Archive for the ‘Poisoning Justice’ Category

Best Sentence LXVII

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Ann Coulter, once again, snags the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award. She could make a clean sweep of these things in her sleep. Writing on the now-famous Ricci v. De Stefano case, which was decided in favor of the plaintiffs by a 5-4 vote on Monday, she concludes

[Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg and the other dissenters made a big point of pretending there was some flaw in this particular test. None adopted [nominee Sonia] Sotomayor’s position that unequal test results alone prove discrimination.

This suggests that a wise Jewess, due to the richness of her life experiences, might come to a better judgment than a Latina judge would.

There are other such gems in there, including one ongoing theme that has long been one of my favorites: How hyper-liberal legal professionals, such as ham-and-egger lawyers, ambulance chasers, county superior court judges, appellate judges, legal pundits, et al…out of some supposed sense of inner decency…continue to saddle other professions with bizarre rules, regulations, codes and taboos that dare not come within a hundred and fifty yards of their own mahogany doorways.

They’re vultures. Which means you can’t really blame them. It’s contrary to a vulture’s nature to scrape a bone only halfway clean. Them getting away with it — that’s our fault.

Reid Won’t Read

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

Our Senate Majority Leader belongs to the adorable party, so he can get away with this. Even though the chamber he leads, is constitutionally tasked with figuring out whether a nominee is worthy or not…and it is the only legislative body that can sign off on that. Harry Reid, CEO of Congress’ upper chamber, according to his own words, hasn’t cracked open a Sotomayor opinion. Hasn’t even peeked at so much as a word in any one of ’em. And doesn’t plan to.

He brags about it.

Uninformed is the new informed. Knowing-nothing is the new knowing-something. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius…

I understand that during her career, she’s written hundreds and hundreds of opinions. I haven’t read a single one of them, and if I’m fortunate before we end this, I won’t have to read one of them. But — I’m not familiar with that opinion, but there will be plenty of time for people who are concerned about the Second Amendment — and there are lots of people on the Judiciary Committee who are concerned about it — they’ll have lots of time to offer her questions and she’ll proceed to answer them. But I don’t know anything about that.

Just another chapter in the ongoing civil war between those who, upon being presented with a package, inspect the contents — and those who inspect the packaging. The “steak” people versus the “sizzle” people. Senator Reid is typifying an elite crusty layer within the “sizzle” camp…those who not only fixate on appearance at the expense of diligently inspecting substance, but bristle with a secret antipathy toward anyone who would deign to take a look at contents. Toward anyone who would, even by accident, become aware of them.

Bragging about ignorance. Just imagine it. But in Camp Sizzle, it makes all the sense in the world.

That Would Be Sufficient Reason

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

More wisdom posted by me, at your Sotomayor News Update Center…a place formerly known as FARK. It’s a generic comment that couldn’ve been placed under any one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of links that have gone up over the last few days.

On her qualifications, I don’t have much of an opinion one way or the other. She seems decidedly average and ordinary, by design, like if there was something too truly remarkable about her judicial & logical reasoning ability she would’ve been eliminated.

But it’s a HUGE red flag to me that the very people who want her seated, like, NOW, this week, this afternoon would be better — are the same ones submitting a FARK link about Sotomayor twenty times an hour around the clock. Very few things in life scream Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain louder than that.

On the “Latina” thing: I can just see the man-and-God conversation:

Man: All these centuries rolling on by. When are you going to bless us with harmony and equality and banish the tension from our racial/gender differences to the ash heap of history once and for all?

God: When you stop bringing those differences up, stupid!

Anyone who thinks the Supreme Court should include a black seat, a woman-seat, a Hispanic-seat, a Jewish seat and/or a disabled-seat…should really just stay home and watch reruns on election day. They’re placing the responsibilities of special agendized advocacy groups, onto the arbiters in the middle. Judges and justices aren’t supposed to be advocates. As things sit now, I don’t see a reason to vote against Sotomayor, but if she’s coupled-up with an agenda of turning neutral arbiters into advocates, then that would be sufficient reason.

Article was already “red-lit” before I made my comment…which I’m positive will be subjected to respectful and thoughtful treatment by the intellectual giants there. “Red-lit” means it was un-approved for publication to the general public, so you need to have a TOTALFARK subscription just to see the thread. You can get one here.

I have no idea if that one idea of mine is going to sit out there by its lonesome, or if it will kick off a huge thread-post melee that will stretch on for miles and days. I really don’t know. I really don’t care.

No. I really don’t care. I’m pretty much just sounding off, on this one.

This Vaccine Against Scrutiny

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

The Daily Gut, issuing what I’m afraid is going to be the final word on the Sotomayor nomination for quite some time. Really. There’s really nothing more to be said.

So far, every single headline I’ve seen mentions the woman’s race – which, as you know, is by design. It’s a terrific strategy, this vaccine against scrutiny. Simply make sure you nominate anyone who is the “first” of anything and you create an impenetrable cone of immunity around the nominee (protecting mainly against the media, and of course, conservatives). You could say this strategy worked with great success during the last presidential election – that if Barack wasn’t black, he would have just been another white policy wonk – a less persuasive version of John Edwards, without the wayward weenie.
:
The bottom line is, when a person’s “story” is the story, it’s purely a diversionary tactic to take you off the ideological ball. It’s a clue to everyone – especially the media – that this time you should do more than order the commemorative plates.

Two Dozen Coffee Mugs

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

It’s not about pissing off that one guy, actually; it’s about elaborating on that “Humans Matter” point on which I was ruminating two weekends ago. It occurred to me that, if this was undergo a metamorphosis into an effective campaign to revitalize the Republican party, or at least give new life to someone who would oppose the nihilists who are in charge right now…perhaps this could be most effectively communicated as a limited number of specs on that “Humans Matter” point. In other words, maybe it would be beneficial to make the next few campaigns about mattering.

It seems to me this is the catalyst of what all the shouting is about lately. Is it appropriate for humans, for Americans, to do things that actually make a difference? Without apologizing for it? By that I mean, as individual efforts…rather than these things we should “all come together” to do?

Perhaps it is easy to envision ourselves as not-doing-things, and tearing down anybody else who would think of really-doing-things, simply because we are only casually acquainted with the everyday, real-life benefits of doing things. Or the liabilities involved in not doing them.

So my vision is a set of coffee mugs — sold six or twelve at a time, with twenty-four unique designs. Their designs have it in common that the phrase —

Dare To…

…is right up there at the top.

And then the smaller lettering halfway down says one of the following…

1. Decide Where Your Money Goes
2. Drive Your Car
3. Discipline Your Child
4. Breathe
5. Be an American
6. Support the Troops
7. Clean Up Iraq
8. Support Israel
9. Be, or Appreciate, a Wise Strong Resourceful Manly Dude
10. Be, or Appreciate, a Smart Powerful Gorgeous Woman
11. Support Capital Punishment
12. Organize a Tea Party
13. Defend the Unborn
14. Speak Your Mind
15. Own a Gun
16. Eat Meat
17. Drink Beer
18. Want Terrorists Dead
19. Be What You Are
20. Hang on to What You Have
21. Build Things People Use
22. Watch FOX
23. Vote Against Obama
24. Raise a Boy into a Man

These are all things that have been stigmatized over the last forty years. Or twenty, or seven, or two-to-four.

Not a single one of them should be stigmatized, and deep down, I think everyone knows that.

Let’s un-stigmatize them. Nevermind whether it’s possible, in the years ahead, to get someone elected on that or not. Just forget all about that. Un-stigmatize regardless.

Empathy

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

Thomas Sowell writes with some interesting thoughts about the replacement for retiring justice David Souter. Said thoughts inspired by a snippet from the Holy Lips of our Divinely Inspired President Himself…in keeping with what we have come to expect from Him, polished to a mirror finish, but reckless and poorly-thought-out nevertheless.

“I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book. It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives,” [President Obama] said. “I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.”

Wow, what a great deal! Who can argue against justice?

Not so fast. Out here in the world of grown-ups, there’s a little bit more to a “just outcome” than this Alan Shore tactic of figuring out who the “good guy” is and then giving him everything. Professor Sowell reminds us what maturity is by going back over a piece of American history.

Part I:

That we are discussing the next Supreme Court justice in terms of group “representation” is a sign of how far we have already strayed from the purpose of law and the weighty responsibility of appointing someone to sit for life on the highest court in the land.

That President Obama has made “empathy” with certain groups one of his criteria for choosing a Supreme Court nominee is a dangerous sign of how much further the Supreme Court may be pushed away from the rule of law and toward even more arbitrary judicial edicts to advance the agenda of the left and set it in legal concrete, immune from the democratic process.

Would you want to go into court to appear before a judge with “empathy” for groups A, B and C, if you were a member of groups X, Y or Z? Nothing could be further from the rule of law. That would be bad news, even in a traffic court, much less in a court that has the last word on your rights under the Constitution of the United States.

Part II:

Like most people, Justice [Oliver Wendell] Holmes had empathy for some and antipathy for others, but his votes on the Supreme Court often went against those for whom he had empathy and for those for whom he had antipathy. As Holmes himself put it: “I loathed most of the things in favor of which I decided.”

Justice Holmes thought like a grown-up. It is a type of diligent thinking that often escapes those who enjoy the luxury of bringing about a revolution, and thus to think about justice in purely black-and-white terms.

Part III:

Barack Obama’s vision of America is one in which a President of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell banks how to bank, control the medical system and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor other politicians have any expertise or experience.

The Constitution of the United States gives no president, nor the entire federal government, the authority to do such things. But spending trillions of dollars to bail out all sorts of companies buys the power to tell them how to operate.

Appointing judges to the federal courts– including the Supreme Court– who believe in expanding the powers of the federal government to make arbitrary decisions, choosing who will be winners and losers in the economy and in the society, is perfectly consistent with a vision of the world where self-confident and self-righteous elites rule according to their own notions, instead of merely governing under the restraints of the Constitution.

Part IV:

This process of “interpreting” the Constitution (or legislation) to mean pretty much whatever you want it to mean, no matter how plainly the words say something else, has been called judicial activism. But, as a result of widespread objections to this, that problem has been solved by redefining “judicial activism” to mean something different.

By the new definition, a judge who declares legislation that exceeds the authority of the legislature unconstitutional is called a “judicial activist.” The verbal virtuosity is breathtaking. With just a new meaning to an old phrase, reality is turned upside down. Those who oppose letting government actions exceed the bounds of the Constitution– justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas– are now called “judicial activists.” It is a verbal coup.

Our vocabulary is being assaulted. With that, our tethering to reality is likewise under assault; and with that, our sense of justice as well.

As I reflect on the wisdom of Dr. Sowell’s words, I realize something: Of all the privileged victim-groups that now enjoy the benefits of stylish empathy, very few of them do so in any modern or revolutionary way. It comes down really to just black people. Nobody can say no to a woman, of course — but that’s been true for an exceptionally long time. Back in the Middle English years, in the days of Chivalry, it was thought to be ungentlemanly for a dude to even somehow become intertwined in a battle of wills with a female, let alone to try to prevail in one. Five, six, eight or ten centuries later, men still wait, without Obama’s “empathy,” to enjoy one day in court on an equal footing with the mothers of their children. In many cases, with the mentally-imbalanced, drug-addicted, larcenous or gold-digging mothers of their children. Justice needs to show more empathy there? Justice has already shown an excess of it.

What about the poor? It’s very fashionable now to root for the underdog. But this has always been the case. How many centuries have people said Oh, look at me, I’m the good guy because I’m doing something for poor people. And that includes judicial officers. Obama wishes to start something new here? Something new would be empathy toward corporations that are targeted with obviously baseless lawsuits, and are compelled to settle out of court because of the anticipated costs involved with fighting.

What other group needs some empathy, that hasn’t already gotten it?

It’s a very sad thing to realize, this late in the game, that a blind Lady Justice is a novelty. That it should be so far out of “mainstream” thinking to expect two parties should appear in court, with the expectation that they’re taking their conflict to something resembling a level field.

But hey. This is the era of hope and change. So get ready.

