Scoundrels At The Wheel, Pigs At The Trough

If ever there was any doubt about the elitist mentality of today’s Left, one needs only to witness their condescension and smarm in response to those who oppose their communist-lite healthcare agenda.

The mask is slipping and the real agenda is revealing itself:  Obama and his sycophants are intent on controlling the culture forever.  How?  By controlling three of its largest institutions:  Finance, Manufacturing, and Healthcare.  If they get away with it, you can kiss your freedoms goodbye as they will control the central machinery of American prosperity.  And we know what the devout Left does with prosperity, right?  They give it away to moochers, losers, thugs, political hangers-on, and all the sewage and effluvia that circles the Progressive Planet.

How did it come to this?  Simple, the Scoundrels At The Wheel can always count on the Pigs At The Trough – the people mooching for stuff they have not earned nor deserve.  Obama’s central appeal is first to the Something-For-Nothing crowd and only secondarily to political children spewed forth from the university madrassas over the past 5 decades.  Telling crackwhores they are entitled to – indeed have a right to – a home, buys votes.  Now replace “crackwhore” with every manner of human dysfunction, personal irresponsibility,  and loser behaviors and you have the core voting block of the Left.

There is, however, a way to jam this back down the throats of the pig farmers in the Congress – let’s make them live with the programs they propose first.    Every person confronting a Congress Critter should demand the following:

Will you as a Congress Critter commit to a 5 year trial run of whatever healthcare system you think is good for all of us that applies only to the Congress, the President, and all other government employees? Will you further commit to limit these trial participants to ONLY the benefits of such a program and agree to not use your private wealth to get better health coverage in any way-, shape-, or fashion?

Let’s see how enthusiastic these bottom feeding political windbags are if they have to live with the system they define first, and shake out the bugs.  I’d love to see Ted Kennedy waiting in line for his brain tumor treatments.  I’d love to see Nancy Pelosi no longer eligible for the cosmetic procedures that give her that permanently surprised look.

Let’s demonstrate publicly what all sane citizens know:  The Congress is hypocritical and corrupt,  Obama cares only about his place in the record books and not a whit about the nation, and half of We The People are dishonest, greedy, and only too happy to steal from the other half.    Let government employees – all of them – be first to be forced to live with the system the Scoundrels At The Wheel are trying to inflict upon all of us.

The Obama Worshipers

This ought to be required reading for all American (and by that I include Canada, Mexico, Central-, and South American) High School students. Strike that, this is a Must Read for any person with brains enough left to realize what a threat to durable liberty Obama and the Left present:

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/7705

P.S. The Right isn’t much better, if at all.

Our Long, Cold, Winter begins …

All Hail The Neo-Coms

Today the nation that presided over the death of Communism presided over the death of Capitalism.  The very people who benefited most completely from free markets, rule of law, property rights, and personal responsibility have turned their backs on all of it, preferring instead to drink from the sewage spewed forth by the collectivists.  In so doing, it breathed new life into the very Communist ideology that 4 generations of Americans and its allies fought to suppress.  Neo-Communism is the new order.  All hail the Neo-Coms.

Their first General Secretary, Comrade Obama stands in the wings prepared to rule over the workers in a grand socialist paradise.   Like all dictators, he speaks in the grandiloquent, claiming to do good – but only if the good is at the expense of others, the hated rich.  Never mind that he himself is many leagues removed from the common man.  (He does, after all, already have his own Khrushchev-era dacha in Chicago obtained via his currently-imprisoned real estate fairy, Tony Rezko.)  Never mind that his vision of “change” merely involves reinstating the collective that oppressed literally millions during the 20th Century.  Never mind that he is willing to sacrifice our individual liberties – any and all of them – on the altar of the “public good”.  He is Comrade Change.  He is the Great Black Hope.  He is the Collectivist Savior.  So … all hail the Neo-Com Stalin.

