Correspondence
Correspondence Hard Times For Trial Lawyers Carolyn Lochhead’s article on trial lawyers was right on target (“The Growing Power of Trial Lawyers,” Sept. 23). Lochhead mentioned briefly the...
...but it’s a thread of evil that runs prominently through our history, and one about which we should indeed be remorseful...
...Mark R. Voss Cottage Grove, MN Looking Forward to 2000 As a consultant who will soon earn his living by making software systems Year 2000-compliant, I was an interested reader of Lawrence J. Siskind’s “The Year 2000 Crisis” (Sept...
...According to law, the only difference between murder and legal abortion is the position of the victim...
...First, in the early days of mainframe computers, long before the advent of memory chips, computer memory was constructed of wires strung through tiny iron “cores,” called bits...
...A good deal of what Hanson says makes sense, but at least two of his points should not pass without response...
...Our joy in beauty, then, should lead us to thank the Creator...
...The decorative arts are useful, St...
...As long as the blue suits at campaign headquarters continue to equate “black” with the inner city, welfare, and poverty, the goal of increasing support among black voters will prove elusive...
...Norman Brust New York, NY The Truth about the West I read with great interest Victor Davis Hanson’s piece “Ken Burns’s West” (Sept...
...Art can also be used to express the beauty of abstract ideals and to lead us to love virtue...
...The defendant has no such option...
...S.W...
...Depending on the computer, a number of these constructs (usually eight or nine) would be assembled into a matrix such that there were enough bits to make a byte...
...That is reason number two...
...One byte equals one character of data...
...Poll after poll shows that these voters share Republican values and ideas...
...The answer is simple: If it’s really art, it’ll be attacked as being too conservative...
...Makes you wonder about Perot’s aesthetics...
...Siskind was right on the mark when he wrote that nobody dreamed that these systems would still be around and functioning at the turn of the century...
...For the most part, the systems that have survived do not exist as they were originally designed...
...16...
...The permanentstorage media of the day (cards, tapes, disks, and drums) were bulky if not expensive and did not lend themselves to storing unnecessary data...
...And our joy in Creation should move us to want to form a closer union, through prayer, with the Creator...
...This is what “art” meant from the 13th century to the 18th century...
...Sheridan and Sherman, Custer too, exterminated far more whites in their bloody careers than they did Indians...
...They were willing to shoot “Virginians, Georgians, and Texans as well as Lakotas and Cherokees” when ordered to do so...
...If, however, the baby’s head is far enough up the birth canal and out of sight, it is a legal abortion...
...Don Schenk Allentown, PA Fit as a Fiddle, Indeed Joseph Epstein is unfair to violinists when he accuses them of preferring indiscriminate eating to fitness (“The Romanian Air-Force Diet,” Sept...
...Pinchas Zukerman is not chubby...
...And if we claim to believe that art ennobles without also believing that that which does not ennoble is not art, then we’re sniffing what Ernest Renan called “the perfume of an empty vase...
...But most of the California Indians were not exceptionally warlike, and they were slaughtered too...
...The plaintiff can control his costs and has the option of dropping out if he feels that the costs will exceed the possible rewards...
...And he did: He put the blasphemers, the Sodomites, and the usurers in the same circle as the despisers of God, nature, and art...
...This does not make American society uniquely or exceptionally evil...
...While the article correctly spelled out the possible apocalypse, Siskind only partially addressed why we find ourselves in this predicament...
...Lochhead mentioned briefly the one reform that stands a chance of putting some responsibility back into the civil-justice system: a loser-pays law...
...This myopic, stereotypical view of African Americans completely ignores the social and economic mobility of the suburban black middle class, whose values, aspirations, and entrepreneurial dreams are in sync with the GOP’s message of equal opportunity, economic growth, lower taxes, quality education, personal responsibility, safe neighborhoods and drug-free schools...
...But as in the April 29 editorial, you failed to explain the legal reasoning behind the baby’s removal from the womb “feet first...
...Itzhak Perlman’s legs were crippled by polio when he was young...
...And love in your heart isn’t put there to stay—love isn’t love till you give it away...
...But I have never heard the term “technotwit...
...In fact, I have always been struck by how little of that sort of thing there was in the Civil War, comparatively speaking...
...This hard-wired memory was very expensive, and as a rule we had little available with which to run programs and process data...
...Also, it is true that a key dimension of the tragedy of, say, the Plains Indians “was that they occupied a vast expanse and were often a warlike people...
...A due appreciation for the remarkable achievements of the American experience— including its elements of genuinely democratic grandeur—has to be combined with a willingness to face the appalling legacy of (what else can we call it...
