Reading old letters

The New Neo Posted on by

My ex-husband saves things. A lot of things. But mostly paper.

Old magazines, old newspapers, old medical records, every piece of artwork our son ever created, and old letters.

Recently he’s been going through the stacks and trying to weed a lot of it out. Good luck. But one of the results of that activity is that he periodically shows me some old letters he thinks might interest me. Some of these are around fifty years old, and none of them were written later than thirty years ago.

It turns out I remember none of them – nor does he, by the way. Some of them I may not even have ever seen in the first place, since many were written to him by members of his family, my in-laws. I’ve found reading them to be an emotional and sometimes revelatory experience.

There’s the humor, wit, and warmth of some people who’ve died, and the act of missing them anew. That’s bittersweet.

Some of the letters to my ex from one particular sibling of his, and his mother, somewhat stunned me. I saw two things in those letters that I would have liked to have known at the time. The first is that one relative, who hasn’t always been the friendliest in real life, always closed his notes by saying to say hi to me. So much friendlier and more thoughtful towards me than I ever knew! The same for my mother-in-law, who mentioned me in every letter with great warmth and praise although in person we had our differences and problems. The whole thing just about brought me to tears, not tears of upset but of a complex of feelings that came down to: if only I’d known. She’s been gone almost twenty years.

A few from my mother, who was a good writer. And although I don’t remember these particular ones I certainly remember her letters, a few of which I’ve saved in my own archives over the years.

And one from a friend I thought had never written me a single thing. Perhaps that’s all she ever did write me – just the one – but it shocked and pleased me nevertheless to see it.

I often tease my ex about his propensity for saving so much. At least now that we don’t live together, I don’t have to open closets and see the stacks, or encounter them in random places out in the open (I have my own stacks, of course, but most are in a file cabinet and the rest are relatively small). But I can hardly criticize him at this point for saving these letters. They seem very precious all these years later.

Garland’s DOJ: We had to hold back on the Biden investigation in order to save the Biden investigation

The New Neo Posted on by

Something like that. Something absolutely, obviously absurd like that.

Here’s the supposed explanation for the kid-glove treatment of Biden:

President Biden’s legal team has cooperated with Justice Department investigators, helping it avoid more aggressive actions by law enforcement thus far….

One reason not to involve the FBI at an early stage: That way the Justice Department would preserve the ability to take a tougher line, including executing a future search warrant, if negotiations ever turned hostile, current and former law-enforcement officials said.

I was unaware that the DOJ and FBI only got one bite at the apple. But no, they don’t just get one bite at the apple, so this excuse seems nonsensical.

From Jonathan Turley:

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Justice Department was given the opportunity to conduct the search for classified material in the Biden office and residences, but declined to do so. Instead, it allow uncleared and unnamed private counsel to search for classified material after the discovery of the highly classified documents in the Penn Biden Center office. It was a decision that could benefit Biden greatly, but at a considerable cost to the department itself.

If true, the decision raises additional questions over the independence of top law enforcement personnel.

Ya think?

Bias is so difficult to deny here that I wonder whether they possibly want the bias to be obvious, to demoralize and frustrate the right still further – because, after all, what can the right do about it at the moment? Vote to impeach Garland in the House? So what?

Turley goes on:

This follows a litany of controversies involving both Donald Trump and Biden where the FBI and DOJ have been accused of political bias and unequal treatment. While the FBI recently denounced critics as “conspiracy theorists,” the record of inexplicable decisions continues to grow by the day.

I think Turley means “the record of otherwise inexplicable decisions continues to grow by the day.”

More:

There is no plausible reason why, given the chance, the Justice Department would not want to conduct a national security search itself. After Nov. 2, the Justice Department was aware that material at the top secret or higher levels was discovered in a closet in the Penn Biden Center. It was also aware that the material may have been moved over the course of six years and that other material could be in other unsecured locations. Nevertheless, it reportedly opted to allow uncleared attorneys to search for additional classified material under a type of “look but please don’t read” edict.

As someone who has worked with classified evidence at the TS/SCI level since the Reagan administration, the decision is breathtaking. It effectively replaced well-established national security protocols with an honor system to be followed by persons unknown…

The decision undermines the credibility of the Justice Department in both the Biden and Trump investigations.

