South Dakota Politics

Pacific Rim (2013)

Holy Buckets, but this one was a lot better than I expected. Given that movie making these days seems to have been reduced to choreographing action sequences (see Star Trek) and allowing for the fact that it belongs to that general category of movies in which giant monsters battle giant robots, it's hard not to award Pacific Rim five out of five stars. It does a superb job of almost everything that can be expected of such a film.

Story

The earth is invaded by giant reptiles (Kaiju), which enter our world through a dimensional rift on the ocean floor. Mankind responds by pulling together and building giant, humanoid robots (Jaegers). Each Jaeger is controlled by two pilots ( or in one case, a set of triplets) who are mentally linked with the machine and with each other. After seven years of war, the tide turns against mankind as the Kaiju increase in power and numbers faster than human industry can respond. A former Jaeger pilot is brought out of retirement to command one of the few remaining machines in a last ditch effort to close dimensional portal.

Acting/Casting

Charlie Hunnam (Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy) has the lead role as our returning pilot. Emotionally wounded but not weakened by the death of his brother/partner early in the war, Raleigh Becket is now paired with Mako Mori (played by Rinko Kikuchi). Mori carries a heavier set of emotional baggage, having lost her family to a Kaiju attack when she was a child.

The pairing of pilots is a clever device for keeping relationships neatly sorted. In addition we get a father/son pair, a Slavic husband and wife team, and the Chinese triplets, in diminishing degrees of exposure. We also get a pair of deliciously quirky tech nerds (actors Charlie Day and Burn Gorman).

Finally, Idris Elba gives us Stacker Pentecost, the fiery commander. If you haven't heard him declare "Today, we are cancelling the apocalypse" you haven't been listening.

All the actors are very well cast, physically and temperamentally.

Plot/Dialogue/Mood

The storyline is boilerplate fantasy/sci-fi. Hopelessly outgunned, our heroes must overcome inner demons and mutual mistrust in order to pull off a more or less miraculous stratagem. Think here of Independence Day, The Lord of the Rings, and The Avengers. The dialogue is a bit better than you would expect, if not the least bit inventive.

The pacing and mood, however, are very good. I found that the sense of desperation was very convincing and built steadily throughout the film. This owed a lot to the role played by the two tech nerds, who argue incessantly about what is going on and what will happen next. Of course, they both turn out to be right.

The real test of this kind of movie is whether it can rekindle some of the same excitement I felt when I was six years old and saw Godzilla for the first time. It did that.

Visual Effects/Sound

The special effects were flawless and spectacular. I doubt whether anything as large as a Jaeger or a Kaiju has ever been thrown into the air on planet earth, let alone the one punch the other out. The laws of Hollywood physics were scrupulously observed, so the action felt plausible without being fitted out for any thinking. Along with the sound and the texture of water and fire, everything seemed to be suitably heavy. I am happy to report that there was not a hint of offensive, Peter Jackson goofiness in the action.

The interiors of the Jaeger fortress had an iron retro look, a bit like the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). Pretty much everything else, including the inside and outside of the machines, the streets of Hong Kong, and the monsters was glowing with red and blue pastel fire. It was visually delightful, due in part to the fact that the power never went out even when flying giants were scraping the architecture off of whole city blocks.

An Odd Note (small spoiler alert)

There were a lot of rather blunt references to Independence Day (1996). We learn a lot about the enemy when one of the scientists mentally interfaces with an alien brain. For instance, the creatures responsible for sending the Kaiju here are in the habit of plundering whole worlds. Those same aliens look rather a lot like the critters that Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum waved at from their hijacked spacecraft. I will stop there, but there is a lot more. This borrowing is so blatant that is must mean something. I have no clue, unless it was just lazy theft.

Summary

There is almost nothing new or surprising here, so I can't quite give it five stars. It is certainly four star popcorn fun. Box office returns seem a bit anemic, which is probably due to the fact that there is so much apocalyptic banging going on in summer theaters that audiences are just worn out with it. It is also possible that the idea of giant robots sounds too Might Morphin' Power Rangers. I note that the Jaeger pilots are called rangers. That is too bad, because this is the sort of thing you will really like if you like that sort of thing. I do.