...But this passes over the difference between killing soldiers and murdering civilians...
...As these systems grew larger and more complex, the idea of undertaking a major project to correct the Year 2000 shortcoming was a tough sell to management, because management correctly believes that the old legacy systems should be replaced...
...On a lighter note, I have been in the computer-software business for 29 years, and I am all too familiar with terms like “techie,” “bit-chaser,” “coremonger,” and, of course, “geek...
...he cannot work out on Epstein’s Nordic Walk-Fit...
...If the defendant wins, the plaintiff has no responsibility for the defendant’s costs or the “pain and suffering” the defendant experienced...
...The art establishment likes to remind you that Dante put “the despisers of art” in hell...
...Jim Killoran Shelton, WA A Conservative Art Lesson David Gelernter asks, “What is Conservative Art...
...Trial lawyers believe all innocent victims deserve compensation, unless those victims are their own...
...Isaac Stern has a much better chance of making age 75 than Epstein does...
...Unnecessary data were not stored, and the century portion of the year (the 19) was considered unnecessary...
...Faye M. Anderson Washington, DC Perot’s Aesthetics I was more amused by the quotation Ross Perot got right than by the one he got wrong (“Perot’s Familiar Misquotations,” Sept...
...Judith Green San Jose, CA...
...The mind can perceive and rejoice in these qualities...
...Bondurant Grenada, MS Abortion’s Legal Side Thank you for another excellent editorial regarding partial-birth abortions (“Abortion and the President,” Sept...
...just look at him...
...I raise these matters to underscore Davis’s point that the moral complexity of history shouldn’t be smoothed over for the sake of easy lessons...
...The loser-pays law will be effective only if the plaintiff attorney is also a responsible party, perhaps up to the percentage he would have received under a contingency-fee arrangement...
...If the baby proceeds head first and the physician terminates the baby’s life with the head exposed, that is clearly murder in every jurisdiction of the United States...
...Clearly, black middle-class voters should be added to the coveted mix of suburban voters and “soccer moms...
...They are sick and tired of being taken for granted by the Democrats while being invisible to Republicans...
...He overlooked two very important reasons...
...The soul that has learned through art to love Creation should therefore have a wholesomeness, proper proportion, and clarity of its own...
...Thomas taught, because “beauty” is the mind’s perception of the goodness of Creation: Something that exists as God intended it to has a wholeness (as opposed to being damaged or incomplete), proper proportion, and clarity (“Bright colors are more beautiful,” he wrote...
...Thomas Aquinas, who taught that “art” or artifice is the creation of useful objects, and usurers got rich without making anything...
...Under the current system, if a plaintiff wins in court, the defendant is responsible for his own costs, the plaintiff ’s costs, and the damages...
...Only in America can someone say anything he wants about you in a legal document, force you to hire a lawyer to defend yourself, make you suffer anxiety about financial ruin, and then walk away from it all with no obligation to you for your costs and your pain and suffering...
...Instead, they have evolved to keep pace with changing business needs and, in the process, have become more functional...
...He ended his acceptance speech with a ringing poetic quatrain: “A bell is no bell till you ring it...
...white racism...
...Black voters’ disaffection with failed Democratic policies of government dependency, coupled with the growing acceptance that a sustainable Republican majority cannot be achieved without increased support from black voters, provides a wonderful synergy and opportunity...
...Even in the most brutal final stages of the Civil War, the strategies of Sheridan, Sherman, and Custer did not emphasize the systematic extermination of enemy civilians...
...Dante was a student of St...
...but it is hard to believe that it is not a part of the explanation...
...The thought of a loser-pays law strikes fear into the trial lawyer’s heart since it makes him responsible for the damage he inflicts on his innocent victims...
...The point is that, by design, we used memory sparingly...
...Jeff Weintraub Williamstown, MA Not Just Urban Tucker Carlson is right on target about the futility of Jack Kemp’s strategy to increase support among African-American voters (“Jack Kemp, Apostle to the Unconvertible,” Sept...
...I agree with him that the word “racism” is too simple by itself to account for this difference...
...A song is no song till you sing it...
...Under a loser-pays law, the plaintiff would have to take into account a less predictable cost of the defendant’s expenses and would have to think twice about naming someone as a defendant...
...I’m sure Hanson appreciates the difference...
...So what happened...
...This in turn begs the question: Why is the DoleKemp campaign not exploiting this opportunity...
...In order to protect himself legally, the obstetrician deliberately and inconveniently turns the baby around...
...In case you don’t recognize this, it is the introduction to the reprise of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” from The Sound of Music...
Vol. 2 • October 1996 • No. 4
