Defending Jacob Quotes

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead.

The interior of a teenager’s mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever.

An emotion is a thought, yes, an idea, but it is also a sensation, an ache in your body. Desire, love, hate, fear, repulsion - you feel these things in your muscle and bones, not just in your mind.

Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you

no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed

Predisposition is not predestination.

the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

...don't worry about how things look. People are going to think whatever they think. To hell with 'em. You can't worry about it.

We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls.

but good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones.

So I got on with the business of lawyering away at the evidence. Minimizing it. Defending Jacob.

I admit--no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed-

I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions-guilty/innocent, criminal/victim-cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

So, if it's an axe weilding maniac reeking bloody havoc all over the neighborhood, exactly what are we going to defend ourselves with, our boners?" Callum to Jacob

I have an idea that is is what enduring love really means, Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.

A good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it. A single word or gesture, a tone of voice can conjure up so many remembrances.

A jury verdict is just a guess - a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote.

The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance....

Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you.

You're staring.' 'You're my wife. I'm allowed to stare.' 'Is that the rule?' 'Yes. Stare, leer, ogle, anything I want. Trust me. I'm a lawyer.

This is the best thing about men's friendships: most any awkwardness can be ignored by mutual agreement and, true connection being unimaginable, you can get on with the easier business of parallel living.

At seventeen, I knew: my entire childhood had been just a prelude to this girl. I had never felt anything like it, and still haven't. I felt changed by her, physically. I became a different person, myself, the person I am now. And everything that came after-my family, my home, our entire life together-was a gift she gave me.

It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these "soft" problems in the land of After.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe.

I had a childish attraction to men of my father's generation, as if I still harbored a faint hope of being unorphaned, even at this late date.

But then, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels.

I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.

We’re not arguing. We’re discussing.” “You’re a lawyer; you don’t know the difference. I’m arguing.

Every father knows the disconcerting when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self...made real and flesh. He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in your environment that confirm your preconceived ideas and not see things that conflict with what you already believe. I think maybe something like that happens with kids. You see what you want to see.

Try to relax," he suggested as another shiver rippled through me violently. "You'll be warm in a minute. Of course, you'd warm up faster if you took your clothes off." Edward growled sharply. "That's just a simple fact," Jacob defended himself. "Survival 101.

The leopard in the zoo wanders to the edge of his pen and, through the bars or across an unjumpable moat, he stares at you with contempt for your inferiority, for needing that barrier between you. There is a shared understanding in that moment, nonverbal but no less real: the leopard is predator and you are prey, and it is only the barrier that permits us humans to feel superior and secure. That feeling, standing at the leopard’s cage, is edged with shame, at the animal’s superior strength, at his hauteur, his low estimation of you.

You have to follow your intuition. That is what expertise is: all the experience, the cases won and lost, the painful mistakes, all the technical details you learn by rote repetition, over time these things leave you with an instinctive sense of your craft. A "gut" for it.

A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who's been indicted.

Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking,

such a thing as too much attention?” “When you aren’t strong enough to defend yourself?” I ask, voice hard. “Yeah.

There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea -- the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

All they got locked up in this hole is my body. That's all they got, my body, not me. I'm everywhere, see? Everywhere you look, junior, everywhere you go.

Somewhere she had learned that if an interviewer remains silent, the interviewee will rush to fill the silence.

I don't want you to say anything. I want you to listen. You know, being confident isn't the same as being right.

It turns out, you can get used to almost anything. What one day seems a shocking, unbearable outrage over time comes to seem ordinary, unremarkable.

On the whole it is certainly not necessary. Nothing can better defend us than nature itself, which has let certain flowers and leaves grow in a particular color and shape. People who do not find them beneficial, suitable for their special needs, which cannot be known, can easily walk right by them. But they cannot demand that the flowers and leaves be colored and cut in another way.

The rest-the vast majority, tens of thousands of days-are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest. We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories...But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and 'The End' is never the end.

The truth is, the best win-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it.

We must have seemed just like everyone else, which, when you get down to it, is all I ever wanted.

Studies have shown that fathers of murdered children often die within a few years of the murder, often of heart failure. Really, they die of grief.

We both love him. I’m just saying, you can love your child and still see his flaws. You have to see his flaws, otherwise how can you help him?

Even the wettest violence, in the end, is cooked down to the stuff of court cases; a ream of paper, a few exhibits, a dozen...witnesses. The world looks away, and why not?

A hint of nonconformity was all he would risk.

efficiently the system worked. A courthouse is a factory, sorting violence into a taxonomy of crimes, processing

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead

School isn’t supposed to be dangerous. It’s not a place they should be afraid of. It’s their second home. It’s where they spend most of their waking hours.

