【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障1系列】【1-06】文史哲

Threesu

速度


Threesu第一次发小分队的帖。。。很紧张的说。。。
如果有错误希望各位大大不吝指正哇~~
本来想贴一个911的同谋被抓的事情的，后来字数不够所以换成这个了
这次字数可能有点多，大家好好搞哇~~
最近忙学校的事情，今晚开始补小分队作业


American History: Hurricane Katrina, Iraq and the Great Recession
计时1：
STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember. This week in our series, we continue the story of the presidency of George W. Bush.

George W. Bush began his second term -- and fifth year in office -- in January two thousand five.

Early in his first term, terrorists had carried out the worst attacks in United States history. President Bush declared a war on terror and led the country into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In his second inaugural address, he promised to continue fighting to defeat terrorism and increase democracy around the world.

GEORGE W. BUSH: "So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

He also talked about his goals at home and what he called America's ideal of freedom.

GEORGE W. BUSH: "In America's ideal of freedom, citizens find the dignity and security of economic independence instead of laboring on the edge of subsistence. This is the broader definition of liberty that motivated the Homestead Act, the Social Security Act, and the GI Bill of Rights...

"We will widen the ownership of homes and businesses, retirement savings, and health insurance, preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society. By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear and make our society more prosperous and just and equal."

The United States Constitution limits presidents to two terms. Presidential historian Russell Riley at the University of Virginia's Miller Center says presidents traditionally use their first term to focus on their major goals for the country.

Second terms, he says, "tend to be unhappy times."

During his second term, Richard Nixon resigned over the attempt to hide political wrongdoing in the Watergate case. Bill Clinton faced a trial in the Senate over his attempt to hide a relationship with a young aide.
【349】
计时2
But the first major problem of George Bush's second term dropped from the sky.

(MUSIC)

SUSAN BENNETT: "You saw people on the rooftops. You saw people using claw hammers trying to break through their attic to get up onto their roof. That's why you had so many people who drowned."

In August of two thousand five, Susan Bennett received a phone call from her daughter, a television reporter in New Orleans, Louisiana.

SUSAN BENNETT: "She called, on a Friday, and said, 'I think you need to come pick up my son, because there's a really big storm coming.'"

(SOUND)

It was Hurricane Katrina -- one of the worst natural disasters in American history. Along the Gulf of Mexico the hardest hit states were Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Over one thousand eight hundred people died. Property damage totaled more than seventy-five billion dollars.

But Katrina will be remembered mostly because of what happened in New Orleans.

(STORM SOUND AND VOICE)

A day before the storm hit, officials had ordered everyone to leave the city. But thousands of people stayed. Some chose not to leave. Others were too poor, too old or too sick to go.
Then, the levees broke.

(MUSIC AND FLOOD SOUNDS)

Those flood barriers were supposed to protect the city. Much of New Orleans was built on land that lies below sea level.

(SOUND)

As Katrina hit, more than eighty percent of the city flooded. In some areas, the water was six meters deep.

Many people who stayed were caught in the floods.

Officials struggled to get food, water and medicine to the survivors. The displaced included thousands of people who took shelter in the Superdome, a big sports arena.

Out on the streets, lawless acts fed a sense of disorder and helplessness.

WOMAN: "It's disgusting and frustrating. And we are human beings, and they're treating us like we're criminals."

GROUP OF PEOPLE SHOUTING: "We want help! We want help! Help us!"

Susan Bennett helped create an exhibit about Hurricane Katrina at the Newseum, a museum of news in Washington.
【341】
计时3
SUSAN BENNETT: "Not only in this country, but also in newspapers across the world, you saw the same headline. It ranged from 'Engulfed' to 'Our Tsunami.' 'Chaos.' And then it went to 'Anarchy,' 'National Disgrace.'"

Congress later found that officials at every level of government -- local, state and federal -- had failed in doing their jobs.

President Bush flew over New Orleans to inspect the damage. A photograph showed him looking out the window of Air Force One at the ground below. Russell Riley at the University of Virginia says the picture expressed what many people were thinking about the handling of the disaster.
RUSSELL RILEY: "Because of the ineffectiveness of the government response at the time, that image communicated to the American people that the president was remote. That he wasn't on the ground. That the best he could do was just look out the window of a passing plane."

(MUSIC)
In two thousand five a different kind of storm was hitting Iraq. American and Iraqi officials were struggling to create a democratic government. Local militias were on the rise and attacking coalition forces and other Iraqis.

The violence also included al-Qaida suicide bombings in Iraq, which angered many Iraqis. And there was international anger as the result of photos that showed American troops abusing Iraqi prisoners.

