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No territory-wide census was taken in the Congo until long after the rubber terror was over. But Daniel Vangroenweghe, a Belgian anthropologist who worked in a former rubber area in the 1970s, found persuasive demographic evidence that large numbers of men had been worked to death as rubber slaves or killed in punitive raids - and he discovered the evidence in the regime's own statistics. No other explanation accounts for the curious pattern that threads through the village-by-village headcounts taken in the colony long before the first territorial census. These local headcounts consistently show far more women than men.

At Inongo in 1907, for example, there were 309 children 402 adult women, but only 275 adult men. (This was the very town for which, some ten years earlier, the district commissioner had ordered "absolute submission or complete extermination:') At nearby Iboko in 1908 there were 322 children, 543 adult women, but only 262 adult men. Statistics from numerous other villages show the same pattern. Sifting such figures today is like sifting the ruins of an Auschwitz crematorium. They do not tell you precise death tolls, but they reek of mass murder.

During Leopold's rule, by how much, from all four causes, did the Congo population shrink? Just as when historians chart population loss from the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe, they can be more confident of the percentage than they are of absolute numbers. They have, after all, no census data. Interestingly, some estimates of population loss in the Congo made by those who saw it firsthand agree with some of those made by more scientific methods today.

An official Belgian government commission in 1919 estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopold's state, the population of the territory had "been reduced by half." Major Charles C. Liebrechts, a top executive of the Congo state administration for most of its existence, arrived at the same estimate in 1920. The most authoritative judgment today comes from Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and perhaps the greatest living ethnographer of Congo basin peoples. He bases his calculations on "innumerable local sources from different areas: priests noticing their flocks were shrinking, oral traditions, genealogies, and much more." His estimate is the same: between 1880 and 1920, the population of the Congo was cut "by at least a half."

Half of what? Only in the 1920s were the first attempts made at a territory-wide census. In 1924 the population was reckoned at ten million, a figure confirmed by later counts. This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.

Burned villages, starved hostages, terrified refugees dying in swamps, orders for "extermination" - even in crass, purely monetary terms, aren't these inefficient means of doing business? Massacring huge numbers of people may frighten the survivors into gathering rubber, but doesn't it destroy the labor force? Indeed it does. Belgian administrators ordered the census taken in 1924 because they were deeply concerned about a shortage of available workers. "We run the risk of someday seeing our native population collapse and disappear;' fretfully declared the permanent committee of the National Colonial Congress of Belgium that year. "So that we will find ourselves confronted with a kind of desert."

Why, then, did the killings go on for so long? The same irrationality lies at the heart of many other mass murders. In the Soviet Union, for example, shooting or jailing political opponents at first helped the Communist Party and then Josef Stalin gain absolute power. But after there were no visible opponents left, seven million more people were executed, and many millions more died in the far-flung camps of the gulag. So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt; so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals were shot that the almost leaderless Red Army was nearly crushed by the German invasion of 1941

In the Congo, as in Russia, mass murder had a momentum of its own. Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone's life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. Congo annals abound in cases like that of Rene de Permentier, an officer in the Equator district in the late 1890s. The Africans nicknamed him Bajunu (for bas genoux, on your knees), because he always made people kneel before him. He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passersby for target practice. If he found a leaf in a courtyard that women prisoners had swept, he ordered a dozen of them beheaded. If he found a path in the forest not well-maintained, he ordered a child killed in the nearest village.

Two Force Publique officers, Clement Brasseur and Leon Cerckel, once ordered a man hung from a palm tree by his feet while a fire was lit beneath him and he was cooked to death. Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list is much longer.

Michael Herr, the most brilliant reporter of the Vietnam War, captures the same frenzy in the voice of one American soldier he met: "We'd rip out the hedges and burn the hooches and blow all the wells and kill every chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, if we can't shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here?" When another American, Francis Ford Coppola, tried to put the blood lust of that war on film, where did he turn for the plot of his Apocalypse Now? To Joseph Conrad, who had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases

Practicing social distancing techniques not only protects you from the crowds, it protects the crowds from you. If one actually falls ill, the best thing to do from a public health standpoint may be to self-quarantine at home to prevent the spread of the virus. Otherwise, you are visiting a potential death sentence on everyone you meet. The extreme lethality of the current strain of HSN1 may actually work in humanity's favor - people may be so ill and succumb so quickly that they are unlikely to get out of bed and spread it to others outside their households. Experts expect the virus may ratchet down its lethality in the interest of being more effectively spread. Of course, if we do become infected, it may be a day or two before we know it, so all but essential personnel should consider preparing for a prolonged "snow emergency"-type isolation at home in the event of a pandemic." Instead of a snow "day," though, Osterholm compares it to preparing for a worldwide "12- to 15-month blizzard." although each wave may only last a matter of weeks in any particular locale. Everyone should also begin getting into the habit of practicing what infectious control experts refer to as proper "respiratory etiquette."

Most people know to cover their nose and mouth when they cough or sneeze, but most people are not doing it right. One should not cough or sneeze into one's hand. The current thinking is one should only cough into the crook of the arm. Covering our nose and mouth can somewhat limit the dispersal of contaminated respiratory droplets, but when we cough into our hand, it becomes coated with virus that can then be transferred to everything from elevator buttons and light switches to gas pump and toilet handles. A recent study found that the virus could be recovered from more than 50% of common household and day care center surfaces during flu season. This is not surprising, given that up to five infectious viral doses have been measured in every drop of nasal secretions. Coughing into the inner elbow area of one's arm or sleeve prevents the contamination of one's hands. This takes practice, so we should all start rehearsing now. The Mayo Clinic has a slogan: "The 10 worst sources of contagion are our fingers."