Palin Still Under Attack

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

Politico

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s life has changed in a myriad of ways since she became the Republican vice presidential nominee last August, but one aspect of her newfound fame has been more bracing than the others: Since entering the national spotlight, Palin has been inundated by ethics complaints, most of them filed against her after she agreed to become Sen. John McCain’s running mate.

The complaints run the gamut, ranging from the governor’s use of state funds and staff to the workings of her political action committee and even to a jacket she wore to a snow machine race involving her husband.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how many complaints have been filed because the state doesn’t keep count and the complaints are kept confidential by the attorney general’s office unless the state moves forward with a public accusation of wrongdoing. But in total there have been more than a dozen, and most of those have surfaced in the last seven months.

That much is clear because the complainants have a habit of notifying the media and bloggers each time they lodge a grievance. It’s evidence, say Palin’s defenders, that there is a clear political component to them.

“As we’ve been saying, the number of ethics complaints filed against the governor and her staff — as well as the tortured logic they contain — continue to constitute the most disturbing trend in Alaska politics,” said Palin spokeswoman Sharon Leighow in a recent statement after one ostensibly confidential complaint was sent to the Anchorage Daily News and other news outlets.

“In the past several months, we have seen an orchestrated effort by the governor’s opponents to make differences of opinion and ideology almost criminal,” said Mike Nizich, the governor’s chief of staff, in a statement. “Governor Palin has spent a considerable amount of time and money fighting ethics complaints – and no charge has been substantiated. I hope that the publicity-seekers will face a backlash from Alaskans who have a sense of fair play and proportion. I served six previous governors, and I’ve never seen anything like the attacks against Governor Palin.”

You can contribute to Sarah Palin’s defense fund here — for now, so far as I know.

That may change soon, as the fund has now been challenged as a…wait for it…yup, you guessed it. An ethics violation.

The complainant, Kim Chatman of Eagle River, claims Palin is misusing the governor’s office for personal gain by securing unwarranted benefits and receiving improper gifts.
:
Chatman’s complaint cites as potential donors the 500,000 supporters signed up for Palin’s Facebook account and various political organizations.

“Gov. Palin is perched to improperly receive an enormous amount of money for herself and her family and position a pool of pre-paid defense lawyers organized to deflect consequences of wrongdoings,” the complaint says.

Chatman told The Associated Press in a phone interview that she voted for Palin as governor in 2006, but now sees her as unethical. Palin “is not holding up her end of the bargain,” she said.

Elsewhere in the news, Wikipedia’s Astroturfing page is still filled to the brim under the “Examples, Political” section with anecdotes about right-wing organizations pushing right-wing agendas through phony or motivated right-wing individuals. It has absolutely no examples whatsoever of any astroturfing going the other direction. This has led to a vigorous debate under the talk page about why this might be.

I’m thinking if the truth of the Palin complaints ever gets out, Wikipedia just might be able to remedy that, and therefore enhance/preserve/salvage its reputation as a centrist, complete and unfiltered information resource. But that’s a pretty big “if.”

Souter Out

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Yech. I’m just thinking about who the replacement’s gonna be. Oprah Winfrey? Tickle-Me Elmo?

This is a good reminder, though. Bush II did not completely destroy his own conservative credentials. As far as Supreme Court nominees, he remains in good standing…in fact, he solidly out performed his old man — who was responsible for nominating that abomination Souter in the first place — as well as the great icon Ronaldus Maximus, who signed off on O’Connor and Kennedy.

So show a little gratitude to that village idiot down in Crawford, if for no other reason that you know it’s gonna get a whole lot worse.

Little Laws

Friday, April 24th, 2009

Anchoress:

[M]y husband and I were strolling through the city and realized we were going to be late for a gathering, so we hopped in a cab and had a very interesting chat with the driver, an Afghani (is that correct?) who has lived here for 30 years, raised a family and so forth. In talking about the advantages of working for oneself, he said he had not yet felt the pinch of the bad economy, but he expected he would, sooner or later. Then he complained that America was “no longer a democracy.”

I asked him what he meant by that and he said, “this country used to be about freedom. You work, you pay your taxes, and you are left alone to live your life. That was freedom. Now America is all about little laws, I am being nagged to death with the little laws. I work on cars like a hobby. I always keep my cab covered, out of regard for my neighbors. Then I am told, ‘you’re not allowed to cover your car’, I think because they wonder what is under it. So I don’t cover it, and then I get told it must come off the street because it is an eyesore, but I am not allowed to cover it.”

“Yeah, those little laws,” I teased, “Chesterton said, ‘When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom. You do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.’ ”

“But I am not breaking any laws!” he said, “I do nothing but work and work and I work very hard, and I feel like every day America is finding new laws, more laws, and no matter how much I want to just live my life and keep to myself, America is making so many laws that we all cannot just live anymore, now we have to always answer to someone. I don’t like it.”

“No, I can’t say I like it much, either,” I agreed.

But the little laws are costless, we think. We must think this sometimes at some level, otherwise, would it be such a simple matter to create a society so full of the little laws?

Costless. Affordable. But are they?

Of course, as our government steals more and more of the wealth from its own citizens, we’re seeing that the responsibilites that the government is entrusted with are being breached. If we’re going to have a fascist government, they’re at least supposed to keep us safe, right?

Yeah, not quite.

Just look at Contra Costa County in California, where certain criminals are no longer going to be prosecuted.

Misdemeanors such as assaults, thefts and burglaries will no longer be prosecuted in Contra Costa County because of budget cuts, the county’s top prosecutor said Tuesday.

District Attorney Robert Kochly also said that beginning May 4, his office will no longer prosecute felony drug cases involving smaller amounts of narcotics. That means anyone caught with less than a gram of methamphetamine or cocaine, less than 0.5 grams of heroin and fewer than five pills of ecstasy, OxyContin or Vicodin won’t be charged.

People who are suspected of misdemeanor drug crimes, break minor traffic laws, shoplift, trespass or commit misdemeanor vandalism will also be in the clear. Those crimes won’t be prosecuted, either.

Jeremy Clarkson, host of BBC’s Top Gear, rules himself out of consideration for the job of Prime Minister of the UK…with some interesting words that dovetail nicely into this topic overall:

He ruled himself out of Downing Street when asked at the Hay Festival in Powys about a 1,000-strong Facebook group calling for him to get his job.

He talked of his loathing for health and safety rules and bureaucracy.

The broadcaster said the government should be in charge of “building park benches and nothing else”.

This is a country in which you’re supposed to have a license to watch the “telly”…the equivalent of 300 USD, I understand, per year…and then they have some goo-gooder nanny-constables knocking on the door of your “flat” looking for television sets so they can enforce this. The English need a Prime Minister Clarkson; it would do ’em some good. I see them as the nicely-poached frog floating belly-side up in the pot of boiling water. That Spirit of 1776 that compelled us to sever the bonds, out of protest of taxation-without-representation — it is a regional thing. It is the absence of something-else, like the dark or the cold, but it is something more than that, I think. It is a recalcitrant refusal to co-exist with the invading nanny-state that insists your kids have to wear helmets and elbow pads on a swing set.

The “little laws” of the nanny-state, in turn, constitute a recalcitrant refusal to co-exist with common sense. Before you know it, you’ve blown so much time & money on the fancy cupholder and seatwarmers that you can’t afford to make the engine run. You’re letting criminals out of jail — so that you tell people what to eat and how to live.

Make sure the good guys win and the bad guys lose…maintain some police stations, fire halls, and maybe Jeremy’s precious park benches…and that is it.

The Axis of Evil…Now

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Byron York writes about the Bush speechwriter responsible for the term “Axis of Evil,” and his reflections on whether it fits today.

Recently I called David Frum, who is a friend and also the Bush speechwriter who came up with the “Axis” concept. (He originally wrote it as “Axis of Hatred.”) Given the seriousness of the situations in Iran and North Korea today, I asked, why all the mocking of the concept, virtually from the very beginning?

“The thing I never cease to marvel at,” Frum told me, “is that the phrase has become more and more of a joke even as the demonstration of the validity of the concept has become more extensive.” Frum listed some of the things the public knows now that it didn’t when Bush gave his speech — the A.Q. Khan network, the Iran-North Korea connection, the Iran-Hamas link. That’s just the kind of thing Bush was talking about.

But why were people ever laughing? Well, a lot of them just liked to laugh at Bush. But Frum believes there’s something else — the complicated nature of the word “evil.” “It just seemed overtorqued,” he told me. We use the word “evil,” Frum explained, in two very different ways. One is the totally serious sense in which we describe a very, very small group of bad actors — a group that doesn’t extend far beyond Adolf Hitler. The other is the sense in which we use “evil” as a light-hearted description for things that are at most a bit naughty — like saying we feel “evil” after ordering the chocolate cake. “If you’re not talking about Hitler, you’re talking about cake,” Frum said. “That’s why it was funny.” But that incongruity made it difficult for people to take the “Axis of Evil” seriously, even though it was, and is, quite serious.

…[T]wo-thirds of the “Axis of Evil” are still at it, and still among the most pressing problems facing the United States today. And that’s no “Saturday Night Live” skit.

I have a different thought about that word “evil.” Whether you’re talking about an evil tinpot dictator or an evil slice of chocolate cake, in my mind, is fairly well determined in an instant, right down to the very core of the brain of the person using or hearing the word. I don’t think Frum’s thoughts here make a great deal of sense, frankly, because I don’t think there’s any lack of understanding or ambiguity here whatsoever.

I think that lack of ambiguity is the problem. People laugh at the term…out of nervousness.

It commands a sense of responsibility. It commands action. I say “that guy down the street did something rude…” or “liberal…” or “radical…” or even “environmentally unsound…” and it seems more than reasonable to leave well enough alone, go back to watching Dancing With the Stars and gnawing on a butter stick.

But to say someone close by did something evil — that’s practically the same as demanding someone actually do something about it. Who among us can say out loud “I know of an evil thing that is being done but I’m not going to do anything about it”? Sure you can do that, but you can’t take pride in it.

So if you’re already fixated on laziness, and someone comes along to point out something evil was done, that gentleman is ruling out continued laziness as an option. That’s why he has to be ridiculed and mocked. It’s absolutely necessary.

The irony is, in such a lazy society, the only thing that remains truly evil is noticing evil. And, after a time, the only thing that remains “good” is a readiness, willingness and ability to pretend evil is not taking place when you know damn good and well that it is.

These are treacherous times. We’re allowing our court jesters to become our kingmakers. Down that road lies a sure path to ruin.

“Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil…” — Isaiah 5:20

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Two Steps From Dipso

Friday, April 17th, 2009

Blogger friend Andy has a two-step plan for dealing with pirates.

I like it. I like it a whole lot. I like it the way I like Oxy-Clean…which means…by channeling a tiny vestigial quantity of resourcefulness, such a morsel as I would not deign to boast about…I can come up with some productive new applications for this simple formula above and beyond what its creator ever intended. I want to use the two-step plan on tinpot dictator assholes like Kim-Jong. Panhandlers. Telemarketers. Kids that skateboard in retail store parking lots after the assistant-manager that drew the short straw was sent out to ask them to stop.

Looking Back at the Somali Pirate Situation

Friday, April 17th, 2009

This video went up a week ago, before that bold rescue supposedly ordered by President Obama. Perhaps the President managed to catch this segment and see the wisdom in Ambassador Bolton’s remarks:

The President’s response to a reporter’s question at 0:44 is one of many reasons I’m convinced he’s a one-termer. Nobody voted for someone to talk to people constantly like the school Vice-Principal talking to the stupidest third-grader who’s just been sent down to the office for the eleventh time in a week. Alright…maybe some people did vote for exactly that. But for those who ever did find that appealing, how long does it remain so? Four years or more? I’m skeptical. Skeptical at best.

Steven Crowder call this out, and does his customary excellent job doing so —

Don’t be too tough on President Obama. If I were Him, it would be awfully tough to convince me the typical American voter had any intelligence at all.