President Bush had declared the end of major combat operations on May first, two thousand three. That was less than two months after the invasion. But the numbers of civilian and military deaths were growing. And, in the United States, surveys were showing that a growing number of Americans thought going into Iraq was a mistake.

JUDITH YAPHE: "The bad news was we were uncomfortable with it, and we wanted to get out, and we could not understand how things could go so terribly wrong."

Judith Yaphe joined the National Defense University after twenty years as a Middle East expert at the Central Intelligence Agency.

JUDITH YAPHE: "That's where the lack of strategy and the mismanagement come in. But I think it's also true that, you know, Americans just wanted to say, 'Why are we in Iraq? Why are we in any of these places?' Because, historically speaking, it's not a role we've been comfortable with."

She says by President Bush's second term, few Iraqis wanted to cooperate with the Americans to make the country more secure. But President Bush said American troops could not leave until Iraqi forces replaced them.
【411】
计时4
In two thousand six, an Iraqi court sentenced the country's former leader to death. Saddam Hussein was hanged for crimes against humanity. But nothing else seemed to change -- violence and insurgent attacks continued.

Iraq seemed to be on the edge of being torn apart by civil war.

Early the next year, President Bush announced that he was sending more troops to Iraq. He thought it would help stop the violence.
GEORGE W. BUSH: "These troops will work alongside Iraqi units and be embedded in their formations. Our troops will have a well-defined mission – to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs."

The temporary increase of about thirty thousand troops came to be called "the surge."

In September of two thousand seven, the top commander in Iraq reported to Congress that the violence was decreasing. The surge may have helped create the conditions for this change but there were other reasons as well. Middle East expert Judith Yaphe says many Iraqis decided to work with the Americans to defeat the insurgency.

JUDITH YAPHE: "The real truth is – and it's a good news story – that the Iraqis themselves saw that this was a greater danger to them, that there was nothing to be gained, the Sunnis of Iraq in particular, saw that al-Qaida was hurting them, that it was a danger to them, that there was much more to be gained by aligning with the US forces."

By the time President Bush was finishing his second term, Iraqi and American officials had agreed on a withdrawal date to end the war. The last American forces would leave Iraq by the end of twenty-eleven.

Russell Riley at the University of Virginia says it is too soon to know how history will judge the United States' actions in Iraq.

RUSSELL RILEY: "If Iraq proves to be a policy success, then the surge will be a critical turning point and a terrific exercise of presidential leadership."

He also points out that the war is not the only measure by which the forty-third president will be judged.

Professor Riley put it this way: "The great debate among historians will not be whether Bush was a powerful president or consequential president, but whether he directed those powers in the most fruitful way that he could have."
【405】
计时5
So, what else was going on in the United States during this period? Millions of people were voting for which singer should get a recording contract on "American Idol." Year after year it was the most popular show on television.

SIMON COWELL: "Oh, Robert, I think you just killed my favorite song of all time."

ROBERT: "Killed in a good way or a bad way?"

SIMON: "Killing is never good. There's never a happy killing."

ROBERT: "I'm sorry to hear that."

SIMON: "No, that was first degree on that one."

(MUSIC)

But the biggest story in music was not what people were listening to, but how. Sales of CDs in stores fell as more and more people downloaded songs from the Internet. On iTunes, Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry" was the most downloaded song of two thousand seven.

(MUSIC)

For the first half of the decade, there seemed to be nothing to cry about in the American housing market.

(MUSIC)

Home prices were going up and up, which made sellers happy. And lenders were offering bigger and bigger loans at easy terms and low interest rates, which made buyers happy.

The government supported the easing of lending rules as a form of social policy, a way to help more people buy homes. Rates of home ownership -- a part of the American Dream -- reached record highs. In two thousand five nearly seven out of ten Americans owned their own home.

But many home buyers had been given mortgage loans that they could not afford to pay back. And that was not the only problem. Banks had been selling those loans as securities to investors around the world. Everyone thought they were getting a good deal -- the banks, the borrowers, the investors.

But then the price bubble burst and the housing market collapsed.

(MUSIC)

Many borrowers lost their homes because they were unable to make their monthly loan payments. That was the situation Karen Lucas and her husband, of Cleveland, Ohio, found themselves in.

KAREN LUCAS: "I've done my crying. I've made my peace, and I put it in God's hands."

As home values fell, many people found themselves "underwater," meaning they owed more on their mortgage than their house was worth.

Suddenly there was a lot to cry about. By the end of two thousand seven, the economy was sliding into the Great Recession. That -- and the election of two thousand eight -- will be our story next week.