And what of the oligarchs?  The people who allegedly caused the problem and now will reap direct financial support from the people of the United Soviet States Of America?  It’s easy to understand their motivation.  After decades of being abused by the growing collectivism in their nation; of having to pay a disproportionate portion of the taxes; of being vilified for being successful; of being blamed for any and all social ills … the rich got even.   They took huge risks (with the possibility of reaping huge rewards) and laid of the losses on the general public.  No demonstration of the evils of collectivism could ever be more compelling, but the American Sheeple, via their execrable legislators, demanded government “fix” the economy, so the risk takers got paid off.  One can only hope that – in the larger scheme of all the taxation they’ve endured – at least they broke even.  All hail the Neo-Com General Assembly.

In the end, no matter how lousy the politicians, this destruction of liberty is primarily the fault of the people – they whiny liberals, the slimy progressives, the limp conservatives, the fakers, the takers, the indolent, the lazy, the greedy, all of them collaborated to put the knife in the barely quivering carcass of Freedom.  So, all hail the Neo-Coms – you majority of the USA’s 300 million inhabitants.  You have managed to undo in a couple generations what took hundreds of years to build.

The West, and more particularly, Western liberty is dead.  What is before us now is the slow and inexorable slide, first to irrelevance, then to subjugation, and finally to extinction.  And we deserve nothing better.   Any nation willing to embrace the diseased “something for nothing” ideas of Comrade Obama and his fellow travelers shall surely get what it asks for.

God Bless America … What’s Left Of It.

Bailing On Liberty

It is maddening to listen to the many voices weigh in on the current banking “Crisis”.  It’s as if all reason has been abandoned.   Stike that.  Reason has been abandoned.  As the congresscritters writhe and moan like Pfleger and Wright at an Obama concert, it is, perhaps, instructive to “review what we’ve learned”:

1. This wasn’t caused by free markets or Capitalism.  It was caused by decades of government spending.  In particular, it was caused by government spending money it did not have.  It did so explicitly – via deficit spending – and implicitly, by forcing lenders to make bad loans and then promising them they’d be “protected” from the subsequent losses.  This is, after all, what the “Your welfare qualifies as mortgage income” scam was all about.  In other words, the last thing we had here was a “free” market.
2. Once government figured out it could no longer tax its way out of trouble, it retreated to the next ring of hell: it printed money, lots of money.  Well, more precisely, it lowered interest rates.  This devalued the currency, drove oil prices through the roof, and generally had the effect of being inflationary, even though the formal measure of inflation did not reflect this.  This, um, slowed the economy down further.
3. The banks in question do bear some responsibility, notwithstanding the predations of the government upon their lending practices.  In no case are they entitled to your money unless you’d like to donate it as a charity.  Using government to force you bail them out of their own mess is flatly communist … which is probably why Obama is particularly keen for it.  Laying off the risk to the public while retaining the rewards for oneself is the act of a despotic oligarch, hence the neo-cons, con-neo-cons, and just plain con men who support this.
4. This produced the perfect storm for the usual communists like Comrade Obama and oligarchs like McCain and Bush.  They are trying to terrify us into supporting a further violation of our wealth by “fixing” the economy with tax money.  They are wrong and they are profoundly evil for demanding this.  The way to “fix” this problem is to let the banking institutions in question go bankrupt and be reorganized under competent new managers appointed by whoever buys their remains.  Alternately, the banks might want to renegotiate the terms of their mortgages voluntarily with the borrowers.

There is no simple fix here.  Nothing we do will avoid massive pain in the short run.  But, if we allow the scoundrels in government to prop up the failing banks, we will pay for this forever.  Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” will not be held back.  It does not answer to Congress, it does not answer to the Obama communists, it does not answer to the oligarchs.  It answers to Reality – so should we.

Gas Is Still Cheap

I had an interesting conversation with a retired auto mechanic yesterday. He tells me that in the early 1960s gas was around 25 cents per gallon, and a full time mechanic made about $3000 per year.

