Chez Chesler

Here is the text of the proposed amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution, with regard to same-sex marriage and civil unions, from the Massachusetts Lesbian & Gay Bar Association site:

Amended Travaligni/Finneran/Lees "Compromise" Amendment Text:

"The unified purpose of this Article is both to define the institution of civil marriage and to establish civil unions to provide same-sex persons with entirely the same benefits, protections, rights, privileges and obligations as are afforded to married persons, while recognizing that under present federal law same-sex persons in civil unions will be denied federal benefits available to married persons. "It being the public policy of this commonwealth to protect the unique relationship of marriage, only the union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in the commonwealth. Two persons of the same sex shall have the right to form a civil union if they otherwise meet the requirements set forth by law for marriage. Civil unions for same sex persons are established by this Article and shall provide entirely the same benefits, protections, rights, privileges and obligations that are afforded to persons married under the law of the commonwealth. All laws applicable to marriage shall also apply to civil unions. "This Article is self-executing, but the general court may enact laws not inconsistent with anything herein contained to carry out the purpose of this Article."

Personally I'm in a different-sex one-wage-earner marriage, so it's to my advantage to be recognized as married by the IRS, but suppose there were a different-sex DINK couple in Massachusetts, who decided that the state benefits of marriage were a benefit to them (inheritance, hospital visits, whatever the list is) but that the federal benefits were a net loss to them. Would they be eligible for a civil union? Governor Romney wants the SJC to stay the implementation of their Goodridge ruling until the 2005 ConCon and statewide election. How come he didn't urge implementation of civil unions in the interim? Will a man be allowed to civil union his brother? Given the strict reading the SJC recently gave to the incest statue which references the statute prohibiting a man from marrying his sister, I'd suspect that he would be allowed to civil union his brother.

The newspaper reporting of Commonwealth vs. Rahim was particularly bad. The case is fairly straightforward. Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 207, section 1, lists the relatives that a man may not marry. Chapter 272, section 17, prohibits marriage and sexual intercourse (and as of the closing of a loophole a couple of years ago, all sorts of non-genital sexual acts) between "Persons within degrees of consanguinity within which marriages are prohibited". The majority opinion gave meaning to the word "consanguinity" in C. 272 § 17 as limiting the entire list from C. 207 § 1 referenced to only that subset which are consanguinity (blood) as distinguished from those which are affinity (by marriage.) The dissent didn't. In some states affinal incest is punished, in other states they are not. The Model Penal Code does not. Woody Allen engaged in it. The Model Penal Code supports the majority opinion, and the majority also used it to conclude that relationships by adoption are to be treated as relationships by blood, and the majority throws in adoption. The Massachusetts adoption statute, C. 210 § 6 has too many exceptions and exceptions to exceptions for me to follow. Here I disagree with the majority opinion: just as the legislature could have said "consanguinity or affinity" if they'd wanted to, or left off the modifier, they could have said "consanguinity, affinity, or adoption", as they've said elsewhere. Both sides reject eugenics. The dissent tries to find legislative intent. There was much hand-wringing about the exploitive nature of the particular relationship, but that's already covered by the other violations with which the defendant is charged. The Herald wouldn't name the defendant or the case, because that could lead to identifying the victim. But the Globe named names. The Herald story quoted out of context

``In such cases, there may develop a sexual relationship that is neither illicit or exploitive, as, for example, when a grown man marries his stepmother, who may be his own age, after his father's death.''

While that is true in the commentaries to the Model Penal Code, as quoted by the majority opinion, that particular marriage would be prohibited in Massachusetts. Chapter 207 § 3 provides that "The prohibition of the two preceding sections shall continue notwithstanding the dissolution, by death or divorce, of the marriage by which the affinity was created". And what happened to my posting to ne.politics yesterday in which I expressed these thoughts?

See http://www.thebostonchannel.com/education/2948308/detail.html?treets=bos&tid=2654276836813&tml=bos_9am&tmi=bos_9am_1_08000003252004&ts=H

Authorities in Plant City [Florida] said a high school science teacher killed a sickly pair of baby rabbits with a shovel in front of her stunned class. Teacher Jane Bender won't face criminal charges, but she is facing two civil counts of animal cruelty that carry fines of $620. One Animal Services investigator said Bender has to be held accountable, because her actions are "just not what we want to teach people to do with injured or sick animals."