Getting back to this rescue operation, though: Fellow Webloggin contributor JoshuaPundit has a few more questions about what exactly went on here…

[W]e already know that the US forces involved (either Marine Scouts or SEALS) were under orders to hold off while negotiations with the pirates were continuing.Aside from this factoid being released by the Department of Defense, this was confirmed by the fact that Captain Phillips made an escape into the water and started swimming for the USS Bainbridge. The Naval/Marine forces involved thus had a clear shot to take out the pirates, but held off and did nothing to interfere with Phillips being recaptured by the pirates.

They were obviously under orders not to shoot. So if there was a White House call, it was to remove previous restrictions on our military placed on them by personal order of the President.

I still give him kudos for that if that’s how it went down, but it leads to other questions.

I wonder… just why did this drag on for so long? Piracy is the only thing Somalia can claim as anything like a growth industry, and in the past they’ve hijacked cargoes and collected ransoms with impunity. Was President Obama planning to emulate the Europeans and pay ransom? Was that why the pirates were allowed to chat with CNN and their cell phones were not jammed?

What if the lifeboat Captain Phillips was being held on had started to make for shore? Were the men on the Bainbridge authorized to stop them? I have a feeling they weren’t., based on the rules of Engagement and the probable orders from the President.

And finally, why exactly is Somali piracy still a problem?

The locations of the pirate bases are known, and the President has supposedly pledged to work with other nations to stop Somali piracy and protect the international waterway at the Horn of Africa. So why haven’t there been decisive attacks on the pirate bases and the pirate’s Islamist protectors like the local al-Qaeda affiliate Al Shabab, which takes a share of the loot as ‘taxes’? It could easily be done from the air or the sea.

Why haven’t the navies of interested parties participated in a joint naval blockade, with instructions to interdict any ship approaching Somalia with suspicious cargo or to blow any Somalian craft that strays out of a clearly marked safe zone out of the water?

I keep hearing that President Obama is more “curious” and “open-minded” than His predecessor. Well, actually…it’s been a few weeks since I heard that. But still, that’s supposed to be the prevailing theme. Nevertheless, when questions like these are brought up, and “Pee Wee” dismisses them all with some flippant comment about “we’re talking about housing right now,” it helps to cement His reputation more and more as the President of non-curiosity.

Does He have a shot at re-election in 2012? Of course He does. He can answer some questions that aren’t completely to His liking and stop controlling what “we’re” all talking about from moment to moment. Or…He could still have a shot…but only in a country that has lost any & all respect for ideas and information. Within a society that has embraced the paste-jar and devoted itself to a return to Kindergarten days, where the rules were simple, a teacher was constantly telling you what to think & what to say, and they even had nap-time.

For the time being, His methods are well-defined. No more questions need be asked, President Obama orchestrated a brave rescue, now move along folks there’s nothing else to see here.

My One-Liner on Boston Legal

Sunday, April 12th, 2009

The so-called “conservatives” on that show, misrepresent conservative thought pretty much exactly the same way the liberals do.

Sorry, to all you friends reading this who were so adamant about how much I’d love it because it “does such a fair job of presenting both sides.” I imagine it might look that way to you, if you’ve never done such a thing yourself, and never actually seen this done.

This brings me to another one of my one-liners:

Is it possible to make liberal ideas look good, without misrepresenting something?

This Is Good LX

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Scipio

Future Present
Posted on March 29th, 2009 by Scipio

Our archeologist, while rummaging among the ruins of our fallen civilization, met a ghost from the long dead race of Americans. The wraith boasted much about what we had been as a people.

We died in the hundreds of thousands to end slavery here and around the world.

We invented Jazz.

We wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg address.

We went to the moon to see how far we could hit a golf ball.

We lifted a telescope into orbit that could see to the edge of the universe.

When people snuck into the country against our laws, we made parking lots and food stands off to the side of the road so they wouldn’t get hurt, and we let them use our hospitals for free, and we made their children citizens.

We didn’t care what God you worshipped as long as we could worship ours.

We let the People arm themselves at will. Just to make sure.

We gave everybody the vote.

We built Disneyworld. Just for fun.

We had a revolution so successful it was still going strong two and a quarter centuries later.

We had so many heroes, even at the end, that we felt free to hate them and burn them in effigy.

We electrified the guitar.

We invented a music so compelling that it rocked the world.

The archeologist asked, “If you accomplished all of this, then why did your nation collapse?” The ghost answered, “Because we went insane.”

“Please explain.”

The ghost took a breath and said, “We traded beauty for ugliness, truth for lies, liberty for comfort, love for indifference, responsibility for frivolity, duty for entertainment, history for sound bites, and children for pleasure. We had gold, but we tossed it aside and replaced it with cleverly designed dross. We turned men into women and women into men and marveled at our new creative power. We stopped looking up to Heaven and began to keep our gaze firmly fixed on the ground. We abandoned the old God for a host of hip, cool and slick new ones.”

“And?”

“Those new gods turned on us. At first they granted us our every wish. They laughed with us. They danced with us. We all ate, drank and made all sorts of merry. All of us exulted in our power. And then…” Here the ghost stopped for a moment. His mouth was half open as if trying to speak. His body shuddered as it remembered an ancient terror. “But there were some among us who felt something was wrong, dreadfully wrong.”

“How so?”

There’s more…much more. What’re you still doing here?

R and R-Lite Instead of D and D-Lite

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Cylarz has a challenge in the comments section that really makes you think. His intent is to show how absurd is the notion that Rush Limbaugh is running much of anything, along with the idea that anyone, anywhere, is somehow forced to listen to him:

Imagine what life in this nation would be like if our parties were Republican and Republican-lite…instead of Democrat and Democrat-lite. The former is what the political scene would look like if everyone were listening to Rush.

It is my conviction that American consensus-politics are revolving on the rim of a large wheel. It is a merry-go-round that spins into & out of, not so much conservatism and liberalism, but fantasy and reality. Right now we’re on the 1976-77 sector of the wheel, wherein we just installed a hopey-changey youthful-charismatic guy who’s gonna solve all our problems. This is an exceptionally narrow pie-slice of the wheel’s orbit. It’s over in the blink of an eye. We see life’s problems are ours to solve and it’s not realistic to elect some savior-champion to deal with them on our behalf…we see it some more…we see it some more…lesson learned. For a few more years.

This dream Cylarz has, is at the opposite side…and is perhaps a little bit wider. It’s the 1969-1973, 1980-1986 side of the wheel.

So it’ll happen. It’ll happen, and we’ll get tired of it. All this stuff is inevitable, as the wheel keeps on turning. That’s my point. We kick the democrats out of power when we get tired of fantasy; when we notice, that to keep liberal ideas even looking good, there’s this never-ending pressure on to pretend simple things are complicated, and complicated things are simple. After awhile we get tired of that and we kick ’em out. We fire the Republicans when we notice, gee, it’s been awhile since we engaged the government to solve a problem and watched the problem disappear before our very eyes, wouldn’t that be neat? (The conservative platform is constructed around the paradigm that this isn’t really the purpose of government; in that way, the Founding Fathers worked under well-defined conservative bias.) People will listen to Rush, to learn what they should’ve learned before they went to vote. It’s already started to happen. It’s that human instinct to think and think and think some more about “did I turn off the stove?” when the car is zipping on down the freeway and it’s way too late to do anything about it.

But imagine if things were that way, and they stayed that way? I notice when we’re in the fantasy zone, we really are D and D-Lite. Oooh, look at me, I’m a compassionate conservative, I can blow money away on bullshit projects just as fast as my democrat “friends”; vote for me. When Republicans are in power the liberals don’t engage in some contest to see who can be the most-moderate lib. They just get all pissy and mumble the word “fascism” a lot.

So lessee…what would happen…

That last election would have been between Fred Thompson & Sarah Palin…and…Joe Lieberman and Ron Paul. Dr. Paul would be considerably more hawkish, his concerns about the constitutionality of the War on Terror ejected from his platform. Gen. David Petraeus would now have a fifth star. We would have pulled out of the United Nations.

A massive stimulus bill would have injected trillions of dollars into the U.S. economy over the next decade-and-a-half…in the form of a tax cut.

Barack Obama’s formidable oratory skills would be deployed where they would do the most good: On a radio or television program, trying to compete with Rush Limbaugh.

The front page of my local newspaper, and yours, wouldn’t speak very often to the plight of: state legislators pretending to care about balancing the budget, homeless people, unionized workers, ignorant addle-brained students who can’t graduate high school because they haven’t learned anything, prison guards, single moms, troubled youth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They’d live in a larger, better-informed world. Their headlines would very seldom deploy words like “BUDGET” and “DEFICIT” and “PROGRAM” and “NEED”…instead, you’d see proud, hopeful words in those daily headlines like “FREEDOM” and “OPPORTUNITY” and “LIBERTY.”

Your television “news” program wouldn’t talk too much about liberal programs are going to do. They’d be better-anchored to reality; they’d talk about what tax cuts have done, versus what liberal programs have done.

When some big major mega-city that’s been run by democrats for generation after generation, runs into a predictable budget deficit…you’d hear about it that way. An important part of the news report would be an editorial analysis of some rival city, floating along free of the concern of ever-enlarging social programs, without the deficits and without the liberals running everything. The news report would go through the budgets, line by equivalent line. After all, it isn’t useful news unless we explain why the problem occurred, is it?

Kids can pray in the classroom. Every classroom. If they don’t know English yet, they’re sent to remedial classes to learn it, before they learn another thing. Kids know how to fire guns, shoot arrows, build fires, tie knots. Intelligent Design? It’s recognized as precisely what it is: Just an idea that the universe, particularly the bits of it that make life possible, is here because of non-random activity as opposed to random activity. And then it’s debated. As science. Which it is.

Oh, and before I forget: This asshole is locked up for good, and/or fried crispy.

A convicted sex offender due to be released Saturday from prison after serving 11 months warned in letters that if set free, he would reoffend, even against children. In the letters, Michael McGill begged authorities to keep him locked up for life.

“Please throw the book at me … I’m harmful to others I should be locked up for life,” he wrote in block letters that resemble a child’s writing. “I will sexual abuse men. Do this for the safe (sic) of others then I be able not to hurt anyone else. Judge I’m begging you to put me away.”

In another place he wrote that he had told his two 7-year-old male victims, “I will do more sex crimes with boys 4 to 14. I will molest with boys 15 to 18.”

Neither the Polk County attorney’s office, which prosecuted McGill and distributed his letters to other agencies, nor the Iowa Board of Parole, nor the attorney general’s office, which handles civil commitments for sexually violent predators, says it can do anything to prevent McGill’s release.

Feminists are about as powerful…oh…as they are right now. See, we still have that going for us. People have only partially lost their minds. They’re still not ready to trust feminists again just yet. Feminists get together in their little clubs, isolated from everyone else, sharing notes with each other along with instructions to help-me-hate-this-thing-over-here. That’s the form in which they want to exist. Everyone else, walled off from them, gets work done, makes money, and has fun doing it.

At work, you can still be sent to sensitivity training — if you’ve somehow demonstrated this is necessary. Departments of people are not sent to mandatory sensitivity training. People are not randomly sent to sensitivity training. You can’t unilaterally decide you were harassed; it really does depend on the will and intent of the alleged harasser. And nobody makes any money off of the sexual-harassment racket. If they’re in some position that is created to deal with this in some way, they do it as volunteers, because the issue is supposed to be so important to them…which only makes sense. In other words: Lawyers don’t run things.

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit CalendarIn your work cubicle, or in your office, you can put up a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar. If anyone comes by to mutter so much as a peep of protest, that is the one treading on thin ice…not you. The phrases “objectification of women” and “unrealistic unhealthy body images” are about as socially acceptable in that world, as a racial epithet is in this one.

Family comedies do not conclude with a feel-good comedy-tragedy ending with the dad whacking himself in the head realizing he’s been a jerk, or an asshole, or a killjoy, or a workaholic. If anything, they end with the kid whacking himself in the forehead, belatedly realizing he should’ve been listening to his Dad.

Neighbors talk to each other. They have block parties. You don’t need to drive 40, 50, 60 miles into the county to discharge a pellet gun or a firearm. Once the shooting-range is set up, you can do it right in front of City Hall. On weekends, the whole town gets together for target shooting. Somewhere else, they have a beer garden. (You can’t go to the target shooting after you go to the beer festival, because alcohol and firearms don’t mix…yes, Republicans and conservatives do get that. Most of us bathe daily and have all our teeth. Really!)