 

Zimmerman, Self Defense, & Stand Your Ground

What follows is my column for South Dakota Magazine. I think that Dr. Schaff and I have no significant disagreements.

Carrying a gun, like driving a car, involves a very heavy moral and legal responsibility. Carelessness and error can have grave consequences for which the person is liable. This responsibility is heavier still when a private individual draws a weapon to defend himself or someone else. If someone is armed and observes a school shooting about to happen, what should he do? Most of us would say he should stop it if he can, even if it means firing the gun. If, however, he has misinterpreted the situation or injures a bystander, he must know that he will bear the responsibility for that.

When George Zimmerman set out on foot, armed, to follow Trayvon Martin, a young man who was not engaged in any criminal activity, it resulted in a violent confrontation and the death of Martin. It seems to me that Zimmerman should have been held criminally responsible for his behavior. Firing "a warning shot" or even pointing a weapon at someone (say, a police officer) can land you in the slammer, while falling well short of murder.

That said, there is a very good reason why Florida police did not initially charge Zimmerman with murder or manslaughter. They had no case. Once the story became racially charged, political pressures lead to a special prosecutor and a charge of second degree murder. The affidavit on which the charge was brought excluded exculpatory evidence in Zimmerman's favor, something that is ethically and legally suspect. That the special prosecutor was inclined to such mischief supports the original decision not to bring charges.

Zimmerman claimed that he shot Martin in self defense. It doesn't matter that Zimmerman was the initial aggressor. If Martin responded to Zimmerman's non-deadly aggression with deadly force, Zimmerman was entitled to defend himself with the same. According to eyewitness accounts, Martin was on top of Zimmerman, beating him "mixed martial arts style," when Zimmerman fired his weapon. Zimmerman sustained injuries to the back of his head.

It was the responsibility of the prosecution to refute the claim of self-defense. To do that, they would have had to convince the jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Zimmerman did not believe that he was in danger of serious injury or death when he used deadly force to defend himself.

That is the question that the jury was instructed to answer. It was not whether Zimmerman was a racist or whether he profiled Martin. It was not whether Zimmerman might have shot Martin with some kind of criminal intent. To convict Zimmerman, they would have had to conclude beyond reasonable doubt that he was not acting in self-defense. Presented with the evidence mentioned above, a responsible jury could hardly have reached such a conclusion and this one did not.

If you think that Trayvon Martin was an innocent victim, you will certainly be disappointed by the verdict. Some voices in the media are now declaring that it is now "open season on black boys." There will probably be calls for reforming our criminal statutes to make sure that the next George Zimmerman cannot escape. While such reactions are understandable, it might be a good idea to take a breath and ask what that will mean. Who will it benefit and who will it injure if we make it easier to convict young men, African American or otherwise, of murder? Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

What follows is in addition to the column.

My old friend Ken Laster and I have been fighting on Facebook about this. One issue is whether Florida's "stand your ground law" was involved in this case. I think not. As I understand that law, it modifies traditional self-defense rules. What happens if someone breaks into my home and threatens my life? Under traditional rules, I can use deadly force only if I have no safe avenue of retreat (for example, running screaming out the back door). Under the SYG rules, I can use deadly force in self-defense even if I had a safe avenue of retreat.

If the general account of the shooting is correct, it happened when GZ was on his back and TM was on top of him. SYG was not relevant in that case and would not have influenced the local authorities in their initial decision not to pursue charges, nor would it have influenced the jury. The defense in the case did not appeal to the SYG law for the simple reason that traditional self-defense rules were enough.

I believe it is true that the jury was instructed to consider the SYG law. This may be because SYG lowers the threshold for use of deadly force to a "reasonable belief" that such force is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm. Again, that is irrelevant here because an appeal to SYG would have been necessary only if the case had not turned on simple self-defense. Neither the defense nor the prosecution thought that SYG was relevant to the case and that strikes me as dispositive.