Fomite is the technical term for a contaminated physical object, like the archetypal doorknob, that can transmit disease among people. It comes from the Latin fomes, meaning "tlnder." This sparking of an infectious blaze can be prevented through disinfection. At room temperature and humidity, influenza virus can survive intact for up to 48 hours on nonporous surfaces like metal or plastic and up to 12 hours on cloth, paper, or tissues. but can be killed easily with a simple solution of household bleach. One tablespoon of chlorine bleach mixed in a gallon of water is a potent disinfectant. This diluted bleach solution can be sprayed on potentially contaminated common surfaces and left to sit for at least five minutes. Frequently used but infrequently disinfected objects, such as refrigerator handles and phone receivers, should not be missed. The bleach solution can also be used to wash contaminated clothes and bedding, as research has shown that a shaken contaminated blanket can release infectious viral particles into the environment. It must be chlorine bleach, meaning it should contain a chlorine-based compound like sodium hypochlorite. So-called "color-safe" bleaches should not be used as disinfectants.

Wrapped in a stolen fatty coat from our cells, influenza viruses like H5N1 can lie in wait for days under the right conditions, patiently twiddling their thumbs until someone grasps the same doorknob. The virus still needs to bypass the skin barrier and find a way into the body, though. This is why we should get into the habit of avoiding touching our eyes, noses, and mouths whenever possible in public until we can wash or sanitize our hands. The power of this simple intervention is illustrated by a study that showed that children aged four to eight taught to not touch their noses and eyes essentially halved their risk of contracting cold infections. Although viruses like influenza can go airborne, studies of outbreaks at nursing homes suggest that this direct physical contact may play a significant role in its spread.

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

ndrea Diamond of Toronto is used to having squirrels in her backyard, but she did a double take recently when she saw one holding something blue. She looked closer. The squirrel was twirling a paring knife in its front paws. Eventually, it ran away unhurt, and she noticed it had also gotten into some hand sanitizer she'd left out. They're trying to be COVID conscientious, I guess, she said

Police in Ballwin, Mo., investigated two missing pies. Someone apparently decided a Honey Baked Ham store should not have been closed for Thanksgiving. They entered the shop, which was unlocked. And they left a note - "no one was here, and we were in desperate need of pies," end quote. No word on whether they were pumpkin or pecan. Police told KPLR-TV the shop did not press charges because there was money left behind for the pies, plus tax.

Casinos were supposed to be the catalyst to rebuild Atlantic City. Instead they have transformed it into the place where the South Bronx meets Las Vegas-by-the-Sea, where heroin and hookers are readily available and armed robbery is a constant danger, especially for old folks.

Publicists like to put on airs about a grand and glorious old Atlantic City. In truth the town was conceived as an excuse to sell train tickets. Civil engineer Richard Osborne, who witnessed but did not share in the profits created when a little lake port became mighty Chicago, shepherded thirty-four rich Philadelphians onto barren, windswept Absecon Island in 1852 and asked them to envision a workingman's resort that would make them richer still. The well-to-do already had their beach resort at Cape May Point thirty miles south at the Garden State's southern tip. Osborne picked this shifting sand not because of any natural beauty, but simply because it was the closest straight line between the sea and the crowded workshops of what had been, until a few years before, the dominant city of the Western Hemisphere. This was the easiest way for Osborne and his partner, Shore physician John Pitney, to profit from train fares and real estate.

The first train filled with beach goers arrived in Atlantic City on July 1,1854. The first Boardwalk went up in 1870, a cultural oddity eight feet wide and made in sections so it could be hauled back for storage in winter. The Boardwalk was an industrial-era sensation, for it allowed visitors to experience nature vicariously, looking out at the beach, the crowds and waves while escaping the messy reality of wet sand. The world's playground was born. Soon bigger, permanent planking was in place and grand hotels like Haddon Hall, the Marlborough-Blenheim and the Traymore rose beside the boards.

Despite these few elegant hostelries Atlantic City was always honkytonk, with saloons during Prohibition, back-room gambling run by the likes of Skinny D' Amato, and lots of hype. Mob guys played there, too, because it was an open city where nobody was supposed to get rubbed out. The Miss America Pageant began there as a publicity stunt in 1921, held after Labor Day to coax from tourists one more weekend of hotel revenues.

But Atlantic City did not share in the prosperity of the Pax Americana that followed World War II. No interstate highway was built to Atlantic City. Instead, the new superhighways, along with jet travel, opened up new vacation possibilities for Atlantic City's traditional market as people from Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore hit the road, filling Kemmons Wilson's Holiday Inns. Television hurt Atlantic City, too. The giant Boardwalk showrooms - where tourists could type a letter on a two-ton typewriter, sample Heinz's 57 varieties, and watch the famous diving horse in between - closed down as network television offered a cheaper way to hawk wares to the masses.

New Jersey was a Northern state in the Civil War, but Atlantic City lies south of the Mason-Dixon Line both geographically and in spirit. When changing vacation patterns meant that the big Boardwalk hotels could not sustain themselves, the absentee owners took their profits elsewhere and let upkeep slide, a process known as disinvesting. Whites who could find better jobs moved out either to the surrounding suburbs or far away. But the blacks, who made the beds, entertained in the black nightclubs in the summer, and got by on relief in the winter were not welcome in the suburbs and lacked the resources to move anyway, so they stayed on. By 1976, when city fathers, merchants and the local newspaper were organizing the second statewide vote for casinos, the most popular bumper sticker in town said, WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE ATLANTIC CITY PLEASE TURN OFF THE LIGHTS.

Authorizing casinos did not change the old ways of Atlantic City. By 1991 the casinos employed nearly fifty thousand people, yet unemployment in Atlantic City remained higher than in the rest of New Jersey as well as the nation because the casinos prefer to hire their workers from the suburbs, which are overwhelmingly white. The state government encourages this policy in myriad ways, including studied indifference to the casinos' flouting of the fair employment laws and by subsidizing bus fares from white communities an hour away, while only rudimentary and costly transit is available in Atlantic City's poorest areas.

While Atlantic City nurtures its romantic image as the Queen of Resorts, the harsh truth years after legal casinos started is that a greater portion of its people live in public housing than in any other city in America.