....I never expected to lose in court. In practice, I did lose, of course. Every lawyer loses, just as every baseball player makes an out seventy percent of the time he goes to bat.

My childhood ended that summer. I learned the word murder. But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that...You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to...see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you.

Before, she had this way of focusing on whomever she spoke to, so that you felt you were the most impossibly captivating person in the room; now, her eyes wandered and she seemed not to be in the room herself.

The truth is, the best won-lost records are not built on great trial work. They are built on cherry-picking only the strongest cases for trial and pleading out the rest, regardless of the right and wrong of it.

both remembered how it all started, and even now, in the middle of my middle age, when I think of that shining young girl, I still feel a little thrill of first love, still there, still burning like a pilot light.

She did not want to go but understood that I was uneasy, that I felt spotlighted here, that I was not much of a talker to begin with -- chitchat in crowded rooms always left me exhausted -- and these things all had to be weighed.

This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

With the minivan in the air, rolling counterclockwise, the engine racing, Laurie screaming -- a fraction of a second, that's all -- Jacob would have thought of me -- who had held him, my own baby, looked down into his eyes -- and he would have understood I loved him, no matter what, to the very end -- as he saw the concrete wall flying forward to meet him.

Why risk the rare happy marriage-rarer still, a love marriage that endures-for something as common and toxic as complete, unthinking, transparent honesty? Who would be helped by my telling? Me? not at all. I was made of steel, I promise you.

In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest—the vast majority, tens of thousands of days—are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous.

Out popped Paul Duffy, in plain clothes except for a state police windbreaker and a badge clipped to his belt. He looked at me - I think by now I had dropped the bat to my side, at least, though I must have looked ridiculous anyway - and he raised his eyebrows. 'Get back in the house, Babe Ruth.

in the living room, old grandmas, baby cousins.

We were too sick of the case to talk about it anymore but too obsessed with it to talk about anything else.

liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who’s been indicted.

The girl was about to cry, which reminded me of the grown woman I had just left on the sidewalk also near tears. Jesus, there was no escaping them.

one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but after all, we were children.

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents’ children and we become our children’s parents instead.

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents’ children and we become our children’s parents instead. What

Like I knew it was bad. And there were these posters.

The iPod was a leak. It was a danger. I brought it down to the basement and laid it on my little worktable, glass side up, and I got a hammer and smashed it.

Parents of murdered children have it worst, and to me the fathers have it even worse than the mothers because they are taught to be stoic, to “act like a man.

You can’t do it alone, that’s the thing. You have to remember there are other people out there who have gone through it, who know what you’re going through.

I used to wonder what it would be like if a magical amnesia descended and erased my mind completely, leaving only a body and some sort of blank self, all potential, all soft clay.

Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines.

no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but

Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality. We do not punish the leopard for its wildness.

It is a childish realization, I admit—no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but after all, we were children.

Predisposition is not predestination. We humans are much, much more than our DNA.

Grand juries serve for months, and they figure out pretty quickly what the gig is all about: accuse, point your finger, name the wicked one. A

some point as adults we cease to be our parents’ children and we become our children’s parents

It is, of course, the last resort of a liar to challenge his inquisitor to call him a liar directly.

narcissistic personality disorder. This is the one you probably know something about. Its primary characteristics are grandiosity and lack of empathy.

NPD is not a chemical imbalance. And it is not genetic. It is a complex of behaviors, a deeply ingrained habit.

I did not usually feel that sort of passion about any case, but I disliked this murderer already. For murdering, yes, but also for fucking with us. For refusing to submit.

Witness: I thought it was a mistake. Based on what we knew at the time, it was a mistake to turn away from Patz as a suspect so early in the investigation.

But things were racing too fast to linger over the past or future. There was only now.

There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—“the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

A good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it.

Anyway, the point is, I just think we flatter ourselves when we say we can engineer our kids to be this way or that way. It’s mostly just hardwired.

Why risk the rare happy marriage—rarer still, a love marriage that endures—for something as common and as toxic as complete, unthinking, transparent honesty?

He was just innocent. With the best intentions, he smashed people’s lives and never lost a minute of sleep over it. He only went after bad guys, after all. That

could make a decision about whether to call Dr. Vogel as a witness

Also, it must be said, I had a childish attraction to men of my father's generation, as if I still harbored a faint hope of being unorphaned, even at this late date.

A jury could only declare my son 'not guilty', never 'innocent'.

good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones.

the sky, settling in

(I am as conventional as white toast.)

For all we have learned, the fact remains that we do not understand in any meaningful way why people do what they do, and likely never will.

understood that the actual reason courtrooms often have no windows is to prevent the parties from heaving lawyers out of them.

Ninguém a quem valha a pena conhecer pode ser propriamente conhecido. Ninguém que valha a pena possuir pode ser realmente possuído.

