ve priced it and we’re marketing it at a level where these retailers who deal in other products can make money out of taking it to their villages and selling it.” For the ColaLife operational trial in Zambia, everybody on the ground (wholesalers, distributors and retailers) is making a profit. Recommended retail for the kit is 5,000 kwacha (about $1). Retailers make 35 percent profit, while wholesalers make 20 percent profit.
After assessing the range North Korea’s missiles, Max Fisher concludes that, even “if North Korea did decide to start a war against the U.S., or even if a second Korean War begins accidentally, there is very little reason to think that it could carry out any part of its purported battle plans against the U.S. mainland.” Evan Osnos spells out the real threat:
U.S. military commanders used their Winter Wargames last month to play out what would happen if Kim’s regime were to collapse in a coup or civil unrest, leaving his nuclear arsenal exposed. “It’s a scenario that some believe is more likely than a North Korea attack on the South,” ABC News reported. (Previous studies have suggested that the U.S. would need at least a hundred thousand troops to secure the nukes, and three times that to begin to sustain and stabilize the country—more than peak commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.)
Kevin Ashton claims the meme had “nothing to do with community and everything to do with commerce”, noting that one of the first imitations of the original “Harlem Shake” videos was from a company called Maker Studios trying to promote itself, and that soon after the song’s record label, Mad Decent, got in the game as well. Then came the advertisers and media companies:
This is abnormal. “Single Ladies,” “Somebody That I Used To Know,” Carly Rae Jepson’s “Call Me Maybe,” and Psy’s “Gangnam Style” were made by professionals and first imitated by professionals–Saturday Night Live in the case of “Single Ladies,” indie Canadian band Walk Off The Earth in the case of “Somebody That I Used To Know,” and Justin Bieber in the case of “Call Me Maybe”–then later by fans and amateurs. “Harlem Shake,” was a meme made by an amateur, George Miller, but its rapid replication was driven by media and marketing professionals, led and orchestrated by three companies: Maker Studios, Mad Decent, and IAC.
It’s an interesting theory, and Ashton has a great handle on the evolution of the “Harlem Shake” meme from its beginning … through its viral comedown, but the underlying statement is loaded in a way that skirts certain details—like the fact that fan-made “Harlem Shake” videos amassed several hundred thousand views, a number strong enough to be considered “viral,” prior to any “corporate” involvement in the meme. Ashton also goes to great pains to point out the corporate ties for some of the outlets responsible for contributing to the “Harlem Shake” meme that directly benefited from its popularity while glossing over the fact that the meme, like many before it, got its footing through corporate-funded channels: Maker Studios got wind of the meme after employee Vernon Shaw discovered it on uber-popular social site Reddit, which is owned by monolithic media empire Advance Publications, and all the fan-made videos were largely uploaded to a hugely popular corporate entity, YouTube. While Reddit and YouTube foster unique digital communities and everyday contributors have the ability to affect every denizen that doesn’t negate the fact that they are corporations.
The Dish 