But not all of Atlantic City's dozen temples of chance stand by the city's slums. Harrah's Casino Hotel is on the northwestern edge of Atlantic City just off another road across the marsh to Absecon Island, the White Horse Pike. Just before reaching the public housing projects that stretch for block after block, players can tum north and head through the stands of phragmites and sedges to Harrah's or its sole marina neighbor, Trump Castle Hotel & Casino Resort by-the-Bay.

In its advertising Harrah's appeals to those who do not want to be reminded of the underclass by so little as a passing glance at a poor person through a car window. Harrah's calls itself "The Other Atlantic City" This slogan worked so well that Harrah's added a second: "The Better People Place." Its billboards, newspaper ads and posters feature smiling middle-aged and elderly white couples, often in expensive attire, endorsing Harrah's as a fun place for people like themselves. When leading Atlantic City blacks like Pierre Hollingsworth, the retired deputy fire chief and former city commissioner, complained that the slogans exuded a subtle racism, Harrah's responded by adding a very few black faces to its posters, particularly the faces of blacks who serve casino patrons.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" 1994

"He really hated the light-skinned leaders like Benjamin Hooks and [former HEW secretary] Patricia Harris," recalled Michael Middleton, Thomas's trusted, liberal colleague in Washington. "He thought they were 'bourgeois Negroes' who thought they were white."

At the same time, a number of EEOC colleagues believed that once in power, Thomas treated light-skinned women in particular with more deference than those with darker skin, showing a kind of contempt toward those more like himself. "He had more respect for light women, and he was definitely different around white people," asserted a former employee at the EEOC whom he eventually fired, Angela Wright. Wright, who was willing to testify that Thomas had made crude and unwanted sexual comments to her in the office, thought it unlikely that he would have behaved so disrespectfully had she had lighter skin.

When Anita Hill surfaced with her allegations, Thomas offhandedly confirmed this prejudice by telling his mother that there was no way he could have been seriously interested in Hill, because she was too dark for his taste. As his mother recalled the conversation, Thomas asked her, "Mamma, what kind of women do I like?"

Leola Williams, who is as dark as her son, said she hadn't thought much about it.

"Well, what color was Kathy?" he persisted, referring to his first wife, Kathy Ambush, who was three quarters black and one quarter Japanese.

"She was brown," Leola said she answered.

"And the others?" inquired Thomas.

"They've all been light-skinned too," his mother said.

"Right," she says Thomas answered. "So what would I want with a woman as black as Anita Hill?"

Jane Mayer "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas" (1994)

If it were printed as this book is, the Open Letter would run to only about a dozen pages. Yet in that short space Williams anticipated almost all the major charges that would be made by the international Congo protest movement of more than a decade later. Although by 1890 scattered criticism of Leopold's Congo state had been published in Europe, most of it focused on the king's discrimination against foreign traders. Williams's concern was human rights, and his was the first comprehensive, systematic indictment of Leopold's colonial regime written by anyone. Here are his main accusations:

? Stanley and his white assistants had used a variety of tricks, such as fooling Africans into thinking that whites had supernatural powers, to get Congo chiefs to sign their land over to Leopold. For example: "A number of electric batteries had been purchased in London, and when attached to the arm under the coat, communicated with a band of ribbon which passed over the palm of the white brother's hand, and when he gave the black brother a cordial grasp of the hand the black brother was greatly surprised to find his white brother so strong, that he nearly knocked him off his feet. When the native inquired about the disparity of strength between himself and his white brother, he was told that the white man could pull up trees and perform the most prodigious feats of strength." Another trick was to use a magnifying glass to light a cigar, after which "the white man explained his intimate relation to the sun, and declared that if he were to request him to burn up his black brother's village it would be done." In another ruse, a white man would ostentatiously load a gun but covertly slip the bullet up his sleeve. He would then hand the gun to a black chief, step off a distance, and ask the chief to take aim and shoot; the white man, unharmed, would bend over and retrieve the bullet from his shoe. "By such means and a few boxes of gin, whole villages have been signed away to your Majesty." Land purchased in this way, Williams wrote, was "territory to which your Majesty has no more legal claim, than I have to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Belgian army."

? Far from being a great hero, Stanley had been a tyrant. His "name produces a shudder among this simple folk when mentioned; they remember his broken promises, his copious profanity, his hot temper, his heavy blows, his severe and rigorous measures, by which they were mulcted of their lands." (Note Williams's assumption, so unimaginable to his white contemporaries, that Africans had a right to African land.) Of the hundreds of Europeans and Americans who traveled to the Congo in the state's early years, Williams is the only one on record as questioning Africans about their personal experience of Stanley.

? Leopold's establishment of military bases along the river had caused a wave of death and destruction, because the African soldiers who manned them were expected to feed themselves. "These piratical, buccaneering posts compel the natives to furnish them with fish, goats, fowls, and vegetables at the mouths of their muskets; and whenever the natives refuse white officers come with an expeditionary force and burn away the homes of the natives."

? "Your Majesty's Government is excessively cruel to its prisoners, condemning them, for the slightest offenses, to the chain gang. Often these ox-chains eat into the necks of the prisoners and produce sores about which the flies circle, aggravating the running wound."

? Leopold's claim that his new state was providing wise government and public services was a fraud. There were no schools and no hospitals except for a few sheds "not fit to be occupied by a horse." Virtually none of the colony's officials knew any African language. "The Courts of your Majesty's Government are abortive, unjust, partial and delinquent." (Here, as elsewhere, Williams provided a vivid example: a white servant of the governor-general went unpunished for stealing wine while black servants were falsely accused and beaten.)

? White traders and state officials were kidnapping African women and using them as concubines.

? White officers were shooting villagers, sometimes to capture their women, sometimes to intimidate the survivors into working as forced laborers, and sometimes for sport. "Two Belgian Army officers saw, from the deck of their steamer, a native in a canoe some distance away... The officers made a wager of 5 pounds that they could hit the native with their rifles. Three shots were fired and the native fell dead, pierced through the head."

