Airmail

There are certain obvious, every day, common things and knowledge that most of us have never noticed that either never existed or that have completely vanished.  There are no 1975 quarters, for instance—the US mint never produced any because they were ramping up production of the bicentennial quarter.  Do you even know the location of the closest payphone to your house?  Contrary to popular belief, the names of Columbus’ three ships were not the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. And did you know that you can’t send letters by airmail anymore?  

Okay, technically, you can still send mail that will travel by air.  The United States Postal Service claims that Express Mail and Priority Mail travel by air, but they no longer use the term ‘airmail’ and the old service for private letters is no longer being offered.  

Up until 1977, you could buy special airmail stamps to use on correspondence and you would be assured that the letter would be delivered as soon as possible because these letters would be sorted first and travel to the destination by airplane.  For this faster service, the post office charged much more per ounce of weight, meaning that the letters were printed on the lightest and thinnest possible stationary, with specially marked envelopes to aid in the sorting.

Getting an airmail letter meant someone cared, it meant that they wanted their message to get to you as fast as possible, and it meant there was something adventurous about the special journey the letter took.  I miss all of that.

When Ben Franklin established America’s postal system, there was only one class of mail and the cost to send a simple letter anywhere in the former colonies was two cents.  The British had a sliding scale for postage that depended on how far the letter was to be sent, but Franklin cut those rates as an act of unifying the colonies into a nation.  The cost was low, but the service was slow:  it might take two weeks for a letter to travel from New York to South Carolina.

As the country grew, the cost of transporting letters across the constantly increasing distances was partially offset by the steady improvements of transportation infrastructure such as roads, canals, and  eventually trains.  With the acquisition of California, however, the postal service had to dramatically raise rates again.  Most letters traveled to the West Coast by ship around Cape Horn, a passage that took up to three months and cost half a dollar per letter.  If you were in a hurry, you could pay a full dollar for a letter that would be shipped to Panama, then travel cross the Isthmus of Panama by mule, then would be loaded onto a different boat to be shipped to San Francisco, arriving in the incredible time of only three weeks.  

And then, we got airmail.  Not really, but it was the airmail of its day.  For a brief period, lasting only 18 months, your mail could travel by a private mail service called the Pony Express that would carry the lightest possible letter from Saint Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco in only ten days.  

Perhaps no one has ever described the Pony Express better than Mark Twain, who witnessed one of the riders in 1861 while traveling to Nevada by stagecoach:

“Both rider and horse went ‘flying light.’  The rider's dress was thin, and fitted close; he wore a "roundabout," and a skull cap, and tucked his pantaloons into his boot-tops like a race-rider.  He carried no arms—he carried only what was not absolutely necessary, for even the postage on his literary freight was worth five dollars a letter.  He got but little frivolous correspondence to carry —his bag had business letters in it, mostly.  His horse was stripped of all unnecessary weight, too.  He wore a little wafer of a racing saddle, and no visible blanket.  He wore light shoes, or none at all.  The little flat mail-pockets strapped under the rider's thighs would each hold about the bulk of a child's primer. They held many and many an important business chapter and newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and thin as gold-leaf, nearly, and thus bulk and weight were economized.  The stage-coach traveled about a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five miles a day (twenty-four hours), the pony-rider about two hundred and fifty.  There were about eighty pony riders in the saddle all the time, night and day, stretching in a long, scattering procession from Missouri to California, forty flying eastward, and forty toward the west, and among them making four hundred gallant horses earn as tiring livelihood and see a deal of scenery every single day in the year.” (Roughing It, Chapter 8.)

The trans-continental telegraph service put an almost immediate stop to the express riders.  Two days after the telegraph service was operational, the Pony Express shut down for good.  For only a dollar, your telegraph message of ten words was sent across the continent instantly.  When the railroad linked the two coasts together, once again the postal service would deliver a letter anywhere in the country for only a few pennies, though it might still take more than a week for a letter to cross the continent.

Now we bring in airmail.

In June 1910, just seven years after the Wright Brother’s first flight, Congressman Shepherd Morris of Texas introduced a bill charging the Postmaster General to investigate the possibility of using airplanes to ship the mail.  The bill promptly died in committee as New York papers ridiculed the ridiculous idea.