But Ben Rifkin lay in a refrigerated drawer in the M.E.’s office while my son lay in his warm bed, with nothing but luck to separate the one from the other.

Somebody stitched three holes in a line across that boy’s chest and left nothing to indicate who or why.

actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—“the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

...no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed...

Don't worry about how things look. People are going to think whatever they think. The hell with 'em. You can't worry about it.

A liberal, it turns out, is a conservative who’s been indicted.

there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law’s little binary distinctions—guilty/innocent, criminal/victim—cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

Well,” he said, “it’s a very circumstantial case. There’s the thumbprint,

And we would always be shaped by the experience, in ways we could not guess at the time.

you can love your child and still see his flaws. You have to see his flaws, otherwise how can you help him?

We do not punish the leopard for its wildness.

Every criminal is still a man, a complex of good and bad, fully deserving of our empathy and mercy.

It is a common architectural strategy to build courtrooms without windows, to enhance the effect of a chamber isolated from the everyday world, a theater for the great and timeless work of the law.

This is the best thing about men’s friendships: most any awkwardness can be ignored by mutual agreement and, true connection being unimaginable, you can get on with the easier business of parallel living.

crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

defendant … snap. “So what was that trigger? What was it that converted a fantasy of murder into the real thing?” He paused. It was the central question to be answered, the riddle Logiudice simply had to solve: how does a normal

That is what expertise is: all the experience, the cases won and lost, the painful mistakes, all the technical details you learn by rote repetition, over time these things leave you with an instinctive sense of your craft. A “gut” for it.

I never argue,” Jacobs said. “That’s because you don’t know this kind of ignorance,” Rayber explained. “You’ve never experienced it.” Jacobs snorted. “Oh yes I have,” he said. “What happened?” “I never argue.” “But you know you’re right,” Rayber persisted. “I never argue.” “Well, I’m going to argue,” Rayber said. “I’m going to say the right thing as fast as they can say the wrong. It’ll be a question of speed. Understand,” he went on, “this is no mission of conversion; I’m defending myself.” “I understand that,” Jacobs said. “I hope you’re able to do it.” “I’ve already done it! You read the paper. There it is.” Rayber wondered if Jacobs were dense or preoccupied. “Okay, then leave it there. Don’t spoil your complexion arguing with barbers.

They were chosen for their perfect ignorance of these things. That is how the system works. In the end, the lawyers and judges happily step aside and hand the entire process over to a dozen complete amateurs. It would be funny if it were not so perverse.

This”—she pinched the skin of her own arm and pulled up a sample of her own flesh—“the human body is a machine. It is a system, a very complex system made of molecules and driven by chemical reactions and electrical impulses. Our minds are part of that system.

The town’s young parents especially prized this idea of Newton as a child’s paradise. Many of them had left the hip, sophisticated city to move here. They had accepted massive expenses, stultifying monotony, and the queasy disappointment of settling for a conventional life. To

I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known. Laurie

At seventeen, I knew: my entire childhood had been just a prelude to this girl. I had never felt anything like it, and still haven't. I felt changed by her, physically. I became a different person, myself, the person I am now. And everything that came after-my family, my home, our entire life together-was a gift she gave me.

I did not speak. I have found in any Q&A, in court, in witness interviews, wherever, often the best thing you can do is wait, say nothing. The witness will want to fill the awkward silence. He will feel a vague compassion to keep talking, to prove he is not holding back, to prove he is smart and in the know, to earn your trust.

I do not believe in the court system, at least I do not think it is especially good at finding the truth. No lawyer does. We have all seen too many mistakes, too many bad results. A jury verdict is just a guess—a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual. I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard.

But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that. You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to pace around and around it, see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you. You have to hold it inside yourself in secret for years, like the hideous stone inside a peach. How

The towering lie of the criminal justice system—that we can reliably determine the truth, that we can know “beyond a reasonable doubt” who is guilty and who is not—is built on this whopper of an admission: after a thousand years or so of refining the process, judges and lawyers are no more able to say what is true than a dozen knuckleheads selected at random off the street.

I could not help seeing in Laurie the ghost of her younger self, the teenaged girl with a lovely, full, heart-shaped face. I have an idea that this is what enduring love really means. Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known. Laurie

keep me on the payroll, but I could not stay there, not as a charity case. Laurie might be able to go back to teaching, but we would not be able to pay the bills on her income alone. This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

I have in mind an experiment. Take an infant—regardless of ancestry, race, talent, or predilection, so long as he is essentially healthy—and I will make of him whatever you like. I will produce an artist, soldier, doctor, lawyer, priest; or I will raise him to be a thief. You may decide. The infant is equally capable of all these things. All that is required is training, time, and a properly controlled environment.

