Pyrrhus (318-272 BC was one of the most successful ancient Greek generals of the Hellenistic era. He was king of the Greek tribe of Molossians[1](from ca. 297 BC), Epirus (306-301, 297-272 BC) and Macedon (288-284, 273-272 BC), and one of the strongest opponents of early Rome. Some of his battles, though successful, cost him staggering losses, from which the term Pyrrhic victory was coined.
Pyrrhus was the son of Aeacides of Epirus and Phthia, and a second cousin of Alexander the Great. Prince of one of the Alexandrian successor states, Pyrrhus’ childhood and youth went by in unquiet conditions. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
He was only two years old when his father was dethroned and the family took refuge with Glaukias, king of the Taulanti, one of the largest Illyrian tribes.
Later, the Epirotes called him back but he was dethroned again at the age of 17 when he left his kingdom to attend the wedding of Glaukias’ son in Illyria. In the wars of the diadochi Pyrrhus fought beside his brother-in-law Demetrius I of Macedon on the losing side in the pivotal Battle of Ipsus (301 BC). Later, he was made a hostage of Ptolemy I Soter by a treaty between Ptolemy I and Demetrius. Pyrrhus married Ptolemy I’s stepdaughter Antigone and in 297 BC, with Ptolemy I’s aid, restored his kingdom of Epirus. Next he went to war against his former ally Demetrius. By 286 BC he had deposed his former brother-in-law and taken control over the kingdom of Macedon. Pyrrhus was driven out of Macedon by Lysimachus, his former ally, in 284 BC.
In 281 BC, the Greek city of Tarentum, in southern Italy, fell out with Rome and was faced with a Roman attack and certain defeat. Rome had already made itself into a major power, and was poised to subdue all the Greek cities in Magna Graecia. The Tarentines asked Pyrrhus to lead their war against the Romans.
Pyrrhus was encouraged to aid the Tarentines by the oracle of Delphi. His goals were not, however, selfless. He recognized the possibility of carving out an empire for himself in Italy. He made an alliance with Ptolemy Ceraunus, King of Macedon and his most powerful neighbor, and arrived in Italy in 280 BC.
He entered Italy with an army consisting of 3,000 cavalry, 2,000 archers, 500 slingers, 20,000 infantry and 20 war elephants in a bid to subdue the Romans.
Due to his superior cavalry and his elephants he defeated the Romans, led by Consul Publius Valerius Laevinus, in the Battle of Heraclea in 280 BC. There are conflicting sources about casualties. Hieronymus of Cardia reports the Romans lost about 7,000 while Pyrrhus lost 3,000 soldiers, including many of his best. Dionysius gives a bloodier view of 15,000 Roman dead and 13,000 Greek. Several tribes including the Lucani, Bruttii, Messapians, and the Greek cities of Croton and Locri joined Pyrrhus. He then offered the Romans a peace treaty which was eventually rejected. Pyrrhus spent winter in Campania.
When Pyrrhus invaded Apulia (279 BC), the two armies met in the Battle of Asculum where Pyrrhus won a very costly victory. The consul Publius Decius Mus was the Roman commander, and his able force, though defeated, broke the back of Pyrrhus’ Hellenistic army, and guaranteed the security of the city itself. The battle foreshadowed later Roman victories over more numerous and well armed successor state military forces and inspired the term “Pyrrhic victory”, meaning a victory which comes at a crippling cost. At the end, the Romans had lost 6,000 men and Pyrrhus 3,500 but, while battered, his army was still a force to be reckoned with.
In 278 BC, Pyrrhus received two offers simultaneously. The Greek cities in Sicily asked him to come and drive out Carthage, which along with Rome was one of the two great powers of the Western Mediterranean. At the same time, the Macedonians, whose King Ceraunus had been killed by invading Gauls, asked Pyrrhus to ascend the throne of Macedon. Pyrrhus decided that Sicily offered him a greater opportunity, and transferred his army there.
Pyrrhus was proclaimed king of Sicily. He was already making plans for his son Helenus to inherit the kingdom of Sicily and his other son Alexander to be given Italy. In 277 Pyrrhus captured Eryx, the strongest Carthaginian fortress in Sicily. This prompted the rest of the Carthaginian-controlled cities to defect to Pyrrhus.
In 276 BC, Pyrrhus negotiated with the Carthaginians. Although they were inclined to come to terms with Pyrrhus, supply him money and send him ships once friendly relations were established, he demanded that Carthage abandon all of Sicily and make the Libyan Sea a boundary between themselves and the Greeks. Meanwhile he had begun to display despotic behavior towards the Sicilian Greeks and soon Sicilian opinion became inflamed against him. Though he defeated the Carthaginians in another battle, he was forced to abandon Sicily and return to Italy.
While Pyrrhus had been campaigning against the Carthaginians, the Romans rebuilt their army by calling up thousands of fresh recruits. When Pyrrhus returned from Sicily, he found himself vastly outnumbered against a superior Roman army. After the inconclusive Battle of Beneventum in 275 BC Pyrrhus decided to end his campaign in Italy and return to Epirus which resulted in the loss of all his Italian holdings. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Though his western campaign had taken a heavy toll on his army as well as his treasury Pyrrhus yet again went to war. Attacking King Antigonus II Gonatas he won an easy victory and seized the Macedonian throne.