Today, the US national median income is about $45K or so and gas is around $3.75 nationwide. If you do the math, you realize that we’re paying about the same proportion of our income for gas as our grandparents!

Actually, we are doing better than our grandparents in many ways.  Modern cars get way better gas mileage than the barges of 1960.  This means we spend less to go further.  A modern car is also better in almost every way.  A $20,000 Honda Accord has more and better features than the most expensive 1960 production Cadillac or Mercedes.  It’s more has more gizmos, is more comfortable, and is generally safer than the cars of 40 years ago.

So, when you see the Big Eeeeeeeeeevil Oil companies making lots of money, take a moment and give thanks.  They’re keeping your gas at a more-or-less constant price, decade after decade, AND they’re part of your retirement fund, pension fund, 401K, or other broadly-based investment.  Their success (or failure) is the success or failure of millions upon millions of citizens.  Everyone needs to quit whining about high gas prices and get to work themselves trying to be at least as productive as Exxon/Mobil.

Political Genius

While the “news” claps and cheers about Obama finally distancing and now denouncing Jeremiah Wright, I stand in awe of the sheer facility and political play of the Obama campaign.

Wright’s racist vitriol was part and parcel of his weekly expositions on Black Liberation Theology (which is neither liberating nor theological, and even less so Black). Yet, after 20 years, Obama managed to never have heard any of it.  Then, along comes the media-at-large with the evidence, and Obama finds himself in a royal pickle.  He can’t back away too far from his “spiritual adviser” because that demonstrates a lack of loyalty – an unforgivable sin for most of us.  He can’t stay too close, because that would, ahem, make him, well … RACIST.  He’s stuck.

Oh dear, what’s the “Presidential Candidate For Change – ANY Change” ™ to do?  Simple.  Call up your dear spiritual adviser and ask him to say what he’s already been saying louder and more often.  Wright’s over-the-top performance these past days was done with one purpose in mind: To give Obama the room to walk away with credibility.  To be able to say that these “extreme” views are offensive. In short, to disconnect the loyalty issue so Obama could get back to polishing his “mainstream agent of non racial, oh so earnest, candidate of destiny” image.

It’s genius I tell you.  Obama’s political competitors are rank amateurs by comparison.  Whether Obama is elected President or remains a pestilence in Illinois, look for “The Barak & Jerry Show” – a cartoonish public reconciliation when Wright’s vile bilge and Obama’s midden of ideas no longer matter.

So This Is Progress?

We love to tell ourselves that the human race is making progress. This notion infests our discussions of technology, culture, religion, politics, human relations, and most anything that human beings find interesting. Indeed, we are so immersed in the sea of alleged progress that minor counter-revolutions have sprung up to decry everything from global trade to the loss of the “traditional” family farm / hardware store / vegetable stand / school system, ad infinitum.

But a lot of what gets peddled as “progress” isn’t. And it gets successfully peddled as such precisely because too few people have the necessary baseline knowledge to assess whether the new really is an improvement on the old. If you don’t understand something of Bach, then Rap will constitute music. If you’ve never seen Peter O’Toole in Becket, than Sean Penn is going to seem like the a fine actor. The yowlings of most current female R & B artists seem impressive until you hear Kiri Te Kanawa sing Gershwin. This isn’t just a matter of taste. Quality has some objective standards no matter how hard they are to discern. The broader point is that “progress” implies improvement compared to some former thing or state. If you do not understand the former, you cannot judge how progressive the latter.

I recently had a (literally) vivid reminder of this. For some thirty years I’ve been a serious black and white photographer, working with traditional silver materials in a wet (chemical) darkroom. On a whim, I recently bought a reasonably high-end “prosumer” grade digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR). This is a state-of-the art 10 megapixel camera with every bell and whistle a serious photographer could want, manufactured by one of the two dominant names in professional photography.