? Instead of Leopold's being the noble antislavery crusader he portrayed himself as, "Your Majesty's Government is engaged in the slave-trade, wholesale and retail. It buys and sells and steals slaves. Your Majesty's Government gives 3 pounds per head for able-bodied slaves for military service. The labour force at the stations of your Majesty's Government in the Upper River is composed of slaves of all ages and both sexes."

***

Williams was not done. Three months after writing the Open Letter, he produced A Report upon the Congo-State and Country to the President of the Republic if the United States if America. President Harrison probably had no more expected to hear from him than Leopold had. In writing to the president, Williams repeated his charges, adding that the United States had a special responsibility toward the Congo, because it had "introduced this African Government into the sisterhood of States." As in the Open Letter, he supported the charges with personal examples. "At Stanley-Falls slaves were offered to me in broad day-light; and at night I discovered canoe loads of slaves, bound strongly together:' Williams called for this "oppressive and cruel Government" to be replaced by a new regime that would be "local, not European; international, not narional; just, not cruel."

Whether Williams was calling for self-government or for international trusteeship, it would be many years before anyone else from Europe or the United States would do the same. In a letter Williams wrote to the American secretary of state, he used a phrase that seems plucked from the Nuremberg trials of more than half a century later. Leopold's Congo state, Williams wrote, was guilty of" crimes against humanity."

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

He who hesitates is lost
(16th century proverb)

I was watching one of those Kung Fu epics the other night and the leading character in it made a very profound remark to his closest friend.

He said, "The man whose experiences with the opposite sex are unhappy ones never finishes first in the obstacle race of life. Then he kicked his mate in the groin and rode off into the sunset.

I suddenly thought to myself that could very well account for my own failure to break life's tape ahead of the field. Because my experiences with girls, especially my early experiences, to call them gruesome would just be flattering.

And that's why when I was seventeen, all of romance was summed up for me in scene from a film called History is Made At Night. Nobody remembers that now.

In this scene Charles Boyer took Jean Arthur to dinner in a restaurant where a strolling violinist leaned over and played a melody into her left ear.

And as she listened her hand crept across the table and she linked her little finger into his, into Charle Boyer's, not the violinist's. Because that would have cropped up the violin playing.

I can't tell you what paroxysms of dewy-eyed soppiness that that sent me into.

If I could only arrange a setup like that for myself then life would have nothing further it could offer me.

Within a month a new family moved in next door containing a daughter called Bernice. And the other happy circumstance was that the haberdashers on the parade went bust. And it was re-opened, as, after some initial difficulties with the neon sign, The Hendon Brasserie.

What's more, and this is the strange thing, it was owned and run by an ex-member of the Debroy Summers Savoy Orpheums.

So I had it all now. The time, the place, the girl, and the strolling violinist.

So I asked Bernice for a date. And when she met me at the Hendon Brasserie she looked a knockout. Admittedly she did appear to be about two feet taller than Jean Arthur. That was because Hendon girls of that time were very strong on what were then called beehive hair-dos.

Anyway, I pushed Bernice through that three-course a la carte in record time. And the moment that coffee was plunked down, I was all set for blast-off.

I said to her, "What's your favorite tune?" And I sort of smiled. "What's your favorite tune?" Did the Boyer nose wrinkle.

And she said, "What's the one that goes?" and then she hummed a few bars.

I said, "That's the national anthem."

She said, "Well, you pick one."

I said, "All right."

Beckoning the violinist over I said, "My good man. Do you know 'Time after Time I tell myself that I'm'. "

And he nodded, winked and then he leaned forward over Bernice's ear and he started playing on that low sexy violin string that they don't seem to use much any more.

Say what you like. There is something about those old Hollywood ploys, because he hadn't played more than about twelve bars when I saw Bernice's hand come creeping across the table towards mine.

I closed my eyes in sheer bliss. Such sheer bliss that I didn't even notice when the music stopped.

It was only when I heard this strange kind of sawing noise that I opened my eyes again.

That idiot was as inexpert at the game as I was. He'd got his bow stuck right through her beehive.

You know that peculiarly stiff kind of lacquer that girls put on their hair in those days? It had somehow bonded to the rosin on his bow. And it was awful. Her hair sort of swaying with this . . .

I can't even talk about it even now. It's a good example of that culled-through proverb, isn't it?

The man whose experiences with the opposite sex are unhappy ones never finishes first in the obstacle of life.

Or, if you prefer it in the western version, he who has sad dates is last.

Denis Norden
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The unexpected perks were things like this. When I first became a star I had never learnt to drive so I hired a chauffeur to drive me around. But later I moved with my family to Los Angeles, and everybody drives there so I had to take a test. Before I took it, a man behind a desk informed me, in a prepared speech he had probably given many times, "The person who will perform your test is sitting outside in the car. You will speak to him only to say, 'Good morning.' There will be no normal conversation. He will give you instructions, you will listen and respond. There will be no personal remarks whatsoever."

I said, "Yes, Officer, I understand." I went outside and got into the car.

The guy looked at me and he said, "I loved you in The Man Who Would Be King. You're going to have to be shit to not pass this test." So at the age of fifty that was how I got my first driver's licence.


Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

Two weeks after [Joe] Arpaio was found guilty, Trump started focusing the thoughts of those who would attend his Phoenix rally the next week. It began with an off-air interview with a television pundit working for Fox News, the reliably Trump-supporting cable channel.

"Is there anyone in local law enforcement who has done more to crack down on illegal immigration than Sheriff Joe?" Trump asked Fox's Gregg Jarrett. "He has protected people from crimes and saved lives. He doesn't deserve to be treated this way." Jarrett said Trump also told him, "I am seriously considering a pardon for Sheriff Arpaio. He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. He's a great American patriot and I hate to see what has happened to him."