In 272 BC, Cleonymus, a Spartan of royal blood who was hated among fellow Spartans, asked Pyrrhus to attack Sparta and place him in power. Pyrrhus agreed to the plan intending to win control of the Peloponnese for himself but unexpectedly strong resistance thwarted his assault on Sparta. He was immediately offered an opportunity to intervene in a civic dispute in Argos. Entering the city with his army by stealth, he found himself caught in a confused battle in the narrow city streets. During the confusion an old Argead woman watching from a rooftop threw a roofing tile which stunned him, allowing an Argive soldier to kill him (some reports claim he was poisoned by a servant).
hile he was a mercurial and often restless leader, and not always a wise king, he was considered one of the greatest military commanders of his time. Plutarch records that Hannibal ranked Pyrrhus as either the greatest or the second greatest commander the world had seen (after Alexander the Great if the second version of the tradition is followed). Pyrrhus was also known to be very benevolent. As a general Pyrrhus’ greatest political weaknesses were the failure to maintain focus and the failure to maintain a strong treasury at home (many of his soldiers were costly mercenaries).
His name is famous for the phrase “Pyrrhic victory” which refers to an exchange at the Battle of Asculum. In response to congratulations for winning a costly victory over the Romans, he is reported to have said: “One more such victory will undo me!”
yrrhus wrote Memoirs and several books on the art of war. These have since been lost although Hannibal was influenced by them and they received praise from Cicero.
The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is one of the country’s most glittering cultural jewels. Created ten years before the state, it has gone out to the battlefields in wartime to boost the troops’ morale, and built a reputation as one of the world’s leading orchestras. But in a country stuffed to the rafters with classical musicians, many of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union, competition for funds is inevitable—and increasingly bitter.
But that, the management at the Philharmonic seems to feel, has gone far enough. So it has mounted a public campaign to shame the government into giving it more money, after being allotted a little over 8m shekels ($2.37m) this year, some 1.5m less than it got last year.
Avi Shoshani, the orchestra’s director, blames the cuts on the fact that the number of cultural bodies in Israel is growing but the state budget for the lot of them is not. The government now covers around 12% of the Philharmonic’s costs. Around half—an unusually high proportion—is paid for by ticket sales and membership fees; private donors make up the difference. But this seems to irk audiences. At a gala concert last month, Mr Shoshani was jeered when he made a speech effusively thanking a corporate sponsor. It was unclear whether the anger was directed at the sponsor, the government or Mr Shoshani.
There is discontent in the ranks too. Some musicians complain that the music director, the jet-setting Indian-born Zubin Mehta, who fought to find space on an aircraft to Israel during the 1967 war and made the trip sitting on ammunition boxes, is good at bringing in the money but that there is too little time for rehearsal with him or with local guest conductors. So quality, they say, has dropped.
But the budget issue is clearly a sore point at the ministry for science, technology, culture and sport. “What budget issue?” explodes a spokeswoman, Liat Gur. The ministry has just 35m shekels to dole out to 17 different musical ensembles. Moreover, she says pointedly, one reason the Philharmonic’s budget was cut was that for two years running the Philharmonic paid more than was agreed—to Mr Shoshani himself.
ABOUT one in 20 children (those under 18) have a group of symptoms that has come to be known as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). About 60% of them carry those symptoms into adulthood. For what is, at root, a genetic phenomenon, that is a lot—yet many studies have shown that ADHD is indeed genetic and not, as was once suspected, the result of poor parenting. It is associated with particular variants of receptor molecules for neurotransmitters in the brain. A neurotransmitter is a chemical that carries messages between nerve cells and, in the case of ADHD, that chemical is often dopamine, which controls feelings of reward and pleasure. The suggestion is that people with ADHD are receiving positive neurological feedback for inappropriate behaviour. The surprise is that the variant receptors are still there. Natural selection might have been expected to purge them from the population unless they have some compensating benefit.
Of course, this analysis turns on the definition of “inappropriate”. The main symptom of ADHD is impulsiveness. Sufferers have trouble concentrating on any task unless they receive constant feedback, stimulation and reward. They thus tend to flit from activity to activity. Adults with ADHD tend to perform poorly in modern society and are prone to addictive and compulsive behaviour. But might such people do well in different circumstances?
One hypothesis is that the behaviour associated with ADHD helps people, such as hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads, who lead a peripatetic life. Since today’s sedentary city dwellers are recently descended from such people, natural selection may not have had time to purge the genes that cause it.
Dan Eisenberg, of Northwestern University in Illinois, and his colleagues decided to test this by studying the Ariaal, a group of pastoral nomads who live in Kenya. The receptor Mr Eisenberg looked at was the 7R variant of a protein called DRD4. Previous work has shown that this variant is associated with novelty-seeking, food- and drug-cravings, and ADHD.
The team looked for 7R in two groups of Ariaal. One was still pastoral and nomadic. The other had recently settled down. As they report in this week’s BMC Evolutionary Biology, they found that about a fifth of the population of both groups had the 7R version of DRD4. However, the consequences of this were very different. Among the nomads, who wander around northern Kenya herding cattle, camels, sheep and goats, those with 7R were better nourished than those without. The opposite was true of their settled relations: those with 7R were worse nourished than those without it.
How 7R causes this is not yet known. It may stem from behavioural differences or it may be that different versions of DRD4 have different effects on the way the body processes food. Nevertheless, this discovery fits past findings that 7R and a set of similar variants of DRD4, known collectively as “long alleles”, are more common in migratory populations.