Love letters will be carried in a rose-pink aeroplane, steered by Cupid’s wings and operated by perfumed gasoline. … [and] postmen will wear wired coat tails and on their feet will be wings.

Despite the public ridicule, within months the Postmaster began authorizing demonstration flights of the mail for short ranges by airplane.  More publicity stunts than practical deliveries, there was no doubt that as soon as the technology of flight became practical, the postal service would begin transport by mail.

Regular airmail service started in 1918, with transcontinental service beginning two years later.  Though interrupted by World War II, international airmail began in 1939 and was using jet aircraft only twenty years later.  Unfortunately, regular airmail service ended in 1977, and today, only about 1% of our domestic mail travels by air.

There is, of course, a noticeable trend in the evolution of mail service:  as technology advances, mail service gets faster and the relative cost decreases, but something intangible is lost in the process.  Today, an email reaches me within seconds of being sent, but it lacks the emotional weight of that airmail letter…it lacks the touch of intimacy.

As Emily Dickinson said, “The ways that letters go Are lovely as the ways the light goes – The sun himself is known to lose his way Yet find it, in a letter's ray."

Caesar and the Pirates

Revolutions, like forest fires, are far easier to start than to end.  Countless revolutionary leaders have discovered the difficulty of disbanding an army after the battles have ended.  Thousands of unemployed young men, unable to find work in a civilian workforce in an economy struggling to recover from the disruptions of war, have all too often returned to violence as way of life simply to survive.

After the American Civil War, for example, restless veterans frequently either turned to crime or became mercenaries in the seemingly endless revolutions in Latin America.  Similarly, Boers who had been forced into exile by the British after their defeat during the Boer War in Africa, fought for several armies during the Mexican Revolution.

Perhaps no military leader solved the problem of how to “fire” angry young men with weapons better than Julius Caesar, who carved out new cities in conquered territory as a reward for his loyal veterans.  Not only did the presence of these soldiers help to Romanize the newly acquired territory, but it removed the possibility of these men being used in a military coup against Caesar by moving the veterans far from Rome.

Caesar probably learned this lesson after being captured by pirates.

Following the Marian-Sulla Civil War in 89 BCE, revolutions and violence erupted throughout the Mediterranean area, providing new employment opportunities to men who had been trained to fight, but couldn’t find work after the previous battles had ended.  Many of these young men turned to piracy and were collectively known as the Cilician pirates.  Carthage had been destroyed and Ptolemaic Egypt was collapsing from internal rot (several centuries of sibling marriage by the pharaohs will do that), which led to a power vacuum at sea.  

Based out of what is now Western Turkey, the notorious Cilician pirates did what pirates have always done:  they preyed on commercial shipping and kidnapped the rich for large ransoms.  These sea raiders were renowned for incredible violence but were also known to honor their ransoms and to release their captives unharmed…if they were paid.  Since the pirates were also known to profit from the growing slave trade, captives not ransomed were sold far from their homes.

That the pirates honored ransoms was not to say that they were trustworthy—treating their captives fairly was just a good business practice.  In fact, the pirates were more than capable of acting treacherously, as they did with Spartacus, the former gladiator who led a slave revolt that was almost successful.  Spartacus had contracted with the pirates to transport his army (for a large fee) to Sicily.  After accepting the payment, the pirates reneged on their promise and left Spartacus and his army abandoned on the beach, at the mercy of a Roman Army not known for dispensing mercy.

Julius Caesar was a wealthy twenty-five-year-old attorney who was already well known for prosecuting the supporters of Sulla, when he set sail for Rhodes to study oratory to further his professional career.  As you have already guessed, a band of the Cilician pirates seized Caesar and his entire party, intending to ransom the young Caesar for an incredible sum:  twenty talents of silver (then worth about half a million sesterces).

Comparing the relative value of money in different cultures across a gap of more than two millennia, with widely varied purchasing power, is almost impossible, but this amount was at least the equivalent of $150,000 today and probably more.  As large as that sum was for a young lawyer, Caesar ridiculed the pirates, laughingly insisting that he was worth more than twice that.  At Caesar’s insistence, the pirates raised the ransom amount to 50 talents, or 1,200,000 sesterces.  This was a brilliant tactic by Caesar as it guaranteed that the pirates treated their valuable captive like a king until they were paid.