I was greeted at the Magraths’ apartment door by a dumpy, pie-faced woman with a frizz of unsprung black hair. She wore black spandex leggings and an oversized T-shirt with an equally oversized message stamped across the front: Don’t Give Me Attitude, I Have One of My Own. This witticism ran six full lines, drawing my eyes southward over her person from wavering bosom to detumescent belly, a journey I regret even now.

Her left hand dangled from the armrest, her long fingers and beautiful clear nails. She always had lovely, elegant hands; my own mother’s fat-fingered scrubwoman hands looked like dog’s paws beside Laurie’s. I reached across to take her hand, lacing my fingers in hers so that our two hands made one fist. The sight of her hand in mine made me briefly sentimental. I gave her an encouraging look and jostled our knotted hands.

Let us be practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law.… [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African savannah three million or so years ago. Now, let us agree that we may pronounce whatever laws we like for this clever little creature, still it would be unwise to pet him.

But then, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels. Me, I told myself that in court I could make things turn out right—that when I won, justice was served. You can get drunk on such thinking, and in Jacob’s case I was.

There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—“the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.” That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality. We do not punish the leopard for its wildness.

I have in mind an experiment. Take an infant—regardless of ancestry, race, talent, or predilection, so long as he is essentially healthy—and I will make of him whatever you like. I will produce an artist, soldier, doctor, lawyer, priest; or I will raise him to be a thief. You may decide. The infant is equally capable of all these things. All that is required is training, time, and a properly controlled environment.” —JOHN F. WATKINS,    Principles of Behaviorism (1913)

In court, the thing we punish is the criminal intention. -the mens rea, the guilty mind. There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea - "the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty." That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality.

Let us be practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law.… [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African savannah three million or so years ago. Now, let us agree that we may pronounce whatever laws we like for this clever little creature, still it would be unwise to pet him.” —REYNARD THOMPSON, A General Theory of Human Violence (1921)

Next to me was Jacob, this riddle Laurie and I had made. His size, his resemblance to me, the likelihood that he would fill out and come to resemble me even more - all this shattered me. Every father knows the disconcerting moment when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self, stand right up in front of you, made real and flesh. He is you and not you, familiar and strange.

Let us be practical in our expectations of the Criminal Law.… [For] we have merely to imagine, by some trick of time travel, meeting our earliest hominid ancestor, Adam, a proto-man, short of stature, luxuriantly furred, newly bipedal, foraging about on the African savannah three million or so years ago. Now, let us agree that we may pronounce whatever laws we like for this clever little creature, still it would be unwise to pet him.” —REYNARD THOMPSON,    A General Theory of Human Violence (1921)

Precisely how the electrical signals and chemical reactions occurring second by second in the human body make the leap to thought, motivation, impulse—where the physical machinery of man stops and the ghost in the machine, consciousness, begins—is not truly a scientific question, for the simple reason that we cannot design an experiment to capture, measure or duplicate it. For all we have learned, the fact remains that we do not understand in any meaningful way why people do what they do, and likely never will.

At two o’clock, Paul and I commandeered the principal’s office and together we interviewed the highest-priority witnesses: the victim’s close friends, a few kids who were known to walk to school through Cold Spring Park, and those who specifically requested to speak with the investigators. Two dozen interviews were scheduled for the two of us. Other CPAC detectives would conduct interviews at the same time. Most we expected to be brief and yield nothing. We were trawling, dragging our net along the sea bottom, hoping.

Life goes on, probably too long if we’re being honest about it. In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest—the vast majority, tens of thousands of days—are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest. We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories, as I am doing here. But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and “The End” is never the end.

Now, this was not exactly true. I do not believe in the court system, at least I do not think it is especially good at finding the truth. No lawyer does. We have all seen too many mistakes, too many bad results. A jury verdict is just a guess—a well-intentioned guess, generally, but you simply cannot tell fact from fiction by taking a vote. And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual. I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard. Of course, Logiudice

Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free—those "errors" we recognize and accept. They are the predictable result of stacking the deck in defendants' favor as we do. The real surprise is the frequency of false positives, the innocent men found guilty. That error rate we do not acknowledge—do not even think about—because it calls so much into question. The fact is, what we call proof is as fallible as the witnesses who produce it, human beings all. Memories fail, eyewitness identifications are notoriously unreliable, even the best-intentioned cops are subject to failures of judgment and recall. The human element in any system is always prone to error.

stupid things. The interior of a teenager’s mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever; this was just a case of Stupid winning a battle. Considering the pressure Jake was under and the fact he’d been practically locked up in the house for months, and now the growing clamor as the trial approached, it was understandable. Could you really hold the kid responsible for every tasteless, tactless, brainless thing he said? What kid would not begin to act a little crazy in Jacob’s situation? Anyway, who among us would be judged by the dumbest things we did as teenagers? I told myself these things, I marshaled my arguments as I’d been trained to do, but I could not get that boy’s cry out of my head: “Stop, you’re hurting me.” And something in me tore open. I don’t know how else to put it. I still would not admit doubt into my thinking. I still believed in Jacob and, God knows, I still loved him, and there was no evidence—no real proof—of anything. The lawyer in me understood all this. But the part of

