Month: February 2022

I just ran across it for the first time, so I thought I’d pass it along; it’s Schoeller v. Bd. of Reg. (Mass. 2012) (opinion by Justice Fernande Duffy):

[T]he Board of Registration of Funeral Directors and Embalmers … permanently revok[ed] Troy J. Schoeller’s licenses to do business in the Commonwealth as a funeral director and embalmer … after Schoeller made comments to a newspaper reporter about his experiences in the embalming profession and those comments were later published as part of an article about Schoeller.

Schoeller did not reveal any confidential or private information about any deceased person or bereaved family members whom he had served. Rather, the board found that Schoeller had violated an ethical regulation prohibiting an embalmer from “comment[ing] on the condition of any dead human body entrusted to his or her care,” 239 Code Mass. Regs. § 3.13(7) (1998), and that he had used unprofessional language in his descriptions of dead bodies. By doing so, the board concluded, Schoeller had “engaged in gross misconduct and unprofessional conduct which undermines the integrity of the profession.” …

The conduct at issue here occurred in late 2006, when a newspaper reporter sought to interview Schoeller about a retail clothing store Schoeller had opened in the Allston section of Boston…. Among the topics discussed that evening was Schoeller’s work as an embalmer, and Schoeller made statements describing certain of his experiences. Approximately one week later, the newspaper published an article about Schoeller that included his comments about embalming[, including:]

“‘The medical examiner cut all the bones out of this infant …,’ Schoeller recalls, ‘and they did a calvarian, which means they cut the top of your head off and take out your brain. So I had a baby that looked like a bear skin rug. I had to rebuild it in nine hours. I used everything: duct tape, masking tape, tissue builder, wound filler. I worked for nine and a half hours…. I put, like, coat hangers and caulk in there and put him into a little baby outfit. He even weighed enough too, because I packed his head and his chest. He looked awesome.’ …

“Looking over the menu … before his wife arrives, Schoeller says he can’t order the chicken satay here because when he got it last time, the skewered meat had fat chunks on it. ‘I can’t eat fat like that,’ he says. ‘And I really hate embalming fat people, like people who weigh 300 pounds. Because when you cut open a fat person,’ he says matter-of-factly, ‘butter leaks out. Literally, yellow oil leaks out of the wound and floats on top of the water. If you put butter in the microwave and put it in the water, it turns into little balls — fat globules — and that’s what comes out of fat dead people. It’s so nasty.'” …

“On the walk home to the couple’s … apartment, Schoeller thinks of something else to tell me. ‘Here’s something my friends find amusing. Decomposing bodies give off methane. What your body does with methane, it puts it all in the same place, which is your bowels. So you actually fart out dead people rot and it smells like the guy you were working on today. I’ll go home and I’ll fart and [my wife] will be like, ‘Oh my God,’ and I’ll be like, ‘That was Mr. Rosenberg [a fictitious name -EV].'”

After seeing Schoeller’s statements in the article, the chapel that employed Schoeller as an embalmer terminated his employment and filed a complaint with the board….

If interpreted literally, the regulation would not only prohibit funeral directors and embalmers from discussing an essential component of their profession in the course of their personal lives, but would also prevent any comment about a deceased’s condition to bereaved family members or to authorities to whom embalmers and funeral directors are required to report. The board has construed § 3.13(7) more narrowly; it submits that the regulation prohibits only the use of “unprofessional language,” which it defines as comments made “in an undignified and salacious manner about the condition of dead bodies.” As construed by the board, § 3.13(7) prohibits an embalmer or funeral director from making any undignified comments about dead human bodies that have ever been entrusted to his or her care, including when made in a private capacity and not as a professional and when the speech is uttered outside of the presence of the deceased or the bereaved….

While the analogy is imperfect, the regulation governing the speech of funeral services professionals, like regulations governing that of attorneys, seeks to restrict speech both when embalmers and funeral directors are acting directly in the performance of their professional capacities and when they are not providing funeral services and are not speaking in the presence of the deceased or bereaved. The board found that Schoeller’s speech, which occurred while he was not rendering professional services, violated § 3.13(7) and “constituted misconduct that undermined the integrity of the profession.” Whether the board may permissibly regulate speech in this context — where the speaker is not acting in his or her professional capacity — turns on whether the restriction is narrowly drawn and whether the board’s interest is sufficient to require that the First Amendment interests at stake must “give way to other compelling needs of society.”