Men do not stand by, brain-dead, clutching a purse outside the womens’ toilet, awaiting their next orders. They talk to other men. They get together and compare notes. They each express admiration for the sidearm the other fella has purchased to defend his lady and his children, should any bad guys be stupid enough to enter uninvited in the dark of some terrible night. They brag about who achieved the tightest grouping on the targets. And they fantasize, together, like giddy little boys, about muscle cars. Women get together and compare notes too. They don’t brag about whose boyfriend bought them the largest engagement ring, or who took charge of the family menu or what they told the hubby to start eating, or how they keep him from hogging the remote. Their rivalry is engaged, instead, in terms of who does the best job bringing her husband beer. “Oh yeah? I’d never think of handing it to him without the cap already popped off…and it’s always ice cold.”

Vice President Palin is even more influential in her new role, than Dick Cheney was in his. She’s a true role model. Women suddenly want their hair made up into her ‘do, just like they wanted to emulate Hillary’s back in the 1990’s. Palin’s face, in this universe, is everyplace Obama’s face is in this one. Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, USA Today…et al. (Obama’s face, in turn, could be on a milk carton somewhere.) Everything female is Palin, Palin, Palin. Women want to learn to fly airplanes, to fire shotguns, to ride ATVs, to clean rifles and pistols, to drive a dogsled…and to field dress a moose. The fashionable cliche, assuming there is one, is “Yoo betcha!”

Tenth Amendment, all the way. Some states and counties allow gay marriage and others don’t; some states and counties allow pot, and others don’t. Some states and counties are officially Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Scientologist, if they can get the votes. Nothing is singled out for social stigma, be it positive or negative. So a married gay man just might be an abuser and a generally bad husband, just like a married straight man — “loving” is no longer a euphemism for “same-sex.” And if you smoke pot, you just might have an addiction problem…just like someone who drinks, might have an addiction problem. That means, friends and family might be inclined to intervene if the signs are there. And anyone can be a religious fundamentalist whacko; not just the Christians. If your child needs medical care but you think his sickness is Gods’ will, the nanny-state might eventually interfere — if you’re showing signs of possibly lopping off your daughter’s head because she’d dating the wrong fella, the nanny-state just might interfere with that too. True equality.

When kids get into fights on the playground, all the trouble is reserved for the kid who threw the first punch. The kid who threw the last one, assuming that’s someone else, hasn’t got a single thing to worry about. And that’s precisely the way the world politics work, too.

You may say I’m a dreamer…but I’m not the only one.

The Thought That Counts

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

Doug Ross at Director Blue:

The modern Democrat Party, controlled by George Soros, is infected with a sickness.

And they don’t — that’s right, I said it — they don’t support the troops. In fact, Democrats hate the troops.

And Barack Obama proved it with his outrageous proposal to charge veterans for their own health care while preparing to offer citizenship and free health care for illegal immigrants. And I don’t care if he retracted his demands. It’s the thought that counts.

It seems like a thought every civilized mind must prepare to reject, even before gathering the information needed to substantiate it or place it into doubt, just as a matter of social protocol.

But it is the thought that counts.

With a decent command of recent history, a capable conciousness must anticipate that questions could bubble up to the surface regarding…how to synchronize traffic lights at an intersection…how to schedule recycling or garbage pickup…should we cook something from scratch tonight, or microwave a pizza…rocky road or plain vanilla…the next move to make in a game of checkers…

…and Soros’ democrat-party would instantly leap to the pro-chaos, anti-order, pro-bad-guy, anti-justice, pro-terrorist, anti-American position.

I mean, why would you think it’d work out any other way? Seriously?

Cheney Says We’re Being Made Less Safe

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

In my mind, it wasn’t exactly the election of Barack Obama that did it.

It was this notion that anything that might be called “torture” is an extreme thing, therefore anyone who argues against it is being a moderate. That just isn’t right. For one thing, if things are being called “torture” when there’s nothing torturous about them other than the fact they’re uncomfortable, then you can call anything torture that isn’t fun. Secondly, the argument’s been used that our fighting men and women are exposed to danger if we continue these practices…which doesn’t mean anything. And that isn’t my opinion, it’s the opinion of people arguing this way. Just ask ’em “So if we put a stop to these practices that makes our troops safer?” Just take the argument seriously. And you’ll be called a big ol’ dummy. Okay, so we’re not after results here when we stop this “torture.” It’s just a thing to do to make some unnamed people happy with us; and the people we’re fighting are not the people we’re supposed to be making happy.

Thirdly, it is a skewed representation of what we should be calling “civilized.” In this sense, a yawning gulf is defined between red America and blue America. Someone threatens or injures someone else who is entirely innocent. We’re going to do something meaningful about this, or we’ll do something ritualistic about it. This demonstrates our civilization, or lack thereof — but which is which? Is it more civilized to conduct some ritual and then allow the danger to continue walking among us, unabated?

This stuff starts on the playground, really. Who among us hasn’t been hauled to the principal’s office after hitting back at the school bully — and then told, gosh darn it, he’s here all the time but you’re supposed to be better! It’s the tactic of the thoroughly cowardly bureaucrat.

Some of us want punishment for whoever started the fight; some of us want punishment for whoever finished it.

This is why so many wars have been started under democrat Presidents. It’s also why, the wars our country fought that finished with a lasting, enduring, durable peace, were fought before we had the United Nations. Since then, every wildfire around the globe, rather than being altogether extinguished, just subsides into a smoldering slow burn ready to erupt into an inferno at any time.

The reason is simple. When your policy is opposed to the true eradication of bad guys, you’re always going to be up to your eyeballs in bad guys. Being liberal means there’s always another excuse for a little bit more chaos the next day.

Deadly-Good People

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

Thing I Know #91. “Esteem” is something sought with the greatest urgency by those who struggle with doubts about whether they’ve earned it.

Dick Morris on the connection between Barack Obama’s new administration, and the Warren Court of the 1950’s and 1960’s…and other stuff. “Emasculating intelligence”:

President-elect Barack Obama’s new head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, Dawn Johnsen, called the legal reasoning which gave the president broad powers to authorize “rough” interrogation of terrorists “shockingly flawed…bogus…outlandish.” She said it allowed “horrific acts” and demanded to know “Where is the outrage? The public outcry?” This is the person who will decide how to interrogate terrorists.
:
Doesn’t [Obama] realize that without warrantless FISA wiretaps we could never have uncovered the plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge (how could we have gotten a warrant for conversations about the bridge when we didn’t yet know that al Qaeda had it in its sights?) Has he forgotten that we only found the name of the operative who was tasked with destroying the bridge because we subjected Kahlid Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11, to “rough” interrogation techniques? Does he really mean to leave us vulnerable to terrorist attacks?

Yes he does. Not because he is callous or fiendish, but because the new president seems to carry the thinking that animated the decisions of the Warren Court on defendant’s rights over into the battle against terror. When the Warren Court first ruled that all defendants deserved free lawyers, that they had to be explicitly told of their right to remain silent, that evidence not obtained through warrants was inadmissible as were any “fruits of the poisonous tree” it occasioned great controversy (enough to help Nixon get elected president). Law and order types said that these decisions would lead to the release of thousands of criminals who would otherwise be in prison and would cause tens or hundreds of thousands more innocent people to become victims of serious crime. And they were right. The decisions of the Warren Court had exactly this effect.

The Warren Court is a fascinating little pearl in the big, fleshy oyster of American history. This is the chapter in which it became obligatory for our system of justice, and therefore our government, to pretend one thing was true while it knew, beyond doubt, that a contrary thing was true. Whether you believe the infectious condition in our country’s intellect is terminal, or not, this is the moment where we caught the bug. We decided material success was a loathsome thing in 1932, and then in the early 1960’s we decided it was a grievous sin to actually know something. “Rules” had to be followed, and if the rules weren’t followed you had to pretend not to know what you actually knew.

Throwing around words like “Constitution,” I’m sure, seemed so harmless at the time. That’s where the Warren Court was getting its authority, so it was mandatory to use that word, right? Trouble is, the C-word carries with it an implication of non-negotiability, at least to the atrophied mind. Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan found this out…make this one guy’s day unpleasant, or let nine planeloads of people burn to death? I’ll take the latter, please, Alex.

PAT BUCHANAN: Let me ask you a couple questions. This Bojinka plot that was going to bring down nine airliners over the Pacific at one time, apparently that was broken by the fact that enhanced interrogation techniques were done in the Philippines on people they caught there. Was that immoral, to use these on an individual, which you might constitute torture if it saves nine passenger planes from going down over the Pacific?

[KRYSTIA] FREELAND: Do you think it would be immoral to preemptively kill someone who hasn’t committed a crime yet?

BUCHANAN: Let me tell you something — it would be moral to take Khalid Shaikh Mohammed out and say here, and shoot him in the head, but it’s immoral —
FREELAND: For what he’s done already.

BUCHANAN: Exactly. But it’s immoral to water board him three minutes?

FREELAND: I’m asking you.

BUCHANAN: I’m saying it’s moral to kill him and given what he’s done and what you know he’s done, it is moral to impose physical pain upon him, excruciating pain, to get information to save lives, yes.

FREELAND: I disagree. I think there’s a very, very clear line.

The tragedy involved in these arguments is that people end up shouting at each other about what’s moral. At that point, it’s clear to everybody no minds are going to be changed.

But they also — both sides — occasionally bob back into the land of where you talk about what will happen if we do this, and what else will happen if we do that. This, unlike morals, is “provable” or at least can be subject to the objective commentary of history.

On the other hand, the “waterboarding is immoral” people aren’t really headed there, they’re just providing the illusion of doing so. Nobody opposed to wiretapping, or waterboarding, really wants to get into a prolonged discussion of what happens if we repeat the Warren Court days, and just build taboo upon taboo to prove what good people we are. They don’t wanna go there.

Because what’s the first question you ask? Where’s-the-benefit. Who, back in the halcyon days of the Warren Court inventing one new “right” for criminals after another, looked to America from around the world and said to themselves, “ah…what a nice, bright, beacon of civilization for us, the rest of the world’s countries, to admire.” Who did that? Who’s ready to do that now? It comes down to that, doesn’t it…who’s ready to love us all to pieces, when our government promises never to do any wiretapping and never to do any waterboarding — who hates us today? There is nobody. Hating the country is a strategy, used by its enemies to get what they want; to peel back the armor.

If, God forbid, this nation does come crashing down in our lifetime, it will be the conclusive event to a madcap vicious-cycle fools-errand of trying to prove what good people we are, to nameless faceless strangers around the world who will never, ever, in a million years, no matter what, ever recognize it. We’ll prove ourselves to death this way. And we’ll do it without becoming better people.

As Morris pointed out, we’ve done it before. It didn’t lead to a Golden Age of worldwide opinion smiling upon America’s wonderful, wise, benevolent Government. It led to the exact opposite, in fact. People talk of that time as emotionally frayed, a vast landscape of wreckage devastated by “Vietnam and Watergate.” But the wreckage came from men not knowing if their wives and children would come home from wherever they were, each night, alive and intact. It was a triangle of unholy forces consisting of Vietnam, Watergate and Warren Court justice — that endless deadly-good cycle of proving, in futility, how decent you are. That suicide pact that somehow isn’t thought of as a suicide pact, even though it is that and is little else.

Man in Divorce Wants His Kidney Back

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

Who Needs Furniture Anyway?And man, I’m just lovin’ the picture with the article. Gonna be usin’ that one.

…a New York surgeon, Richard Batista, is asking his wife, Dawnell Batista, for the kidney he gave her in 2001 back, or if she can’t live without it (ha ha)–for $1.5 million in exchange for his regret over the gift.

Good on her for taking his name. But as I understand it, she instigated divorce proceedings after she slept around.