Did they have any credibility left, even before this? But he’s correct that this undermines what was left, if anything.

However, the Justice Department continued to defer to Biden’s counsel like a mere pedestrian at a potential crime scene.

I think that’s too kind. Even a rubbernecking pedestrian takes cellphone photos and videos these days, but the FBI did not. In shades of the Hillary Clinton email “investigation,” the whole thing was done on trust.

Oh, and about “preserving the ability to take a tougher line”? Here’s what Turley writes about what he calls that “baffling” statement:

It is akin to saying that I could have used my keys to enter the home but that would have meant that I could not later force the residents to open the door. If it conducted the search, it could record the search, seize the documents, and take any position it wanted after the fact.

Whatever the endgame here, it certainly was never to treat VP Biden (who had no ability to declassify documents taken at the time) as they had treated former president Trump (who did have the right but whom they treated as a criminal instead). Whatever they’re trying to say to the American public, they’re not trying to make sense to any thinking person – they’re just giving the left some (admittedly weak) talking points, and then they’re doing exactly what they want to do.

What is their goal? Perhaps it’s to keep their options open. If at some future point they want to get rid of Biden, they have this weapon. I don’t think they’re planning that now, though. Meanwhile, they can cite “don’t taint our investigation!” if the House wants any cooperation from them in the House’s investigation of the same set of circumstances.

Dueling Odiles

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’ve been working on a big long post today but finally abandoned it for now because I just need to take my mind off ugly, depressing things. So I’ve pivoted to this one.]

“Swan Lake” is one of those ballets just about everyone knows something about. White swan queen, black swan pretender, evil magician’s spell, beautiful Tchaikovsky music.

But this post is about dancers, then and now, and the way they dance a single Odile (Black Swan) variation. First we have the mid-20th-century performance of Maya Plisetskaya. This was filmed in 1973 when Plisetskaya was either 47 or 48 years old, an age when most dancers have retired or are very much faded:

And this is another Russian dancer who is thought to be excellent in the role, Olga Smirnova. I don’t know the exact year in which this was filmed, but since she’s only 31 years old now, it’s fairly current.

These two videos demonstrate a paradox in ballet development. Smirnova has the more conventional ballet body – long and lithe and elegant. Her line is beautiful, her feet highly arched, her technique stellar all around, and her extensions high.

And yet what she’s doing here doesn’t interest me. In fact, it disturbs me somewhat and makes me feel uneasy. She looks uneasy, at least intermittently. Her dancing stops and starts, with flowing movements one moment and then a pose that interrupts the flow for just a split second but enough to notice.

If there’s one thing separating older dancers from more recent ones – in addition to their lower extensions – it’s their amazing speed. Plisetskaya’s turns just whip around, or appear to. It’s not even clear that she is faster but her emphasis makes her look faster to me. There are also fewer dynamics in Smirnova’s performance compared to the older dancer. That relative monotony is typical of more recent dancers, whose movements don’t tend to have as many accents and whose emphasis is more even.

I find it disconcerting, as though something is ever-so-slightly off but you don’t know what it is because everything is so elegant and lean and gorgeous. But to me, it’s not exactly dancing. I perceive their mental focus on technique, and they are relentlessly, enerringly centered and careful. But ballet should sometimes be more daring, and Plisetskaya is bold and unafraid – which suits the role of Odile in particular. She projects an unusual combination of power and femininity, as well as flirtatiousness when required. Her eyes never reveal uncertainty, unlike those of Smirnova who every now and then seems to have a brief moment of anxiety.

What do I see more recent dancers such as Smirnova conveying in this role? They know that the role of Odile requires that they pretend to be Swan Queen Odette. So they must flap their arms and look evil now and then to show they’re nasty Odile and not really sad Odette. But Plisetskaya embodies the character and never forgets it. She dances with abandon, a trait I’ve never seen in ballet dancers today. When seen in person (which I witnessed as a child) Plisetskaya’s effect onstage was explosive. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since, and I’ve seen a lot of dancers.

The imaginary Biden versus the real one: Mona Charen’s dilemma

The New Neo Posted on by

Erstwhile conservative columnist Mona Charen is struggling to retain the image of the Biden she wishes existed. Her piece in Time is called, “We Elected Biden to Be Better Than This,” and it begins this way:

In 2020, America elected Joe Biden to be not-Trump—a role for which he seemed well-suited.