So what do they do with sick animals in Florida? Send them to hospices? These are rabbits. By definition their eyes weren't even open otherwise they'd be hares.) It might have shocked the class, and depending on the grade level have been good or bad pedagogics, but it wasn't cruel to the fluffy bunnies. According to the Florida statutes "Cruelty" means any act of neglect, torture, or torment that causes unjustifiable pain or suffering of an animal. The fluffy bunnies didn't feel a thing, and the swift dispatch ended their suffering.

North Andover wants to change its name. http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=2851 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/03/22/name_change_sought_for_north_andover/ I suggest they rename themselves East Lawrence.

This was one of the days when I thought that if I didn't work here, I'd have to pay them to sit here and look out the window. These orioles are the first birds to return this spring. Today was a late-season storm (first significant snow since December.) Behind the trees in the background is the Bedford-Billerica Narrow Gauge rail-trail. (Behind that is Concord Road, and about half a mile further is the Concord River.) This photo doesn't do justice to the brilliant red color on the bird's breast. (Irfanview lacks a histogram tool.) Thes birds came to eat the dried fruit on the tree left over from last year. I like my Sony P30 camera too.

The Volokh Conspiracy discussed whether Bill Clinton is "Eligible" to be Vice President, within the meaning of the Twelfth Amendment, given that he can't be "Elected", also here, pointing to a NY Times op-ed by Prof. Gillers.

It's an interesting question.

On a related note, I've wondered how the two years in the 22nd Amendment is measured, for instance here in misc.legal.moderated when I asked, at the time in late 1998 that it was conceivable that Bill Clinton would leave office, what it means to be "elected".

When is the President elected for the purpose of this amendment? First Tuesday after a Monday in November? At the meeting of the Electoral College in early January?

(eg Jimmy Carter, eligible to be President, and therefore eligible to be VP, is VP, under Gore, and his Gore leaves office on January 1, 2003. May Carter run for President in November 2004? As of his Electoral College election on January 15, he's served more than two years, and has already been once elected President.

What if Gore leaves office on January 19, 2003? When the Electoral College meets on 1/15/2005 he has not served more than two years.

But there is no scenario, I think, where any date but January 20, 1999 matters for whether Gore is eligible for re-re-election in 2008, in the more likely scenario, where the two years of another's term come before the once-elected.)

I've been carrying a VCR around in my trunk for a few months. It's an RCA with Commercial Advance. It no longer rewinds to the very beginning -- which means it never gets to the next step of marking the commercials. I've had it about three years. I bought the 2-year service plan and got it serviced twice at Circuit City; when I brought it back late last year they said it wasn't worth the bench charge to diagnose it. I got a Go Video dual-deck VCR as a replacement -- many bells and whistles, but their claim that it's like 2 VCRs in 1 isn't true, since it can only record from one channel at a time, and only the first deck has Commerical Advance. So it's like 1 great VCR in 1, with an auxiliary VCR attached. And if I put a 19" TV on top of it the case flexes and the buttons and ejection don't work. Today (that's what one is supposed to do in a blog, talk about today, right?) I brought it to McAndrew's TV Repair here in Billerica. And the technician -- who in the past repaired a VCR that others could not -- told me the same thing, that it's not worth repairing. It seems a shame to throw out something that new, that's still 85% functional.

The recent Max Max movie has me thinking about Josephus, and scholarly debates about forgeries therein. In modern times, if it's published, there are thousands of copies of it. Even Shakespeare's works were published in his lifetime, or soon thereafter, in the Folios. But when we're readling with ancient manuscripts, those that pre-date movable type or the printing press at all, there are very limited numbers of copies. Roger Pearse is apparently a British software engineer who has studied the Classics and the early Christian church. In reading what he writes, it appears that in all of the Roman libraries there were very few copies of Josephus' works, and that hardly any of the originals survive, and even very few copies of copies of copies survived from then until past the Middle Ages. Is that the case? Pearse describes various manuscripts, and, similar to how DNA markers are traced, how various examples may be considered to be related, copies of one to the other. I understand that this is why a find like the Dead Sea Scrolls is so valuable. In absolute numbers, how many copies of a work like Josephus, or any of the other ancient texts which I would have studied if I'd had a classical Liberal Arts education, existing at any time? Pearse relates some of this in http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/manuscripts/index.htm (In particular, is what is the line coming from a contemporary Greek copy? And what's a good modern edition of any or all those translations? Whiston's English isn't so easy either.)

According to my Computational Geometry in C textbook (by Joseph O'Rourke) the Voronoi diagram is a geometric structure second in importance only to the convex hull. He continues with some applications:

Imagine a vast forest containing a number of fire observation towers. Each ranger is responsible for extinguishing any fire closer to her tower than to any other tower. The set of all trees for which a particular ranger is responsible constitutes the "Voronoi polygon" associated with her tower. The Vornoi diagram maps out the lines between these areas of responsibility: the spots in the forest that are equidistant from two or more towers.

Imagine now the perverse situation where all the rangers ignite their towers simultaneously, and the forest burns at a uniform rate. The fire will spread in circles centered on each tower. The points at which the fire quenches because it reaches previously consumed trees are those points equidistant from two or more towers, which are exactly the points on the Voronoi diagram.

My city is redistricting its 9 elementary schools. Voronoi diagrams come to mind, to suggest a districting such that each child attends the nearest school. And I'm trying to use one of the algorithms O'Rourke discusses to make the diagram for the city. But even if I do, there are at least five wrinkes:

• The schools have different capacities
• The population density, especially the population of school-age children, is not uniform
• Pythagorean distance is not as important as over-the-road distance. For instance, a cul-de-sac may empty onto a street in the opposite direction from the houses on that cul-de-sac than a school: the effective distance to that school is not the straight-line distance from the house to the school, but the distance from the house to the intersection of the cul-de-sac with the street, and from there, over roads, to the school.
• Some schools are more desirable than other schools. I suppose the diagram is to help form a fair and equitable districting, but a school which is more desirable will have a greater "yield" -- more eligible students will attend it -- than a less desirable school, so its district should be smaller.
• Some clusters of residences are so far from the nearest school that children who live there have to take a bus no matter what. In such a case, and especially if (for instance by virtue of being a new development) the residents have less claim on a particular near school, it may make sense to run a bus from that cluster to a further school. How do we account for this? The full bus going directly from a residence cluster to a school should have a cost function less than a bus making pickups along that route.

Any thoughts or solutions welcome.

I've been on the 'net, in its various forms, since around 1982. That was when I went up to the 12th floor of William James Hall and begged an account on wjh12, then Harvard's gateway machine, and with a voiceline telephone connection in parallel (no doubt using a Sprint account) send a message down and up the East Coast, through Brown, Yale, CUNY, and Columbia, to my brother, sitting at a similar machine in a Princeton Engineering lab. I had limited Usenet at Harvard by 1983, and I think I posted to outside Harvard to the rest of Usenet, back when the net was flat, by 1984. In 1987 I had a work account on tmc!mirror, then the domain for an R&D division of the Times Mirror Company, and in 1989 I had a contract with DEC's Ultrix Engineering Group, leaving me one node off netrix. My brother set up my daughter's web page when she was born in 1995, and soon after that I found that Co-op City, the 55,000-person apartment complex where I grew up had no presence on the web, and I resolved to fix it, with the site that became http://home.comcast.net/~coopcity. More than ten years ago Eugene Volokh published "Lawsuit, Shmawsuit," 103 Yale Law Journal 463 (1993) . Since then I've come across his name from time to time, usually associated with liberties (First or Second Amendment) or Judaica. So naturally when I wanted to see what were current legal theories about just how far a town can go in celebrating religious holidays (the creche on the common) I expected Professor Volokh to have something to say. I'm not sure if he did, but he and other like-minded people had a lot to say, almost all of with which I agreed, on The Volokh Conspiracy and that 'blog became one of my regular reads. And since the etiquette is apparently not to write back to the authors of the 'blog, but to publish one's own, here I am. People send in responses to the Co-op City page, but I have to format them by hand, and I'm usually way behind. This will be more immediate. In any case, I recommend The Volokh Conspiracy.

Here I am in the blogosphere. Or if one considers Usenet, as present on the web through http://groups.google.com to be the world's biggest blog, I was already here.