I do think this is legally silly but it’s equally silly to suppose this a bolt-outta-the-blue, no one would think of such a thing save for a truly deranged mind. Not necessarily the case. I can think of a scenario or two. For example — if she’s asking for alimony. No. Nobody’s walking around with one of my organs in her (…no, not that one) and asking for regular payments just to keep her comfy on top of alive. Not without an issue like this coming up. So without knowing anything more than I do right now, that’s my educated guess: He’s being slapped with alimony, or he expects to be, and he’s covering his bases ahead of time with a “What About.” That much, I’d do. Especially if it’s her idea to get out.

Even if I’m wrong, it doesn’t make him a cad, by any means. Just a bit of a nut.

I would apply equal standards if the roles were reversed, by the way. I wonder if all the armchair-judgenjuries who are condemning him for this, can say the same. How ’bout it? He slept with another girl, and then started divorce proceedings against his lovely bride, with her kidney inside him. So the wifey slapped him with a demand. Covering her bases, cold hearted bitch, or a li’l of both?

No fair having one opinion about one, and another ’bout another.

Pothead Culture

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

Last night, I was noticing Michael Savage‘s observations about things, match my own, most closely when he says stuff that “everybody knows” is crazy.

Last night it was pot. Now, if I go only by what I’ve been hearing, just the opinions people have about things that they want to put out there whether they can explain ’em or not — we have to legalize this stuff pronto. It is not, not, not, not, not, repeat not, a “gateway drug.” It’s cheap, it’s good for you, it makes wonderful rope and sweaters, and besides if we legalize it we can tax it; that’ll “pay off the deficit overnight,” they tell me. Besides, “contrary to popular belief,” smoking pot increases your powers of observation and concentration. You’d want your brain surgeon to smoke pot.

Well for a melodious, cheerful dinner conversation, you really shouldn’t get Dr. Michael Alan Weiner going about marijuana. This is the point where, I’m going to presume, the guests start to regret allowing the conversation to drift in that general direction, for one quickly gathers the impression the good doctor can barely contain himself. Not only is pot a gateway drug, he says, but it’s a deadly one, one that destroys the consumer’s ability to think. Yes, this is what I’d been noticing. Pay off the deficit overnight, for example. They don’t mean this year’s budget deficit, at the state or federal level; they’re talking about the trillions and trillions owed by our federal government, more properly called the public debt. A little bit of third-grade math is devastating to that argument, especially when you start applying it to interest. Let’s see…ten trillion dollars “overnight” is eight hundred thirty-three billion dollars an hour, which comes to just shy of fourteen billion dollars a minute in tax receipts on legalized, taxable marijuana.

Er, uh, yeah, says the stoner. I was speaking, y’know, whatchamacallzit, metaphorically. Yeah. Yeah sure you were, pothead. You were talking out your butt. You weren’t speaking any way except cheerleading. You were trolling for recruits.

Now I don’t really have a dog in this hunt about legalizing marijuana one way or another, but I really can’t stand looking at an issue too closely when it’s part of something much bigger, which is why we haven’t been talking about pot too much in these pages. It’s not just about smoking pot. There’s a whole culture built around this, and that’s what Savage was going after last night. Here’s his argument: Because of the year we’re in, the potheads are coming into power right now. Seems, to me, this has been going on since about ’93, when Clinton was sworn in. But it’s been getting worse. One way or another the stoners are running the show. We have this window of ages we like to see in our leaders; the ones who make the actual decisions; the baby boomers who latched on, generationally, to the pothead culture, are there right now. So pretty much every office that counts for something — in the private sector as well as in government — is filled by a pothead.

Savage’s condemnation of the plant is even harsher than mine. As I understand it, he seems to believe in once-a-pothead-always-a-pothead…as if, once you inhale in your early twenties, in your late fifties youre still making bonehead decisions. Not sure if I’d go that far. But there certainly is a lag time, and a pronounced tendency to reject humility. I mean sincere, substantial humility. The tendency I see is to say “That must be an okay thing to do, for I just did it.” And it does seem persistent across time: That other guy did something, that’s awful, terrible, horrible, bad. I did something, even something that is against the law…well hey man, it’s all relative.

Savage went on to offer two examples of potheads running the show: Shutting down Guantanamo, or at least ceasing & desisting from the “torture” conducted within, and sending San Francisco’s police department to some kind of sensitivity training. I wish he went on much further than that, and maybe he did but my commute came to an end. I know I could add to a list like that all day long.

But I’m much more into definitions than examples, here. I’m junior to the baby boomers by some twelve to twenty years or so, which means I’ve been struggling awkwardly in their impressive wake all my life and will be continuing to do so until the day I drop dead. I consider myself well-qualified to speak on this. And Savage is right — the smoke-holers are running the show. Stoners hire other stoners. Because it’s them against the world, man. So this is becoming an important issue, one that’s affecting us all even in ways we don’t understand immediately when it isn’t pointed out.

Reefer GirlIt has a lot to do with something called “love”; that’s why you have to immediately stop torturing terrorists, and that of course means you have to stop doing anything that anybody, anywhere, no matter how recklessly, might label “torture.” Pretty much just feed ’em three times a day, fluff up their pillows, find out what else they want from you, go get it, and wait for them to talk. Police shouldn’t hurt criminals, and probably shouldn’t even arrest them for anything either. Countries shouldn’t go to war, no matter the reason. Make-love-not-war.

Conversely with that, whatever the potheads mean by “love,” it doesn’t have much to do with compatibility, because they seem to be insisting that whatever confrontation might possibly happen, does happen. A woman who is madly in love with her man, and none other, is deeply offensive to them. That could be because the feminist movement came to maturity at the same time as the pothead movement. If you really want to piss off a pothead, make a suggestion, in theory or in practice, that a woman who really loves her man will go get him a cold beer out of the fridge. (I’m entirely unsure how they’re going to react if she runs into the bedroom and gets him a jay.) But everything is like that; they don’t want people, in general, getting along with other people. Not across class lines, anyway. The real contradiction here, is that this is precisely what they say they’re working tirelessly to bring about, but I’ve noticed for years now when it’s right in front of their faces they don’t see it that way, and in fact recoil from it. Everyone has to be fighting something — man. Immigrants are constantly “oppressed” by bigoted “xenophobes” who in fact are insisting on nothing more than that the law be followed. Blacks are always oppressed by whites, women are always oppressed by men, citizens are always oppressed by the police and children are always oppressed by their parents. Everyone should constantly be throwing off shackles, storming some fortress or rampart, overthrowing someone, showing ’em what’s-what.

There are no consequences for anything. That’s probably the biggest, most important item, right there. No decision is ever made out of a sense of “if-this-then-that”; there are no domino effects, there is no cause-and-effect. Decisions are made, instead, on value-systems and overly-simplistic “should”s. If you think we’ll be unable to prevent an attack after we stop “torturing” terrorists, well, you’re just wrong. This argument won’t be taken anywhere, logically, mind you. It’ll simply be ended. It’ll be answered with mocking, “The Experts Say,” some quotes from The Daily Show, maybe a recycled line from Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs…and that’s about it. If you bring up some solid evidence of your own, such as mentioning Kalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abdul Hakim Murad, well, you’re just a mean unreasonable poopy-head. Trust me on this. I’ve been there.

So it really ends up being a child’s fantasy land, when you get down to it. I don’t mean a small child’s fantasy; I’m talking a teenager, of the slothy kind, the kind that doesn’t roll out of bed or do the dishes or cut the grass without a whole lot of nagging. Every little thing that would require some foresight or manual labor brings forth a torrent of excuses. There are lots of positive thoughts about how we all need to love each other and get along with each other — right up until positive thoughts about other people determine something decisive must be done, something that requires effort. Then we don’t need to think such positive thoughts about each other anymore. Like, for example, very wealthy people are just as much entitled to keep their money as the rest of us, and it’s probably beneficial to allow them to do so, because the rest of us are in a symbiotic relationship with them…that would be a positive, compassionate thought, one that is compatible with the continuing harmonious working of an evolved, civilized society. But you’ll never see the potheads support that one, because that’s just a bit too much civilization and “love” for them to choke down at all at once. Far better to drone onward about being oppressed, man, by that evil corporate America, man.

Every little call to take garbage out, is met with some plea for moral relativism, cry for revolution, or both of those. I mean literal garbage, such as everyday household chores, as well as figurative garbage, like making sure Big Bad Bart catches that midnight train outta here and doncha dare come back. Hippies hate cowboys, I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, and they pull no punches that the thing they hate the most about cowboys, is the white hat, the black hat and the moral clarity. They hate the way this leads to realizations, fifteen minutes before closing-credits, that a real confrontation has to take place…for consequences loom over the “town,” if it does not. The stoner hippie isn’t down with that. He philosophizes his way out of every little thing that needs doing, and all without putting down the doobie or moving his ass off that well-worn mattress.

Hippies and those oh-so-hated cowboys are close cousins, in a way. They’re both all about confrontation. But the cowboy uses bullets instead of rhetoric and the hippy doesn’t like that. The dirtiest secret of all lies within that special hatred for bullets. It isn’t the property damage, or the death, or the carnage, or the danger to the bystanders the hippy hates when hot lead is flying around the saloon. It is the finality of the solution. No more negotiations; they never began. An elegant Obama/Cronkite lilt to the voice doesn’t count for shit. Settlements to disputes are not proposed, only implemented. Nothing is up for appeal.

In other words, decisions actually get made. Situations get changed. That is what cannot be tolerated on Planet Pothead. Ain’t that a kicker? The culture began for the express purpose of upsetting the status quo on a grand, cosmic scale; once it got some momentum built up, it became all about preserving status quos, even within microscopic, practically insignificant settings. Every situational change is a verbal agreement, which is just meaningless jibber-jabber, since every agreement has a loophole.

So I think Savage has a point here, and it’s a little bit of a frightening one when you think about it. Potheads are making the decisions now, and that means all decisions are cosmetic in nature, accountability never figures into it, consequences aren’t to be reckoned with. Do we have a society that can withstand that for long? Are our most influential and powerful positions-of-trust grappling with decisions on a daily-basis, decisions that can be made well, or at least harmlessly, by people who don’t believe actions have consequences? People that are only there to enforce contrarian social codes, love without accompanying feelings of symbiosis, and surreal & tie-died systems of quasi-moral babbling?

Can our culture stand for very long, when there is no human passion worth satisfying except lusting for the perverse, and the next case-of-the-munchies? With every single office that really matters, turned into a “work-free-drug-place”?

There’s the big question.

I guess we’ll be finding out the answer pretty soon, now.

Up For Appeal

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

Several years ago I noticed my son was starting to engage in “reasoned” debate about discipline, restrictions, et al, not so much as a matter of reason but as a matter of ritual. (Cut me some slack, because when they’re seven or eight, you have to do some studying to tell the difference.) I instituted a “Budweiser” policy, in which the parental rejoinder is an immediate, and deliberately thoughtless, “Why Ask Why?” That’s the exact opposite of what our prevailing sensibilities say a “thoughtful” parent is supposed to do. Parents, especially fathers, should be open to the idea that they’re fallible. In fact they should be looking for excuses to admit it. But hey, I’d already been doing the why-ask-why thing with his mother for years. One tires rather quickly of encountering dissent, constantly, which exists solely for dissent’s sake.

Or at least I do.

It seems schools don’t.

No wait, read that article again. Not schools. The justice system. The ACLU. The system that binds those three together. System. Why do we need a system? A system is an assemblage of parts forming a complex or unitary whole. Why are things so complex? It’s a dress code policy. You’re either in compliance with it or you aren’t.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Toni Kay Scott showed up at Redwood Middle School in “a denim skirt, a brown shirt with a pink border, and long socks with pictures of Tigger.”

This violated the school’s dress code, which requires certain colors or fabrics and bans clothing with words, photos or symbols.

The Chronicle, quoting from the lawsuit, says the 14-year-old “was escorted to the principal’s office by a uniformed police officer and, along with two of her schoolmates, was sent to an in-school suspension program called Students With Attitude Problems.”

The ACLU says her younger sister, a sixth-grader named Sydni, was sent to the principal’s office for wearing shirts emblazoned with pro-Christian and anti-drug messages.

“I agree; no midriffs, mini-skirts or cleavage,” the girls’ mother says in a statement from the local ACLU. “School is a place to learn. But anything above that should be my call as a parent. Pink socks and two-tones are not a crime. That’s just nitpicking.”