A second question is whether the Justice Department will seek civil rights charges against GZ. I think that unlikely because the prosecution would have to prove that GZ fired his weapon because of racial animus. I don't see how they could possibly accomplish that. Apparently the FBI has sought and failed to find any evidence that GZ exhibited racial bias. The prosecution would have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that when he pulled the trigger he was motivated by racial animus and not by a fear for his life. Not likely.

ps.  The best single thing I have read on this issue is William Saletan's piece at Slate. 

A Note on Martin/Zimmerman Affair, With A Comment on Murder Stats

I largely agree with Prof. Blanchard, but feel moved to compose a "concurring opinion." George Zimmerman was almost certainly not guilty of the crimes with which he was charged, but that is not the same as saying he was innocent.  Zimmerman, some of his cheerleaders should note, was a fool to get out of his car with a loaded pistol and search for Trayvon Martin.  He greatly increased the chances that something bad was going to happen, which is why he should have been charged with negligent homicide and remains in jeopardy of a civil wrongful death suit. 

At the same time, Trayvon Martin was a fool as well.  Despite the efforts of some to paint Martin as St. Trayvon, he was clearly a young man with a record of  bad judgement and offensive opinions.  Throwing the media narrative on its head, its seems far more likely that Trayvon Martin held both racist and homophobic opinions than George Zimmerman, who seems to be a basically decent, if foolish, man.  And, not to put too fine a point on it, when you are smashing a man's head into the sidewalk, you are asking for trouble.  There are no "good guys" in this story.  It seems to me that it was two people using incredibly bad judgement and then paying a deadly price for it.

This case should ( and probably won't) create room for a healthy discussion of race and crime in America.  Look at the FBI Stats.  While the statistics have a lot of missing data, the pattern is clear: white people kill white people and black people kill black people.  That is not surprising.  People tend to murder people they know.  The incident if Florida is an outlier, namely a mixed race killing involving strangers.  It should not be used to draw generalizations. 

The murder problem in the US is young black men killing other young black men.  Look at Baton Rouge as one example. 

Last year, 83 people died by homicide in Baton Rouge. Of that number, 87 percent were black, and 87 percent were male. Two-thirds had been in trouble with the law before, and one-third had been in trouble with the law for drugs. The median age of victims: 26.

Of the perpetrators, the median age was 22. Get this: 96 percent of them were black, and 90 percent were male. Almost two-thirds had previous arrests. One out of four had a drug record.

President Obama should spend less time talking about how Trayvon Martin could have been his son and more time thinking of the thousands of young black men killed by other young black men.  I suspect neither he nor anyone else will, though, because there is no political hay to be made talking about black on black crime and, sorry to say, there is so little we can do as a matter of policy to change that sad situation. 

Is there a literary renaissance under way in South Dakota?

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal. A snippet:

John Miller is a retired professor of History at South Dakota State University. Judging from his work ethic, Miller hasn’t figured out yet that he’s retired. A passion for Midwestern history in general, and South Dakota history in specific, keeps him researching and writing. His latest efforts deserve our attention. Miller asks whether a literary renaissance is occurring in South Dakota.

Miller has been kind enough to send me a preliminary draft of his work and given me permission to write about his tentative conclusions in these pages.

Zimmerman v. Sharpton

I still think that George Zimmerman should have been held criminally responsible for following Trayvon Martin with a loaded gun, if the law allows such a thing. That said, I could never see a case against him for murder or manslaughter. Was Zimmerman justified in shooting Martin when the latter was on top of him and his head was hitting the pavement? I don't know. Could a reasonable jury have concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman's act amounted to a crime?

No, and this jury didn't. They confirmed the original decision of police and prosecutors not to pursue charges against Zimmerman. There was never any real case. This was a show trial. It was generated by irresponsible behavior on the part of the media (Zimmerman was a "white Hispanic"?) and by political blowhards like Al Sharpton. That is precisely the sort of thing that the jury system is supposed to resist. In this case, it did.

