【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障15系列】【15-11】文史哲

kudoucliff

今天的第二篇仍然是从The Call of The Wild里选的，我觉得很有意思的一段，蛮家庭的感觉，哈哈。


第四篇和第五篇是同一篇文章


SPEED


【Time 1】

The Supreme Court Intended to Protect Government Employees

Over two decades ago, in O’Connor v. Ortega, the Supreme Court attempted to provide guidance on the scope of the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protection for government employees in the workplace.  Although the O’Connor Court ruled that public employees retain their Fourth Amendment rights, the Justices splintered regarding the proper standard for delineating those rights. Last Term, in City of Ontario v. Quon, the Supreme Court used O’Connor as guidance to hold — on the specific set of facts in the case — that a police chief did not violate the Fourth Amendment by auditing a SWAT team member’s messages sent from a government-issued pager. Yet instead of clarifying whether a government employee enjoys a reasonable expectation of privacy when using government-issued equipment, the Court provided no helpful guidance for similar cases in the future, declining to decide whether the Fourth Amendment provides such a reasonable expectation in technological contexts. Although the Court would prefer to allow technological norms to develop before crafting rigid rules, its reluctance to devise an intelligible principle for Fourth Amendment rights regarding technology will have the negative effect of causing lower courts to rely on O’Connor to an even greater extent. Because the O’Connor test is flexible and fact-specific, judges will often be able to reach whatever conclusion they want.  The Court should have ruled that public employees do not enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy when sending text messages from government-issued devices.
(235)

【Time 2】

Querrals & the Personality of Mercedes

Charles and Hal wrangled whenever Mercedes gave them a chance. It was the cherished belief of each that he did more than his share of the work, and neither forbore to speak this belief at every opportunity. Sometimes Mercedes sided with her husband, sometimes with her brother. The result was a beautiful and unending family quarrel. Starting from a dispute as to which should chop a few sticks for the fire (a dispute which concerned only Charles and Hal), presently would be lugged in the rest of the family, fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, people thousands of miles away, and some of them dead. That Hal's views on art, or the sort of society plays his mother's brother wrote, should have anything to do with the chopping of a few sticks of firewood, passes comprehension; nevertheless the quarrel was as likely to tend in that direction as in the direction of Charles's political prejudices. And that Charles's sister's tale-bearing tongue should be relevant to the building of a Yukon fire, was apparent only to Mercedes, who disburdened herself of copious opinions upon that topic, and incidentally upon a few other traits unpleasantly peculiar to her husband's family. In the meantime the fire remained unbuilt, the camp half pitched, and the dogs unfed.

Mercedes nursed a special grievance—the grievance of sex. She was pretty and soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But the present treatment by her husband and brother was everything save chivalrous. It was her custom to be helpless. They complained. Upon which impeachment of what to her was her most essential sex prerogative, she made their lives unendurable. She no longer considered the dogs, and because she was sore and tired, she persisted in riding on the sled. She was pretty and soft, but she weighed one hundred and twenty pounds—a lusty last straw to the load dragged by the weak and starving animals. She rode for days, till they fell in the traces and the sled stood still. Charles and Hal begged her to get off and walk, pleaded with her, entreated, the while she wept and importuned Heaven with a recital of their brutality.
(362)

【Time 3】

LOCAL STORY
A community newspaper covers a national tragedy.

LETTER FROM NEWTOWN about how the Newtown Bee covered the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. When Shannon Hicks, a reporter and photographer for the Newtown Bee, pulled into the Sandy Hook Elementary School’s parking lot, Newtown police officers had already entered the school. She saw a young officer, William Chapman, come out of the school yelling, “Get a bus!” He had a limp girl in his arms. A few minutes later, officers began to lead the first class of children out of the school. With their eyes clenched shut, the children appeared trusting. Hicks’s photograph of the class has become the iconic picture of the tragedy. Hicks has been at the Bee since 1985, when she was sixteen. She spent her first two decades at the paper taking hundreds of pictures of car crashes. Five years ago, she decided to join the Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire & Rescue Company. Her pictures of accidents are now framed on the walls of the Sandy Hook firehouse. Mentions John Voket. The Bee was founded in 1877. The paper is currently delivered to the homes of two-thirds of the residents of Newtown, and after the shooting the editor, Curtiss Clark, found himself thinking about its purpose. He wanted the paper to draw the community together, to reclaim its routine—a task made nearly impossible by all the outsiders streaming into town. The Bee reporters talked about the deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary School as if the children had been in some sort of natural disaster. They referred to “the incident” and avoided the name Adam Lanza, which had become a kind of obscenity. After the camera crews left, a new crop of investigators took over. The Sandy Hook Truther Movement, a loose coalition of online conspiracy theorists, claimed that the massacre had never happened. The Bee recently submitted Hicks’s photograph of the children being led to safety for the Pulitzer Prize, but Hicks still felt conflicted about her work that day.
(327)

【Time 4】

Bittersweet Tea
Tracy Thompson digs beneath the surface of the “New South.”