Here, the board has proposed that the compelling societal need to which speech rights must give way is the integrity of the funeral services profession…. As noted, the Legislature has provided that embalmers and funeral directors may be required to abstain from using “profane, indecent or obscene language” while acting in a professional capacity, and we agree that violation of such a restriction on speech could undermine the integrity of the funeral services profession. We have recognized in other contexts that there is a “special sensitivity” required in the processing and handling of a deceased human body,  and that funeral services “are always rendered and most often contracted for under emotional circumstances.”

The board proposes that these interests require the broadening of limitations on the speech of embalmers and funeral directors to include comments made outside of funeral homes, and would extend the prohibition to comments made by embalmers and funeral directors in any context…. As we have described, however, regulations that attempt to limit the speech of licensed professionals when acting outside of their professional capacity must be narrow, and applied with precision to the type of speech that the board has a legitimate interest in regulating…. [W]e conclude that the board’s generalized interest in maintaining the integrity of the profession cannot outweigh the First Amendment rights of embalmers and funeral directors when acting outside of their professional capacity; and, even if the board’s interest could outweigh those First Amendment rights, § 3.13(7) is not sufficiently narrow to achieve that end.

The record contains numerous examples of circumstances in which the board’s regulation could reach constitutionally protected speech and potentially expose embalmers and funeral directors to discipline given the board’s prohibition of “unprofessional” or “undignified” comments. Among these examples are articles in professional publications in which the authors, who are funeral service professionals, comment on the condition of deceased bodies in graphic terms that some might subjectively view as undignified. {One such article describes in detail the “skin slip” that occurred as a consequence of bodies having been exposed to high heat in the fire that caused their deaths. In another article, an embalmer described as coming from Massachusetts offers a “Tech Tip”: “A dull [instrument] will prevent the cavity chemical from getting into [hollow organs] to do its job, and that may cause gas buildup.” Other articles detail the reconstruction of disfigured corpses, including a description of the swollen and distorted appearance of a body that had been shipped from overseas. The condition of the body “wasn’t good…. Some facial tissue was beginning to separate from early stages of decomposition.” One article is devoted to the difficulties of reconstructing the face of a teenage boy that had become distorted by a large tumor; the author wrote, “This distortion was (and probably still is) one of the most grotesque things I’ve ever seen in my life.” The author described the “tissues throughout the body” as “spongy and breaking down from the effects of drug treatment,” and proposed a procedure he had found useful in the circumstances to get “better control of the head.”} … Like these authors, Schoeller did not identify a particular deceased person or reveal confidential information about any decedent’s family. His comments described in detail the process of embalming the dead, an area recognized by the profession as one about which the public knows little and should be more informed….

In summary, while there may be circumstances in which the board can appropriately seek to limit the speech rights of licensed funeral directors and embalmers, in proscribing all “undignified” comments, the board has “traveled in the constitutionally unacceptable direction,”  of banning a substantial amount of protected speech. The board cannot apply § 3.13(7) to restrict such a wide range of speech, nor may it limit that speech by relying on a generalized notion of the integrity of the funeral services profession.

 

The post An Interesting Professional Speech Case from 10 Years Ago, Involving Speech About Dead Bodies appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/H71urnb
via IFTTT

When Russian troops entered Ukraine last Thursday, it was hard not to feel an overwhelming sense of doom and gloom.  There were, it seemed to me, two possible outcomes, both terrible: Either the Russians would steamroll over the Ukrainian resistance, occupy Kyiv, install a puppet government, throw Zelensky and his associates in jail (or worse), and leave; or, the Ukrainian resistance would be more formidable than expected, and there would be a horrific, bloody carnage that would, inevitably, end in a Russian victory by virtue of their vastly superior force, at the cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties.

But I hadn’t foreseen the third possibility:  that the Allies could deploy a weapon powerful enough to force Putin to reconsider the wisdom of what he was doing and bring him to the negotiating table. But that is what seems to be happening.

As I write this, the two sides are meeting at the Belarus-Ukraine border to explore whether some kind of negotiated settlement is possible. What is noteworthy – remarkable, even, – is that it was the Russians who instigated the negotiations, inviting Zelensky to come to the table. On Day Four of the invasion.

That does not look, to me, like the move of someone who believes he is in a strong position, with the situation well in hand. It looks even less like that when, after Zelensky refuses to come to Belarus, Putin compromises, and agrees that the two sides can hold their meeting at the border.

If you saw that coming on Thursday morning, you’re a lot smarter than I am.