One suggestion is that long-distance migration selects for long alleles (see chart) because they reward exploratory behaviour. This might be an advantage in migratory societies because it encourages people to hunt down resources when they constantly move through unfamiliar surroundings.
As for the Ariaal, there remains the question of why 7R—although it is apparently beneficial to a nomadic way of life—is found in only a fifth of the population. One possibility is that its effects are beneficial only when they are not universal, and some sort of equilibrium between variants emerges. A second is that the advantage is gained when 7R exists along with another version of DRD4 (the genes for the two variants having come from different parents). Unfortunately, the way Mr Eisenberg collected the data does not allow these hypotheses to be tested. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Either way, his research raises the question of whether people suffering from ADHD and conditions related to it, such as addiction, are misfits coping with a genetic legacy that was useful in the evolutionary past, but is now damaging. As society continues to diverge from that evolutionary past, the economic and social consequences of being such a misfit may become increasingly important.
Jack Simplot, potato- and memory-chip tycoon, died on May 25th, aged 99
Does the American Dream come with fries or hash browns? In Jack Simplot’s version, it came with both. Starting out at 14 with little education and only $80 from his mother, Mr Simplot died a multi-billionaire. Much of his success he owed to the Russet Burbank that grows so well in Idaho’s light volcanic soil, and Mr Spud, as he became known, never forgot this debt, nor rejected his roots: till the day he died his favourite restaurant was McDonald’s, where he always ordered either french fries or hash browns. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Mr Simplot’s was an all-American story, even involving a log cabin. That was the house built by his father, after the family moved to Idaho from Iowa in 1910. Dad, however, was stern and after a series of rows young Jack left home for the small town of Declo. The teachers in his boarding-house there were paid with IOUs that carried interest if held long enough. With money raised from rearing orphaned lambs, Jack bought these notes for 50 cents on the dollar and used them as collateral for a bank loan. That money bought him several hundred pigs, which he fattened with swill made from potato peelings and the meat of wild horses: “I shot ‘em, jerked the hides off and cooked ‘em myself,” he said. He sold the pigs for $7,800.
Next came farming and a half share in a machine that sorted potatoes. Unwilling to let Jack rent the machine out, his partner, who was “about half alcoholled up”, agreed to see outright ownership settled by the toss of a coin. Jack won. Mass sorting then began, followed by processing and drying, not just of potatoes but of other vegetables, too. A trip to California to collect a debt resulted in Mr Simplot coming back with an order for 500,000lb (227 tonnes) of dried onions; and onion powder, he said, was like gold dust.
By 1940 he had 30,000 acres (12,150 hectares) of land and was filling 10,000 freight wagons with potatoes a year. Once America was at war, every third portion of potatoes on the GIs’ plates was supplied by Mr Simplot. He could take the credit when, in 1948, Idaho first put “World Famous Potatoes” on its car licence plates.
Eager to cut costs and to keep control, he became a great vertical integrator, owning much of the land on which he grew his produce and fertilising it with phosphate from his own mines. He even owned the forests that provided the wood for the boxes in which his veg was packed before he processed it. Any food he could not sell he fed to his cattle, and in time he would own the biggest cattle ranch in America.
With restless energy and a gambler’s love of a new enterprise, he was always innovating. Not all his ventures succeeded. An attempt to take large-scale farming to Germany was a failure, and other investments in Latin America and Europe flopped. But he looked only for a 51% success rate, and that he far exceeded. A hugely profitable breakthrough came in 1953, when one of his chemists perfected a technique for freezing chipped potatoes. By the late 1960s Mr Simplot was the biggest supplier of french fries to McDonald’s. In 1980 a $1m investment gave him 40% of a start-up that became Micron Technology, which makes semiconductors for storing data in microchips and memory cards.
Mr Simplot’s success had the traditional ingredients: hard work, thrift, enterprise, readiness to take risks and a shrewd ability to assess an opportunity. It also involved an occasional brush with the tax man. The authorities first accused him of tax dodging after the war. Charged with trying to manipulate potato futures, he paid $50,000 in fines in 1976, and he and his privately owned company both paid more fines for tax fraud in 1977.
In other respects, too, Mr Simplot departed from the usual heroic script. The patriot who flew a gigantic Stars and Stripes above his house thought religion was “hocus-pocus”. The lifelong teetotaller and anti-smoker was addicted to sleeping pills. The munificent donor to many good causes was ready to foreclose on a loan to his son. Indeed, the man who said he put his family above all else was a distant father to both his eldest boys, whom he sent away to school. He made more time, though, for his adored grandchildren.
He had critics, too. Environmentalists in particular were horrified at his company’s hostility to land-use and clean-air laws. Mr Simplot himself, an avowed lover of skiing, duck shooting and the great outdoors, was attacked in the 1970s for his support for new coal-fired electricity plants along the Snake river and for a scheme to generate hydro-power by diverting water from another river into a vast underground tube. Free-traders took him to task for his readiness to lobby President Ronald Reagan to put a $300m tariff on imported computer chips.
Other traits earned a certain admiration. Mr Simplot was unstuffy: he often answered the telephone himself and his number was never ex-directory. He was frugal to the point of stinginess, driving a scruffy Lincoln Town Car for six or seven years before buying a new one, and he did not like paying to have the brakes fixed. Even his hostility to “goddamn parking spaces for cripples” may not have done him any harm. In potato country, the American Dream does not have much room for political correctness.
