January 1, 2014
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News For The Day


US tries to block Afghanistan from releasing 'dangerous' prisoners --NBC
By Jessica Donati, Reuters


KABUL, Afghanistan -- The United States wants Afghanistan to halt the release of 88 prisoners from an Afghan jail because they pose a serious threat to security, U.S. officials said on Wednesday, adding to strains between the two sides.

The United States only recently transferred the prison at Bagram to Afghan control after it had become a serious source of tension with the government in Afghanistan which is fighting a Taliban-led insurgency.

Relations with Afghanistan have grown particularly strained over President Hamid Karzai's refusal to sign a bilateral security deal that would keep around 8,000 U.S. troops in the country after 2014, when most foreign forces are due to leave.

A U.S. army official said the release of the 88 contravened a presidential decree to complete investigations at the prison and prosecute individuals when required.
"The Afghan Review Board has exceeded its mandate and ordered the release of a number of dangerous individuals who are legitimate threats and for whom there is strong evidence supporting prosecution or further investigation," said Colonel Dave Lapan, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The United States long resisted handing over the facility - because it feared individuals it considered dangerous would be released - but ultimately reached a deal with the Afghan government in early 2013.

About 40 percent of the prisoners were directly responsible for wounding or killing 57 Afghan civilians and security forces, and 30 percent had participated in direct attacks that killed or wounded 60 U.S. and coalition troops, a U.S. official said.
The head of the Afghan commission charged with reviewing the cases denied that the 88 posed a threat.

"In many cases, detainees were wrongly linked to certain incidents they were not involved in," said Abdul Shakor Dadras.
The planned release will however alarm many senior Afghan security sources, who often see released prisoners return to the battlefield.
The bilateral security deal has to be signed for the United States and its allies to provide billions more dollars in aid.

Without a deal, the United States could pull all of its troops out, the so-called zero option, leaving Afghan forces to battle the Taliban on their own.
Karzai however has said the deal can wait until after presidential elections, scheduled for April, and that the "zero option" is an empty threat.



Is Karzai right in saying the US will not really pull out all our troops if the agreement is not signed? I suspect he is, since doing that wouldn't be easy to accomplish and we have, I think, a strong desire to maintain a military base in Afghanistan as we have in Saudi Arabia. It seems to me that we may have to give in on the release of prisoners who are considered to be innocent and incorrectly connected with crimes. From what I have been seeing over the last 10 or more years, our information is not always accurate about who is guilty and dangerous, although I do think that the investigations and trials should be completed before their release.

At some point soon I would like to see our troops pulled out. We fight too often and in too many places. It stretches our resources too much and is a real part of why our budget for domestic expenditures is always so tight. Of course, while I'm wishing, I will also wish for the Republican dominance in the House of Representatives to be broken so we could go ahead and pass more social programs such as poverty programs and better schools. We shouldn't be so low on the list of countries whose students rank high on standardized tests. That's shameful, to me.

I am getting very tired of the wars we have been prosecuting, and in truth we have a limited right to mandate the policies of a foreign country. There are large numbers of places who don't like America, but for the most part they aren't real threats to our security, in that they don't have nuclear weapons or even an army capable of attacking the US. I would like to see diplomacy be the means of solving problems abroad, and fewer states who have to be considered enemies.

I understand Karzai's wanting the American foot on his neck to be smaller. I doubt that the US presence in Afghanistan as a permanent condition will ever be popular there, and it seems to me that it would be much preferable for those countries who house a base for us to be our allies. It is always dangerous for our soldiers otherwise. I would prefer a condition of friendship over dominance, and Al Qaeda is less strong and active now, anyway. We could stand down without being in real danger, I think.




Political divide over evolution is growing, new Pew survey shows – NBC
Alan Boyle, Science Editor

Fewer than half of the Republicans surveyed in a fresh assessment of American attitudes toward evolution said they agree with the view that humans and other creatures have evolved over time.

That's a significant shift since 2009, the last time the Washington-based Pew Research Center asked Americans about the evolution issue. Moreover, the gap between Republicans and Democrats is growing.

The latest survey, released Monday, suggests that at the widest scale, acceptance of evolutionary theory is about the same as it was four years earlier. Sixty percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement that "humans and other living things have evolved over time," while 33 percent said "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time." However, there were sharp differences in some of the demographic breakdowns.

