Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

Who is stupider? A stupid person or the people who elect a stupid person to high office?

That was my thought when I saw the thread concerning this exchange at Town Hall

However while that phrase came to mind I think this isn’t a case of stupidity, it’s a case of honesty.

Senator Hirono is a Marxist, and as a Marxist she is interested in ends, not means and because this is the case of course she wants every judge, every justice and every officer of the court to interpret any law to achieve her Marxist ends.

The only reason why she objects to Senator Cruz is that she said the quiet part out loud, that may have been careless but not stupid, because she knows that while it might make some complications for her fellow Democrats it won’t hurt her one bit with the voters of her state who elected and re-elected her.

But there is one more bit of irony here. Consider this paragraph:

But the law on the books offered a different model: “To enter a man’s house” without a proper warrant, Lord Chief Justice Pratt proclaimed in 1763, is to attack “the liberty of the subject” and “destroy the liberty of the kingdom.” Huckle v. Money, 2 Wils. K. B. 206, 207, 95 Eng. Rep. 768, 769 (K. B.1763). That was the idea behind the Fourth Amendment.

and a footnote that goes with it:

⁴ In a 1763 Parliamentary debate, about searches made to enforce a tax, William Pitt the Elder orated as follows: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England cannot enter—all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!” Miller v. United States, 357 U. S. 301, 307, and n. 7 (1958) (citing The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations 379 (2d ed. 1953); 15 T. Hansard, Parliamentary History of England, col. 1307 (1813)).

Those words citing the original intent of the 4th amendment were not written by Ted Cruz or by Kurt Schlichter or even by Justice Clarence Thomas. They were written by Justice Elana Kagan in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lange v. California released yesterday.

Take a note of the dates cited there. 1958,, 1953, 1813, 1763. 1763 a full twelve years before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord , thirteen years before the Declaration of Independence and over a quarter of a century before the 4th Amendment was ratified nearly a quarter century before the ratification of the US constitution and over a quarter of a century before the 4th Amendment which this what this case is about, was approved.

Imagine that, citing not just the original intent of the 4th amendment but the original ideas behind it! I wonder if Senator Hirano disapproves?

I suspect not. Apparently there is nothing wrong with originalism, even for a liberal justice or a liberal senator, as long as it can be used to support a result they agree with.

Unexpectedly of course.

In Turkey, a controversy erupted because Ancestry.com revealed that many Turks have more Greek DNA than Turkish. The Turkish DNA Project, a “community project” that researches Oghuz Turks, forerunners of the Ottoman Turks that conquered Anatolia from the Greek Byzantine Empire, called for boycotts of Ancestry.com, and Ahval, an online news site reporting on Turkey but based in the United Arab Emirates, reports that revelations about Turkish DNA have “shaken Turkish beliefs in their “Turkishness.”

The Turks originated in northeastern, Asia before migrating across southwest Asia in the medieval period, leaving significant pockets of Turks in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Persia, among others. Anatolia had long been a crossroad between Europe and Asia, and had been the home of Hittites, Lydians, Celts, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and more. Classical Greece famously colonized much of Anatolia, establishing settlements along the Aegean coast and in Pontus on the Black Sea, and Istanbul itself began as a Greek colony called Byzantium. Alexander the Great spread Greek culture even further across Anatolia into Persia and India, and the Pontic King Mithridates the Great claimed descent from Alexander and from the Persian King Xerxes

In 1071, the Turks under defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert, and the conquest of Anatolia began. Constantinople was conquered by Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 after a 53-day siege, and the Turks continued to advance across the Balkans and into Greece itself, taking Greece’s Peloponnesian Peninsula by 1459, Bosnia in 1463, and the Greek island of Rhodes in 1529. It was in Wallachia, in the Balkans, that Mehmed II, in 1462, faced Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Vlad impaled 23,000 Turks before Mehmed II was able to take Wallachia, too. In 1683, the Turks were finally defeated by the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the Battle of Vienna, and the Turks never threatened Europe again. At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was broken up, and Turkey’s borders have remained relatively the same since.

All of this history just goes to show what a mix Anatolians are. Even Turkish President Erdogan hails from a formerly Greek town that’s since been Turkified, and though would never admit it, likely has significant Greek heritage. A funny little joke the Greeks played, submitting to the Ottomans only to turn them all at least partly Greek.

Which just goes to show how little blood has to do with culture, despite what the race essentialists claim. I touched on this a little bit on Twitter with Ricochet’s Jon Gabriel (no relation) and Australian writer Gray Connolly. Culture is far more about common languages and beliefs than about ancestry, so whether the Turks have Greek or Turkic blood doesn’t matter. The Turks are tied by Islam and by the Turkish language. Both Connolly and Gabriel made the point that under the Roman Empire, a Roman was anyone who swore allegiance to Rome. Blood mattered little.

I remember when the U.S. seemed headed that way. Seems so long ago.