Moreover, I have an embarrassment of software riches with at least four different photo editors at my disposal, all running on a nice high-performance computer with a large screen, lots of memory, blah, blah, blah. (I even actually know how to use some useful part of each of these programs, a not inconsiderable accomplishment.)

So … off on holidays I went, shiny new toy in hand. I took more pictures in a week than I’d taken in the past year, simply because of the ease and facility of the new DSLR. I didn’t do this thoughtlessly though. Thirty years of making serious pictures teaches you a discipline of shooting that emphasizes economy and deliberation as you work. I translated this discipline into the new digital world and was, at least at first blush, pretty happy with what came home on film, er, I mean, memory card.

When I got the images into the computer, I began the process of gentle corrections. Again, the many years have taught me that fine photographs respond to small, subtle improvement, not being beat over the head with a CPU. But I noticed a curious thing. Notwithstanding the almost unlimited control over the image the computer affords me, I simply could not come close to the final picture quality I’ve come to regard as “normal”.

The reason is pretty simple. I ordinarily shoot with a couple film cameras that produce negatives 6cm x 6cm or 4″ x 5″ respectively. The amount of “information” that a piece of analog film in these sizes can hold (dynamic range, tonality, resolution, detail) far exceeds anything in the digital world until you get into the $40,000 stratosphere of pro gear. (Even there, I doubt that a Hasselblad H3D can touch a properly exposed 4×5 negative.) To turn a phrase from the custom car builders, “There ain’t no substitute for square inches.” My $1200 state-of-the art DSLR – a magnificently engineered and very well thought out tool – can’t produce images as objectively good as an old $100 used pro camera I bought on eBay recently. The “information space” of the two respective instruments is that different.

So … is the new camera “progress”. Well, maybe, at least in some dimensions. In looking at the results of the past several weeks, the camera seems to produce images that are comparable to a well engineered 35mm camera of yesteryear. I long ago abandoned 35mm for anything but amusement’s sake exactly because it could not hold the tonal fidelity and detail of the larger film negatives. But, small, easy to use cameras have a place in photojournalism, street shooting, sports, and casual hobby shooting. In these contexts, the new DSLR is a hands down improvement over its film brethren. A 10 megapixel image is, as I said, comparable to a decent 35mm negative, and the ability to easily manipulate it in the computer is orders-of-magnitude easier than doing it in the darkroom.

But I seek quality. I strive to make prints that are breathtaking (to me at least). By that measure the DSLR is a giant step backwards. As sophisticated as the light meter, auto focus, and optics are, they cannot compensate for the sheer lack of information captured on the CCD, at least by comparison to a well executed analog film negative. For the same reason that synthesizers and samplers did not replace Steinway pianos, digital photography – at least for the forseeable future – is not going to replace the traditional high end silver print. I can make that judgment because I know what was and thus can judge what is.

It’s tempting to dismiss all this as just an artifact of age: I’ve lived long enough now to have some context from then and now. But its deeper than mere age. It has to do with how we’re educated. It has to do with our culture. In the evolution of Western civilization, it became clear at some point that knowing “what was” was fundamentally important in the education of young minds. That’s why educational institutions came to teach liberal arts: History, Philosophy, Geography, Literature and all the rest were put in place to give the young student a crash course in context – so they’d know enough to develop a sense of what was bull and what was cow patties. But our educational system is in tatters. It has been polluted by politicians, cause monkeys, ideologues of all stripes, and people seeking to avoid real work.

The consequences are horrific, not the least of which is that everything is now “Unique”, “Awesome”, and “Real Progress” (Dude!). It’s why young adults can fill a 160 MB iPod and never have heard the Mozart Jupiter symphony. It’s why a good many people under 30 know all about Flickr but have never seen the ageless beauty of Rembrandt. It’s why people run in droves to the social networking web sites, sharing some of the most intimate details of their lives (and some of the most mundane) but cannot write a compelling personal letter as simple as a thank-you note. This is not about technology. It is about institutionalized ignorance. It is about the academy, parents, and the society at-large having totally failed our young because it was easier to give them what they wanted than what they needed.