For example, 43 percent of Republicans acknowledged evolution, compared with 67 percent of Democrats. Among white evangelical Protestants, 64 percent said humans have always existed in their present form, while only 15 percent of white mainline Protestants agreed.

This year's Republican-Democrat gap was 24 percentage points, compared with a 10-point gap in 2009 and a 13-point gap in 2005. Pew's researchers said party differences remained even when other factors — such as the racial and ethnic composition of the political groups, and religious and educational background — were taken into account.

"It's an intriguing finding that is suggestive of greater polarization," Cary Funk, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project and Social & Demographic Trends project, told NBC News.

Pew's survey indicated that changing the wording of the survey question from "humans and other living things" to "animals and other living things" made little difference in the response.

Based on studies of our planet's past, the scientific consensus holds that organisms have evolved and given rise to new species over the past several billion years. Public acceptance of evolutionary theory in the United States, however, tends to lag behind other countries. A 2005 analysis of survey results from 34 countries, conducted for the journal Science, put the United States in 33rd place when it comes to embracing evolution — ahead of only Turkey.

This year's nationwide Pew survey was conducted via telephone between March 31 and April 8, with a representative sample of 1,983 adults aged 18 or older. The margin of sampling error is 3.0 percentage points.


People have been arguing over this as long as I can remember, but in the 1950's it was mainly an argument between religions. I wonder how many Republicans who don't believe in evolution are Evangelical Christians, and how many of those are voting for all conservative issues as well. I know the Evangelical Christians have increased in number and have begun to vote as a block against Liberal issues of all kinds. Still the Democrats outnumber the Republicans in this country. Social issues such as gay rights and abortion are a large part of the reason, though Liberals are more likely to want an economic safety net as well.

I always have given the religious right the right to maintain whatever beliefs they want, but I hate to see it affecting what is taught to young people in school. Our students already lag behind too many countries in their science and math scores, much less basic reading skills, and every now and then a textbook is issued that does not teach evolution in deference to religious beliefs in their state. It's one more sign of the merging of church and state, which goes against the right of non-religious people or members of liberal religions to maintain their beliefs, too. I don't like it at all. It's an erosion of one of our most important freedoms.



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The Online Education Revolution Drifts Off Course – NPR
by Eric Westervelt
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One year ago, many were pointing to the growth of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, as the most important trend in higher education. Many saw the rapid expansion of MOOCs as a higher education revolution that would help address two long-vexing problems: access for underserved students and cost.

In theory, students saddled by rising debt and unable to tap into the best schools would be able to take free classes from rock star professors at elite schools via Udacity, edX, Coursera and other MOOC platforms.

But if 2012 was the "Year of the MOOC," as The New York Times famously called it, 2013 might be dubbed the year that online education fell back to earth. Faculty at several institutions rebelled against the rapid expansion of online learning — and the nation's largest MOOC providers are responding.

Earlier this year, San Jose State University partnered with Udacity to offer several types of for-credit MOOC classes at low cost. The partnership was announced in January with lots of enthusiastic publicity, including a plug from California Gov. Jerry Brown, who said MOOC experiments are central to democratizing education.
"We've got to invest in learning, in teaching, in education," he said. "And we do that not by just the way we did it 100 years ago. We keep changing."
“ We look back at our early work and realize it wasn't quite as good as it should have been. We had so many moments for improvement.

- Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of MOOC provider Udacity
But by all accounts, the San Jose experiment was a bust. Completion rates and grades were worse than for those who took traditional campus-style classes. And the students who did best weren't the underserved students San Jose most wanted to reach.
It wasn't really proving to be cheaper, either, says Peter Hadreas, the chairman of San Jose State's philosophy department.

"The people that do well in these kind of courses are people who are already studious. Or who are taking courses for their own enrichment after they've graduated," he says.

"A year and a half ago ... people thought this was going to solve the problems of higher education because people would be educated for less money. That's not the way it's worked out."

Now, San Jose State is scaling back its relationship with Udacity, taking more direct control of the courses it offers through the company and rethinking its commitment to MOOCs.

'We Have A Lousy Product'
Other schools are hitting the pause button as well. A recent University of Pennsylvania study confirmed a massive problem: MOOCs have painfully few active users. About half who registered for a class ever viewed a lecture, and completion rates averaged just 4 percent across all courses.

Sebastian Thrun, Udacity's co-founder and a prime mover in MOOCs, recently told Fast Company magazine, "We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don't educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product."

Thrun says he doesn't regret that position. "I think that's just honest, and I think we should have an honest discourse about what we do," he says.
"Online education that leaves almost everybody behind except for highly motivated students, to me, can't be a viable path to education. We look back at our early work and realize it wasn't quite as good as it should have been. We had so many moments for improvement."

That the former Stanford professor and inventor — whose online artificial intelligence course helped kick off the MOOC frenzy — was fundamentally rethinking its viability shook the higher education world.
What was missing, many students complained, was a human connection beyond the streamed lecture.

That's what Tracy Wheeler found lacking. This year she immersed herself in five MOOCs from two providers and completed three, including a course on global poverty. She had read the professor's book and was excited and upbeat.
"I thought I'd go in deeper and come out wanting to move to India and help her with one of her experiments," she says.


When I was in college I took one course without a professor, which was experimental studies in animal and human psychology. I had to go weekly to the professor and pass a short test which he would administer on the book chapters which were assigned. I did okay, but I didn't find it as interesting and if I had questions I didn't have an easy way to get them answered. If a college professor is well prepared for his subject and if he is enthusiastic about doing the teaching, he fires up student interest and participation in the voluntary act of learning. Besides, he will know more from his own education in the subject than a student can get from simply reading one book on the subject, and can provide more understanding and background knowledge. A professor who gives broad lectures or a stimulating discussion in class will make it all much more interesting and informational. I think the live professor is very much a plus.



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Vitamin E Might Help Slow Alzheimer's Early On – NPR
by Nancy Shute
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Alzheimer's is a disease without a cure, and the available treatments only slow its progression for a bit. Now there's evidence vitamin E may help hold it at bay, at least for people in the early stages of the disease.

The finding, though inconclusive, is a bit of a surprise. Vitamin E has gotten a bad rap in recent years. A 2005 study found that taking high doses of vitamin E increased the risk of death, and other studies have shown no benefit in preventing cancer or heart disease. And vitamin E hasn't been shown to improve thinking in people with no memory problems, or to slow progression to Alzheimer's in people mild cognitive impairment.

But this study found that people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease who took big doses of vitamin E had slower functional declines. That slowing effect translates into a delay in progression of about 6 months over an average of two years. The people who took vitamin E were better able to do things like dress themselves, and reduced the amount of caregiver help they needed by about 2 hours a day.

The study, which was published Tuesday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, found that the people taking vitamin E also did better than people taking a placebo or Namenda, called memantine generically, a drug used to treat symptoms of advanced Alzheimer's.

Vitamin E Pills May Raise, Not Lower, Prostate Cancer Risk
"We are more optimistic," says Dr. Maurice Dysken, a researcher with the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, who led the study. Dysken and his colleagues used to prescribe 2,000 international units of vitamin E to Alzheimer's patients, based on a 1997 study that showed that it helped delay progression of symptoms. But the 2005 meta-analysis that showed higher death rates in people who took more than 400 IU a day dampened their enthusiasm, Dysken tells Shots. "We were very aware of that when we started this trial."

The group of people in this study taking vitamin E had a slightly lower death rate than the placebo group, but the number of participants, 613 patients at 14 Veterans Affairs medical facilities around the country, was too small to prove that's really true. It would take thousands of patients to figure that out.

The Case Against Multivitamins Grows Stronger
And other puzzles remain. Some of the people in the study were taking memantine along with vitamin E, and they didn't see the benefits in the people taking vitamin E alone. Dysken says he and his colleagues don't know why. They also don't know why vitamin E, which is an antioxidant, might help in the early stages of Alzheimer's, but not later on. Some people think that vitamin E enhances the effect of other Alzheimer's drugs like Aricept, but this study doesn't prove that.

But Dysken can see a real benefit for slowing the march of the disease early on.
"I think it would be particularly meaningful for patients in the mild to moderate group," Dysken says. "Patients who are at the end of the illness, no one thinks slowing the rate of decline means anything if a patient is six months from going into hospice. But earlier in the disease it can be a meaningful difference."

Lots more work needs to be done to see if this apparent benefit is real, according to both Dysken and an editorial accompanying the study. And Dysken cautions that Alzheimer's patients should be given vitamin E only under a doctor's supervision.


I didn't see here any mention of other conditions than prostate cancer that could be negatively affected by large doses of Vitamin E. In the seventies it became popular to take large doses of Vitamin C, supposedly to help prevent colds. In the last ten years a report came out mentioning every conceivable stomach and colon symptom and kidney stones. From my own experience with it, it increased indigestion to a great degree and I already had problems with ulcer symptoms, so I didn't continue taking extra Vitamin C.

I don't think, therefore, that mega doses of vitamins should be taken without studies to find out what side effects there might be. Too many people take them without giving it much thought. I do take an aspirin a day for two reasons – my blood cholesterol runs high which could lead to clogged arteries, and preventing a blood clot is important. The other reason is that aspirin and n-saids are thought to help prevent dementia. I also don't think that the six months that Vitamin E gives in simply slowing down the progression of the illness is that important in the long haul. It's a limited success.



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Here's How Young Farmers Looking For Land Are Getting Creative – NPR
by Dan Charles
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Across the country, there's a wave of interest in local food. And a new generation of young farmers is trying to grow it.
Many of these farmers — many of whom didn't grow up on farms — would like to stay close to cities. After all, that's where the demand for local food is.
The problem is, that's where land is most expensive. So young farmers looking for affordable land are forced to get creative.

Lindsey Lusher Shute, executive director of the National Young Farmer's Coalition, says that her organization conducted a survey of 1,000 farmers in 2011, and "land access came up as the No. 2 challenge for farmers [who were] getting started." It came in right behind not having enough financial capital.

Put simply, in areas close to major cities, especially on the East and West coasts, farmers can't pay nearly as much for land as people who would build houses on it.
In fact, it's not a new problem. Several decades ago, state and local governments, and nonprofit organizations, began attempts to preserve farmland that was threatened by urban sprawl.

They set up programs that give farmers cash in exchange for a legally binding promise that their land can only be used for farming, forever. As a result, farmers don't have to compete against developers for that land, making the land cheaper.

Shute says these programs are great — but insufficient. When she and her husband tried to buy land in the Hudson River Valley for their own farming operation, they found that even this permanent farmland was too expensive for normal farmers to buy.

Who Are The Young Farmers Of 'Generation Organic'?
Their farm, Hearty Roots Community Farm, grows mostly high-value vegetables. "We're making, per acre, just about as much as you can," says Shute. "And still, this conserved land was really out of reach."

They realized that they were facing competition of a different kind: wealthy people who wanted farms as country estates, bidding up the price. They were allowed to buy the preserved farms because they were not subdividing the property and developing it, but they were not really using the land as a working farm.

So Shute and her young farmers coalition are pushing for an extra level of farmland protection. Under these rules, people would be allowed to own conserved farmland only if they actually earn most of their money from farming.

This kind of program already exists in Vermont and Massachusetts. But it, too, has limitations. Robert Wagner, a senior adviser for the American Farmland Trust, says Massachusetts and Vermont recently looked at who's buying this relatively cheap land.
"What they found is that these properties — when they sell — are being sold to other farmers who are adding these operations onto their farms," says Wagner. Young farmers, just starting out, typically can't compete for this land against established farmers who want to expand.

So many young farmers aren't taking the traditional route. They aren't buying land at all, but renting instead. Sometimes, they are forming partnerships with older farmers who are leaving the business but don't want to sell the family land.

Chris Guerre is an example. To get to his land, you drive down a long lane, past million-dollar homes on multiacre wooded lots, in the wealthy community of Great Falls, Va., just outside Washington, D.C.

Then, unexpectedly, you come to an old barn, a couple of chicken coops, and 2 1/2 acres of vegetables. During the winter, the vegetables are covered by a kind of blanket, to keep them from freezing, that still lets water and sun through.
"We're one of the few farms left in the county, let alone one that grows and picks every week of the year," Guerre says. "Every week, even in winter, I'm growing and picking crops.

Guerre didn't grow up on this farm, or on any farm.
About five years ago, before he arrived at this spot, he ditched what he calls his "career job" to grow and sell food. He and his wife expanded their garden; they started selling vegetables at a farmers market and opened their own store selling food grown on other local farms. One day, at the farmers market, a woman came up to them.

"She approached my wife, and wondered if we might be interested in living on her family's farm. There was room to grow vegetables, or have animals. And we said, 'Yeah!' " recalls Guerre.

It turned out to be this farm. Guerre and his wife moved into the house. They're renting the land, and there's no guarantee that the family that owns it won't someday decide to sell it to a developer.

But Guerre doesn't seem worried. "They've been just very kind to us, and very encouraging, and helped us get to where we are," he says.
Guerre has built a new chicken coop; fixed roofs and plumbing; turned an old milk room into a washroom for vegetables.

He says, even if they did have to move someday, and leave all this behind, it wouldn't be the end of the world. He's pretty sure he could find land somewhere else. "If you walk a couple of miles in any direction, there's hundreds of acres."

In fact, he says, "Acquiring land is honestly probably the easiest part of doing all this. It's the commitment, the stamina, learning how to do it and doing it every single day: That's the hard part."

If you're ready to do all that, he says, you really can make a living. As for finding land, start hanging out with farmers, ask questions, and chances are you'll eventually hear about places where you can grow some food and start your own farming business.


This is good news. Family farms have been going under since the large truck farms have made advances, and anything that makes it easier for them to finance themselves is good. I hate to see the very wealthy taking over in every endeavor and driving up prices on everything. The middle class isn't winning right now, and the middle class is a stabilizing force in our country, so that we don't have only the poor and the rich. That kind of population isn't the America that fosters self-development and our freedoms.



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2013 Was The Year Bills To Criminalize Animal Cruelty Videos Failed – NPR
by Eliza Barclay

­ The past year was a busy one for the animal welfare activists who've turned their hidden cameras on confinement facilities where huge numbers of food animals are raised.

Livestock producers — and the policymakers they influence — were just as busy trying to make it illegal for activists to enter these facilities undercover.
You see, for the last several years, groups like the Humane Society of the U.S. and Mercy for Animals have caught some workers abusing animals red-handed. The groups say this abuse happens regularly out of view of the public and the law, and to expose it, they have to send in activists posing as ordinary workers, armed with video cameras.
The shocking videos made public have rankled animal agriculture groups, and strained their relationships with retailers. They typically respond that the videos aren't representative — they merely show one employee, doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Industry groups, in turn, have pressured legislators in several states to introduce measures intended to protect them from these kinds of incursions into their business.

The colloquial term for this legislation is ag-gag. It refers to laws that make it illegal to photograph or shoot videos of internal operations of farms where food animals are being raised. And awareness of such laws is growing: "Ag gag" was featured as one of the words of the year in Sunday's New York Times.

States Crack Down On Animal Welfare Activists And Their Undercover Videos
A Legal Twist In The Effort To Ban Cameras From Livestock Plants
Three states signed ag-gag bills into law in 2011 and 2012, setting new legal precedents. This year, a flurry of legislation — 15 ag-gag bills — was introduced in 11 states, but interestingly, not a single one passed. (Indeed, in some states, more than one measure was introduced: Tennessee and Arkansas each had two, while Indiana had three.)

What explains the failure of these bills, which either didn't get enough votes or were vetoed by governors? For details, we turned to Matt Dominguez, who spent 2013 traveling around the U.S. fighting various ag-gag bills for the Humane Society of the U.S.

According to Dominguez, ag-gag laws failed this year because of a large and broad coalition opposing them that tapped its grass-roots network to hammer legislators with emails, phone calls and online campaigns. The coalition included animal welfare groups, of course, but also environmental groups like Food and Water Watch, and organizations that advocate for a free press, like the National Press Photographers Association, and legal issues, like the American Civil Liberties Union.

The coalition also had public opinion on its side. A 2012 nationwide poll commissioned by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals showed that 71 percent of Americans support undercover investigative efforts by animal welfare organizations to expose animal abuse on industrial farms, and 64 percent oppose making such efforts illegal.

Another advantage was high-profile media coverage from The New York Times, Mother Jones and Rolling Stone, plus dozens of editorials in newspapers condemning ag-gag, says Dominguez.

Despite the sharp opposition, the trend seems to be towards more bills, not fewer, especially if investigations continue to paint damaging portraits of the industry.
"We do an investigation that shows cruelty, and a legislator introduces one of these bills to criminalize investigations themselves," says Dominguez. He cited the example of the 2012 HSUS investigation that showed workers throwing piglets at Wyoming Premium Farms, which prompted Wyoming state legislator Sue Wallis to introduce an ag-gag bill in 2013.

What's more, says Dominguez, lawmakers are trying to find new ways to keep activists off the farm. The original ag-gag bills made it illegal to take photos and video, but now some states are instead attempting to pass mandatory reporting bills. They would require anyone who witnesses and videotapes abuse on a farm to turn recordings over to the state within 24 to 48 hours.

"It seems like it would be pro-animal, but it means you can't document a series of abuses," Dominguez says. "And then the industry can say, 'This is an isolated incident.' "

As we reported earlier in the year, California introduced a measure that would have required that anyone who videotapes or records animal abuse turn over a copy of the evidence to police within 48 hours. It failed.

So, what might next year hold for animal activists fighting ag-gag laws?
Dominguez expects that 2014 will be a lot like 2013, and that 10 to 15 bills will come back in various states, since many legislators work on a two-year cycle.
"They'll likely come back in the states where we've been fighting, and in new states," says Dominguez. "Lawmakers view it that they were beat by animal rights groups. They'll tweak the bills, make them more like animal protection bills to dupe the public."


A hundred years ago there would have been no voice speaking up for animal protection under such a situation. The fact that animals can be owned, as humans once were, implies to some of the “conservative” persuasion that there should be no rules on how the owner treats their property. Many think that ones own conscience should be the only guide. Conscience can't be trusted to take care of the situation, however. I was shocked when I read that the first child protection case was brought by an animal protection activist.

Cruelty is a part of the mentality in this country, if no protective laws were in place, and in this case even where there are laws the cruelty still goes on when it isn't detected. Thus we need to protect those who risk their safety and even their lives, I suspect, by going in under cover to verify infractions of the laws. I had never heard of ag gags before. This causes a new low in my faith in big farming. We need our regulations in this country, or there would be no controlling what goes on.



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When The Supreme Court Decided Tomatoes Were Vegetables – NPR
by Jess Jiang

­ In a recent show, we talked about an importer that sold pillows shaped like stuffed animals. Or maybe they're stuffed animals that can be used as pillows.

It turns out, this distinction — is it fundamentally a pillow or a stuffed animal? — is important, because there's a tariff on pillows but not on stuffed animals.
This feels ridiculous and legalistic in the way that a lot of 21st century stories feel ridiculous and legalistic. But it turns out, this kind of thing goes back centuries.

In the 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court faced a similarly ridiculous question: Are tomatoes fruits or vegetables?
At the time the Port Authority of New York classified tomatoes as vegetables, which were subject to a 10 percent import tax.

A fruit importer argued that tomatoes were fruits, which were not taxed.
In the case, witnesses read from dictionaries, and definitions for "fruit" and "vegetable" were read in court. Also definitions of "tomato," "pea," "eggplant," "cucumber," "squash" and "pepper."
In the Supreme Court decision, the justices distinguished between science and everyday life. The justices admitted that botanically speaking, tomatoes were technically fruits. But in everyday life, they decided, vegetables were things "usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats ... and not, like fruits generally, as dessert."

So under customs law, the court ruled, tomatoes counted as vegetables — and the importer had to keep paying the tariff.


This story is short, but interesting, because it shows the kind of thinking that judges have to do to interpret the law. I took one business law course and, while I wouldn't want to have to learn enough along those lines to be a lawyer, I had a greater respect for the essential fairness of the law after that. Not all judges are equally conscientious about their decisions, but by and large it is a much better way to decide disputes and govern people in their behavior than a posse of vigilantes, as was pretty much the case in the American West of the 1800's. I not only like lawyers because they are usually lively in their thinking processes, but they are usually on the side of goodness.