Growing up in rural South Carolina, I tended a large vegetable garden and a small orchard with my family. The land, given to my dad by his mother as a wedding present, had once been a cotton field. Of the yearly rituals involved with the garden, my favorite was the October tilling. A relative who made his living as a real farmer would come down to the house with his professional till and run it through our ground, turning the brittle old corn stalks and bean vines from the previous harvest under so they could disintegrate and enrich the soil for the coming spring’s planting. There was always something refreshing about it, seeing the topsoil unburdened of all that dead weight—not far off emotionally from the Sunday cycle of confession and forgiveness.

Pardon me for waxing misty about the Lowder family garden. In her quietly brilliant book The New Mind of the South, Tracy Thompson writes that Southerners have—or at least imagine they have—a unique relationship to dirt:

"Southerners may live in the heart of Manhattan, in a penthouse in Pairs, or in a condo in Buckhead—but if they identify themselves as Southerners, it means that somewhere, and probably not very far back, they have a close personal connection to the land: relatives who live in the rural South, a grandfather who farmed, a small town that is the ancestral family home, a cousin up in some holler who still talks with a twang. Lifelong residents of, say, Kansas may also lay claim to agrarian roots, but they don’t celebrate it the way Southerners tend to, laboring as so many of us do under the delusion that we have a special, mystical attachment to The Land."
(290)

【Time 5】

Thompson knows exactly why I maintain my delusional dirt attachment—my potted herbs in Harlem somehow don’t satisfy it—but that tilling I remember so well gets at another point her book, a rigorous psychological profile told in the easy drawl of a homecoming story, has right about “our” people.

The problem with the modern South, as Thompson sees it, is the region’s desperate, almost pathological desire to till under a whole mess of historical refuse so that it can get on with being and branding itself “new.” But the difference is, these remnants—horrific racial violence, Jim Crow-era indignities, Lost Cause mythology, and, of course, the noxious sludge of slavery itself—will not fertilize the land; they will blight it. Indeed, since they have already been salt on the Southern earth for the 150 years since the Civil War, Thompson hopes that the ongoing sesquicentennial will show her fellow Southerners finally ready to suspend their famed cordiality for a spell in order to honestly, purgatively sort through the trash.

A Yankee couldn’t get away with this book. But Thompson’s upbringing in Georgia allows for an intimacy of insight (not to mention a pleasing front-porch cadence) that tempers her chastisements with a weary strain of compassion. She loves the South and, though she recognizes its many flaws, ultimately wants to see it heal. The medicine required is obvious from the outset: The South must face “the way it has assiduously cultivated, refined, and tended” the “myths, distortions, and strategic omissions” that define its deeply skewed sense of history. Southerners, Thompson notes, echoing the historian Carl Degler, have a peculiar sense of “two-ness”—that is, of cherishing their identity but knowing, if only in their guts, that something is fundamentally amiss behind the sweet tea and yes ma’ams.
(297)


OBSTACLE

OBAMA’S BRIEF AGAINST PROPOSITION 8 GOES FAR

Thursday night, just hours before a filing deadline, President Obama’s Justice Department submitted an amicus curiae brief asking the Supreme Court to strike down Proposition 8—California’s gay-marriage ban. Even more importantly, it did so by asserting a bold claim to full equality for gay and lesbian Americans, which is a significant development in the nation’s rapidly moving consideration of the issue.

The brief—which President Obama, according to a report on SCOTUSblog, personally helped craft—did not directly ask the Supreme Court to declare marriage equality a constitutional right. Even so, its legal reasoning points squarely in that direction. If the Court accepts the full weight and reasoning of the President’s arguments, any state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage would fail the test of constitutionality. Twenty-nine states, in addition to California, have such amendments now.

Theodore Boutrous, one of the lead attorneys in the small group of legal heavyweights representing the Proposition 8 plaintiffs (a team including David Boies and Ted Olson), said on a conference call for reporters which was quickly arranged after the brief was filed, that they were “extremely pleased” that the government had taken a strong stand for marriage. He added, with respect to other anti-gay marriage bans, “I don’t see any way these laws could survive” under the legal test urged by the Justice Department in its brief.

It would have been close to impossible to imagine these developments less than a year ago.

Until last May, the President was not even on record as supporting same-sex marriage. Early on during his first term, gay-rights advocates were enraged when the Justice Department filed a grossly insensitive, Bush-era brief in a lesser known gay-rights case. Because the federal government is not a party to the California case, he could have sat this one out, or asked the Supreme Court to rule on narrow procedural grounds that would bring marriage only to California.
Instead, his Administration has filed a brief that goes further than he ever has before, and further than the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals went in its reasoning when it affirmed the lower court’s ruling throwing out Proposition 8. Nor is Obama alone on this one: a group of prominent Republicans submitted an amicus brief of their own against Proposition 8, and dozens of corporations have signed one, too. Even the State of California, which had refused to defend the law, submitted a new amicus brief on Thursday, asking the Court to declare its own law unconstitutional.

Some of the arguments in Obama’s brief are particular to California, or to states that have full domestic-partnership or civil-union laws. California, it says
provides to same-sex couples registered as domestic partners all the legal incidents of marriage, but it nonetheless denies them the designation of marriage allowed to their opposite-sex counterparts. Particularly in those circumstances, the exclusion of gay and lesbian couples from marriage does not substantially further any important governmental interest. Proposition 8 thus violates equal protection.

Importantly, however, the Administration goes on to say that any legislative classifications based upon sexual orientation—like laws that limit marriage to heterosexuals—in order to be justified constitutionally, should be subject to a standard of review known as “heightened scrutiny.” The implications of this argument are extremely broad.

Under heightened scrutiny, laws that hinge on sexual orientation are only constitutional if they are needed to advance a compelling or important government interest. Uniformly, in the gay-marriage cases, the only justifications put forth by opponents of marriage equality are those based on tradition, custom, or prejudice. Because those reasons are not ”compelling,” the gay-marriage bans cannot survive the test. The government has advanced a similar argument in the Defense of Marriage Act cases—which involve not the right to marry but the federal recognition of otherwise valid marriages—but never in a pure marriage case. (The Court will hear the Proposition 8 case on March 26th and the DOMA case on March 27th.)

Attorney General Eric Holder, in his own statement following the submission of the brief, called the issues in the case “not just important to the tens of thousands [of] Americans who are being denied equal benefits and rights under our laws, but to our Nation as a whole.”

Administration officials speaking immediately after the filing on background characterized the deliberations leading up to it as a balancing act in which the final result was both consistent with the President’s pro-equality values, yet also politically strategic. It does not call for gay marriage immediately in all fifty states. Yet, the President and his staff felt strongly that he had to come out fully in favor of gay rights, as he had done in his Inaugural Address—and it achieved that, too, making a legal argument breathtaking in its full embrace of gay rights.
(798)

cleotina

2'19
2'30
3'
2'
1'50
5'15

ssk3666

1 01:53
The Super Court passed O vO act of privacy rights. The goverment officals should not issue messages from government devices that will threaten citizens' privacy rights.

2 02:48
H and C are M's husband and brother. They will dispute once they have a chance, all about tiny things in family life. This made M tired, and she was reluctant to deal with family affairs untill H and C begged her for restart.

3 02:25 [327]
H was a photographer in Bee and she experinced the massacre in the elementary school and took many pictures. H was a photographer for many years and took pictures for accidents, Bee is a local newspaper and wants to be more involved in local news.

4 02:05 [290]
The author's grandma gave them a garden and farm land, the author's family moved there and lived fro a long time. The author love the crops there. And he cites T's famous book to explain that the sountheners have a deep relationship with land.

5 02:11 [297]
Although the Southeners love their land and dirt, but T points out that there still are many flaws in the South, such as the slavery. T hopes that ongoing sequences will help modify these flaws since the Civil War. The southeners should try to become better.

Obstacle
6 05:40 [798]
Main Point: Dicuss the implications of president Obama and his government's accepting of same-sex marrage.
Structure: Event, Obama's government denied a proposal for ban same-sex marriage in Califonia -- Implications: Admit by the constitution and the super court that same-sex poeple should have equal marriage rights -- Reasons to do so: in accordance with equal human rights, eliminate discrimination of gays or lesibians -- Predication: admitted by central government, other states will eventually change to allow same-sex marriage.

peterlongzhang

2013-3-3
1.2'18'': 235 words
goverment has issued a new regulation on protection of public employees. the public employees still remain the right in the fourth amendment rights.
2.2'28'': 362 words
the C's family ware in a mass because of the issue about whether they should build an stove. the famaily stuck into the quarrel and do nothing in the house.
3.2'19'': 327 words
the story is about the experience of S in the massacre in Newtown. his photos reflect many part of the tragedy.
4.1'50'': 290 words
the author has an precious feeling about the land in california. his favorite part of the rural work in the october tilling.
5.2'32'': 297 wrods
t' book reveal his perspective of my view on the tilling work.
6.5'54'': 798 words
main idea: obama has striked down the proposition 8, which was an gay marriage ban.
structure:
come up the main idea of the passage.
the passage has presented background information, explaination and attitude of attorney about the proposition 8.

studio22

time1 2:12
time2 3:09   difficult

studio22

time3
327  2:20

448406078

1-235-2'03''
Dissussion about whether government employees have peivacy right to send email using government devise.

2-362-3'23''
A family quarrl about who should chop the woods.

3-327-3'03''
Bee covered a shooting issues in school. H taking out the picturtre want to draw people together.

4-290-2'20''
The author grow up with a large garden, and intorduction of a garden.

5-297-1'51''
A book share some points with the author, and the topic of it is about South problems.

spencerX

thx for shairng~

0:00:54
0:01:38
0:01:19
0:01:08
0:01:17

0:03:49

vividlai

1-1'13
2-1'59
3-1'24
4-1'11
5-1'06

3'50
main idea:the p 8 is stroke down by Obama, p 8 is to support the gay marriage, and many attorneys explained that why it is stroke down, and many people call for gay rights.

limin501

Time 1
2’17
Time 2
2’46
Time 3
2’30
Time 4
2’21
Time 5
3
Obstacle:
6’23