Perhaps it will turn out to be all bluff and bother. But it feels, to me, like the tide has perhaps already started to turn. After four days. What happened?

Two things happened. The first, of course, is that the Ukrainian resistance appears to have been stronger, and the steamroll into Kyiv was going to take longer, than anticipated.

Not to minimize in any way the quite extraordinary bravery and valor that the Ukrainians are demonstrating,** my guess is that, standing alone, that didn’t give Putin too much pause. He had only deployed a relatively small fraction of his troops, and the overwhelming superiority of their numbers surely meant that the steamroll-into-Kyiv strategy was still available, it would just have to come at the cost of immense bloodshed and suffering.  And I’m not at all sure that those consequences weigh much in Putin’s calculus.

** I grew up in a household where, to be entirely candid, Ukrainians were not held in terribly high regard. My grand-parents fled from that part of the world; Jews had an especially tough time in the Ukrainian countryside, and the stories they brought with them of life in the Ukraine were not pleasant ones. But it’s hard not to be stirred by the incredible courage that so many Ukrainians are now demonstrating to defend their country’s independence.

The other thing that happened is that on Saturday – the day before Putin extended his offer to begin negotiations – the Allies rolled out their new “sanctions.” It includes a weapon that appears capable of inflicting – indeed, one that has already begun inflicting – catastrophic damage on the Russian economy and the Russian people.

The sanctions package announced on Saturday not only included kicking several large Russian banks off of the SWIFT network – the main global network for bank-to-bank transactions – it also …

“…prohibits United States persons from engaging in transactions with the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the National Wealth Fund of the Russian Federation, and the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation. This action effectively immobilizes any assets of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation held in the United States or by U.S. persons, wherever located.”

It is rather breath-taking in its simplicity.  The Fed, of course, is a “United States person.” So it means that, henceforth, the Fed will not honor requests from the Russian Central Bank to “cash in” any portion of their dollar holdings.

So that stack of 600 billion or so dollars that Putin and his cohorts have gathered together to ride out the war?  It’s now worth a good deal less than it was on Friday, because a substantial portion of that stack is “held”** in US financial institutions that are ultimately under the Fed’s control, and the Fed is now prohibited from transferring control over those funds to the Russian Central Bank (or to anyone else designated as the recipient by the Russian Central Bank).

** The use of “hold” in its various forms in connection with these accounts is antiquated and, worse, confusing. Putin’s stack – or, really, anybody’s stack – isn’t “held” anywhere, these days; at least, not in the sense that it consists of tangible things, like dollar bills, capable of a “holding.” The stack isn’t really a thing that can be held; it consists of ledger entries, inter-linked to various obligations of financial institutions within the global system requiring them to adjust their ledger entries as directed by the “holder” of the account.

And if the Germans, and the Swiss, and the British, and the others who “hold” these assets that “belong” to the Russian government also get on board, the stack gets smaller and smaller.

It starts a kind of death-spiral, because Putin will really need those dollars to prop up the ruble. That’s almost certainly why he put the stack together in the first place – a rainy day fund for buying up rubles to keep the price stable.  It has already, as of today, fallen by one-third. It will continue to fall, because as the sanctions noose tightens a ruble can buy fewer and fewer things; and the drop accelerates as more people become increasingly desperate to unload the rubles that they have and convert them into something of value before they fall further.

The Russian Central Bank can stop all this from happening by promising to keep buying rubles, at a set and stable price, in exchange for good old American dollars.

Except now it can’t.

This is the kind of thing that brings governments down – when the price of bread goes up 500% because your leaders have done something very stupid. Isolated from the global financial system – with nobody willing to take their rubles, or even their dollars and deutschemarks and euros in exchange for goods and services – the Russian economy will go into free fall.  And Putin surely knows that. His oligarch friends know it, too.  The suffering this will impose on the Russian people will be immense, and many of them may not take kindly to having had that imposed on them in order to satisfy Putin’s imperial fantasies. If they’re not worried about that, they should be.

It could all turn out differently, of course.  I could be wrong, and the war could take a completely different turn. The actual implementation of these sanctions, and the goal of isolating Russia from the global financial system, may prove too difficult to accomplish. As the saying goes, there’s nothing harder to predict than the future.

But the sanctions do already seem to be working: the ruble is collapsing, the Russian stock market (closed today, by order of the government) has lost around 40% of its value, the Russian Central Bank has raised interest rates to 20%, and Putin has asked for a meeting with the Ukrainians.