(MUSIC)

You can find our series online with transcripts, MP3s, podcasts and pictures at 51voa.com. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter at VOA Learning English. I'm Steve Ember, inviting you to join us again next week for THE MAKING OF A NATION -- American history in VOA Special English.
【464】

越障
THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE. By William J. Stuntz. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2011. Pp. viii, 413. $35.00.

The cruelly early death of Professor William Stuntz cost us our deepest thinker about criminal law. I use the term “thinker” because the clichéd term “scholar” would miss the point. Law professors speak of each other as scholars in part as a default. Given the vocabulary of the profession, it makes no sense to call ourselves “lawyers” in the way our colleagues can call themselves economists, historians, philosophers, or chemists. But the term “scholar” summons up an image of classical and historical erudition, an image that corresponds poorly to the analytic commentary that many legal academics write; more importantly, it would mischaracterize Stuntz’s contribution. Stuntz was surely erudite in all the venerable ways, and his sensitivity to historical perspective was exquisite, but his writing does not depend on reference to esoteric knowledge, primary materials, or archival sources — nor on any methodological breakthroughs of empirical science. His materials were the legal doctrines, manifest institutional structures, and empirical data available to all of us. His contribution, fully realized in this grand valedictory book, was to teach us to think creatively and critically about how we design the technology of government and to accept responsibility for its means and its products.

In The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, Stuntz demonstrates that American criminal justice is a disaster. It is a horrendous mess of mismatched means and ends, of legal protections thwarted and misguided, of political demagoguery imposing brutal penalties on the undeserving, and of willful inefficiencies in the institutions created to protect both public safety and the public fisc. Moreover, in his most declamatory message, Stuntz joins the large contemporary chorus that has denounced the state of incarceration in America for both its embarrassing magnitude and its ugly disproportionalities. But the title suggests that the system has collapsed from something — that at times our criminal justice system has done things right such that it can point us down a righteous path. We can put things in terms of Stuntz’s bad (current) world and good (to some extent past, and possibly future) world.

Here are some key features of the world that Stuntz laments that we now inhabit: In the state criminal courts, which do most of the work in our system, we see high-volume, bureaucratic justice dominated by plea bargains (p. 7); much of the litigation we do see is about peripheral procedural matters (p. 196); jury trials almost never happen in part because trials almost never happen (p. 39); we skimp on and dither about police budgets, while prison populations swing widely with political winds and turn upward even at a time of lowering or flat crime rates (p. 5); and prosecutorial discretion often takes the cynical, even sadistic, form of strategically choosing from a menu of highly technical criminal laws with rigid mens rea requirements and strict and severe sentencing schemes such that there is little left for a trial judge — or any honest jury — to do (p. 4). At the federal level, we see a hyper-regulatory criminal law that not only is harsh and rigid itself, but also perversely interacts with state law by offering a backup threat for local district attorneys to deploy in securing guilty pleas (p. 66). At both levels, crimes are often pretextual or contrived to help prosecutors finesse the proof problems that they would face in proving conventional wrongful intent (pp. 300–01).

Here are some key features of the world Stuntz would prefer: At the state level, the ruling penal code would be mostly about the core malum in se crimes against person and property and would be written in transparent lay prose (pp. 303–04); prosecutors would be comfortable bringing large numbers of winnable cases to trial and would accept a certain number of acquittals as a reasonable outcome of the system (pp. 302–05); they would face neither voters’ wrath nor loss of professional ego if they lost cases, because the jury system would be simple and efficient enough to make trials common and timely (p. 302); the jurors would be defendants’ true peers and neighbors (p. 304); they would recognize in the jury instructions not just technical elements of crimes but normative principles of wrongfulness (pp. 303–04); they would administer a healthy dose of rational jury nullification, because their ethical sense would enable them to recognize the mercy-deserving frailties of some defendants (p. 304); and defense lawyers would have resources, especially for investigation (pp. 299–300). In this world, juries might even get to decide issues of law as well as fact, thereby minimizing any role for appellate courts to micromanage the criminal law definitions that might constrain juries’ ethical judgments. More broadly, this would be a world where most of the investment in criminal justice would be up front — in density of policing, rather than in imprisonment (pp. 30–31, 138–42). Federal statutory law would cover core crimes for which federal jurisdiction is a provable practical necessity, not a constitutional contrivance (pp. 305–07). And federal constitutional law, abetted by congressional power under the Fourteenth Amendment, would serve primarily as a check on state criminal law to advance the values of equal protection and proportionality (p. 291).