Caesar took full advantage of his captor’s new respect and sent almost all of his entourage out to raise the large ransom, retaining only two slaves to see to his daily needs.  While he waited, Caesar acted as if he were on vacation, dining well, sleeping late, and truly enjoying himself.  When the pirates entertained themselves with games or sporting contests, Caesar joined in, frequently besting the pirates (particularly after he taught the pirates how to play Roman games).  When Caesar decided to take an afternoon nap, he sent his slaves out to order the pirates to keep quiet so as not to interrupt his sleep.  Caesar also wrote frequently, composing poetry which he read to his captors.  

More than anything else, Caesar ridiculed his captors, making frequent jokes at their expense.  At one point, he even offered to take over the leadership of the gang, promising that under his command, the pirates would each make more money.  He taunted the pirates, frequently telling them that he would one day crucify the lot of them—a taunt that the pirates treated as a joke from their new friend.

After thirty-eight days, Caesar’s associates returned and paid the unusually large ransom.  As promised, the Cilician pirates promptly released Caesar, who made his way to Miletus, the Roman capital of Asia Minor.  There, he raised a small army, hired enough ships to transport it and set out to search for his former captors.  He eventually discovered them on the same small island where they had held him captive.  

Catching the pirates off guard, Caesar and his force quickly captured the pirates and recovered not only the ransom he had paid, but considerable other stolen loot, as well.  Caesar transported the pirates back to Miletus, where he told the Roman governor to execute the pirates.  When the governor refused, saying he didn’t have the proper authority, Caesar ignored the governor and had the pirates crucified, exactly as he had told him he would do.  

Caesar obviously knew that the Roman government wasn’t going to complain that he had usurped proper authority.  And Caesar knew that his actions were going to win him the admiration of the Roman citizens, and that with the admiration of the masses became political power.

Caesar's experience with the Cilician pirates is a reminder of his ruthlessness and his willingness to do whatever it took to achieve his goals.  It also shows that he was not afraid to stand up to even the most dangerous enemies.

Eight years after Caesar was released, the Roman Senate appointed Pompey, the Great, to deal with the Cilician pirates.  Pompey quickly assembled a large fleet and went on to defeat the pirates in a series of decisive battles.  He then established a system of naval patrols to prevent the pirates from resurfacing.  This victory also made Pompey popular with the Roman people, eventually setting up the contest between the two men for control of Rome. 

But that’s a different and much longer story.

Camel Racers—Yee-HAL!

There is an ongoing writers’ strike in Hollywood—the writers are concerned about the impact of AI on their future employment.  They’re right to be concerned:  AI is going to change just about everyone’s job and writers may see their jobs change before other professions do.

I’ve wasted quite a few hours experimenting with ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, and if I owned a small newspaper, I’d already be using both services to help provide content.  Both bots can already produce prose that’s as good as what you now find in most national newspapers and it’s far superior to what I see in the local papers.  Simply put, AI works, it already works well, and it is going to get much better extremely quickly.

AI is going to bring a major change in the way we all work, probably making an even bigger change in the ways we work and live than the computer revolution did a few decades ago.  Everyone and every job is going to be changed because of AI, and there is no way of stopping the juggernaut…nor should we want to, as AI is going to make our lives better and more productive, and it will substantially raise the standard of living for all of us.  However, the process of change is going to hurt a lot of us in the short run (some of us a lot more than others) while both employees and employers seek solutions.

We are going to have to change the way we work and we are going to have to accept machines that learn at unimaginable speeds as our assistants and partners.  We are going to have to find ways to accept a greater degree of automation and computerization in our workplaces and our lives.  We will have to find ways to cope as computers and robots become a major part of all segments of our lives.  Artificial intelligence is forcing us to change.

To help in this process, I have an example of change resistant people coping.  Let’s talk camels.

It would surprise most people—even those who live in the Middle East—that camels originated in North America.  About 56 million years ago, during the Eocene Epoch, camelids evolved in North America, multiplying and eventually separating into a number of species that spread across the world and eventually arrived in the Middle East, even as the original camelids became extinct in North America (possibly due to overhunting).