Fortnight For Freedom

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  A taste:

John Fisher was a Catholic bishop in England in the 16th century. For refusing to recognize the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon and refusing to take an oath declaring Henry the head of the Church in England, Fisher was condemned to death. He was beheaded on June 22, 1535.

Two weeks later, on July 6, Thomas More was beheaded for much the same reason, refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy. More’s head replaced Fisher’s on a stake at Tower Bridge in London. Both Fisher and More were later declared martyrs and saints by the Catholic Church and share a feast day, June 22.

Inspired by the example of Fisher and More, the American Catholic bishops have declared June 21 to July 4 this year a “Fortnight for Freedom.” This is intended to call attention to abuses of religious liberty by the American government.

Obama Delays Employer Mandate at Midnight with a Fog and No Moon

After several years of handing out waivers to exempt employers from the requirements of ObamaCare, canceling another part of the bill, and delaying the exchanges that would offer a range of plans to small businesses by at least a year, we now learn that the employer mandate will also be delayed until, well, after the next election. The Administration obviously wanted us to know about this because they announced it in a Treasury Department blog, on the Eve of the Fourth of July.

The mandate would have required any firm with more than 50 full time employees to offer insurance that meets the standards of the new health czars or pay a $2,000 penalty per employee. It was supposed to take effect in January of next year.

Is this a big deal or not? Letting it leak out like they did suggests that the Administration can't quite decide what they think about it. Kevin Drum, voice of the Administration at Mother Jones, thinks it's no big deal because the employer mandate was no big deal. Then he offers us two rather different explanations of why that mandate was in the bill.

The employer mandate requires big employers to offer insurance to their employees. Most big employers already offer insurance, so the primary idea behind this wasn't to force laggards to step up to the plate. The idea was to maintain the status quo and make sure that employers currently offering insurance didn't drop it once Obamacare started up.

Okay. That makes it sound important, but maybe the delay won't matter much. Then he adds the following:

If the employer mandate hadn't been in the bill, CBO would have scored its cost higher, which would have meant higher offsetting taxes. That would have made it a tougher sell.

So the employer mandate was in the bill largely (if not entirely) because it allowed the President to say that the bill costs X instead of X+Y. That makes the mandate look like a bit of window dressing. This is apparently what you have to concede if you want to argue that the delay doesn't matter.

Yuval Levin at The National Review observes that ObamaCare is a big machine with a lot of moving parts that depend on one another. Consider the "exchanges" that are supposed to begin operating in three months, in order to offer a range of options for insurance, along with subsidies to anyone who cannot otherwise afford it.

Under the law, eligibility for exchange subsidies depends on an individual not receiving an affordable offer of qualified insurance from an employer. If employers will now not be required to report on their insurance offerings in 2014, I don't see how the government will be able to determine eligibility for subsidies, and therefore how the exchanges will be able to function.

Making subsidies available without proof of eligibility would be very expensive and destabilizing to the insurance system, and would also require the retraction of such subsidies if the employer mandate ever does return. Coming up with other ways to prove eligibility would be very difficult at this late stage (as exchanges are supposed to start operating in three months), and would also be totally lawless—though I recognize that is a rather quaint and old fashioned concern in the age of Obama.

If Levin is correct, this delay is at least a temporary train wreck in the making for the implementation of the law. Moreover, it dispirits the supporters of ObamaCare while giving its opponents new evidence that it is a disaster. Worse still, it reinforces the obvious truth that any part of this law is now negotiable.

Tthe central proposition of defenders of the law has been that continued conservative opposition to it is a denial of the basic reality that the law is on the books and will be implemented. But apparently, the administration does not think of the law as a done deal. They believe they can pick and choose elements to implement or to ignore, and think the nature of the health-care system in the coming years is still an open question.

Yes. Everyone out there whose interests are adversely affected by any provision knows full well that the Administration can gratify them simply by choosing to do so. The Administration can hardly say that the law is the law, because it can obviously rewrite the law on a whim.