My sense is that this is not only a turning-point moment in this war; I think it may well be a turning-point moment in the long history of war. On Thursday, it looked, terrifyingly, like we were about to re-live something out of the 1940s – an all-out ground war in Europe, with tanks and infantry and air cover and the rest of it.

But if the Allies have found a way to wreak havoc on the entire Russian economy without, as it were, firing a shot, this war will not be remembered as a throwback but for the first appearance of a new kind of warfare, played out not on the actual battlefield but on the global network. I don’t know if it will work – but it sure looks to me like it can work, and – much more importantly – that the Russians are starting to act as if they know it can work, too.

The post Thoughts on the War in Ukraine appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/1PmVoXq
via IFTTT

There is one person—and just one person—who is responsible for the widespread death and devastation inside Ukraine right now, and that is Vladimir Putin. He has attacked and invaded a sovereign nation without justification. Putin’s nostalgia for the old Soviet Union is despicable, and his imperialist ambitions to expand his authoritarian grasp are in direct violation of international law, humanitarian principles, and the very stability of the post–World War II peace that has endured in much of the word for decades.

Putin is a tyrant and a killer. His decision to put Russia’s nuclear forces on high is unconscionable. It’s a move that harkens all the way back to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962—a leader of a superpower has unilaterally brought civilization closer to nuclear war. This is indefensible, and the whole world knows it. The people of Russia know it: That’s why thousands of them are protesting Putin’s war all over their country. Putin’s government has arrested more than 6,000 peaceful demonstrators so far.

Putin’s nuclear threats will put the rest of the developed world on high alert in response. This means we’ve rapidly landed in a place where the risk of all-out nuclear war is significantly higher. There’s no reason for this. We are in this situation because of the actions of one very evil man.

All of that said, it’s important to call out the bad U.S. foreign policy moves that helped get us here. And even though no one did this but Putin, the U.S.’s failed approach to Russia for the last 30 years—a bipartisan effort that includes mistakes by Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—deserves criticism as well.

Let’s start with the Clinton administration in the 1990s. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm pointed out, Clinton was the first U.S. president in decades to inherit a world that did not include the Soviet Union. Clinton could have completely revamped NATO now that its purpose—defending member nations against the expansion of the Soviet Union—was no longer applicable. Instead, Clinton, with the Republican Party’s support, oversaw an expansion of NATO. Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland all joined. Years later, Putin would cite this enlargement of NATO as one of the West’s “broken promises” that justified his Ukraine policy.

Again, Putin is dead wrong. Nothing justifies his Ukraine policy. But the purpose of NATO was defensive: to protect the world from Russian aggression. If NATO policy is antagonizing Russia and being used as a pretext for invasion, it clearly isn’t serving that goal.

With the Clinton administration’s backing, NATO also intervened in Yugoslavia in 1999 to ensure an independent Kosovo. That military action never had the backing of the United Nations; it was a violation of international law, just like Putin’s attack on Ukraine.

George Bush’s foreign policy has not held up well, due to the U.S.’s horrendous misadventures in the Middle East, but Bush blundered in Europe as well. At a 2008 NATO summit—one attended by Putin—Bush staunchly supported Ukraine’s eventual admittance to NATO, over the objections of France, the U.K., and Germany.

The Obama administration, of course, inflamed tensions with Russia when the U.S. took sides in the 2014 Ukrainian revolution. And then came Donald Trump. Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media ceaselessly accused Trump of being a Russian stooge, even a pro-Putin plant, installed by Russia as president of the U.S. due to a subtle influence campaign on Facebook. This was of course ridiculous—and as evidence of how ridiculous the claims are, Trump’s actual administration was just as foolishly tough on Russia as his predecessors. In 2017, Vice President Mike Pence even reiterated the 2008 Bucharest declaration.

The Biden administration maintained that same fiction. A clear declaration that the Ukraine would not be joining NATO might have deprived Putin of the intellectual ammo he required to move forward with this invasion. We don’t know for sure. But it was incumbent on the U.S. to try. NATO is a means to an end—a more safe and secure Europe—not an end unto itself. If expansion is creating the very conditions that NATO’s existence is supposed to prevent, it’s not working. Yet every single U.S. president since the end of the Cold War has misunderstood this. And now here we are.

The post The War in Ukraine Is Putin's Fault, but 30 Years of Misguided U.S. Foreign Policy Didn't Help appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/27qbtpT
via IFTTT