Now the remarkable thing here is that it is not Hiawatha who passes through death and emerges reborn, as might be expected, but the god. It is not man who is transformed into a god, but the god who undergoes transformation in and through man. It is as though he had been asleep in the “mother,” i.e., in Hiawatha’s unconscious, and had then been roused and fought with so that he should not overpower his host, but should, on the contrary, himself experience death and rebirth, and reappear in the corn in a new form beneficial to mankind. Consequently he appears at first in hostile form, as an assailant with whom the hero has to wrestle. This is in keeping with the violence of all unconscious dynamism. In this manner the god manifests himself and in this form he must be overcome. The struggle has its parallel in Jacob’s wrestling with the angel at the ford Jabbok. The onslaught of instinct then becomes an experience of divinity, provided that man does not succumb to it and follow it blindly, but defends his humanity against the animal nature of the divine power. It is “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” and “whoso is near unto me, is near unto the fire, and whoso is far from me, is far from the kingdom”; for “the Lord is a consuming fire,” the Messiah is “the Lion of the tribe of Judah”:

What the “geniuses [who] went to Philadelphia” wanted remains the subject of endless debate—a debate fueled by the real differences among them and the very real ambiguities of the compromises they forged. But James Madison did not go to Philadelphia seeking gridlock. Quite the opposite: The Virginian who played such a critical role in the nation’s founding led the charge for a powerful national government. He pushed for a new constitution specifically because its predecessor, the Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1777, had been a catastrophe—a decentralized arrangement too weak to hold the country together or confront pressing problems that needed collective solutions. Madison arrived at the convention with one firm conviction: Government needed the authority to govern.29 In the deliberations that followed, Madison stayed true to that cause. He argued tirelessly for the power of the federal government to be understood broadly and for it to be decisively superior to the states. He even supported an absolute federal veto over all state laws, likening it to “gravity” in the Newtonian framework of the new federal government.30 Most of the concessions to state governments in the final document were ones that Madison had opposed. He was a practical politician, and he ultimately defended these compromises in the public arena—the famed Federalist Papers Madison penned with his colleagues Alexander Hamilton and John Jay are an advertisement, not a blueprint—but he did so because he saw them as necessary, not because he saw them as ideal.31 Throughout, Madison kept his eyes on the prize: enactment of the more vital and resilient government he regarded as a national imperative.

Does that sound awful to you? I hear the little voice in your head: Destruction of evidence! Obstruction of justice! You are naive. You imagine the courts are reliable, that wrong results are rare, and therefore I ought to have trusted the system. If he truly believed Jacob was innocent, you are thinking, he would have simply let the police sweep in and take whatever they liked. Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free—those “errors” we recognize and accept. They are the predictable result of stacking the deck in defendants’ favor as we do. The real surprise is the frequency of false positives, the innocent men found guilty. That error rate we do not acknowledge—do not even think about—because it calls so much into question. The fact is, what we call proof is as fallible as the witnesses who produce it, human beings all. Memories fail, eyewitness identifications are notoriously unreliable, even the best-intentioned cops are subject to failures of judgment and recall. The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking, and there was no way in hell I was going to trust my son’s fate to it. Not because I believed he was guilty, I assure you, but precisely because he was innocent. I was doing what little I could to ensure the right result, the just result. If you do not believe me, go spend a few hours in the nearest criminal court, then ask yourself if you really believe it is error-free. Ask yourself if you would trust your child to it.

God of unrighteousness (compare Romans 9:14). Therefore, Paul clarifies collective identity in Romans 9 just as he does in Romans 2–4. To defend God’s honor, Paul rebuffs Jewish presumption. God’s election of Israel doesn’t imply that he is partial to Jews based on ancestral birth. The Pentateuch itself undermines that assumption. Although Abraham already had Ishmael, God chose Isaac (Romans 9:7). Likewise, God elects the younger Jacob over Esau despite social convention (Romans 9:12). To clarify who are God’s people, Paul engages in what appears to be doublespeak. He previously argued that both Jews and Gentiles are reckoned as “Abraham’s offspring.” Similarly, Paul challenges typical notions of the term Israel in Romans 9:6-8. Christ redefines Paul’s understanding of Israel. What’s at stake? In Romans 9:14, Paul asks, “What shall we say then? Is there injustice [adikia] on God’s part?” He replies, “By no means!” Verses 15-18 offer support: For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then [ara oun] he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills. God’s covenant promises depend on grace, not nationality or social position. This is Paul’s point in Romans 4:16 when speaking of justification: “That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all.” God is not bound by external measures of justice/righteousness. Cultural norms do not constrain God either to save or condemn. Nor should we think God is only concerned for one expression of righteousness, whether “punitive,” “restorative,” or “covenantal” righteousness. The Creator does all things for his name’s sake. This includes raising up oppressive rulers like Pharaoh (Romans 9:17). Paul reinforces the point in Romans 9:22-24: What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for