Ultimately, Stuntz’s diagnosis and call for transformation of the system might be said to revolve around three principles. First, criminal justice should be decentralized, and the costs and benefits of the operation of the system should be internalized: the more local the system is, the better (pp. 311–12). Second, the system should always favor substance over procedure. By substance he means fairer definitions of crimes, and measurement of sentences and adjudication that focuses chiefly on determining guilt or innocence and not on fine-tuning investigative and adjudicative rules (p. 196). Finally, federal law, on its own terms and as a model for state law, should eschew hypertechnical regulatory crimes in favor of core criminal offenses and, through constitutional decisions and implementing legislation, provide a check on state law, to prevent unequal application of criminal law and irrationally severe punishment (pp. 305–07).

Like most of Stuntz’s work, Collapse is a profoundly thoughtful achievement of systems analysis. The breadth and scope of its policy proposals tempt us to read it as a blueprint of major design components needed for programmatic reform. But we should resist that temptation. This Review will argue that when we hold these principles to the standard of structural design guidelines, they prove less reliable, less clear, and less grounded in pragmatic political science than such a standard demands. Rather, we should read Collapse as an exhortation to, and model of, a way of thinking about criminal justice. This way of thinking requires astute analytic rigor in identifying the decisive choices in the building of legal institutions and a proper respect for the human frailty — individual, collective, and institutional — that produces the frequently awful unintended consequences of these choices.

Underscoring our legacy of slavery as historical admonition, Stuntz presents the moral predicate that punishment is a very bad thing, and we should view it as a tragic necessity, not a moral imperative or value. Thus, he believes that relentless self-criticism is the only hope for creating a criminal justice system that is stable, humane, and efficient. The noble risk Stuntz undertakes is to draw lines between good moral vision and bad moral reactiveness, between sensible institutional reform and quixotic, possibly destructive social engineering. Stuntz may well intend — and clearly we should infer — that this risk is one taken in the form of the relentlessly self-critical and morally chastened process of worrying about criminal punishment, not in the form of optimistic programmatic reform. The practical result might prove to be marginal, incremental, and experimental improvements in our system, motivated by a kind of national embarrassment about the condition we have fallen into. Indeed, Stuntz might object to drastic overhaul, even if it were possible, precisely because he fears what human fallibility wreaks when it attempts categorical institutional change.
【1338】

呓语

又赶上沙发了。。
1‘53
1’51
2‘16
2’30
2‘44
越障  明天吧。。。今天看英语都看头大了。。

猫咪团团

啊啊啊！又没坐上沙发！

1:53
1:49
2:10
2:15
2:20

5:49
越障真心没看进去，就知道是S关于law的一些观点...等我有空再看一遍吧...

呓语

啊啊啊！又没坐上沙发！

-- by 会员 猫咪团团 (2012/5/6 21:50:51)

嘿嘿，刚刚一上来就看到小分队发帖了。。。

kevin405hu

2'07
2'11
2'31
2'11
2'31

9'26

CCcarol

速度：
1‘53
It talks about the goal during George W. Bush's terms and other presdients's during their terms.
1'39
The first major problem of George Bush's second term is the Hurricane. People in New Orleans need to help.
1'48
What Presdient Bush did after Katrina hit disappointed to the  New Orleans  eople.
Most people thought  going into Iraq was a mistake.
2'15
President Bush announced that he was sending more troops to Iraq to help them to stop the violence. Some people doubt that whether it is a fruitful way that he could have.
2'08
It talks about the top music show in the United State and recession real estate industry.

越障：5’29
整片文章理论的概念好多~ 从书中引出对美国刑事法律的看法~
从州和联邦的层面都考虑了对于刑法的看法
最后是对本书的一些评价~还是负面的, 是考虑的不充分. 不一定能够真的帮助到美国的刑事法律~

泾渭不凡

辛苦~~~比我第一次做的时候好多啦~~~^^
---------------------------------------------
已经很好的说~~pat pat~~不紧张哈~~

ahasusanna

越障好难，各种稀奇古怪的词读不下去了……

上邪

1:47
BUSH任期的政治政策以及重大事件 包括911阿富汗伊拉克战争 以及他连任后的democracy政策
1:58
任期的另一个问题 风暴来临 洪水泛滥 民众不高兴
2:24
政府治水不力 伊拉克战争民众不支持
2;15
最终撤军大家的看法  负评价
2:25
说了些别的 最高打榜音乐 还有物价飞涨经济衰退
11:13
读的不太好
大概意思是S是个学者scholar 精通各方知识 他将世界万物分为美丑两界
criminal justis的情况 绝大部分是坏的 但一旦有好的 就会引领我们走向好的方向
举了几个他反驳的丑恶现象
他支持的好的现象
给出了对criminal justice的建议
然后最后应该都是作者给出的评价吧 认为有深远意义

mahaofei001

头页看来是占不到了……