WHAT do you give a man who has everything, or at least the seemingly permanent presidency of a big Central Asian republic? You rename its capital in his honour, of course. That is how Sat Tokpakbayev, a member of the one-party parliament and former Kazakhstani defence minister, wanted to mark the 68th birthday next month of President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
In suggesting in parliament that Astana change its name to “Nursultan”, Mr Tokpakbayev achieved the near-impossible: distinguishing himself for sycophancy from the mass of other well-wishers, not least those in parliament. His proposal was at once enthusiastically endorsed by an estimated 90% of the deputies. (The others, all also members of the president’s party, Nur-Otan, must be ruing their absence that day.)
Mr Tokpakbayev and his supporters point to precedents. Russia has St Petersburg, named after Peter the Great’s patron saint, America has Washington, neighbouring Turkmenistan has the Caspian port of Turkmenbashi, named for its late dictator. But Kazakhstan’s opposition newspapers scoffed. Respublika, a weekly, recommended that the circus clowns take a holiday so the parliamentarians could take their place.
With Kazakhstan facing an economic slowdown and galloping inflation, many observers wondered whether parliament might not find more urgent topics to discuss. But Mr Nazarbayev has turned down parliament’s petition. “The decision to change the name will be made by another generation,” he said. This has given rise to speculation that the suggestion was merely intended to burnish the image of a man not known for self-effacing modesty.
Be that as it may, Astana, which will celebrate its tenth anniversary as Kazakhstan’s capital next month, is used to name changes. It has been called Akmolinsk, Tselinograd and Akmola. Mr Nazarbayev himself renamed it Astana (“capital”). A more fitting gift might have been to rename the presidency: the “Nursultanate”, perhaps?
I have received the following e-mail from Alex Kozinski’s wife:
Mr. Frey:
My name is Marcy Tiffany. I have been married to Alex Kozinski for over thirty years and we have raised three sons together. First, let me thank you for making the effort to discover the truth about what happened, and for giving me an opportunity to respond to the stories that have been circulating about Alex.
Turning to the facts of the matter, the LA Times story, authored by Scott Glover, is riddled with half-truths, gross mischaracterizations and outright lies. One significant mischaracterization is that Alex was maintaining some kind of “website” to which he posted pornographic material.
Obviously, Glover’s use of the word “website” was intended to convey a false image of a carefully designed and maintained graphical interface, with text, pictures, sound and hyperlinks, such as businesses maintain or that individuals can set up on Facebook, rather than a bunch of random files located in one of many folders stored on our family’s file server. The “server” is actually just another home computer that sits next to my desk in our home office, and that we use to store files, perform back-ups, and route the Internet to the family network. It has no graphical interface, but if you know the precise location of a file, you can access it either from one of the home computers or remotely.
Using the term “website” also gives the impression that Alex was actively aware of all of the material, when, in fact, it had accumulated over a number of years and he didn’t even remember that some of that stuff had been stored there or whether it had been put there by him or one of our sons, who also have access to the server. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Glover also wrote that “the sexually explicit material on the site was extensive.” In fact, of the several hundred items in the “stuff” folder, the vast majority was cute, amusing, and not in the least bit sexual in nature. For example, there’s a program that lets you build a snowman (no private parts involved). There’s a “stress reliever” that lets you take a virtual hammer to your desktop (which I’ve been using a lot lately). There’s a picture of freshly painted double-yellow lines that go right over road kill, with the caption “not my job award.” There’s something called “cool juggle” that shows a video of a guy juggling who drops a ball outside the frame and becomes a stick figure when he goes to pick it up. There are over 300 individual items in the “stuff” folder, the vast majority of which are of this nature. In addition, this folder contains about a half-dozen items that, while humorous, also have some kind of sexual aspect. Most of these you have already identified on your website.
I would note that in addition to the “stuff” folder, which Alex and my sons used to store a hodge-podge of miscellaneous humorous items, we use to the server to store several dozen other folders that contain a lot of personal material. For example, there is a folder that has copies of papers my kids have written in school. There is another folder that has family photos. There is a folder that has copies of articles that Alex has written. Obviously, the advantage of using a server is so that we can access the material from other computers and also send family members and friends links that will allow them to see a specific item in a folder. For example, this allows me to send links to my sisters so that they can see the latest photo of our grandchild.
This brings us to another falsity in the LA Times article. The reporter describes the handful of comic-sexual items as follows: “the sexually explicit material on the site was extensive.” He then includes graphic descriptions that make the material sound like hard-core porn when, in fact, it is more accurately described as raunchy humor.
One especially egregious misrepresentation is that there was a “video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal.” In subsequent articles, including one in the S.F. Chronicle, this has been described as a “bestiality” video. In fact, as you reveal on your Blog, it is a widely available video of a man trying to relieve himself a field when he is attacked by a donkey he fights off with one hand while trying to hold up his pants with the other. I would note that there is a version of this video on YouTube that apparently aired on the Fox channel. Crude and juvenile, for sure, but not by any stretch of the imagination is it bestiality. The fact is, Alex is not into porn – he is into funny – and sometimes funny has a sexual character.
The tiny percentage of the material that was sexual in nature was all of a humorous character. For example, the “women’s crotches” was one of the many “camel toe” series that is widely available on the net. The insidious effect of these misleading descriptions is that even many of those who have come to Alex’s defense have expressed the view that judges are entitled to look at “porn” if they choose, as if that’s what was really going on here, when it is not.