Real progress springs from rich, fertile minds harnessed with the disciplines of learning, informed with a large base of knowledge, and animated with a passion for excellence. Real progress is dying. It is being replaced not by just the vulgar, but by the trite, the mundane, the uninteresting, the uninspired, the insipid, and the just plain stupid. Western culture gave us The Renaissance, The Reformation, and The Enlightenment. These three events conspired to give us Liberty. Our insipid stupidity will lead us back into a new Dark Ages and a new slavery. To be sure, it will be a digital Dark Age with lousy music, incoherent poetry, no real literature and … blurry pictures.

Contra Kinsley

Every now and then, someone proposes to condescend sufficiently to honor us “chipmunky and earnest” libertarians:

http://tinyurl.com/273vcc

It’s nice to be loved, however condescending the tone. But Kinsley needs refutation, for no other reason than, well … he’s wrong about a lot of things (Some snipping of the original text follows for brevity, not rhetorical advantage):

Libertarians deserve a listen

Yes, they can drive an idea right over a cliff.
But it’s the journey that’s half the fun.
By Michael Kinsley January 12, 2008

Libertarians get patronized a lot. Chipmunky and earnest, always

No condescension here, is there … But, it’s important to be earnest, ask Oscar Wilde.

Legislators and regulators should ask themselves far more often than they do whether their activities expand freedom or contract it.

Legislators and regulators are not served if freedom is expanded.

Furthermore, democracy and majority rule are no answers. Tyranny ofthe majority is a constant danger. How would you like a law requiring people with odd Social Security numbers to give $1,000 to people with
even Social Security numbers? To libertarians, much of what government does is essentially just that.

It’s not just “to libertarians” … it is so as a matter of fact.

So what is wrong with the libertarian case for extremely limited government? Economics 101 teaches some of the basic justifications for government interference in the economy. Some things, such as the cost of national defense, are “public goods.” We can’t each decide for ourselves how much defense we want.

So far, so good. There are things into which we stipulate – via the social contract – the government may poke its nose. This is not because they are “public goods”, but rather those things which are required to preserve and grow liberty itself. Kinsley is making a bogus argument with this “public goods” business, because it allows for almost all manner of abuse – you can call anything you like a “public good” so along as you rationalize it as in the best interest of the group. This is the intellectual basis upon which all Collectivist systems rest (Communism, Socialism,Nazism, Facism, Hillarycare, W’s drug bill …)

Then there are “externalities,” which are costs (or, sometimes, benefits) that your decisions impose on me. Pollution is the classic example. Without government involvement of some sort to override our individual judgments, we will produce more pollution than most of us want. There are “market-oriented” solutions to this problem, but there is a difference — often forgotten, especially by Republicans — between using market forces and leaving something to  the market. The point of principle is whether the government should intervene at all. How it intervenes is purely pragmatic.

Right conclusion, but boneheaded foundation. Interdiction in matters of pollution – say, the raw sewage that emanates when Al Gore opens his mouth – is a matter of thwarting force. If I could pollute just my air, it would be none of the government’s business. But because pollution pretty much always harms others, the government has a role because impeding acts of force increases liberty. What is also not conveniently mentioned here is that the government just loves to do this via non-elected regulatory agents who answer to almost no one in practice.

Libertarians have a fondness for complex arrangements to make markets work in situations where the textbooks say they can’t. Hey, let’s issue stamps, y’see, and use the revenue to form a corporation that sells stock to buy military equipment, then the government leases the equipment and the stockholders vote on whether to use it … and so on. The point becomes proving a point, not economic or government efficiency. Libertarians also have a tendency to see too many issues in terms of property rights (just as liberals, they would counter, tend to see everything in terms of discrimination and equal protection).