And yet “not-Trump” is not a government position, as far as I know. “President” is, and little in Biden’s history (including his stint as Obama’s VP) indicated he was well-suited for that role. And I say that as a person who was a Democrat for much of Joe Biden’s political life, and yet there was no point even back then when I would have considered him a decent candidate for the presidency, much less a good one. He was always a mendacious mediocrity at best.

Charen continues:

In 2016, the country voted for burn-it-all-down upheaval.

No; in 2016 the country voted to make American great again. And Trump just might have done it, given half a chance. But “burn it all down upheaval” is what the left has given us, in a particularly graphic manner in the post-Floyd riots. And even before he was elected, Biden made it clear that he was now a man of the left or at least a servant of the left.

Back to Charen again:

Trump was the tribune of those who felt betrayed and misled and mistreated.

True of some, but not of all of those who voted for him.

…Four chaotic years later, alarmed voters fled into the arms of an aging former vice-president and senator—a man they had twice rejected as a presidential contender—who seemed the personification of the steady hand.

That may be the most interesting sentence of Charen’s essay. The chaos of those four years was hardly Trump’s fault, unless you call mean tweets “chaos.” The chaos was the result of the all-out war against him. But yes, many “alarmed voters” – whipped into a frenzy of anti-Trump mania by the press and the Democrats and the NeverTrumpers, among whom Charen, as policy editor of The Bulwark, must be counted – did indeed vote for Biden for president. But “the personification of the steady hand”? Tell me another one. That was always a fable, and an obvious one at that.

This next paragraph is a marvel of self-delusion, if in fact it is what Charen actually believes:

No one expected Biden to be transformational or extraordinary, but we did need him to be the anti-Trump in the most important ways. We needed him to be sober and responsible, to play by the rules, and to uphold the primacy of law and procedure. And he delivered. President Biden freed the country and the world from the tyranny of tweeted insults, conspiracies, threats, lies, fantasies, and reversals. And while naturally some will criticize his policies, Biden has conducted the presidency with dignity. He has gone some way toward restoring a sense that the system, whatever its flaws, is basically sound.

What strange fantasy world does Charen inhabit? Of course, it may be that she’s lying through her teeth and doesn’t believe a word of what she’s writing. But that’s not the impression I get. I think that this is the Biden she hoped existed, and she hoped it so strongly and detested Trump so profoundly that she saw Biden with proverbial rose-colored glasses. That she is a long-time supposedly conservative commentator may have made her need for self-delusion greater rather than less. If Trump was unacceptable to Charen’s sense of propriety, or to her snobbery, or to whatever it is that motivates the NeverTrumper, then Biden must be the un-Trump because he was the only alternative that ultimately presented itself.

But the revelations of classified documents stored in Biden’s garage along with his Corvette seem to Charen to be too too Trumpish to justify. Her dream-Biden has come tumbling down, confronted by a reality that for some reason Charen is finally unable to completely deny. So Charen admits, “Biden really did do something similar.”

But Charen can’t just rest there; she has to backtrack with this:

The TV analysts who are rushing to explain that what Trump did was orders of magnitude worse than what Biden did are correct, but it will not alter the political calculus.

I’ll just mention a few more highlights (lowlights?) of her essay [my emphasis]:

The great loss here is not that this makes it more challenging to bring criminal charges against Trump for his contempt of the law regarding classified materials, the tragedy is that this is a victory for the kind of cynicism that Trump has popularized. “Drain the swamp.” “Lock Her Up.” “Stop the Steal.” “Defund the FBI.” Trump’s message has been consistent. Everyone is corrupt. The system is rigged. No one is honest. No one really plays by the rules.

Until now, it seemed that President Biden was defying that theme. His administration has been staffed by grown ups. There have been no scandals. The Department of Justice has been methodical and fair in its prosecutions.

How could anyone have been following Biden for the last fifty years – or really, any fraction of that time – and write those words with a straight face? In particular, the “staffed by grown ups” part? And yet there it is – followed by an assertion about the fairness of the DOJ.

Why do I bother with Charen’s essay? I do it because I continue to be fascinated with how people perceive reality, and the process by which they either finally change their minds when faced with something that strongly challenges those perceptions, or they rationalize their reluctance to do so and retain their former beliefs. Charen seems poised on some sort of seesaw that remains weighted more heavily on the “Biden is a good guy” side but is starting to tip.

But Charen made her anti-Trump choice in 2016, and unlike many others she’s never wavered in that choice. By 2020, she had to make believe that Biden was a person he is not, never was, and never will be. So for now I guess she’s stuck with it.

And then there’s the new Martin Luther King statue in Boston

The New Neo Posted on by

The perfect statue for our times.

Is it “a big old dong“?

Is it a turd, or the portion of the anatomy from which a turd might emanate?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But it’s hard to understand how, even without those sordid connotations, a statue of arms with only torso remnants, minus heads or bodies, could be anything but grotesque.

The photo of MLK and his wife, Coretta, on which the sculpture was supposedly modeled, is actually quite nice and might have made a lovely sculpture (I can’t embed it for copyright reasons, but it’s at the link).

And here’s some modernesque (post-modernesque, that is) jargon from the sculptor himself:

When we recognize that all storytelling is an abstraction, all representation is an abstraction, hopefully it allows us to be open to more dynamic and complex forms of representation that don’t stick us to narrative that oversimplifies a person or their legacy, and I think this work really tries to get to the heart of that.

Well, most people aren’t sticking to the oversimplified narrative. The sculptor might end up wishing they had.

Sheila Jackson Lee wants to criminalize “white supremacy” writings that are felt to have inspired a crime

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the bill that Sheila Jackson Lee has introduced. Its title is “Leading Against White Supremacy Act of 2023” – and so I would guess it might be unconstitutional because of its race specificity:

(a) In General.—A person engages in a white supremacy inspired hate crime when white supremacy ideology has motivated the planning, development, preparation, or perpetration of actions that constituted a crime or were undertaken in furtherance of activity that, if effectuated, would have constituted a crime.

So it refers to any crime perpetrated by anyone who espouses and is considered to be motivated by white supremacy ideology – even if the crime is something fairly low level. And the conspiracy to commit that crime is defined as potentially involving those who have nothing to do with the actual commission of the actual crime:

(1) between two or more persons engaged in the planning, development, preparation, or perpetration of a white supremacy inspired hate crime; or

(2) between two or more persons—

(A) at least one of whom engaged in the planning, development, preparation, or perpetration of a white supremacy inspired hate crime; and

(B) at least one of whom published material advancing white supremacy, white supremacist ideology, antagonism based on “replacement theory”, or hate speech that vilifies or is otherwise directed against any non-White person or group, and such published material—

(i) was published on a social media platform or by other means of publication with the likelihood that it would be viewed by persons who are predisposed to engaging in any action in furtherance of a white supremacy inspired hate crime, or who are susceptible to being encouraged to engage in actions in furtherance of a white supremacy inspired hate crime…

I believe what this bill proposes is that, if someone publishes anything online that is read or viewed by someone who later commits any crime motivated by “white supremacy,” that first person can be convicted of conspiracy with that second one even if they have never met or communicated in any way, and even if that person writing the online material is not advocating crimes of any sort. If a judge or jury decides the publicized words fall under any broad and ill-defined heading of “white supremacy,” both people could be convicted.

I’ve mentioned several times before that, even back when I was in law school eons ago, I didn’t like conspiracy laws because they seemed dangerous to me and easy to misuse. Nothing since then has disabused me of that idea.

This bill won’t pass. But if the House was controlled by Democrats instead of Republicans, would it pass? How many would be voting for it, I wonder?

[NOTE: This is the federal hate crime law as it currently stands. I have long been against hate crime laws, too, because all these actions are already amply criminalized and whether they’re motivated by “hate” or not seems irrelevant to me. It merely affords a way to retry someone on federal charges who might be acquitted on state charges. At any rate, the law as stated does not punish the thought crime of publishing something online that someone else then reads and by which he or she is supposedly criminally inspired.]

This is the first explanation of why the Biden classified documents story came out that makes sense to me

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes indeed, I think the idea that the Democrats and the MSM were trying to get ahead of the story is the correct one. Note the timeline Levin presents:

Now we have the news that Hunter paid Joe close to $50K per month to rent the house in Delaware – you know, the one with the Corvette in the garage. I guess access to classified documents is expensive these days:

The file, labeled “background screening test,” shows Hunter Biden lived in the president’s Wilmington, Delaware, residence between March 2017 and February 2018. Hunter Biden also claimed to “own” the property, according to the document.

The document [see *UPDATE below] was originally discovered on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, according to the Washington Examiner, and was reshared on Twitter by the New York Post’s Miranda Devine.

The laptop – the gift that keeps on giving.

There’s also this from Jonathan Turley:

…[W]hy was a legal team sent in six years after Biden took the documents on leaving as vice president? Were the lawyers specifically selected because they had clearances, an acknowledgment there might be classified material unlawfully housed in the office?

After the fourth batch of documents was discovered this week (the third found in Delaware), Richard Sauber, referred to as the “special counsel to the president,” stressed that he has a clearance. Sauber admits the lawyers who found the first batch at the residence didn’t have clearances but says he found the later documents.

It remains unclear which lawyers were involved in which discoveries, whether they had clearances and (if so) at what level. In fact, it seems to suggest Biden continued to use uncleared lawyers after his team found highly classified documents Nov. 2 in the Penn Biden office closet in Washington.

That itself could be viewed as gross mishandling of classified information.

It’s strange Biden did not use security officers or the FBI to conduct further searches. The president has a host of people who regularly handle classified material. So why use the lawyers?

The answer appears the same as in the case of Hillary Clinton’s emails: control. Using private counsel allows Biden to raise attorney-client privilege. Trump also used counsel, but eventually the FBI raided his home to search and remove not just classified material but documents found in boxes with that material.

And now the Secret Service is saying there are no visitor logs for that Delaware house.

You can’t make this stuff up.

*UPDATE: See this for more about whether Hunter Biden actually claimed that amount as rent on Joe Biden’s home. It’s confusing, but it turns out he might have been claiming the rent for an office and also claiming he owned home although he didn’t:

Open thread 1/16/23

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d never heard of this sport before, and I don’t think I really like it. The movement is very restrictive and self-contained, something like school figures in ice skating. But wow, is this girl ever skillful!

If you’re unfamiliar with the ice skating reference, here’s what they used to have to do in addition to free skating:

The Kari Lake election fraud verdict: Part III

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This third part of the series has been sitting around in draft form too long. So even though the caravan has moved on, I’m posting it before it gets even more stale. Part I can be found here. Part II can be found here.]

How could the voting machine debacle in Maricopa County have been prevented? I really don’t see how it could have been predicted that so many machines in Maricopa would either go bonkers on Election Day or would be fiddled with to make them go bonkers on Election Day. But one of those two things happened and once it happened there was no redress because the courts wouldn’t order one, short of a smoking cannon or series of cannons that were never going to materialize.

More generally, however, let’s take a look at this article about Arizona voting security efforts from a while back. It was published the week before the 2022 election:

More than a million ballots for the Nov. 8 election already have been cast in Arizona, which was an early adopter of voting by mail. State lawmakers created the system in 1991 with bipartisan support. Three decades later, that’s how the vast majority of Arizonans cast ballots.

Note that the law establishing a vote-by-mail system was established in Arizona thirty years ago with bipartisan support. I doubt that the people voting for it back then foresaw the problems it would entail; those were very different days. Now the system is deeply entrenched there. But many of the problems alleged in 2022 in Maricopa County don’t seem to have involved that process.

On more recent voting system legal challenges in Arizona [emphasis mine]:

Fast-growing Arizona shifted from a reliably red state to choosing Democratic President Joe Biden by a narrow margin in 2020. That sparked months of lawsuits and a review of Phoenix area ballots by state Senate GOP leaders and allies of former President Donald Trump…

Arizona’s election system has survived multiple legal challenges, although some appeals continue. Lake and Finchem sued to end the use of ballot-counting machines, but a federal judge tossed the case. They appealed the ruling. And the Republican Party of Arizona lost its lawsuit claiming the long practice of early voting violated the state’s Constitution. That case now sits with the state Court of Appeals.

Remember, that was written the week before the election. Moreover:

Lawmakers have changed some of the state’s election laws in recent years, and voters on Nov. 8 will decide on a ballot measure that would tighten voter ID requirements. Here’s a look at those changes and how voting works in Arizona.

There’s much much more at the link and well worth reading. I also had described some of the Arizona efforts and what happened to them in this post and in this one as well. Suffice to say it often comes down to the courts, and they often thwart the efforts of the right to change things.

The bottom line is that voter fraud can only be prevented in a county or a state or a country in which the vast majority of people are committed to doing so, and that includes the courts. Otherwise, it will occur because the rewards are high and the chances of being meaningfully punished are exceedingly low. And it doesn’t even matter whether it does occur or whether it only strongly appears to occur; the damage to public trust is done either way.

There also was a referendum on the ballot in 2022 in Arizona that would have tightened up voter ID laws. It was rejected by a margin that is similar although not identical to the margin by which Kari Lake lost.

Also, there’s more about that ruling in October 2022, when Lake and Finchem sued to stop voting machine tabulation. Their suit was thrown out, with this statement from the judge:

In Friday’s order, Judge John J. Tuchi tossed the lawsuit in full, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the lawsuit and that their claims are “vague,” “speculative” and ultimately amount to “conjectural allegations.” Additionally, the judge declared that the dismissal of the plaintiffs’ suit is further warranted under the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which restricts individuals from bringing lawsuits against states in federal court. The judge stated that, in this case, the “plaintiffs do not plausibly allege a violation of federal law…[and their] complaint asks the federal court to oversee the administrative details of a local election. We find no constitutional basis for doing so.” Finally, the judge referenced the Purcell principle and explained that, even if the court had jurisdiction over the plaintiffs’ suit, given the imminence of the November midterm elections the plaintiffs’ “request [for] a complete overhaul of Arizona’s election procedures” is implausible. In his order, the judge wholly discredited the plaintiffs’ fallacious claims against electronic voting machines, citing numerous audits — which were undertaken following the 2020 election to assess Maricopa County’s tabulation equipment — that proved no evidence of fraud or compromised election security due to the use of the machines.

So they weren’t allowed to stop it ahead of time and they couldn’t do it afterwards. They couldn’t prove it to the court’s satisfaction back in 2020 and therefore they couldn’t allege it prior to the 2022 election. That’s lawfare for you, and one of many examples of the way in which it makes legal challenges to voting practices very difficult – unless, of course, the rule being challenged is considered by the court to have a negative effect on some minority racial group.

And here is a very important article, Rachel Alexander’s explanation of the war on attorneys who represent people on the right and who take these voting challenge cases. It takes a lot of courage to do so, and a group called “The 65 Project” is very upfront about it their program to intimidate these attorneys and prevent them from doing the job (the quote is from the Project’s website):

Following Biden’s victory, an army of Big Lie Lawyers filed 65 lawsuits based on bogus assertions to overturn the election and give Trump a second term. While the nation’s legal institutions stood up to this attempted “coup-via-courtroom,” Trump and his “Big Lie Lawyers” have “learned lessons” from 2020 and are already working to seize control of state and local election processes and to prepare for alicious election litigation efforts.

The 65 Project is a bipartisan effort to protect democracy from these once-and-future abuses by holding accountable Big Lie Lawyers who bring fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results, and by working with bar associations to deter future abuses by establishing clear standards for conduct that punish lies about the conduct or results of elections.

“Bipartisan” – perhaps because of allied NeverTrumpers? – gives them sanctimonious cover. What they are doing is completely against all principles of the legal profession, but they feel protected.

And speaking of protecting – fortifying – future elections, lower down on their page we have this:

Protecting future elections

As the January 6th Committee’s work has confirmed, lawyers played a central role in then-President Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. Many of these lawyers, and their conduct, are subject to ethics rules. But just as Trump and his allies sought to exploit vagueness in the Electoral Count Act, so too have some lawyers evaded accountability because of gaps in the legal profession’s ethical rules. And just as Congress is rushing to fill those statutory holes, state supreme courts also must address certain weaknesses in the rules of professional conduct.

We are working closely with law professors and professional responsibility practitioners to develop model rules, and we will push state bar associations to adopt them.

Who are the fascists here? Power is everything.