So why, if the employer mandate is no big deal, as Drum drums, did the Administration decide to delay it? The only answer is that they think that conservative critics of the employer mandate might be dead spot on. What do I do if I am an employer and I do not want to come under the mandate? I have three obvious options. One is to dump my insurance coverage for my employees and pay the fine. Would this make economic sense? No one knows for sure, yet. Another is to reduce my employee's hours to 30 or less a week, so they aren't full time. A third is to make sure that I don't have more than fifty full time workers. How many employers would have chosen one or more of these options if the mandate had come into effect in January of an election year, as scheduled? The Administration doesn't want to find out.

Do We Want to Kill More Birds & Bats?

I confess that I have a somewhat pernicious sense of humor, something I apparently share with Mother Nature. The white throated needle tail has been spotted in Britain only eight times since 1846. I know nothing about this creature except that it is a bird with a white throat and rather sharp tail feathers.

Recently forty stalwart limey bird watchers gather in the Hebrides, a group of islands just off the coast of Scotland, to catch a glimpse of this rare avian survivor. They got one, but unfortunately the guest of honor didn't survive. After two hours of ecstatic bird watching, the bird flew into a wind turbine and was flattened like a fly with a fly swatter.

There may be many morals to this story, but one is surely this: well-meaning plans often have unforeseen consequences. Wind turbines may be part of a smart energy package, though I have my doubts. What is beyond doubt is that they kill a lot of birds and bats. A study published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin estimates bird fatalities from wind turbines at 573,000 per year. That includes 88,000 raptors, which is worth mentioning only because raptors are really cool. I know I'd be a poorer man if I never saw an eagle fly. I am not sure what seeing an eagle fly into a wind blade would do to my balance sheet.

The carnage is considerably worse for bats. Wind turbines apparently knock about 888,000 of these winged mammals out of the air every year. I really like bats. They are basically mice that scoop the air with big webbed fingers. Some of them use sonar to hunt for creatures I am less fond of, like mosquitoes. Some years ago I set up camp in the Ozarks just as the sun was setting. We were suddenly swarmed by mosquitoes. Then the bats came out and in about a half hour they had scoured Sylamore canyon clean of the pests.

I don't know how many bats we can afford to sacrifice annually to these gleaming white pinwheels, especially since bat populations are suffering a dramatic population decline due to a pernicious fungus. Nearly a million seems like a significant cost.

It is not a cost the wind industry needs to worry about. According to the Associated Press, the Obama Administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind farm for killing eagles or other protected species. Instead, they had shielded the industry from any liability. This is not how they treat oil companies or power companies when birds drown in waste pits or fry on power lines. When a protected hits the fan it is, in principle, a federal crime. The Administration has resolutely kept a blind eye.

You can decide for yourself whether wind power, which generates 3.5% of our electricity nationally, is worth the loss of fur and feathers. If you pretend to care about all about our airborne cousins, you might be concerned that President Obama wants to double "renewable" energy sources by 2020. If wind power expands to contribute 7% of our power, what will that mean for birds and bats?

It is possible that technological innovations will produce less lethal fans. No one seems knows how to do that. It's also possible that, with more efficient turbines we can double the energy yield without quite doubling the number of blades. Still, a doubling of the energy yield will almost certainly mean more blades and that means that the dreadful numbers mentioned above will go up. A policy dedicated to expanding renewables will necessarily have to go on ignoring that.

President Obama has a great faith in the power of central planning. As Ron Bailey points out in Reason Magazine, his recent energy policy initiative amounts to a Soviet style Five Year Plan, only with less than four years to go. We know how central planning works and we can see it in the Administration's handling of the bird problem. When central planners decide to do one good thing, they usually commit to ignoring everything else.

The birds and the bats are not the only ones who will suffer from energy policies driven by pretty ideas. In his speech, the President praised Germany for "going all out in the race for clean energy". One of the results of that all out rush is that German households pay about three times as much for a month of power as their American counterparts. If you tell me that I have to chop falcons and bats into McNuggets in order to keep my house well lit at night and warm in the winter, I might reluctantly buy in. If you tell me I am going to kill those creatures so I can pay three times as much for electricity, I am opting out.