Not a skeptical word from Jarrett, a lawyer, who on Fox's Sean Hannity show told only part of the story. Jarrett called the case a "political prosecution that began in the Obama administration," speaking more like Arpaio's lawyer than a news analyst.

The case began during the George W. Bush administration and the decision to prosecute for criminal contempt came during the Obama era. It was during the Trump administration that Arpaio was tried for criminal contempt of court and convicted.

That Trump is thinking about using pardons to compromise the Mueller investigation was beyond doubt after the Phoenix rally. While the pardon power appears to have no limits, other than using it to prevent impeachment, Trump's willingness to use it is fraught with peril for himself and the Republic. Using pardons strategically could seriously hamper the Russia and other investigations.

Pardons are for "offenses against the United States." By accepting a pardon, a person admits guilt for committing the crime. Anyone is free to accept or reject a pardon, as a principled person might who believes that he or she was innocent and had been wrongly convicted. There are plenty of examples of people who refused to say they committed a murder, rape, or other crime just to get out of prison, even if it meant staying behind bars until they died.

Anyone who accepts a Trump pardon, including Arpaio, is admitting he committed offenses against the federal government. But there is a way around this. The Constitution also gives the president the power to grant reprieves, such as letting a prisoner get out of jail early, without settling the issue of guilt or innocence. Such clemency is not optional. If the president orders someone freed from prison or otherwise relieved of criminal punishment, that person cannot say no.

Pardons can be issued preemptively, before any criminal charges are brought, as President Gerald Ford did when he relieved Richard Nixon and the country of the prospect of Nixon being tried for a host of felonies, including conspiracy and income tax evasion (for which Nixon's lawyer did go to prison).

That explains why strategically issuing pardons and reprieves would likely occur late, not early, in the Mueller probe and those by House and Senate committees. The problem issuing pardons poses for Trump is that anyone who accepts a pardon loses his or her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. If you have been pardoned, you cannot be tried and therefore must testify in criminal proceedings and before Congress. Lying in such proceedings, including falsely claiming you cannot recall something, subjects you to prosecution for that criminal conduct.

Nothing in the Constitution would prevent Trump from issuing serial pardons, either. Thus, he could pardon someone who had evidence that Trump would not want used against him, and if the person was indicted for refusing to testify, he could, as with Arpaio, pardon them again even before they were found guilty of contempt of court.

Presidential pardons apply only to "offenses against the United States." This means that state prosecutors are free to bring charges for crimes within their jurisdiction, which helps explain why Mueller's team is working with Eric Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general. Should Trump pardon, for example, his sons or his son-in-law, or Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, or others, Schneiderman would be free to bring state-level charges.

David Cay Johnston "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America" 2017

There was one jarring recollection in the generally positive picture painted by Thomas's colleagues in the attorney general's office. According to Andy Rothschild, now an attorney in St. Louis but then a friend and fellow lawyer, Thomas liked to taunt another member of the office, who was prim and painfully shy, by making outrageous, gross, and at times off-color remarks. "Clarence was loud and boisterous, kind of the office clown. He couldn't help himself but to needle the guy - he just liked to get under his skin," Rothschild recalled in an interview.

The target of Thomas's taunting was John C. Ashcroft, who would later replace Danforth as attorney general and eventually become Missouri's governor. A tightly wound, strait-laced teetotaler who was the son of a fundamentalist minister and who was himself a gospel singer and songwriter, Ashcroft was easily flustered by Thomas, according to a second colleague who also remembered such episodes. This apparently encouraged Thomas to goad him further.

[and still later, after the book came out, became a terrible attorney general under bush junior]

Jane Mayer "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas" (1994)

No payments of trinkets or brass wire were enough to make people stay in the flooded forest for days at a time to do work that was so arduous - and physically painful. A gatherer had to dry the syrup-like rubber so that it would coagulate, and often the only way to do so was to spread the substance on his arms, thighs, and chest. "The first few times it is not without pain that the man pulls it off the hairy parts of his body," Louis Chaltin, a Force Publique officer, confided to his journal in 1892. "The native doesn't like making rubber. He must be compelled to do it."

How was he to be compelled? A trickle of news and rumor gradually made its way to Europe. "An example of what is done was told me up the Ubangi [River]," the British vice consul reported in 1899. "This officer['s] method was to arrive in canoes at a village, the inhabitants of which invariably bolted on their arrival; the soldiers were then landed, and commenced looting, taking all the chickens, grain, etc., out of the houses; after this they attacked the natives until able to seize their women; these women were kept as hostages until the Chief of the district brought in the required number of kilogrammes of rubber. The rubber having been brought, the women were sold back to their owners for a couple of goats apiece, and so he continued from village to village until the requisite amount of rubber had been collected."

Sometimes the hostages were women, sometimes children, sometimes elders or chiefs. Every state or company post in the rubber areas had a stockade for hostages. If you were a male villager, resisting the order to gather rubber could mean death for your wife. She might die anyway, for in the stockades food was scarce and conditions were harsh. "The women taken during the last raid at Engwettra are causing me no end of trouble."

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

Gambling with Our Lives?

The explosion of H5N1 in early 2004, which led to the deaths of more than 100 million chickens across eight countries in Southeast Asia, was traced to the trade in live birds. The timing and pattern were inconsistent with known migratory bird routes. The initial spread of this disease seems to have been via the railways and highways, not the flyways.

The riskiest segment of trade may be in fighting cocks, transported across borders to be unwilling participants in the high-stakes gambling blood "sport." In cockfighting pits, roosters are set upon one another, often pumped full of steroids and stimulants, with sharpened razors strapped to their legs. The sprays of bloody droplets help ensure that any virus present travels back home after the fights in newly infected birds - or people. A number of cockfighting enthusiasts, and children of cockflghters, have died from H5Nl.

The Thai Department of Disease Control described a case of a young man who had "very close contact to fighting cocks by carrying and helping to clear up the mucus secretion from the throat of the cock during the fighting game by using his mouth." As one leading epidemiologist at the CDC commented dryly, "That was a risk factor for avian flu we hadn't really considered before."