Exactly when camels were domesticated is still being debated, but it was probably between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago.  The domestication of camels revolutionized transportation and trade routes in the region, as these animals were well-suited to survive the harsh desert environments and could transport goods and people over long distances. Camels played a crucial role in the development of caravan routes across the Middle East, facilitating trade and cultural exchange.

Over time, camels became integral to the nomadic lifestyle and to the economies of the Middle Eastern regions, providing transportation, milk, meat, and other valuable resources. The ability of camels to adapt to desert conditions, to travel long distances without water, and to endure extreme temperatures made them invaluable to desert dwellers.  Camels are not as fast as horses over short distances, but they can carry as much as 1300 pounds and work in environments that would quickly exhaust horses.

It didn’t take long before owning, breeding, and racing camels became a status symbol, signifying both wealth and prestige.  Camel racing predates the Islamic era and probably began as a way for various tribes to compete and demonstrate their wealth to gain prestige.

Today, as motorized vehicles have almost completely replaced the camel for transportation, the speedy ungulates remain an important status symbol.  The wealthy raise and breed camels primarily for racing.  If you live in Qatar or Saudi Arabia, racing camels occupy the same role in society as a stable of fast racehorses does in Kentucky.  It won’t surprise you to hear that those camels with winning records sell for millions of dollars.

Not only do the camels have to be fast, but they must also look good.  To be presentable in public, the camels are very carefully combed, perfumed, and made to look as pretty as possible.  The owners go to great lengths to have makeup applied to their camels before every race.  The makeup is applied to enhance the camels’ appearance, highlighting their features and adding a touch of elegance.  The designs often include intricate patterns, symbols, and motifs that reflect the cultural traditions and artistic heritage of the region.

It's worth noting that the use of makeup on camels is primarily for aesthetic purposes and does not affect their actual racing performance.  The focus is on showcasing the beauty and heritage of the camels rather than on altering their physical abilities.

Due to the nature of camels, their races are a little different than traditional horse racing.  First, the racetracks are straight and are much longer than those for horses, allowing the camels to build up and maintain speed.  Though most of the racetracks are around 7 kilometers long, the Liwa Golden Camel Race in the United Arab Emirates. is 1,000 kilometers in length.  

In order for the camels to develop their top speed, the jockeys were traditionally small children from India, whom the wealthy camel breeders had purchased from their impoverished parents.  If the child grew too large or too heavy to be competitive…. Well, the career opportunities for foreign ex-camel jockeys who do not speak the local language are not good in any country.  

The European press began publishing horror stories out of the Middle East about abandoned and abused children who were the by-product of traditional camel racing.  Let’s face it, the wealthy of the Middle East are not exactly the poster children for First Adopters who welcome change and innovation—particularly when you are talking about a centuries-old sport.  When change comes in this region, it comes at a pace that makes stalagmites look rash.  It was almost unthinkable that these oil-rich elites would accept change—but they did.

The camels still race, but the children have been replaced with tiny robots weighing about ten pounds, each equipped with a tiny loudspeaker and a mechanical arm wielding a riding crop.  With lighter loads, the camels can run faster, but since the races are for long distances, the owners must race along the side of the track to stay in communication with the robotic jockeys.   A few jockeys are out of work, but whole new industries have sprung up:  Camel makeup, camel cosmetology and makers of tiny racing silks for those little robotic jockeys.

Today, a typical race features fast camels who wear professional makeup and perfume. Each bears a small robot wearing a colorful racing costume indicating its ownership and swinging  a rotating riding crop.  The camel’s owner screams orders to the animal while racing alongside the track in his Mercedes.  This is your “traditional” camel race, nowadays.

If the oil-rich sheiks can accept change and mechanization, so can the rest of us.

Required Reading

Reading is my favorite preoccupation.  Take one look inside our house and this is obvious:  the house is flooded with books in every imaginable subject, as my choice of reading material has moved well past the valley of eclecticism and is now scaling the craggy heights of schizophrenia.  I’ll read just about anything.

I love libraries and have a large collection of library cards to prove it.  Whenever I’m doing research in a library, I have a strict rule:  Whenever you have scoured the stacks until you have located the volume you are looking for—turn around and take a book at random from the opposite shelf and spend at least a few minutes reading it.  You’d be surprised how often this serendipitous research pays off.