Quoting page 56-57: Most important for the content of immigration reform, the driving force at the core of this movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of Congress, particularly representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the 1920s. But the war against Hitler and the postwar movement against colonialism sharply changed the ideological and moral environment, putting defenders of racial, caste, and ethnic hierarchies on the defensive. Jewish political leaders in New York, most prominently Governor Herbert Lehman, had pioneered in the 1940s in passing state antidiscrimination legislation. Importantly, these statutes and executive orders added “national origin” to race, color, and religion as impermissible grounds for discrimination. Following the shock of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had been especially active in Washington in furthering immigration reform. To the public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House, and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.

At the end of August, less than one month after that story was published, a baby-faced white kid named Kyle Rittenhouse drove from his home in Indiana to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where civil unrest had broken out following the police shooting of a Black man named Jacob Blake. Once there, Rittenhouse shot two people to death and maimed a third. He had taken the trip after a local man created a Facebook event calling for volunteers to “take up arms and defend out [sic] City tonight from the evil thugs.” The post, which was also amplified by radio and other media as it began growing in popularity, had been flagged by Facebook users 455 times. Zuckerberg pronounced the company’s failure to remove the event “an operational mistake.

The meaning of a stipulation is that the defense concedes that a fact is true without the prosecutor having to prove it. Both parties agree to the truth of this fact, therefore you may take it as true and proven.

May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble; may the name of the God of Jacob defend you; may He send you help from the sanctuary, and strengthen you out of Zion. Psalm 20:1-2

This relatively hands-off style of rule practiced by the Eastern European empires was born of pragmatism. Social divisions were not a flaw to be overcome, but a tool to be used. In these realms, universal citizenship did not exist. People lived not as individuals but as parts of wider social estates, each of which came with its own set of privileges and prohibitions. Everyone was discriminated against to some extent, except for the sultan or czar. Everyone also had a function. To most people, before the arrival of modernity, the idea of equality before the law was unthinkable. What mattered most in life was to be allowed to fulfill their role undisturbed. Meanwhile, what mattered most to rulers was that the sum total of these various roles added up to them staying in power. For this, outsiders could be just as useful as locals and often showed themselves to be more dependable. The process of inviting helpful strangers into Eastern Europe began very early. Eastern European monarchs began looking abroad for talent in the Middle Ages Compared to Western Europe, the East was under-populated, lacking sities and the specialized craftsmen and traders who inhabited them. Eastern rulers also sat uneasily on the intersection of multiple frontiers: between pagan and Christian, Christian and Muslim, and Catholic and Orthodox. Because of this, they needed all the help they could get cultivating, defending, and administering their realms. In the eleventh century, A Hungarian king lectured his son about the usefulness of immigrants: 'As guests come from various areas and lands, so they bring with them various languages and customs, various examples and forms of armaments, which adorn and glorify the royal court. . . . For a kingdom of one language and one custom is weak and fragile. Therefore, my son, I order that you should feed them with goodwill and honor them so that they will prefer to live with you rather than inhabit any other place.' The young prince took his father's advice to heart. By the thirteenth century, the kingdom of Hungary harbored, within its ragile borders, groups of Jews, Muslims, Armenians, Slavs, Italians, Franks, Spaniards, and Germans

The howl, Doc, not the silence of the lambs, the howl stays with me, I hear it, I scream, I raise my arms to the sky, I try, Doc, I try to defend myself, to protect my soul. Auntie Badeea used to say that jackals have howled at the innocent moon for aeons because they mourn the fact that they are not eternal, that when Death with his pale eyes comes for them they will be no more, unlike us who climb up Jacob's ladder to Heaven in God's embrace or fall to Satan's fiery Hell. I don't think so, Doc, I disagree. Jackals howl because we don't. The howl has been traveling for thousands of years, from the beginning of time, when Adam and Eve tasted the fruit and Satan triumphed and his son, Death, was born, when loss became our intimate, across deserts and seas the howl moves, loaded with dust and grime and brine, searching for souls to remind them to grieve, but we pay little attention, always avoiding, always moving forward, our souls filled with termite holes that the howl passes through, only whistling. Lost we are, so the jackals and coyotes, the wolves red and gray, howl for us, howl at the baby-faced moon.

