On The Gist, the latest in the Mueller report saga.
In the interview, the Kentucky Derby is this Saturday, but this year, the horse racing event is overshadowed by high fatality rates among equines in California's Santa Anita Park: 23 have died in just three months. Peter Fornatale follows the races closely, and sees mismanagement on both the park’s track and in the appeasement measures that followed: “[It] sort of reminded me of the classic politician’s trick of ‘you don’t like the conversation, okay, let’s change the conversation.’”
On March 25, 2019, the Supreme Court heard argument in The Dutra Group v. Batterton, a case considering whether punitive damages may be awarded in a general maritime action for unseaworthiness. Christopher Batterton was a deckhand on a ship owned by the Dutra Group. In the course of Batterton's work, a hatch cover that covered a compartment storing pressurized air blew open and crushed Batterton’s left hand. The hatch cover allegedly blew because of the ship's lack of a mechanism for exhausting over-pressurized air. Batterton was permanently disabled because of the injury. He brought suit against Dutra Group in federal district court in California, seeking (among other things) punitive damages for unseaworthiness. Dutra Group moved to dismiss the claim for punitive damages, arguing that although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had allowed such damages in its 1987 decision Evich v. Morris, that precedent had been implicitly overruled by the Supreme Court's 1990 decision in Miles v. Apex Marine Corp, which held that the parent of a deceased seaman could not recover loss of society damages in a general maritime action. The district court denied the motion and the Ninth Circuit affirmed, concluding that punitive damages differed materially from loss of society damages, and that, under the Jones Act, Evich remained good law: punitive damages are awardable to seamen for their own injuries in general maritime unseaworthiness actions. That ruling, however, put the Ninth Circuit in direct conflict with a contrary ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on the same issue, and the Supreme Court subsequently granted certiorari to address whether punitive damages may be awarded to a Jones Act seaman in a personal-injury suit alleging a breach of the general maritime duty to provide a seaworthy vessel. To the discuss the case, we have Daryl Joseffer, Senior Vice President and Chief Counsel for Appellate Litigation at the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center.
Humanitarian aid organizations often find themselves torn by reasonable expectations – to address a pressing crisis and to show that what they are doing is actually helping. While these might not seem at odds, in practice, says Monika Krause, they often do.
Krause, an assistant professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, is the author of The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason, an award-winning book from 2014. In her research, she conducted in-depth interviews with “desk officers” across a range of transnational non-governmental organizations (NGO) that respond to emergencies around the world distributing aid to save lives. (“For me,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “headquarters themselves were the field.”)
While she found that NGOs were “relatively autonomous,” their donors put pressure on them “to demonstrate results, and that pressure to show evidence, measurable results, may incentivize NGOs to do projects that are relatively easy to do. It certainly encourages NGOs to do kinds of work, and kinds of projects, where the success is more easily measured rather than other ones.”
While they may resemble businesses in some respect – and some use that observation as a pejorative, Krause notes -- they don’t distribute aid by purchasing power, as a private sector organization would, but rather by need.
The mechanics of this has meant that NGOs have become more focused on being accountable to the beneficiaries “rather than focus on more abstract and large-scale indicators” such as gross domestic product or greater employment which may ultimately improve the beneficiaries’ ecosystem. It also means, in practice, that NGOs focus on meeting the metrics they set at the beginning of a project, which may not serve the entirety of an affected population in crisis. And so, “beneficiaries can become a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.”
That people outside an NGO feel comfortable critiquing them reflects the unique role that NGOs, as opposed to say private businesses, occupy. “[NGOs] seem to represent or speak for our highest ideals as individuals and as humankind,” Krause says, which in turn can foster a sort of cynicism when the ideals the larger community expects aren’t met.
This tension has always intrigued the researcher, who had earlier won an ESRC Future Research Leaders Award to explore how organizations with values-based missions make decisions on how to deploy resources and who to help. In studying NGOs for The Good Project, “I was interested in the middle space, figuring out exactly how they do their work, how they confront the dilemmas that they must be facing ... about what to respond to and what not to respond to.”
Krause came to the London School of Economics in 2016 from Goldsmiths College, and at LSE is co-director of LSE Human Rights, a center for academic research, teaching and critical scholarship on human rights. In addition to her work on the logic of humanitarian aid, she is interested in the history of the social sciences and in social theory. Krause was a Poiesis Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at her alma mater of New York University and a member of the Junior Fellows’ network at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld. She was a core fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies 2016-17.
Back in 2014, Bill Nye The Science Guy was skeptical of genetically modified foods, or GMOs. It raised some eyebrows when he abruptly changed his mind after visiting Monsanto - the huge biochemical agriculture company that was acquired by Bayer. What changed his mind on the trip? Are GMOs good or bad? Plus: in our Customer Service segment, how Vicks VapoRub became a much-loved "cure-all."
On The Gist, the New Yorker’s profile of John Bolton.
In the interview, coders have gone from a band of misfits to rulers of Silicon Valley. Clive Thompson is out with a book about that evolution, which examines the reckless product design stoked by the pursuit of hockey-stick revenue growth and a lack of workplace diversity—whether across gender, socio-economic class, or even age. “The ageism is where some of the trouble begins because you don't have people around that can tell you 'oh, we went through this rodeo 15 years ago,’” Thompson says. He is the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.
In the Spiel, Stacey Abrams isn’t running for Senate in Georgia.
In an exclusive interview, former Border Patrol chief Mark Morgan shares with The Daily Signal's Rob Bluey why it's urgent we take action on the border crisis, and the importance of building a wall. We also cover these stories:•Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., shares what he saw on a recent trip to the border.•President Trump is requesting Congress send $4.5 billion in emergency funding to cope with the border crisis.•Attorney General William Barr is grilled at a contentious hearing about how he handled the release of the Mueller report. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show!
Anti-Semitism is disturbingly on the rise in America. In fact, most religion-based hate crimes in America are against Jews. Congressman Lee Zeldin has fought anti-Semitism on the front lines in Congress -- and he sits on the same committee as freshman congresswoman Ilhan Omar. We also cover these stories:•The Trump administration moves to protect the conscience rights of health-care workers.•House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that Attorney General William Barr should be considered a criminal.•Nick Sandmann’s legal team is suing NBCUniversal and MSNBC for $275 million.The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show!