I think that there is another very important piece of this story that has not received the attention it deserves, and that is the role of Cyrus Sanai.
Cyrus Sanai, a disgruntled attorney/litigant, has widely claimed credit for engineering this smear campaign. In a 2005 decision, District Judge Zilly USDC Western District Seattle, describes Sanai’s conduct in a case before him as “an indescribable abuse of the legal process, unlike anything this Judge has experienced in more than 17 years on the bench and 26 years in private practice: outrageous, disrespectful, and in bad faith.”
Judge Zilly references a decision by LA Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Grimes where she describes Sanai’s conduct in a different lawsuit as follows: “Plaintiff has proliferated needless, baseless pleadings that now occupy about 15 volumes of Superior Court files, not to mention the numerous briefs submitted in the course of the forays into the Court of Appeal and attempts to get before the Supreme Court, and not one pleading appears to have had substantial merit. The genesis of this lawsuit, and the unwarranted grief and expense it has spawned, are an outrage.”
Washington State Superior Court Judge Joseph A. Thibodeau also had a run-in with Sanai, who harassed him to the point that he had to recuse himself from Sanai’s case. I believe you have a copy of the transcript of that hearing. (You may want to link to Overlawyered.com which has some additional details about how Sanai’s conduct).
Sanai wrote a vicious attack against the Ninth Circuit panel (Judges Leavy, Gould and Clifton) that ruled against his efforts to get the federal court to take jurisdiction over his parents’ ugly divorce case. You can read his vitriol at www.ninthcircuit.us (a website obviously designed so that people trying to find the Ninth Circuit website would stumble on his page instead).
Alex, who did not participate in the decision, wrote a public defense of the panel, and thus made himself a target. Sanai apparently made it his mission to retaliate against Alex. He managed to access our private computer and copy these files, which he then shopped around to reporters for months. Finally, he got the LA Times reporter to print the story that set off this firestorm. Sanai not only admits his involvement in all this – he brags about it.
As to how Sanai accessed our server and was able to rummage through our personal files, frankly we are still trying figure it out. Apparently, if a person is able to find a link to an item in the “stuff” file, and he knows what he is doing, it is possible for him to reverse engineer his way into other items stored in that file without our knowledge or consent. Although we typically would only send links to friends and family – who would be unlikely to do such a thing and who would certainly not try to injure us with what they found if they did – it is possible that a link to something in the “stuff” file became public, and Sanai used it to access the other material stored there. Moreover, since there wasn’t anything that remotely resembles a “collection of porn” stored there, we didn’t pay as much attention to the security risks as we obviously should have.
This is a sad and dangerous lesson to anyone who dares to stand on principle and publicly speak out against people like Cyrus Sanai, who are willing to stop at nothing to wreak his petty vengeance on a good and decent man like my husband. It is even more disturbing that Sanai, who is a member of the bar and an officer of the court, can get away with attacking judge after judge after judge, in this fashion. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
It is also an indictment of Scott Glover and the LA Times, who are willing to knowingly distort the facts and with cavalier disregard of the injury they are causing to the reputation of a brilliant and distinguished jurist, in order to sell a few newspapers. And then, of course, there are the bevy of other purportedly respectable publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle, that are willing to repeat Mr. Glover’s story, while adding embellishments and further mischaracterizations along the way. This is apparently what now substitutes for responsible journalism.
While I’m on the topic of responsible journalism, it has recently come to light that the LA Times learned about this material months ago, and sat on it until it would do the maximum damage. Selecting the jury was a very grueling undertaking. Over 150 potential jurors were screened for hour after painful hour on Monday and Tuesday. Scores of men and women took the trip into the jury box, only to leave soon thereafter because they confessed themselves unable to view the materials. A number of others disclosed embarrassing facts about themselves and their families in order to explain why they could not sit on this jury. It was a difficult and painful process for just about everyone who was called into the jury box. Finally, after considering 109 members of the panel, a jury was selected and sworn at the end of the day on Tuesday. And Glover was present in court while all this was going on, biding his time. Only on Wednesday, after the jury had started to hear the case – and jeopardy had attached – did the LA Times choose to “break” its story.
A newspaper – especially a major newspaper as the Los Angeles Times purports to be – is supposed to be a responsible member of the community, not a predator. If the presence of certain files on a judge’s computer is a truly a newsworthy matter, it would have been so months earlier, before Alex was assigned this trial, and certainly a few days earlier, before a jury had been chosen and the trial had commenced. But what excuse is there for timing the story with surgical precision so as to do maximum damage to the judicial process? In doing so, the LA Times caused the effort of the court, the parties and the 150 citizens who answered the call of duty by reporting for jury service from near and far to go to waste, just to make a big splash. This strikes me as worse than irresponsible.
On the brighter side, once again, it is the bloggers such as you, who are willing to look behind the story to discover the real facts. One can only hope that through these efforts, the truth will eventually come out.
Marcy J.K. Tiffany, Esq.
Ms. Tiffany sent me an earlier version of this e-mail Saturday morning. It was she who confirmed for me that the “video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal” (to quote the L.A. Times description) was really the silly YouTube video of a man running away from an aroused donkey.
When I received her e-mail, I asked her whether she had intended for me to publish it. (I don’t want to publish anything that was intended as a private communication, so if there’s any doubt, I ask. That’s how I’d like to be treated, so it’s how I treat others.) We have since spoken about the matter twice on the phone. On Sunday night, she sent me a more polished and up-to-date version, which she authorized me to publish.
I am pleased to give Ms. Tiffany this forum to express her thoughts.
P.S. The partial transcript of the hearing involving Judge Thibodeau may be viewed here. The Overlawyered.com posts with more about Mr. Sanai, referred to in Ms. Tiffany’s e-mail, can be accessed here and here.
126 Comments »
1.
Sanai proves to the world that Kozinski is like everyone else and laughs at funny stuff. Nothing on the website was out of bounds for someone to have on their personal server, even if some of it was lame or in poor taste. Sanai also proves that Sanai is a complete monster, and a disgrace to the bar. But then, there are always a few monsters crawling around. This is as high in the world as he will ever get… a parasite bitterly harassing a giant in the legal world.
What’s surprising is that the monster got an audience. The LA Times must explain its behavior.
Comment by Jem — 6/16/2008 @ 2:04 am
2.
“The fact is, Alex is not into porn – he is into funny – and sometimes funny has a sexual character.”
Spot on. Sums up the whole thing rather nicely.
Comment by Justin Levine — 6/16/2008 @ 2:49 am
3.
“The LA Times must explain its behavior”……. right, and i have bridge in brooklyn i’d like to sell you.
Comment by james conrad — 6/16/2008 @ 4:32 am
4.
To recap for people who come to this page without the background discussion, simply as a point of information, the statement “it is possible for him to reverse engineer his way into other items stored in that file without our knowledge or consent” may be literally true and represent her understanding, but it is not a good description of the situation. In fact, Kozinski made a file link public, and the Yahoo search engine indexes directories from file paths, so any connotation that there was some extraordinary technical feat here, is not accurate.
Note I agree that the reporter distorted the nature of the material itself.
Comment by Seth Finkelstein — 6/16/2008 @ 5:11 am
5.
Wow. The Misses is defending her psycho husband and her demented son — I don’t think a picture of a guy dressed as a priest with a CHILD giving him oral sex is “acceptable humor”. How is that funny? How is it acceptable, even in the disgusting slime capital of San Francisco? His wife thinks this is cute? There are thousands of victims of pedophiles who will fail to see the humor, and the overwhelming majority of US citizens will be disgusted that a JUDGE,his liberal wife and his creepy son think this makes for family fun time. Finally,the LA Times does its job and exposes a California nutjob, and people are mad at the LA Times? I tell the Misses, the Judge, and junior to get some therapy, spend some time with victims of crime. and to get a $%^&& life.
Comment by Karen — 6/16/2008 @ 5:24 am
6.
Latest Overlawyered post:
http://overlawyered.com/2008/06/latest-on-kozinski-and-cyrus-sanai/
Suffice it to say that Patterico should double-check Sanai’s claims about the accuracy of the CD.
Comment by Ted — 6/16/2008 @ 5:53 am
7.
Ms. Tiffany makes an interesting statement about the LATimes’s motives: “While I’m on the topic of responsible journalism, it has recently come to light that the LA Times learned about this material months ago, and sat on it until it would do the maximum damage.”
I’m wondering how she knows this as fact. Is she just “cavorting” with some of the facts, and maybe finding “bestility” in news judgment by professionals that really isn’t there?
Comment by Larry Reilly — 6/16/2008 @ 6:13 am
8.
The thought comes unbidden that such men, as Glover and Sanai have been described to be, would restrain themselves better, if they had seen from some previous, spectacular example that one endangers ones life through such unrestraint.
Comment by Kralizec — 6/16/2008 @ 6:19 am
9.
Ms. Tiffany makes an interesting statement about the LATimes’s motives: “While I’m on the topic of responsible journalism, it has recently come to light that the LA Times learned about this material months ago, and sat on it until it would do the maximum damage.” http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
I’m wondering how she knows this as fact. Is she just “cavorting” with some of the facts, and maybe finding “bestility” in news judgment by professionals that really isn’t there?
She is right.
Cyrus Sanai told Howard Bashman: “I pitched it to the Daily Journal, the Recorder, the LA Times and the WSJ through end of January 2008.” He pitched it to Henry Weinstein, who later took a buyout.
For what it’s worth, Sanai tells me that Weinstein never seemed particularly interested — and that Glover said that he hadn’t known about it from Weinstein.
Comment by Patterico — 6/16/2008 @ 6:23 am
10.
Ms. Tiffany
That may be the case regarding your family server. Hell, I don’t even think its news. But I’ll say this – I was once a big admirer of your husband until one event where I met him. He repeatedly rubbed up against my girlfriend while greeting her of the course of the weekend. I had to talk her out of filing a complaint after the fact (which was difficult as she was being egged on by several profs at my top 10 law school). I have never been so disgusted with a person I admired in my life. Having told this story to other people around the water cooler in recent days, it has struck me that others have similar tales from separate events. Your husband may have a good sense of humor, and may be a brilliant writer – but his manners leave much to be desired.
Comment by anon — 6/16/2008 @ 6:34 am
11.
How is that funny?
Because it mocks a large, very public institution that while generally known for good deeds got into “a bit” of trouble over a minority (a vastly tiny minority, mind you) of members who liked to use their position of authority to diddle little boys…
Comedy is pain, kid.
There are thousands of victims of pedophiles who will fail to see the humor, and the overwhelming majority of US citizens will be disgusted that a JUDGE,his liberal wife and his creepy son think this makes for family fun time.
Lemme guess… You don’t find much of anything funny do you, because you’re too busy feeling everyone’s pain.
I think you’re applying “liberal” to the wrong group here, lady…
Comment by Scott Jacobs — 6/16/2008 @ 6:37 am
12.
Seth has it right: While the LA Times grossly distorted what Kozinski had on his Web site, the notion of it being private or there being an expectation of privacy is illogical. If you want something to be truly private, don’t put it on a network designed to be accessible around the world. (Or at least password-protect it).
Comment by Bradley J Fikes — 6/16/2008 @ 6:45 am
13.
Wow. The Misses is defending her psycho husband and her demented son
I couldn’t agree with Karen more. Good grief. Who ARE these people? They see these things as “funny” and give full access to it to their children and actually use that as a defense???
Then seeing the personal story of harrassment that anon wrote about doesn’t surprise me at all. This is the behavior of men like this. I feel sorry for this woman. She justifies what I would be horrified by.
Comment by Rightwingsparkle — 6/16/2008 @ 6:46 am
14.
One can judge the veracity of the allegation a few posts above by noting that the poster identifies him or herself as “anon.” I’ve been posting here as “Brian,” which is just as anonymous as “anon,” but you can bet that if I had some factual charge to make against someone that was based upon information that wasn’t already public, I’d damn well make my name public.
I wonder what the IP address of “anon” is? Or did he/she post this defamation from Kinko’s?
Comment by Brian — 6/16/2008 @ 7:01 am
15.
Mr. Patterico,
When you say “she’s right” about the LATimes having the info and sitting on it for months until, as she put it, “it would do the maximum damage,” do you mean you agree with what I’m reading in her missive: that the newspaper’s editors deliberately withheld the story until they saw, aha, here’s where we can inflict the most damage.
I don’t doubt Sanai gave the information to someone at the newspaper many months ago. But you and Ms. Tiffany are making a leap of logic from that point.
Perhaps Sanai simply saw in the newspaper recently that Kozinski was presiding over an obscenity trial and approached someone else at the newspaper, someone who now could see there was a story there and moved on it.
I don’t know if that’s how it played out, but from the skimpy facts we have as far as the newspaper is concerned, it’s as plausibile as the different inference you and Ms. Tiffany have taken as gospel.
Me, I don’t know. That’s why I asked how she, and now you, determined the newspaper’s motives.
I can tell you one huge criteria for what is news: irony; e.g. a judge presiding over an obscenity trial makes publicly available sexually explicit photos and videos that strike some reasonable people as offensive. Of course, only a jury from the community decides what sexually explicit materials go so far as to be obscene, which is what was about to take place in Los Angeles last week.
Comment by Larry Reilly — 6/16/2008 @ 7:05 am
16.
Mr. Reilly,
I’m sorry. I just meant to say that she’s right that the paper had the material for months.
As to why they waited, I suspect that you’re correct about the irony aspect.
Comment by Patterico — 6/16/2008 @ 7:09 am
17.
My brother went to law school with Alex Kozinski. And he had a rough and controversial sense of humor then. I’m not surprised that his sense of humor has not changed. It’s not my sense of humor. But I have learned that many good people differ from my own perceptions of “jokes.”
But I would venture a guess that people tend to forgive “Person A” of bad taste if they like “Person A,” and then attack “Person B” horrifically for the same “crime”—if they don’t like “Person B.”
Too often, it is about partisan politics. Or vindictiveness.
Should Judge Kozinski have controlled access to that server? Yep. Is the material on that server a good reason for a mistrial? Maybe. Do we really and truly want to start down this road on the personal lives of public figures? Heck, I remember the Clarence Thomas mess. Many people attacked Judge Thomas for his supposed video rental history, or “dirty jokes” based on hearsay. Yet those same people waved off Bill Clinton’s antics in the White House. The difference, as far too often nowadays, is politics. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
I think that the best rule of thumb is this one: imagine the rule or judgement you wish to apply in the hands of your bitterest and most venal enemy. Because that is what will happen.
I’m also disturbed by the “anon” post above. If someone has harassed another person—FILE THE COMPLAINT. Talking about it later, without proof, just attracts false accusers, and gives them freedom to besmirch the reputations of others with impunity.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
Comment by Eric Blair — 6/16/2008 @ 7:12 am
18.
Of course, only a jury from the community decides what sexually explicit materials go so far as to be obscene, which is what was about to take place in Los Angeles last week.
If there was one judge who would have looked deeply into the theory that a local jury satisfy’s Miller’s “community standards” test in an otherwise entirely federal case, it would have been Kozinski. Too bad.
Comment by nk — 6/16/2008 @ 7:16 am
19.
If you want something to be truly private, don’t put it on a network designed to be accessible around the world.
Your home is private, yes? But how can that be, when it’s on a public street?
Comment by Jim Treacher — 6/16/2008 @ 7:16 am
20.
I sympathize with this woman UP TO A POINT.
It’s disgusting (but not surprising) that a ’serial plaintiff’ like Sanai and a leftist rag like the LA Times would time this hit piece to do maximum damage.
HOWEVER – if you are in a position of authority where ethical behavior is expected – judge, teacher, day care supervisor, etc. – you should have more brains than to store your private “raunchy material” in a place NOT ACCESSIBLE TO THE PUBLIC, especially if you A) are in a position to rule on a case which deals with pornography in any way, and B) generate enemies in your line of work.
To store these materials of “questionable taste” on a server accessible to the public is simply stupid.
Look, I’ve got stuff on my hard drive I wouldn’t exactly want my mom, my employer, or my local TV station to know I have. I’m guessing anyone reading this sentence does, too. That’s why right now at my house, my computer is off, my server is password-protected, and my son won’t be allowed unsupervised access to the internet until he has a drivers license.
C’mon, use some brains.
Comment by Not Tony — 6/16/2008 @ 7:19 am
21.
…the LA Times story, authored by Scott Glover, is riddled with half-truths, gross mischaracterizations and outright lies.
Just another day at the office on Spring Street–no matter if the Times’ or Mrs. K’s version, or a mixture of the two, is correct.
Comment by Patricia — 6/16/2008 @ 7:41 am
22.
– A newspaper – especially a major newspaper as the Los Angeles Times purports to be – is supposed to be a responsible member of the community, not a predator. –
.
LOL. I’ve NEVER seen a media organ that deserve being approached carelessly, as though it was something other than a hungry predator.
.
The line of “responsibility” is described in well-known cases: Pentagon papers, Falwell v. Flynt, etc.
Comment by cboldt — 6/16/2008 @ 7:56 am
23.
Thanks for allowing Ms. Tiffany to fill in the facts of the story. To me this whole thing smelled of “smear campaign” from the beginning, and now I’m convinced.
Comment by Amy Peikoff — 6/16/2008 @ 7:56 am
24.
People you are talking about the LA Times… Nobody should ever expect truth or even common sense from those people.
Comment by John — 6/16/2008 @ 8:05 am
25.
Right on, Ms. Tiffany: this liberal’s on your, and A.K.’s side on this one.
Anon: so, why’d you persuade your girlfriend NOT to make a complaint?
Karen: “I don’t think a picture of a guy dressed as a priest with a CHILD giving him oral sex is “acceptable humor”. How is that funny?” http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Ask the major networks; evidently someone else thinks the same joke is funny (30 seconds ofinternet research yields the following compilation; I’m betting cable shows would yield WAY raunchier stuff):
“The U.S. Cardinals said they are going to develop a code of ethics to help them deal with the sexual scandal. Wait a minute, I thought their already was a code of ethics, it’s called the Bible.” —Jay Leno
“I read this in the paper this morning: New York City has a priest shortage. So you see, there is some good news in the world. … To give you an idea how bad it is, earlier today in Brooklyn an alter boy had to grope himself.” —David Letterman
“As you’ve probably heard, the Pope has asked all the Cardinals to return to Rome. You know how they got them all to come back? They told them that there was going to be a performance by the Vienna Boys Choir.” —Jay Leno
“The Cardinals will be staying at the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the new hotel at the Vatican, where turn down service means the bell boy isn’t interested.” —Daily Show host Jon Stewart
“They say (the Pledge of Allegiance) violates the separation of church and state. How about the separation of church and altar boy? That’s what I’m worried about.” —Jay Leno
“Cardinal Law had difficulty with his memory under oath today. He could only remember three commandments. Under oath, Cardinal Law said ‘I do not recall’ 43 times. I’m telling you, this guy is presidential material.” —David Letterman
“The House Transportation Committee is now considering a bill that would allow pilots to carry guns for protection. I’ve got a better idea, why not give guns to altar boys, give them a fighting chance.” —Jay Leno
“In Boston, it looks like Cardinal Bernard Law isn’t going to be punished. It turns out he’s getting transferred to Rome, which is kind of like a promotion. He said today he wanted to thank all the little people.” —Jay Leno
“The Catholic Church is finally cracking down. Here’s the deal now: if a priest is transferred to another parish, he cannot take his live-in boyfriend.” —David Letterman
“The Catholic Church has just opened a new $2 million cathedral in Los Angeles. They really spared no expense. Each confessional has a panic button in it.” —David Letterman
“The Church reaffirming celibacy — it’s kind of like Clinton reaffirming monogamy.” —Jay Leno
“The big Vatican summit wrapped up, closing ceremonies were Harry Connick Jr. The Vatican is taking a tough stand now, three strikes and you’re transferred.” —David Letterman
“This is the last Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Next year, boys will be involved too. I guess the church lobbied pretty hard on that one.” —Jay Leno
“After all these scandals in the church, many Roman Catholics are calling for an end to celibacy. And end to celibacy, how about starting celibacy? Let’s at least try it to see if it works.” —Jay Leno
“Pope has called all the U.S. cardinals back to the Vatican. He’s going to have Italy’s top soccer coach talk to them. I believe the topic is how to do your job without using your hands.” —Jay Leno
“Today the Catholic Church unveiled its new policy. Don’t ask, don’t confess.” —Jay Leno
“Isn’t it crazy with all these church scandals? I’m beginning to understand how all those Bibles ended up in hotel rooms.” —Jay Leno
“This week hundreds of bishops arrived in Dallas for their annual convention. You know what that means? Party. Party. Party. A couple of bellboys are being carried over the threshold tonight.” —Jay Leno
“There is a big conference of Catholic Bishops in Dallas. Well this is great for the city, it brings in about $12 million in hush money.” —David Letterman
“The Supreme Court ruled today that virtual child pornography is legal. Finally, some good news for the church.” —Jay Leno
“Bush said we’re going after white-collar criminals and I’m thinking ‘Gee I wish the Catholic church would do that.’” —David Letterman
“Kids, if you see an ad that says Cardinals looking for a bat boy, watch out, that has nothing to do with the baseball team.” —Jay Leno http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