Well Josie,” my dad turned to me suddenly. “I think you and Samuel have earned the right to name the colt. Whaddya think?” I looked at Samuel expectantly, but he just shrugged, dipping his head in my direction as he deferred to me. “Go ahead, Josie.” “George Frederic Handel,” I said impulsively. Jacob and my dad groaned loudly in unison and hooted in laughing protest. “What the hell kind of name is that, Josie?” My brother howled. “He’s a composer!” I cried out, embarrassed and wishing I had taken a minute to think before I blurted out the first thing that came to my head. A smile played around Samuel’s lips as he joined in the fray. “He wrote the music that Josie played last night at the church service.” “I just thought the colt should have a Christmas name, and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus is synonymous with Christmas!” I defended and then cringed as Jacob and my dad burst out laughing again. My dad wiped tears of mirth from his eyes as he tried to get control of himself. “We’ll call him Handel,” he choked out. “It’s a very nice name, Josie.” He patted my shoulder, still chuckling. I felt like I was ten years old.

Arnold had never given much thought to whether or not he loved America—but now it seemed pretty obvious to him that he didn’t. Not in the way Nathan Hale had loved America. Or even in the way his late father, a Dutch-Jewish refugee, had loved America. In fact, he found the idea of sacrificing his life for his country somewhat abhorrent. Moreover, it wasn’t that he disliked abstract loyalties in general. He loved New York, for instance: Senegalese takeout at three a.m., and strolling through the Botanical Gardens on the first crisp day of autumn, and feeding the peacocks at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. If Manhattan were invaded—if New Jersey were to send an expeditionary force of militiamen across the Hudson River—he’d willingly take up arms to defend his city. He also loved Sandpiper Key in Florida, where they owned a time-share, and maybe Brown University, where he’d spent five years of graduate school. But the United States? No one could mistake his qualified praise for love.

In 1968, the Bears defeated the Green Bay Packers on a “fair-catch kick”—a rare play that’s still in the NFL rulebook. When a team makes a fair catch of a kick, it has the option of attempting a field goal from that very spot, with defenders kept 10 yards away. The Bears defeated the Packers 13-10 on Nov. 3, 1968, when Mac Percival booted a 43-yard field goal in the last minute. The next morning’s Tribune described the fair-catch kick as a “very rare stratagem.

The Temple Pharisees were known as keepers of the tradition, staunch defenders of the Jewish law – and the minutiae with which they had surrounded it. Unlike the Sadducees, ardent foes on the Temple Council, the Pharisees traveled about Judea, lecturing in synagogues and searching out any perceived wrongdoing. Jacob

Whenever you are crying, I will hold you. Whatever you are doing, I'll defend you.

Christ is on both sides: he holdeth up, and throweth down, in one and the same act; he denieth the woman to be his, and is on her side to grace her, to believe that he is her’s. Christ putteth his child away, and he desireth that his child should not be put away from him; he is for Jacob in his wrestling, and as if he were against him, saith, ‘Let me alone.’ Christ here doth both hold and draw, oppose and defend at once.

Caitlin Conn was a lousy liar. In her father’s house, refusing to lie had been rebellion, and under those circumstances the small rebellions kept one sane. You asserted any control you could; you defended any part of your identity you could own. Lying would have been safer, it would have diverted Alasdair’s attention.

Yang Kyoungjong is the only known person in history to fight on 3 sides of a war. He was a Korean soldier captured by the Japanese and sent to fight the USSR, captured by the USSR and sent to fight Germany, captured by Germany and sent to defend Normandy, where he was captured by the Americans.

a prayer that Thomas Cranmer had composed when England was at war with Scotland in 1548: Most merciful God, the Granter of all peace and quietness, the Giver of all good gifts, the Defender of all nations, who hast willed all men to be accounted as our neighbours, and commanded us to love them as ourself, and not to hate our enemies, but rather to wish them, yea and also to do them good if we can: . . . Give to all us desire of peace, unity, and quietness, and a speedy wearisomeness of all war, hostility, and enmity to all them that be our enemies; that we and they may, in one heart and charitable agreement, praise thy most holy name, and reform our lives to thy godly commandments.

Keeping the World Out of the Gospel An overriding principle in understanding how the Antichrist will be identified is the need to keep referring back to the fact that just as the Holy Spirit is preparing the faithful Church for the coming of Christ, the spirit of antichrist is preparing the harlot church for the coming of the Antichrist and False Prophet. This diabolical strategy includes an across-the-board erosion of scriptural standards of ascertaining and defending truth, and the erosion of godly moral standards once the importance of truth has been diminished. Among other things, we note the castigation of doctrine in the Christian media by Paul Crouch of TBN, who denounced doctrine as “excrement” using a vulgar expletive in a broadcast. Doctrine is in fact “didaskin,” that is, the teaching of Jesus.