There is, however, one kind of book that I absolutely hate to read:  the book that I have to read—particularly one that has been assigned as part of a course curriculum.  Being forced to read any book is a chore that dwarfs the labors of Sisyphus.

Decades ago, I worked for a major Fifth Avenue publishing house and part of my job was to read some of the new books brought on the market.  One of the books that was currently popular was Watership Down, which I dutifully tried to read at least a dozen times.  If you have never read this monstrosity, it is hundreds of pages of cute, lovable rabbits who are hopping around and hopping around and hopping around—until I would fall asleep while on page 15, dreaming of blowing them all to smithereens with a good Remington shotgun.  Anyone who has successfully finished the book should be tested for diabetes.

The quality of the book doesn’t really matter, since any book designated as required reading automatically becomes a horrible book.  A professor once assigned me the task of reading The Education of Henry Adams, since it was his opinion that any student who graduated from college without having read the book was due a full refund of his tuition.  God, I hated that book.  About a dozen years later, I came across my copy of the book and reread it and discovered that in the years the volume had lain idle in my office, the prose had fermented into excellent literary wine, becoming a great book that everyone should read.

Note.  I am the “great uncle” to a young man who is just off to college now.  I sent him a copy of the book with a note containing the advice of the professor who had assigned me the book.  I suspect than my “great nephew” will feel somewhat obligated to read the book, almost guaranteeing that he will absolutely hate it, too, and will remember that his grandfather had frequently stated his brother was crazy.

Naturally, when I became the professor—the “sage on the stage”—I only assigned books that I was absolutely certain that my students would love.  Yeah, and Elvis didn’t do no drugs.

Since I was teaching at Enema U, the Harvard on the Rio Grande. Surrounded by the Chihuahuan Desert, I assigned my students Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey.  This is a fantastic book, one of the most popular books dealing with environmental issues that has been published in the last 50 years.  My students, living in the southwest, would immediately bond with it.

Nope.

My student treated the book like it was bound cancer.  No one liked the book and over half the class mentioned “the horrible desert book” in their end of class evaluations.  From the classroom discussions, it was clear to me that only half the class had actually finished the book and even that low number may be a wild overestimation.  

In a class I taught on the Mexican Revolution, I assigned The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, the great Mexican historian and author.  This is a book so well written, so moving and human that it does for the Mexican Revolution what Hemingway did the Spanish Civil War.  Since major battle of the Mexican Revolution occurred less than 50 miles from the campus of Enema U, and at least a quarter of the class had family in Mexico—the book had to be a success.

Also nope.

The book spans multiple decades with frequent flashbacks and even though I furnished the students with a list of chapters and the dates involved, most of my students seemed to find the events incomprehensible.  Few students understood how the years of fighting had embittered the idealistic young man, changing him into the epitome of what the youth had originally been fighting against.  The only real lesson from the book?  Well, I learned to never use the word “dichotomy” in an exam question since a sizeable percentage of the class wrote essays about the horrifying battlefield torture of what they presumed was a “dick-ectomy”.

Then there was that Civil War class.  Besides the usual textbook, I assigned The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.  Surely, this time I had got it right.  The book won the Pulitzer Prize, is required reading at West Point, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth, The War College, the Citadel, the U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment Officer Qualification Course, The Basic School for Marine Officers, and is one of only two novels (the other being Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer) on the U.S. Army's recommended reading list for Officer Professional Development.  And most importantly, Joss Whedon says the book was the original inspiration for the TV series Firefly.  

Even more noper.

Unfortunately, the great book was made into the movie, Gettysburg, which would have been a great movie if they hadn’t cast that damn Yankee, Martin Sheen, as Robert E. Lee, complete with a southern accent about as authentic as Velveeta Cheese.  For most of the students, watching the movie was preferable to actually reading the book.  Since Ted Turner was the movie’s director and decided to make a movie more than four hours long, it might have been quicker to read the book.

As with most of the books I assigned, the students complained about the book bitterly in class and noted their frustrations in the end of the semester evaluations.  Almost none of the students reported that they enjoyed reading the book.  