The movement of gaming cocks was directly implicated in the rapid spread of H5Nl. Malaysian government officials blamed cockfighters as the main "culprits" for bringing the disease into their country by taking birds to cockfighting competitions in Thailand and bringing them back intected. Thailand, with an estimated 15 million fighting cocks, was eventually forced to pass a nationwide interim ban on cockfighting. The director of Animal Movement Control and Quarantine within the Thai Department of Livestock Development explained what led to the ban: "When one province that banned cockfights didn't have a second wave outbreak of bird flu and an adjacent province did, it reinforced the belief that the cocks spread disease."

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

I wouldn’t leave my little wooden hut for you
(a music hall song written and composed by Tom Mellor and Chas Collins in 1905)

In between the time that this program is recorded and it is broadcast, my wife and I will celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Our Silver wedding.

Now I don't say that in order for you to send me things. If we get hundred of thousands of silver objects it means cleaning them and things. So please don't bother. Just forget the whole thing.

Gold, of course, doesn't tarnish. Just a thought. Just a thought.

The point is that the twenty-fifth wedding is relevant. Because last night I spent an hour and fifty minutes up in our loft. Most of it was spent was spent wallowing in nostalgia. There was a bust of Lord Robert's with an ear missing, up there. And there was moth-eaten dress-maker's dummy. And suddenly I saw in a corner, wrapped up in faded tatty almost rotted rope, what seemed to be one of those removable bits of a table, a mahogany bit about three foot by eighteen inches with two pegs down one side. A leaf, a removable leaf thing. And that was bound round with a hand-knitted cap thing with a pom-pom on the top. A sort of wooly cap.

And suddenly all came back to me. They were my title possessions when I was married. And I remember the ceremony terribly well. Church of the Holy Redeemer, Chelsea. Standing there and Father Duzumeter who married us at one point in the service, "With all my worldly goods I do thee endow."

And I had to repeat it. And I paused a fraction and thought I haven't GOT any worldly goods to ENDOW this good lady. It is absolutely true. It was just after the war.

I had no clothes of my own. I had my de-mob clothes. I had an open car. A clapped-out open car at the time. You know when you think you drive an sports car that your hair blows back. Marvelous. A terrible thing that you don't realize is that in an open car your hair blows forward and it sort of lashes your eyeballs as you're trying to drive

So I bought this wooly hat and my fiance saw it for the first time and said, "You're never to wear that again. You look like a fur-bearing toffee apple."

And I put it aside.

And the only other thing I possessed was this leaf out of our dining room table at home. My mother had sold the table and forgotten about the leaf. And I thought this was a MARVELOUS thing to have.

So the only two things I took to my wedding were this lump of mahogany and this wooly hat with a pom-pom on it.

And do you know I never did give them to my wife. Somehow they got stuck up in the loft when we moved home.

And my wife said, "What are you doing up there all this time? You're on it like an elderly wallet."

I said, "I have got something to give to you. I've brought them down. They've been twenty-five years coming. But I was supposed to endow you with them twenty-five years ago. but now, here they are. A wooden leaf, my little woolen hat, for you."

Frank Muir
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While I was waiting for Shirley, who was delayed for a few days, I hung out in the gorgeous airy lobby spotting stars and, to my great pleasure, being spotted right back. Jane Russell, one of Hollywood's biggest and sexiest stars of the 1940S and 1950s, invited me to lunch at the Beverly Wilshire. John "call me Duke" Wayne landed his helicopter in the hotel's gardens before striding into the lobby in full cowboy get-up, telling me I was going to be a star and giving me the advice I opened this book with. "And never wear suede shoes," he added.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because," he said, low and slow, "I was taking a piss the other day and the guy in the next stall recognized me and turned towards me. He said, 'John Wayne - you're my favorite actor,' and pissed all over my suede shoes."

As if that wasn't enough, when Shirley arrived back in Hollywood, this powerful and beloved Hollywood figure pulled out all the stops and threw me the most dazzling and glamorous welcome-to-LA party. There I met icons like Gloria Swanson, Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli, and soon-to-be best friends, like Sidney Poitier - with whom I went on to make two movies - and the Hollywood super-agent and super-host Irving "Swifty" Lazar, so-named because he once put together three movie deals for Humphrey Bogart in a single day. The following night Shirley took me to dinner in Danny Kaye's kitchen, where the other guests were the Duke of Edinburgh and Cary Grant, and the night after that it was just a quiet family dinner - except that her quiet family dinners consisted of her mum, her dad and her brother, Warren Beatty.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

A Christmas tree at the Tennessee Aquarium is plugged into one of the fish - sort of. The tree is situated near the tank of an electric eel named Miguel Wattson. The aquarium says sensors detect Miguel's little jolts of electricity, which then get transferred to the lights on the tree. But this is 2019, so the eel's shock waves also trigger its Twitter account. Recent posts include booyah and zippity-zappity-zoop. He's great at Christmas lights - still working on his Twitter game.

America's poverty "tax"

By Gary Rivlin

(Charging high fees has become a big business in America, with Wall Street financing the firms that make short-term, very high interest loans.)

It's expensive being poor, the writer James Baldwin famously said. Baldwin uttered those words fifty years ago, long before the working poor became a big business - long before the invention of the payday loan, rent-to-own, and a long list of diabolically clever ideas that entrepreneurs have devised to get hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars rich off those with thin wallets.

Call it a poverty tax. It's the hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, in extra fees people making $20,000 or $25,000 or $30,000 a year pay because they have lousy credit or because they have no savings.

Add up all the profits pocketed by all those payday lenders, check cashers, subprime auto lenders, and other Poverty, Inc. enterprises and divide it by the forty million households the Federal Reserve says survive on $30,000 a year or less. That works out to around $2,500 per household, or a poverty tax of around 10 percent.

The corner check casher takes the biggest bite, at least from those fifteen million or so Americans who have no bank account - the so-called unbanked. In the main, these are people who've bounced too many checks or otherwise messed up their relationship with a bank.