No, libertarians see things in terms of more- or less liberty. The example above that he cites as excessively complex sounds contrived to me – at least I’ve never heard it. If government is restricted to its Constitutional limits, these kinds of contrivances are not required. It has been the so-called “liberals” (who are no such thing) and “conservatives” (who are no such thing) that have chosen to prostitute government into the most complex, inefficient, and byzantine leviathan ever conceived by man.  Libertarians want things simpler not more complicated.

Pollution, libertarians say, is simply theft: You are stealing my clean air. Settle it in court. This is a really terrible idea: inexpert judges, lawyers and juries using the most elaborate and expensive decision-making process known to humankind — litigation

As opposed, of course, to the “expert”, competent, beneficent, and generally great rendering of judgment that proceeds from the Congress, their regulatory appointees, and guys they meet in a Minnesota airport bathroom? Be serious. The peeeepul cannot possibly be worse at this than the unfirable hosts of public “servants”. I’ll take a jury of my peers over the smug, self-satisfied EPA regulators any day.

Sometimes libertarians end up reinventing the wheel. My favorite example is an article I read years ago advocating privatization of highways. This is a classic libertarian fantasy: government auctions off the land,
private enterprise pays for construction and maintenance, tolls cover the cost, competing routes keep it all efficient.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. In this case, libertarians are trying to fix an already broken system (and it’s is almost certainly too
late to do so). Moreover, there is a good case to be made for the roads being run by the government as a matter of national
defense – this was, after all, the original justification for the interstate highway system.  The only beef I have with that is that, if the private sector wants access to those roads, then thems that use ‘em should pay for ‘em.

Something similar goes on when the government forbids or requires people to do something for their own good. Why shouldn’t people, at least adult people, have the right to decide for themselves? Libertarian thinking
has been useful, for example, in making it easier to get prescription drugs through the approval maze at the Food and Drug Administration. The Terri Schiavo case of 2005 was libertarianism’s greatest moment so far, as the entire nation rose up in defense of her right to die.

Yeah, too bad Liberals as a group – who always love this part of libertarianism – fail to see that allowing abortion may arguably
be good for the mother, but its pretty bad for the child. To be fair, many libertarians don’t get this either.

The trouble here is that libertarians tend to analogize everything to the right to die. If you have the right to end your own life, you must have the right to do anything else you wish, short of that. If you’re allowed to shoot yourself through the head, why aren’t you allowed to drive without a seat belt?

The answer is that it’s a bad analogy. When you drive without a seat belt, you are not motivated by a desire to die, or even a desire to take a small risk of dying. Why should your motive matter? Because your death — especially your death in a car crash — does impose externalities on me. I would pay good money not to see your bloody carcass lying beside the highway, or endure the traffic jam or pay the emergency room costs. A serious right, like the right to choose the time and manner of one’s death, may be worth the cost, while a right to be careless or
irresponsible is not.

This argument is bogus on many levels. The most obvious is this: If “you” insist in sticking the government into the process of things that ought to be private – say, like healthcare – you have no business complaining when my behavior “imposes externalities” upon you. What’s next? “We pay for your healthcare, so you have to work out 5 times a week, quit smoking, stop listening to Hannity & Combs …” The externalities to which he refers are not an artifact of the behavior of free citizens. They are the artifact of nosy, self-righteous, save-the-world, self-anointed saviors of mankind who want to do “good” … at the point of a gun. (One also wonders what the criteria separating the “serious rights” from the rest of them might be. I shudder to think.)

A similar flaw affects libertarian thinking about government-mandated income redistribution. Extreme libertarians believe this is immoral or even unconstitutional, and even moderate libertarians disapprove of social welfare programs as an infringement on the freedom of taxpayers.

Because it is wrong morally AND practically. It is wrong morally because it is done by threat of force. It is wrong practically because it “oursources” my choice of which charitable causes I wish to support.  So, for example, some portion of my taxes go to support abortion – something I find vile and outrageous (and even worse than having to support “All things Considered” on NPR… which is pretty bad in its own right).