The overly-opinionated mother then went on to opine about who had ownership over these decisions…whoops, no she didn’t. Or at least there’s very little written about that, that I can see. Just “anything above that should be my call as a parent.” Should be, maybe. But isn’t. You don’t know how to deal with that?

See, that’s the problem right there. All this bloviating about what’s “not a crime.” Not too much consideration for who owns a decision. Nobody’s saying what all kinds of parents said back in my day…”there may be lots of good points to be made against this policy…I personally might not even agree with it…but those are the rules.”

I’m not at all against challenging things that are unfair, and I’m certainly not against teaching the next generation to do that as well. But here’s what the mother missed: That is Phase Two. Before you get into all that, the child first needs to learn how to comply with rules. Stupid ones. How to say to herself, “I have a turf, and my turf extends to this point, that decision over there is made well outside of it even though it has some negligible day-to-day impact on me, and I’m going to respect that.”

Pain in the AssWhen kids learn all about Phase Two before they learn about Phase One, the problem that comes up is that they don’t learn how to recognize this boundary. To the lazy, weak mind, this doesn’t seem to be what’s happening — it’s what the kid wears, after all. Shouldn’t my precious darling be able to wear what she likes? But in the mind of a kid, especially a kid at the center of a controversy like this one, boundaries don’t figure into it. They can’t. Nobody’s really backed the brat into the corner in which she’s forced to learn about them.

So the world just becomes a big playground, in which nobody really has ownership of a decision. Everyone ends up loudly, pugnaciously, bullyingly announcing their opinion of that other guy’s decision, appealing this, overturning that…doing whatever it takes to prevail.

What kind of arsenal do they have to make sure that is the case? Talk loud. Bribe the people who are supposed to be “in charge.” Maybe blackmail some of ’em with some none-too-complimentary newspaper-printing.

Vox populi vox dei. Mob rule. Pitchforks and torches waving over the angry multitudes who are storming the bastille. Appeal to bandwagon. “Can I Get An Amen Here?”

The irony?

The irony is that by channeling the satanic energy of the thoughtless mob, this ends up being an egregious assault upon the individual, which, by design, was supposed to be the beneficiary of defense. The thoughtless parents tried to produce thoughtful adults for the future, who would speak up in favor of right-over-wrong — instead, they produce jealous idealogues. Right vs. wrong doesn’t enter into it. They try to indoctrinate the yearlings with selflessness, and they unleash upon the world vast hordes of selfish little snots. They create a European type of world, one in which everybody’s nose is intruding into everybody else’s business. Nobody owns any decision. Your neighbor can sue you for growing a tree that hangs over his driveway — and then, when he’s done with you, the guy living clear across town can sue for the way the tree looks. And, over the fact that a two-stroke engine was used in the chainsaw that cut it down. A world in which nobody with an opinion is ever told “I’m sorry…you might think that’s your business…but it simply isn’t. You don’t have standing.”

This is exactly the kind of world the parents were trying to avoid making, when they went to the ACLU to sue for the “right” of their li’l babums to dress as “individuals.” That’s why Phase II has to come after Phase I; kids aren’t capable of learning how to behave as individuals, if they haven’t learned to respect authority, so they can learn to respect the boundaries to which authority extends.

To put it more simply — nobody really cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

I feel such a sense of pity for the Jamba Juice manager or Starbuck’s manager or Blockbuster Video manager who’s put in the position of having to hire some of these spoiled brats. These brats who are utterly incapable of saying to themselves, “that’s a stupid rule, but until it’s overturned I’m going to do what it says so nobody can say I did not.” And I feel sorry for the brats, too, when they start to accumulate some experience and get into jobs with serious responsibility…and prestige…and visibility…and rivals.

Because not every little personal conflict, in life, can be settled by dashing off to the ACLU, pissing and moaning about the way you were mistreated…or offended…or slighted…or unfairly restricted. This is still Earth, a round ball filled with red-blooded humans that are three-dimensional and real. If we are destined to dissolve into a puddle of complete anarchy, even if that is unavoidable, it hasn’t quite happened just yet. And every li’l unpopular rule, as of now, is not necessarily up for appeal.

Predictions for the Obama Presidency

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

Everyone got this printed up and posted somewhere, with both black and red pens next to it for check-marks and cross-outs?

You probably should.

All those demeaning, demonic predictions about the George W. Bush Presidency, really haven’t worked out that well have they? On January 20, 2001 I could’ve driven from California to Maine just telling the state border guards along the way I don’t have liquor or fresh fruit…that’s pretty much the way it works now, even though in the meantime, the nation has suffered the worst attack on its own soil since Pearl Harbor. All these “encroachments on our freedoms” have amounted to a smattering of annoyances like closing down Folsom Dam Road. Yup, there’s your George Bush Police State there. Gotta wing on down to Rainbow Bridge, a mile and a half outta your way, and loop back up. The horror.

Contrasted with…

Look for far-left justices appointed to the Supreme Court, effectively tying up the entire government in a trifecta of liberal humanism, the buzzwords of which remain empty platitudes like “hope and change.”

Military cases of troops being tried and convicted for killing the enemy in combat will continue to rise–and the conviction/plea-bargain rate will stay at nearly 100%, as the government seeks to use the best men and women this country has to offer as sacrifical lambs on the altar of global appeasement.

Look for the slow but steady erosion of rights you have enjoyed for your entire lives–all the while being told it’s “for your own good.” Restrictions on gun ownership, home schooling, encouraged dependence on the ever-growing federal government…Of course, this will be done with feel-good phrases like “death with dignity,” “not wanting to be a burden,” and “merciful release from suffering,” all of which ignore the basic fact that we are killing people without their consent for the “good of the people.”…Also, look for taxes to go up. Yes, they’ll go up.

Time will tell. It certainly is uncharted territory.

My concerns only really spike, though, when the reasons are listed for me to feel good about an Obama Administration. Something to do with being unified, right? One only has to inspect for a little while before one sees this is unification among the 52% of us, or so, who voted for Obama. It doesn’t include, nor does it pretend to include, the other 48%. We can go piss off.

That isn’t unified.

His Holy Coronation a More Important Story Than September 11 Attacks

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

What an amazing surprise.

A worldwide media survey released on Monday shows that coverage around Obama’s successful bid to become the next American president was written about twice as often as any other news event since the turn of the century.

“Obama was unprecedented. He has captivated the world,” said Paul Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, which conducted the survey.

Uh oh. Yet another world-surveyor, speaking on behalf of “the world.” I wonder if this one has some captivating tales to recount about running door-to-door on all seven continents to find out what everybody’s thinking?

Or, perhaps, it’s yet another example of re-defining the seemingly static concept of “everyone.”

His Holiness Who Walks On Water damn sure didn’t captivate me, I know that much. Last I checked, I was part of “the world.”

Obama had been written about roughly 250 million times, said Payack. Stories about all the other big news events this century have together generated about half that coverage, he added.

Just…wow. Words fail me. So I’ll rely on Darth Misha, who gets the hat tip for this story, to express the unexpressable…

Oh, and those 3000+ innocent people who died on Sept.11?

Puhleeeeze. Can’t we all just Move OnTM?

Isn’t it enough to know that he only has to raise his nicotine stained metrosexual hands, flex those glistening man boobs pecs, wave his Dumbo ears and the winds will die down, the waves will calm, the climate will cease to change, dogs and cats will be at peace with one another, and Oprah will finally shut the hell up?

Forget that once he’s out of his “President-Elect” bubble he’s going to be busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest trying to hide who and what he really is, which is to say…NUTHIN…He’s the Obamessiah!!

I can’t help but feel a tinge of fear for what is happening to another very basic concept. Authority. We spend all these giga-calories of energy, millions, billions of dollars to erect our corporate and government “Do As I Say Not As I Do” people. They tell us things that are categorically untrue, things that directly contradict even themselves — sentences that twist around in 180-degree hairpin turns before they even reach the dot at the end. “Equal opportunity employer, women and minorities encouraged to apply.” Stuff like that; same breath.

And then all the charlatans who insist on being right, even though they’re telling us untrue, self-contradictory things, are subordinated to the mega-charlatan. His Holiness The 44th President tells you it is a dry sunny day outside and there’s raindrops falling on your head, well, leave the umbrella behind, because you’ve just received The Word. And He talks kinda like Walter Cronkite so it must be true.

That’s what I find a little bit more unsettling than, I suspect, even the most rabid left-wing hippie ever found the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act to be, rhetoric notwithstanding. This hierarchy of lying. The supremacy each face on the totem pole takes on in relation to the face beneath it, is so uncompromising, so non-negotiable. Just stop asking questions. It doesn’t matter what that face on the pole says, if the face above it, says something different.

And worst of all, Obama isn’t the one on the tippy-top. He was elected to “sit down and talk” with that I’m-A-Dinner-Jacket guy over in Iran, and His Holiness will tell I’m-A-Dinner-Jacket…what, exactly? “Oh, mkay…alright, if you say so.” Anything beyond that?

Go on, Obama fans. Tell me where I’m off-base here.

Thing I Know #274. Heath Ledger’s Joker had it exactly right. People will choose brutality, injustice, carnage, malfeasance, death or destruction every time as long as the alternative is true chaos. They want to know there is a plan. If they get the idea there is no plan, they go nuts. If there’s a plan, they’re somewhat satisfied, no matter what that plan actually is.

Have Them Sign the Release Form First

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

The Golden (Shower) State’s High Court has spoken:

California court holds rescuers liable for injuries
posted at 9:45 am on December 20, 2008 by Ed Morrissey

In this season of Christmas, let us reflect on the parable of the Good Samaritan. After a traveler had been assaulted and then ignored by the rest of the community, a Samaritan rescued him and helped him recover. If the Samaritan moved to California, he’d better have a good lawyer, as the state Supreme Court ruled that the liability shield passed for those who conduct emergency rescues and inadvertently injure the victims only applies to medical personnel:

The California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a young woman who pulled a co-worker from a crashed vehicle isn’t immune from civil liability because the care she rendered wasn’t medical.

The divided high court appeared to signal that rescue efforts are the responsibility of trained professionals. It was also thought to be the first ruling by the court that someone who intervened in an accident in good faith could be sued.

Lisa Torti of Northridge allegedly worsened the injuries suffered by Alexandra Van Horn by yanking her “like a rag doll” from the wrecked car on Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

Torti now faces possible liability for injuries suffered by Van Horn, a fellow department store cosmetician who was rendered a paraplegic in the accident that ended a night of Halloween revelry in 2004.

Torti and Van Horn traveled in separate cars, and the driver of Van Horn’s car ran into a light pole at 45 MPH. Torti testified that she saw smoke and liquid coming from the car and thought the vehicle would explode, trapping Van Horn. She rushed to pull her co-worker from the car, and Van Horn alleges that Torti aggravated a broken vertebra that damaged her spinal cord. She sued Torti (and the driver) for causing her paralysis.

The Golden State is special (although, tragically, not overly much). All three branches of our state government have shown this proclivity: If an opportunity arises to make us more sheeplike, just wandering around watching our peers get snatched up by whatever wolf happens along, baah, baah — all three branches have a marked tendency to take that opportunity. So here we sit. A state of veal calves.

This isn’t even a right-versus-left thing. It’s do-something versus do-nothing. Lawyers versus the rest of us.

Get your own ass out of that leaking exploding fireball of a car wreck. I have to worry about punching the time clock so the union will go on protecting my cushy do-nothing job.

Hat tip: Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler.

I Keep Telling You And Telling You; The Most Devastating Thing To Do To A Stupid Idea…

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

…is to take it seriously.

That’s why I ride my bike to work every single day. I tell everybody who asks, it’s about being a moderately fat middle-aged guy as opposed to a grotesquely fat middle-aged guy, and not only that, but UNLESS EVERYBODY STARTS DOING THIS RIGHT NOW THE EARTH IS GONNA DIE!!!! An umptyfratz-many esteemed scientists have told us so so it must be true.

I deadpan that last one. Just for fun. It makes me happy when I get funny looks. I wouldn’t have gotten funny looks on that one just a couple years ago.

The most devastating thing you can do to a stupid idea is to take it seriously.

Or, elect it to be your next President.

Earlier today, I noted that Barack Obama’s team has started hinting that they will move back towards John McCain’s position on interrogation techniqiues. Now supporters of Obama who have criticized the Bush administration’s position on indefinite detention have begun rethinking that policy as well:

As a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama sketched the broad outlines of a plan to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: try detainees in American courts and reject the Bush administration’s military commission system.

Now, as Mr. Obama moves closer to assuming responsibility for Guantánamo, his pledge to close the detention center is bringing to the fore thorny questions under consideration by his advisers. They include where Guantánamo’s detainees could be held in this country, how many might be sent home and a matter that people with ties to the Obama transition team say is worrying them most: What if some detainees are acquitted or cannot be prosecuted at all?

That concern is at the center of a debate among national security, human rights and legal experts that has intensified since the election. Even some liberals are arguing that to deal realistically with terrorism, the new administration should seek Congressional authority for preventive detention of terrorism suspects deemed too dangerous to release even if they cannot be successfully prosecuted.

“You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone,” said one civil liberties lawyer, David D. Cole, a Georgetown law professor who has been a critic of the Bush administration.

You can’t? That’s all we’ve heard from the close-Gitmo crowd for the last seven years. Indefinite detention supposedly violates American values, we’re losing the war if we adapt to the threat against us, blah blah blah. Certainly Barack Obama never gave any indication of nuanced thinking along the lines of indefinite detention during the last two years while campaigning for the presidency. In fact, Obama made the absolutist case that Cole now belatedly rejects in June 2007:

“While we’re at it,” he said, “we’re going to close Guantanamo. And we’re going to restore habeas corpus. … We’re going to lead by example _ by not just word but by deed. That’s our vision for the future.

Now that Obama has to live with these decisions and not simply snipe from the sidelines, the game appears to have changed. A month ago, the NYT’s editorial board scoffed at the Bush administration’s efforts to keep Gitmo detainees from being released as merely a way to avoid bad press and not to keep dangerous people from killing Americans. Suddenly, the New York Times discovers that the American system does allow for indefinite detention to protect society from dangerous individuals without full-blown criminal trials — as with the criminally insane.

Gosh, and all that “shut down Gitmo” stuff sounded so rational and sensible back in the olden days, when we were reassured it wasn’t really gonna happen soon.

So how far did you get when you parents told you to go ahead and run away from home?

I wish like the dickens I could patent this obvious truth, that some silly ideas seem attractive and sensible right up until they’re about to be implemented and then suddenly the beer goggles fall off. But I can’t. The earliest I became aware of it was when Carlin Romano said it after announcing in a book review that, according to Catharine MacKinnon’s “logic,” he just finished raping her. “People claim I dehumanized her,” he said. “In fact, I did worse — I took her seriously. The worst thing that can happen to a flamboyant claim is to be tested.”

That was way back in ’94. Since then, I have seen the wisdom of his words proven over and over again.

So this McCain voter is not weeping, wailing, or gnashing his teeth. He’s not stomping his feet or holding his breath until his face turns blue. He’s conducting his life, riding his bike to work…occasionally indulging in making an Obamaton squirm about driving that enormous SUV everywhere while the earth is dying. And, just reading the news to see how this hopey-changey goodness turns out. This McCain voter is very much like your mom and dad telling you to go ahead and run away from home, and watching to see what happens next.

This McCain voter is expecting — and not just a little bit — that what comes down the news pipeline, as all this hopey-changey goodness is nailed into place, resembles very much this first example. Oh no, Obamatons, your ideas are being taken seriously! What’re ya gonna do now?

Hat tip: Anchoress.

Politically Correct Girliemen of the Week

Saturday, October 25th, 2008

Yasser Abdel Said murdered his own daughters for dating boys who weren’t Muslims. And that silly FBI put out a notice on him, that was so insensitive that it actually called out the facts. Gasp.

Since this murdering bastard butchered his daughters here in the USA, and we’d really, really, like to get him up close and personal with the Mexas execution chamber, Yasser hit the big time, when the FBI posted some ‘Wanted’ info on this steaming load. That’s when this sorry saga strayed into the Girlieman spotlight.

Initially, following the lead of the murdered teenage girls’ great aunt, the initial FBI ‘wanted’ blurb was thrillingly real:

“The 17- and 18-year-old girls were dating American boys, which was contrary to their father’s rules of not dating non-Muslim boys,” The FBI “wanted” poster read early last week. “Reportedly, the girls were murdered due to an ‘Honor Killing.’” (Fox News)

In record time, ‘some Muslims’ whined about the use of ‘honor killing’. These homegrown Jihadikazes are worried that rank and file American individuals will get the ‘wrong’ idea since ‘honor killing’ ‘attaches a religious motive’ to this crime. These murderer coddling traitors to everything we hold dear worry that “honor killing” might make a rational adult discriminate against Mecca Maniacs. If by ‘discriminate’ they mean someone, like me, wants to see this man, who killed his daughters to preserve the family honor, burn in the hell he deserves, then I am guilty as charged.

Going gutless and furtive, the FBI beat a hasty retreat, by rewriting the wanted blurb to make it okey dokey for traitorous, American hating, Sharia loving, scumbags like CAIR. That’s when a craven, Jihadikaze coddling, coward named Mark White, media coordinator in the bureau’s Dallas office, left a lasting stench in our nostrils.

‘…[He whined to Fox] that the FBI changed the wording “because the statement was not meant to indicate that the FBI was ‘labeling’ anything.

“The person who wrote it up did not see the misunderstanding that [the original wording] would create,” White said.

White added that the FBI should not be in the business of calling cases anything that is not described in law.

“It’s our job to find the fugitive. It’s not our job to label this case anything other than what it is, what it is from a criminal perspective,” he said, noting that there was no legal definition of an “honor killing” and that such a motive had not yet been proven in court. That will come out in the trial, and the jury can decide that.” (Fox News)

When challenged about the FBI’s double standard – they, routinely, use the equally ‘discriminatory’ term ‘hate crime’ – this stinking stain on humanity’s butt spewed more weasel words. Blah, blah, blah.

The irony here — a lot of Americans don’t understand very much about Islam, even after all these years. The debate that swirls under the surface, is whether the religion is inherently violent, or whether it’s been hijacked by violent fringe-group radicals.

Politically-correct backpedaling like this, has at least the potential to make the entire religion look more dangerous than it really is. It creates an appearance that in order to make the religion look harmless, you have to suppress facts. Make sure things stay un-discussed. This isn’t a matter of correcting a mistaken record — it’s a matter of whittling down the scope of what can be mentioned.

What people indulge in that for the purpose of making large numbers of other people to think good things about something…or to prevent them from thinking bad things…it lends, at the very least, an appearance that shenanigans are goin’ down. Someone’s selling a pig in a poke. It accomplishes the exact opposite of what’s intended.

Under Investigation For Owning a Whip

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

Last month I became interested in the story of a pensioner in Wiltshire, England, who slowly began to realize nothing was going to be done about the “youths” throwing rocks at his house, and took matters into his own hands. He used a stick to chase off the blokes. The story didn’t mention him whacking anyone; he chased. With a hunk of wood. For which he faced prosecution.

The story has now repeated in the Land Down Under. This time the “youths” are party-crashing, and this time the vigilante threatened law-and-order by means of a sjambok. A five-foot whip.

“I told them it was a private party and to clear off but this big youth put his face right into mine and said: ‘make me’,” said Mr [Dion] Driman, 46.

The South African electrical contractor said he had “sensed trouble” when he saw the youths outside and had armed himself with a decorative sjambok from inside the house.

The gang split into two groups and entered the house at the front and side, kicking a screen door off its hinges in the process. Mr Driman, the only adult at his son’s party, confronted the ringleader as he came around the side of the house.

“As I tackled him, six of them came over the top of me. I received a big hit to the side of my head,” said Mr Driman. “It happened really quickly.”

And…drum roll please…along comes the pencil-neck police spokesman bureaucrat.

None of the youths could be identified and so no charges were laid. Hornsby police were called to the incident and are understood to be considering whether the force Mr Driman used to protect his home was excessive.

NSW Police could not comment on the incident yesterday but a spokesman told the local paper Mr Driman had the right to defend himself – the question was whether he had used too much force.

“All I would suggest, if a situation arises again, leave it to the police to handle,” he said.

+++snicker+++ Yeah, handle it like something out of a Monty Python sketch. “Here here, now, trashing someone’s house, that’s not nice. What’s your name, son?” “Heywood. Heywood Jablowme.” “Oh, now, you’re smart-mouthing the wrong copper, m’lad. I’m well up on the Heywood Jablowme prank. Can only fool me so many times with that one…so you won’t give me your name, huh? Well, I’ll show you. You have no identity. And thus, you’re free to go.”

And that — I am left to presume, from the good nameless faceless spokesman’s remarks — is the proper way to handle it.

After you’ve prosecuted that reckless, vigilante homeowner. Who has a name. And then we can have a civilised society!

Eh…sorry, Mister Namless Faceless Non-Existent Unaccountable pencil-neck police spokesman guy. You know…I think I like my definition of civilization a whole lot better.

Liberals, Conservatives and Justice

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Great points from David Bernstein writing in Cato about the DC v. Heller decision and what it means.

Liberalism is most dizzying when you try to take it seriously.

The Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, upholding the Second Amendment right of individuals to own firearms, should finally lay to rest the widespread myth that the defining difference between liberal and conservative justices is that the former support “individual rights” and “civil liberties,” while the latter routinely defer to government assertions of authority. The Heller dissent presents the remarkable spectacle of four liberal Supreme Court justices tying themselves into an intellectual knot to narrow the protections the Bill of Rights provides.

Liberal justices uphold individual rights and civil liberties, huh? I have heard that before, but I didn’t know they were trying to stick to that one.

They don’t stick to much of anything.

Conservative: Okay, liberal fellow judge, here’s something we have to decide. We have to figure out if we’re going to execute this guy for murdering a little girl. I presume since you’re all about individual rights and civil liberties you’ll be in favor of signing the death warrant with me…

Liberal: No!

Conservative: No?

Liberal: No, absolutely not! I’m here to safeguard the individual rights and civil liberties of that creepy guy, just as much as the little girl.

Conservative: Point taken, but they’re both human beings…and she was innocent, whereas not only is he guilty but he could kill again.

Liberal: Yeah but you don’t know that for sure. Anyway, the little girl’s civil liberties cannot be protected because she’s already dead. We have to concentrate on the living. Even though the manner in which she was removed from the living is unjust, it’s in the past and we can’t do anything about that.

Conservative: Okay, that’s interesting. So the girl was unfairly murdered, but one way or the other she’s no longer alive and therefore beyond our purview as we act to protect the civil liberties of living persons.

Liberal: Precisely.

Conservative: Alright, our next case concerns a homeowner who gunned down a burglar. The burglar is dead, so going by your logic of safeguarding civil liberties for the living, I guess you’ll be joining me in letting the homeowner off the hook.

Liberal: Nonsense! He needs to be punished for his crime!

Conservative: He does?

Liberal: Yes. I mean of course the burglar is dead, but he still has civil liberties that need protecting. It’s all about the rest of us. We need to preserve a system of law and order.

Conservative: So liberalism is all about civil liberties…only for the living though…and preserving law and order.

Liberal: Now you’re getting it. Liberalism is completely consistent, it’s about individual rights for the living and respecting the law, and conservatism is about suspending individual rights for everyone, and anarchy and chaos.

Conservative: Okay, I think I’m getting it. Now our third case for the morning concerns illegal aliens that are running across the border…since you’re all about law and order I guess you’ll be joining me in cracking down on that.

Liberal: What makes you think that?

And so it goes. Nailing down exactly what liberalism is, is just like nailing jello to a tree. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, no consistency. The definitions liberals themselves offer, only make sense so long as you are expected to pay attention to those definitions. They do not endure across multiple issues.

But this definition does…

Twenty-first century American liberalism in a nutshell: That which builds or preserves must, at all costs, be destroyed; that which destroys must, at all costs, be preserved.