How much does the average check-cashing customer fork over?

According to Matt Fellowes, who investigated the high price of being poor as a researcher with the Brookings Institution, the typical unbanked worker bringing home $22,000 a year spends roughly $800 to $900 a year in check-cashing fees. That figure tops $1,000 annually when you include the fees the unbanked pay for money orders and the additional fees check cashers charge (around $2 a check) when you need to pay your bills.

The payday lender - those in the business of making horrifically expensive loans against a person's next paycheck, her social security check, or, increasingly, an unemployment check - takes another big cut of the meager earnings of the working poor. The single mom struggling to get by on $20,000 a year is forever falling a few bucks short before payday, but that's the brilliance of the payday industry, which dates back to the early 1990s. In less than ten minutes, she'll have a few hundred dollars cash in her hands, no questions asked - and then be charged a fee that works out to an annual interest rate of 400 percent.

The average payday customer pays between $600 and $700 a year in fees. More than ten million people avail themselves of a payday lender each year.

The rent-to-own industry draws less than half that many customers but generates around the same revenues as the payday business. The genius of rent-to-own is that its proprietors have figured out how to collect $1,400 in weekly installments on the same child's bedroom set you could pick up for $600 with a credit card. Can't afford a computer for the kids? No problem. The corner rent-to-own store also carries laptops and PCs, along with flat screens, washers and dryers, and living room sets.

The rent-to-own customer, of course, could choose to set aside some money each week until she has saved enough to buy the item in a retail store. She could frequent a secondhand shop. But for essentials there's the risk of being dubbed a negligent parent by the authorities or family, and can you blame the security guard making $25,000 a year or home health aide bringing in $15,000 annually for wanting to come home to a comfortable easy chair and a large flat-screen TV? The point is that the rent-to-own customer is typically paying two and a half times as much as those who have the means to buy retail.

The average rent-to-own customer spends around $1,200 a year.

That means the typical rent-to-own customer pays an extra $700 annually because he or she doesn't have the cash or credit to buy it at a store.

Those living on the bottom of the economic pyramid pay more in a wide array of other ways. The subprime insurance market is its own racket, and even mainstream insurers charge more for auto insurance if you live in an unsafe neighborhood where robberies are more common. Select credit-card companies still cater to those with a subprime credit score of less than 620 - but you'll pay dearly for the privilege of carrying that plastic in your pocket. For instance, there's First Premier, which charges a $95 application fee and both a $45 annual fee and a $6.25 "monthly servicing fee" for a card carrying an APR of 36 percent, which at least is better than the 49.9 percent card it was peddling last year.

And then there's the steep cost of financing your car if you're one of the fifty million or so Americans suffering from a subprime credit score. Rather than a car loan carrying an annual interest rate of around 5 percent, the subprime customer pays interest rates of 18 or 20 or 25 percent a year, if not more.

The person paying 20 percent interest on a $10,000 car loan will pay $900 more each year on a five-year loan compared to the person paying an interest rate of 5 percent on that same loan amount.

Thankfully, a good portion of the working poor never resort to a payday loan. They avoid paying the steep rates charged by the local Rent-A-Center. Plenty of people earning less than $30,000 a year have a checking account and good credit. There's also help on the horizon as the new Consumer Financial Protection Board has singled out payday loans and subprime auto finance as two of its top priorities.

Yet don't underestimate the ingenuity or hunger for profits driving those who the author Mike Hudson dubbed "merchants of misery." A few years back, I attended the annual Check Cashers Convention, where I sat in on a ninety-minute presentation dubbed, "Effective Marketing Strategies to Dominate Your Market." Speaking to a standing-room-only crowd, a consultant named Jim Higgins shared his tips for turning the $l,000-a-year check cashing or payday customer into one worth "$2,000 to $4,000 a year." Pens scribbled furiously as he tossed out ideas: raffle off an iPod. Consider scratch 'n win contests. Institute the kind of customer reward programs that has worked so well for the airlines. And for those who are only semi-regulars, offer a "cash 3, get 1 free" deal. After all, Higgins told the crowd, "These are people not used to getting anything free. These are people not used to getting anything, really."

Adapted from Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.- How the Working Poor Became Big Business.


David Cay Johnston "Divided" (2014)

Reagan was shunning personnel issues, rarely engaging in discussions about congressional strategy, and routinely following his subordinates' advice on media plans. Instead, he mastered the ceremonial and symbolic functions of the office so that he could act presidential even when he wasn't, in the traditional sense, functioning like one.

Reagan's day generally began between 7:00 and 8:00 A. M., when the White House operator would put through a wake-up call. By nine o'clock, after a light breakfast and a glimpse at the morning papers and television news shows, Reagan would ride the elevator downstairs from the second floor of the 132-room residence to the State Floor. There, a cadre of Secret Service agents would escort him out across the flagstone colonnade bordering the Rose Garden, past a well-disguised emergency box containing an extra pistol, and on through the armored door of the Oval Office. His chief of staff would greet him, and they would sit down for his first meeting of the day. If it was cold, the stewards would have a fire blazing; in the summertime, they would have already plumped the pillows on the wrought-iron chaises that graced the patio outside.

By the time he arrived in the Oval Office, Reagan had usually memorized most of the lines he would deliver in his public appearances that day. His nearly photographic recall - sharpened by his training as an actor - was an enormous asset. The night before, at seven, the staff would have sent an usher to the residence with a packet of the next day's instructions - whom he'd be meeting, for how long, and what he was expected to say. On carefully typed index cards, the staff composed most of his remarks, down to the greetings and banter. They wrote out stage directions as well - where to turn and when. (One such cue card was accidentally released publicly, directing Reagan to greet a member of his own cabinet and identifying him as the gentleman sitting under Coolidge's portrait.)

Reagan carried the cards with him when he came into the office in the morning, informing the staff of any changes he thought should be made. The cards were coded by size and filed by color: green for unclassified action, yellow for unclassified information, red for classified information, white for his statements. He had one size for his breast pocket, another, always folded in two, for his outside pocket. Longer remarks were typed in large print on what he called "half sheets." The president used these cards, not only for large meetings, but also for small gatherings of regulars, such as the congressional leaders, whom he usually saw weekly. Frequently he used cards to introduce members of his own cabinet, and, in one instance, he relied on them during a ceremony honoring James Brady, the press secretary wounded beside him in the 1981 assassination attempt. He also had "phone memos," which spelled out what his end of telephone conversations should be and left space for him to jot down what the interlocutor said, so that the staff could keep track. As he moved from one event to another, his staff first gave him a briefing on every move he would make. Over the years, many advisers tried to convince Reagan to dispense with his cue cards, but, conceded Regan, for the president "they were sort of like Linus's blue blanket."

By the standards of most other presidents, Reagan's office hours weren't long. After a 9:00 A.M. meeting with his chief of staff, Reagan attended a nine-thirty national security briefing with his national security adviser, the chief of staff, and frequently the vice president. After that the schedule varied, though usually the staff tried to give the president some private time late in the morning for reading; after lunch, some aides like David Stockman learned to avoid scheduling important business because the president was prone to nodding. off He was often finished for the day by four o'clock, and he usually took both Wednesday and Friday afternoons off. But he was organized and orderly in his habits. He spent about an hour almost every day lifting weights in the private gym - a habit developed under doctor's orders after the 1981 assassination attempt. Where other presidents grew gray in office, Reagan managed to put an inch and a half of muscle on his chest, and he loved to have visitors feel the tone of his biceps. Inside the Oval Office, though, Reagan was formal. He felt awed enough to say "I couldn't take my jacket off in this office," and aides said he never did. They also said he never left at the end of the day without first straightening his desk - a great slab of dark wood as imposing as its donor, Queen Victoria, who had it made for Rutherford B. Hayes from the timbers of the H.M.S. Resolute.

At the end of the day, Reagan usually returned upstairs with paperwork and spent the evening with his wife - both in their pajamas, eating supper from trays in his study, reading, studying the next day's lines, and watching television. Nancy Reagan said her husband generally fell asleep within minutes of going to bed, usually around 11:00 P. M. Just before he did, he would alert the thirty-six-person domestic staff, one of whom would then quietly tum off any remaining lights in the family quarters.

But Reagan was more complicated than liberal caricatures would suggest. He liked to joke about his image, using such lines as: "I hear hard work's never killed anyone, but I figure, why take a chance?" Yet those around him found to their surprise that he could be diligent - even compulsive - in performing the tasks they gave him. He was always immaculately dressed, and he was so punctual that he could time a statement or an appearance down to the second. His delivery and stage presence were honed by years of training. He would follow his daily schedule meticulously, drawing a line through each completed event with an arrow pointing to the next, exactly the way screen actors mark off completed tasks.

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

The rain forest bordering the Kasai River was rich in rubber, and William Sheppard and the other American Presbyterians there found themselves in the midst of a cataclysm. The Kasai was also the scene of some of the strongest resistance to Leopold's rule. Armed men of a chief allied with the regime rampaged through the region where Sheppard worked, plundering and burning more than a dozen villages. Floods of desperate refugees sought help at Sheppard's mission station.

In 1899 the reluctant Sheppard was ordered by his superiors to travel into the bush, at some risk to himself, to investigate the source of the fighting. There he found bloodstained ground, destroyed villages, and many bodies; the air was thick with the stench of rotting flesh. On the day he reached the marauders' camp, his eye was caught by a large number of objects being smoked. The chief "conducted us to a framework of sticks, under which was burning a slow fire, and there they were, the right hands, I counted them, 81 in all," The chief told Sheppard, "See! Here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the State how many we have killed." He proudly showed Sheppard some of the bodies the hands had come from. The smoking preserved the hands in the hot, moist climate, for it might be days or weeks before the chief could display them to the proper official and receive credit for his kills.

Sheppard had stumbled on one of the most grisly aspects of Leopold's rubber system. Like the hostage-taking, the severing of hands was deliberate policy, as even high officials would later admit. "During my time in the Congo I was the first commissioner of the Equator district," recalled Charles Lemaire after his retirement. "As soon as it was a question of rubber, I wrote to the government, 'To gather rubber in the district one must cut off hands, noses and ears.' "

If a village refused to submit to the rubber regime, state or company troops or their allies sometimes shot everyone in sight, so that nearby villages would get the message. But on such occasions some European officers were mistrustful. For each cartridge issued to their soldiers they demanded proof that the bullet had been used to kill someone, not "wasted" in hunting or, worse yet, saved for possible use in a mutiny. The standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse. "Sometimes," said one officer to a missionary, soldiers "shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man." In some military units there was even a "keeper of the hands"; his job was the smoking.

Sheppard was not the first foreign witness to see severed hands in the Congo, nor would he be the last. But the articles he wrote for missionary magazines about his grisly find were reprinted and quoted widely, both in Europe and the United States, and it is partly due to him that people overseas began to associate the Congo with severed hands. A half-dozen years after Sheppard's stark discovery, while attacking the expensive public works Leopold was building with his Congo profits, the socialist leader Emile Vandervelde would speak in the Belgian Parliament of "monumental arches which one will someday call the Arches of the Severed Hands." William Sheppard's outspokenness would eventually bring down the wrath of the authorities and one day Vandervelde, an attorney, would find himself defending Sheppard in a Congo courtroom. But that is getting ahead of our story.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

Miami, Fla., is not known for its winter season, but there can be some chilly days. Last night, the National Weather Service called for lows in the 30s and 40s with a chance of falling iguanas. Apparently, the lizards can fall into a deeper slumber in the cold, and it is not uncommon for them to tumble from trees. The advice for you is watch your heads, and don't bug the iguanas after they land. I mean, do you like being bothered when you're just getting up?