A curious thing happened a few months after the class was over, however.  I got several emails from the parents of my students who had happened to find a pristine copy of Killer Angels laying around the house and had picked it up just to see what it was.  They read the book and enjoyed it enough to take the time to write me a quick note in gratitude.

Of course, they liked the book.  They weren’t required to read it.  So, they did.

An Abnormal Court

This is one of those blogs that will likely cost me subscribers, as readers on both the left and the right will become angry and stop reading me.  I’ll get angry emails from both groups, accusing me of siding with the other camp.  Well, if you didn’t want to hear the “nut” point of view, then you should never have started reading this blog.

Yesterday, President Biden declared that the Supreme Court was “not normal”.  By this, of course, he meant that the decision the court had rendered disagreed with his policy.  This attitude has is perfectly normal, as this country has never had a president who had a good relationship with his Supreme Court.  A few, such as Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon passionately hated the court.  This is actually not necessarily a bad thing, since the three equal branches of the government are meant to check and balance each other. 

While it is dangerous for a president to publicly criticize one of the pillars holding up our government, in this case Biden might be right.  The present Supreme Court is clearly partisan.  However, while Biden is concerned with only the views of the conservative members of the court, I’m worried about the views of both the conservative and the liberal members of the court.   The voting records of both groups clearly demonstrate that the judges are concerned more with ideology than with legalities.

Our Supreme Court is supposed to decide issues, not by what would be considered a social good, but rather, on what is in alignment with existing law and the Constitution.  Sometimes, this means that the Supreme Court is charged with enforcing laws that are extremely unpopular (or are even harmful to society).  If this happens, it is not the job of our judicial system to change or to overturn the law, but rather, that is the task for the legislative branch to change the “bad” law.

As President Abraham Lincoln said:

“When I so pressingly urge a strict observance of all the laws, let me not be understood as saying there are no bad laws.… But I do mean to say, that, although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed.”

For the sake of brevity, Lincoln’s words have usually been paraphrased as “The best way ‌to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.”  

This means that our Supreme Court Justices are supposed to be upholding the law, not upholding an ideological point of view.  Take two of the recent court opinions: the decision on Affirmative Action in college admissions and that on whether the President has the authority to dismiss or lessen student loan repayments.  I can make a pretty good legal argument for either side of both issues, and if I can do it, so could the lawyers who presented arguments to the court.

Assuming that the decisions handed down were legally justified, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the court’s votes split 7-2 or 5-4, but recently, it seems that the majority of the decisions have come to votes that are repeatedly 6-3–split right along ideological lines.  These judges seem to rarely hear any  convincing arguments outside their own comfort zone.

Even recently, the court wasn’t so clearly, routinely divided.  The late Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were widely considered to be outstanding jurists, who in fact, had diametrically opposed political leanings—yet, each occasionally shocked their supporters by voting contrary to their political party.

In the case of United States v. Jones (2012), the Supreme Court examined the issue of warrantless GPS tracking of a suspect's vehicle by law enforcement.  Justice Scalia, known for his strict interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, joined the majority opinion that ruled in favor of the defendant's privacy rights.  The Court held that the government's failure to obtain a warrant when it attached a GPS device to a vehicle in order to monitor its movements violated the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

By comparison, there is the case of Gonzales v. Carhart (2007). This case dealt with the constitutionality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003,  which prohibited a specific type of late-term abortion procedure.  Justice Ginsburg dissented from the majority opinion, which upheld the ban, and she argued that it constituted an undue burden on a woman's right to choose and was inconsistent with prior Supreme Court decisions protecting a woman's access to abortion. However, she did join a separate concurring opinion by Justice Kennedy, that clarified the Court's stance on the importance of women's health exceptions in abortion regulations.  She broke with the rest of the liberal judges and wrote a differing minority opinion.

It is important to remember that justices' decisions are not supposed to be  strictly determined by their ideological leanings, and that they should vote differently on different issues based on their interpretation of the Constitution and the specific facts of each case.

I didn’t always agree with either Ginsburg or Scalia, but even when I disagreed with their opinions, I was always impressed with the logic of their decisions.  Even when their arguments didn’t change my mind, I always learned from them.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened lately.