Love has an immense power. Love is the strongest creative force in life. Love is what makes life meaningful. But love has a very different kind of power compared to what we usually define as power. We are acquainted with the power of the ego, the power of violence, aggression and destructivity. The basic problem for humanity is that people do not grow. That is why we go on writing human history about people like Alexander the Great, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, The stout right-wing Christian Ronald Regan, who murdered Osho, one of the most intelligent spiritual teachers of the 20th century. Osho was elected by Time magazine as one of the most influential people of the 20th century. The murders of John F. Kennedy and Osho caused the United States to regress as a moral, sane and humane country. Initiated sources in the U.S. say that the decision to murder Osho was taken on the highest levels in the U.S and the Vatican. American magazine Elle wrote: "Like Socrates, Osho was considered a corrupter of the morals of young people. Like all true philosophers he demolished a belief system that produced only unhappiness, not joy."The Dalai Lama said: "Osho is an enlightened master who is working with all possibilities to help humanity overcome a difficult phase in developing consciousness.", Joseph Stalin, George W. Bush, who started a war on Iraq built on lies, and murdered 1 million men, women and children to privatize Iraq's oil and sell it at a bargain price to Western oil companies. In modern times, Benjamin Netanyahu is repeating the darkest time in human history that humanity has sworn never to repeat again, by creating a modern concentration camp where defenseless Palestinian men, women and children are killed every day with high-tech weapons. The Western countries look the other way, only saying that Israel has the right to defend itself. Jacob Wallenberg, owner of the Swedish war industry, and the Swedish fascist, racist and bourgeois government, exports weapons to Israel, in order to more effectively murder more women and children per day, Donald Trump is currently dismantling American democracy, education and freedom of speech and is introducing fascism and racism all over the world. These people have a power that is violence, aggression and destruction. It is a power that is against life. It is a power that is against existence. It is a power that is against God. These people are the real psychopaths, narcissists, criminals. who suffer from a deep-seated inferiority complex. History should be erased from these people. Children should not be forced to read about these people and their disgusting and destructive actions. History should be concerned with people like Buddha, Jesus Christ, Kabir, Lao Tzu, Socrates, Rabiya and Osho, who are men and women of love, They are the salt of the earth. These people also have a power, but that is a totally different kind of power, which creates. To be destructive is easy. No intelligence and awareness is needed to be destructive. But to create needs intelligence and awareness. To be creating can only be done by people, who experience love, joy, truth, freedom and beauty. To be creative means to be part of God, because God is the creator. To be creative means to be part of the creativity of God. That is the power of love. The man of love is always creative. Whatsoever he does is creative. And the man of creativity slowly learns about love. Start from love and let love become creativity in your life. Love is our center of being and creativity is our periphery. Love plus creativity is equal to religion.

Like Mencken and Nock, Buchanan evinced a predilection for eyebrow-raising statements about Jews and Germany that testified to an unhealthy obsession with rewriting history. And like Mencken and Nock, he took a jaundiced view of democracy. An admirer of the southern confederacy and a defender of South Africa, he insisted that America was a “republic,” not a “democracy.

In his columns, Buchanan, much like the generation of conservatives immediately after the Second World War had done, consistently referred to the Nuremberg war crimes trials as a form of victor’s justice. In essence, he depicted a moral equivalence between Churchill’s England and Hitler’s Germany. It all came full circle in 1990 when Buchanan defended Saddam Hussein by invoking Hitler’s example in the final days of the Third Reich. It was the height of folly, Buchanan wrote, to insist that Saddam Hussein exit Kuwait. His reputation in the Arab world would be toast. “Even Adolf Hitler,” Buchanan wrote, “preferred to die, a suicide in his bunker, than agree to such a disgrace”—as though Hitler was not already amply disgraced in April 1945.7

We drifted through the days together. But we both remembered how it all started, and even now, in the middle of my middle age, when I think of that shining young girl, I still feel a little thrill of first love, still there, still burning like a pilot light.

Such streets need controls to defend them from the ruin that completely permissive diversity might indeed bring them. But the controls needed are not controls on kinds of uses. The controls needed are controls on the scale of street frontage permitted to a use. This is so obvious and so ubiquitous a city problem that one would think its solution must be among the concerns of zoning theory. Yet the very existence of the problem is not even recognized in zoning theory.

The leopard in the zoo wanders to the edge of his pen and, through the bars or across an unjumpable moat, he stares at you with contempt for your inferiority, for needing that barrier between you, There is a shared understanding in that moment, non verbal but no less real: the leopard is predator and you are prey, and it is only the barrier that permits us humans to feel superior and secure.

I noticed that she said our family

His name is James O’Leary. They call him Father O’Leary. Born February 1943

Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision