[snip] Things the appellate court has to tell immigration judges these days. On November 1 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed the decision of an immigration judge who’d denied the request for asylum from the Mamedovs, a family from Turkmenistan. Ahmed Mamedov claimed he’d been fired whenever an employer found out he was Jewish; his wife, a Muslim, claimed she was fired because she was married to a Jew. “Being excluded from all employment…and being beaten by the police to boot, could amount to persecution,” wrote Judge Richard Posner in the opinion that gave the family another chance.
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[snip] The perfect excuse for watching Monday Night Football. “There are those, said Plato, who go to the Olympics to compete; there are those who go to watch; and there are those who go to buy and sell things,” writes Oxford classicist Jasper Griffin in the New York Review of Books (October 21). “Of the three, he characteristically adds, the noblest are those who go to watch, for their activity is closest to pure contemplation, the highest activity of the human mind. It is a striking thought that in our own time many would vote to give the most honored place to the competitors, the jocks who work out, while others would prefer to single out the entrepreneurs who promote economic progress (and often benefit themselves); but few or none would vote for the observer.”