See, it isn’t tough at all to come up with a definition for liberalism that makes sense and adheres satisfactorily to fact and truth. All you have to do is think for yourself, and stop listening to liberals. They, after all, are the ones who can’t afford to have liberalism recognized for what it really is.

Follow-Up on Horn

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Joe Horn is a free man.

The legal justification is supposedly the “Castle Doctrine,” a subset of Texas’s self-defense law that lets you defend yourself and your property by firing on an unlawful intruder without having to “retreat” first. Having spent the past hour poring over the statutes and giving myself a migraine, it seems to me there are two gray areas: One, whether Horn is to be thought of as defending his home, his neighbor’s home, or himself when the shootings occurred, and two, whether having the right to “stand your ground” (i.e. not retreat) entitles you to precipitate a confrontation that could have been avoided by simply not doing anything. The sections that authorize defense of property (9.42 and 9.43) do allow for deadly force — but only at nighttime in the case of burglary, presumably because it’s harder to tell what a burglar’s packing in dim light and also because a burglar who’s coming through the window at an hour when he knows people are likely to be home is likely to be a bolder, more dangerous burglar. The Horn shootings happened in broad daylight. Which means if he’s off the hook, it has to be on grounds that he was protecting himself, not his property, during the confrontation with the burglars.

Dunno if I agree with this analysis. It presumes the Grand Jury followed the letter of the law, and furthermore that there must have been some tip-off of imminent danger to Mr. Horn. The latter of those has not been substantiated by the 911 call I heard (follow link at the top), and the former of those of course has not been substantiated by anything.

I think the grand jurors simply decided they’d had it up-to-here with the law standing up for bad guys. They didn’t think they should have been meeting for the purpose at hand; they moved to dismiss.

Not sure I can agree with that if that’s the way things went down, but I’m certainly not shedding any tears over it.

H/T: Ace.

Stare Decisis, and Panic For Sake of Panic

Friday, June 27th, 2008

I was checking out Brutally Honest, Rick’s site to follow up on a mildly interesting and explosively-expanding thread underneath the Harley Davidson “Screw It, Let’s Ride” commercial. I have found it to be a dialog worth following, because it has morphed into a deliberation of manhood; an inspection of what, exactly, it is. We can always use more of that, and I’ve noticed both sides are putting a lot of thought into it. Rick (and Gerard too, evidently) sympathized with the ad and the attitude it sought to promote. Guest blogger and frequent commenter BroKen did not. It would seem at first blush that such an exchange wouldn’t have much place to go, since it’s a battle between pet peeves and therefore between emotions. Rick is sick and tired of being told the planet is in danger and we all need to buy some carbon credits and unplug our cell phones; Ken is sick and tired of apathetic, irresponsible people.

I think Ken’s crime, here, is one of overanalysis. He’s rather like the guy who’s told the urban legend about the late-night pedestrian who sees two headlights coming toward him, assumes they’re motorcycles, and goes between them…is DRT (Died Right There)…and upon hearing the story, the guy asks “but how do they know what he was thinking if he died?” Sometimes logical questions can open up entire sub-arguments that, when all’s said & done, aren’t worth pursuing. It’s possible.

Also possible, is the Panic For Sake Of Panic, and although I’m sure Rick has other examples in mind besides global warming, the environmental movement is certainly central to his inspiration. We’re being called-upon to panic over things quite a lot lately. Panic is not constructive thinking. Masculinity, Ken’s comments about it notwithstanding, can have a lot to do with letting it pass by with little action, or even no action at all. This would be the “keep your head together” aspect of manliness. In the case of the gas that costs almost five bucks a gallon, our error is in forgetting supply-and-demand, being too quick to blame cartoonish stereotypes like “Oil Executives”…presuming that our destruction is desired by people who are engaged in trade with us, and not by the people who seek re-election to Congress periodically through messages that resonate with our suffering. In the case of global warming, we’re confronted by a boogeyman that exists in the mind. Buzzwords, a few “scientists” funded with George Soros’ money, the allure of knowing massive bureaucracies and orthodox fellowships are already mobilized into motion around the boogeyman. The ambition to be part of something huge, nevermind having no impact at all on what it does based on one’s individual participation in it. Like the Barack Obama campaign, modern radical environmentalism has become a tantalizing pastime for those among us who lack intellectual masculinity. Those who desire to clamber on board a massive ship so they can be seen being on it, to grab an oar and help row it so they can be seen rowing it…and have nothing to do with steering it. Steering entails decision-making, and decision-making involves far too much responsibility for the gelded mind.

The four-word tagline “Screw it, let’s ride” is a joke that’s gone over Ken’s head, I’m afraid. In some situations, it can be a healthy and mature attitude. Like, anytime panic is the point. When someone nameless and faceless wants you to lose your bearings, and whispers scary campfire stories into your ear so you’ll fearfully listen to whatever comes next. The headstrong, able-minded manly man says “screw it, let’s ride.”

Through the kernel of truth that was involved in the scary story to make the remaining 99% of the panic digestible, this may entail risk. But we tend to forget that life is all about risk, and it is only through the elimination of life that you completely eliminate all risk.

Enough about that particular confusion vis a vis manhood, masculinity, manly thinking, etc. Let us examine another flavor of such confusion. Let us turn our attention from those who over-analyze, to those who do not analyze enough.

Rick has some more good stuff that is worthy of comment.

Dahlia Lithwick has made a career out of commenting on American law, especially as it is molded and shaped in our Supreme Court. She was born, and remains, a Canadian citizen. If you’ve exchanged ideas over the innernets with enough Canadian citizens about American law, as much as I have, you know what’s strange about that. For the benefit of the uninitiated, I shall expound…

The weakness in her mindset is betrayed by the passage:

The conventional wisdom that the Supreme Court is precariously balanced on a knife’s edge—with four liberals and four conservatives battling for the heart and mind of swing Justice Anthony Kennedy—is too simplistic. The current term has seen enough unanimous and near-unanimous decisions to suggest that the story of a 5-4 court is dramatic but inaccurate. That said, it’s clear there are four justices on the bench who deeply mistrust the judiciary, in the manner of a Rockette who doesn’t care for dancing. Dissenting in this month’s habeas case, Justice Antonin Scalia predicted that judicial overreaching “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” John Roberts added that “unelected, politically unaccountable judges” should not shape detention policy. One more jurist at the high court who generally believes that jurists cannot be trusted would spell the difference between a court that is a coequal branch of government and one that cheers from the bleachers. [emphasis mine]

Okay, now for this to make any sort of sense — you have to believe that any self-imposed limitation on the Supreme Court’s authority would be tantamount to an internal, self-criticizing belief “that jurists cannot be trusted.” Her “Rockette” crack makes it clear, to me, that she means to devalue such restraint, to make it equivalent into almost to sort of a mental illness. Perhaps she doesn’t realize the extraordinary intellectual difficulty that would be involved in applying this rule to the Supreme Court, and keep other institutions insulated from it, but I’m willing to go out and a limb and presume: Dahlia Lithwick does not believe in restraint of authority anywhere. Wherever someone can order something, they should. She probably liked it just fine when Gavin Newsom handed out marriage licenses when the law clearly said he didn’t have the authority to do it; I’m sure she was just as fond of the Supreme Court giving George Bush the smackdown over Guantanamo detainees and military tribunals.

How about President Bush’s decision to form those tribunals before the Supreme Court decision came down? If I’m correct in thinking Lithwick admires lack of authoritative self-restraint, that’d be a great example of it. Her careless, breezy use of the word “coequal” implies that she thinks the three branches should be able to do more-or-less the same things, and her implication that the Supreme Court carries legislative power would help to substantiate that. Somehow, I don’t think Lithwick is going to be quite as big a fan as that. No, she likes restraints on government-branch power to be jettisoned, when the decision under consideration is one she happens to like.

You simply can’t have separation of powers…a uniquely American doctrine…with that in place. Furthermore, as it’s been pointed out in many other places since then, Lithwick is engaged in some Holy Battle in which we old white males represent the forces of evil, because we’re old, white and male:

Anybody who believes the current Supreme Court looks like America needs to take a few more trips on a Greyhound bus. All the judges are white and/or old; most are both. [emphasis mine]

I have to stand on what I entered at Rick’s place:

What I wouldn’t give for a pleasant (hopefully, to stay that way) dinner conversation with her, or someone from this planet. Is their idea of the “wall of separation” between judiciary & legislature, the same as mine? Do they even have one? Or are they so much into “pack every single panel that has any authority at all with good people like me” that they haven’t even put that much thought into it?

In order to define what exactly is wrong with nutty, delusional people, sometimes it’s necessary to state the obvious. Popular belief notwithstanding, this is something I really hate doing…but let’s go for it.

You have a law. Like most laws, it leaves room for interpretation. Perhaps because the law exists in a context in which it’s impossible to avoid that, or perhaps because the law just happens to be worded badly. Let’s make it a badly worded law to make the example clearer — the law is:

Don’t Drive Fast Here

You drive through there at 45 because you think that isn’t fast. Why, on the freeway, you’re allowed to go as fast as 65! But the cop who busted you thinks anything over 30 is pretty fast. He busts you. You appeal. The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Court, here, essentially has two options: 1. It can uphold your penalty or 2. It can let you off the hook. It comes down to the “opinion” of the Justices overruling all other opinions now and forevermore (or at least, until a better sign is put up with a better law behind it). The side effect is that, if you are let off the hook for driving 45, it will become legally impossible to cite someone for driving through the same thoroughfare doing 35. On the other hand, if you’re busted, then anyone who gets a ticket for driving 55 and wants to appeal can just forget it.

This is jurisprudence. It is, specifically, stare decisis et non quieta movere; “stand by and adhere to decisions and not disturb what is settled” — or at least, that’s what it is called the next time a different case presents the same question. It is “law,” in all the ways that matter, but without democratic participation by the electorate, without critical thinking, without deliberation about cause-and-effect. Consistency is the only virtue to it.

I made reference to Lithwick’s “planet.” On mine, stare decisis is a noble ideal but when too much emanates from it, that is a toxic agent. So people like me see the Supreme Court as engaged in a struggle, to continue deciding cases for as many decades as possible without hopelessly tying itself up into a huge knot. The nightmare scenario is one in which stare decisis runs headlong off in one direction, and common sense sprints in the opposite direction. At that point, the Supreme Court must overrule itself, and admit that justice has been miscarried. For years.

Lithwick’s planet is one in which this is a desirable outcome. Bad laws like “Don’t Drive Fast” breathe life into the judicial branch, give it a reason for being “coequal,” and the courts are at their most noble and glorious when they seize this false authority and wield it.

I do not know what people on Planet Lithwick mean by “coequal,” exactly. I really don’t. I don’t think they know either. It’s clear to me they think decisions are “good” when they exude greater volumes of stare decisis side-effect…make things illegal that weren’t before…make things legal that were illegal before. It’s obvious they think more highly of the decision when the interpreted effect is contrary to the reasoned expectation of Congress, or other lawgivers, when the laws were legislated or ratified. They place a value on unintended consequences.

On my planet, we call that what it is: Bad law. We count on the judicial branch to step in, and make law that way where it did not exist previously — when Congress is unwilling, or unable, to do it’s job. And it’s an occasion for mourning, not celebration, because we know a law has just been made that has no common sense behind it. We know a “committee” decision — the most dreadful kind — has just been made, and nobody will be accountable to it because it will not have been made in any one individual’s name. Breathy, throwaway phrases like “evolving social mores” and “standards of decency” will be used to announce the results of polls — polls that were in fact never taken. Impact without ownership. Remember what I said about decision-making being an unacceptable burden to a gelded mind. This is an entire system of government, ruled by gelded minds.

So I agree with Planet Lithwick about the stakes being “very high.” She’s right. Just not in the way she thinks she is.

This is America. You may have heard of it, Dahlia. It is a place where our Supreme Court, and all the rest of our judicial branch…is not a supplementary Congress.

Our real Congress has long vacations for a reason, after all — we can only take so much of what they do. The courts are places where Congress’ messes are cleaned up. Congress certainly doesn’t need help making them.