But freedom is only one of the two core values our nation was built on. The other is equality. Defining equality, libertarians tend to take a narrow view, believing that it means only political equality with no financial aspects. Defining freedom, by contrast, they take a broad view, and see a violation in every nickel a citizen is forced to spend.

No, Sparky, libertarians don’t “take that view”. It was the view of the Framers. They understood (imperfectly) that it was to
be equality of opportunity to government protections, not equality of outcomes.  That is, government should serve its citizens equally. This is very different than various formulas (he cites below) wherein both liberals and conservatives wish to use government to mediate how “fair” things are generally, even/especially in the private sector.

Libertarians ask: By what justification does the government concern itself with inequality, financial or otherwise? They are nearly alone in asking this question. Even conservatives claim a great concern for equality of opportunity, while opposing equality of result. And the reasons seem obvious: some degree of material equality as a necessary basis for political equality; the huge role of luck in getting each of us to our relative stations in life; etc.

This is neo-collectivist nonsense in the absence of a real argument.  There are any number of vivid counterexamples of people who achieve great things in the presence of a manifestly unfair world, economic or otherwise. The moment government is injected into the fairness equation, no good thing comes from it. Why? Because, apart from defending liberty itself, anytime government decides what is “fair”, it almost always does so to the benefit of one group and at the expense of another. Liberty is diminished.

In rare cases, this is justified. For instance, the liberty of a murderer is limited intentionally, because not doing so causes a net reduction in liberty for victims. But that’s not the debate being had today. Today’s “fairness” police inevitably end up poking about in personal matters which – frankly – are almost never about our corporate liberty, but are a tinkering exercise designed to buy votes.

But nothing like this is obvious to libertarians. They force us to think it all through from scratch. Good for them.

Sadly, all that “thinking” we induce seems not to result in productive conclusions in those who are doing that thinking … at least as evidenced by this piece.

Eeeeeeevvvvviiill Lawyers, Stoooopid Juries

Lawyer jokes are a staple of humor going back to at least Shakespeare and perhaps even longer. So it is tempting to turn on them again when reading this:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15446658/

But is this really a “lawyer problem”? In part, yes. The legal profession is, by definition, at the center of all things, um … “legal”. Lawyers run for office and make law. Lawyers try cases. More importantly, lawyers become judges who run the mechanics of the courtroom and instruct jurors on the fine points of the law. So, yes, when we see obscenities like the one described above, the legal profession bears some of the blame. The failure of our laws to properly balance how civil law, especially, ought to be adjudicated when the plaintiff was mid-crime is simply … criminal.

But, it’s not that simple. In the end, it is jurors who hold the keys to the final findings of a court. And jurors are not doing their jobs. I had the honor to serve as jury forman in a criminal case a number of years ago. What I saw in the jury room was terrifying. A young man’s life hung in the balance yet jurors could be seen sleeping during the testimony. Some jurors had their minds made up without respect to the facts of the matter. Virtually none of them seemed interested in the “common sense” test that ought to be a bedrock for all such deliberations.

The deliberation behind closed doors was unrelentingly depressing. To be sure, most of the jury took the job seriously. They just couldn’t reason all that well. Simple, logical discussion evaded at least half of this man’s “jury of peers”. We’re not talking formal logic and modus tolens here. We’re talking about fairly direct reasoning – the kind you use to find a shortcut to work in the morning. And this was no homogenous jury either. Both genders, several races, and many portions of the age spectrum were represented among the twelve of us.

In the end, we managed to agree on a Not Guilty verdict, but only upon consideration of a legal technicality. His crime? He had “sold drugs” under duress. His former dealer had threatened to kill the defendant’s mother and break his legs if he did not procure the drugs in question. What made the case maddening was that the aforementioned dealer was working for the state at the time in order to reduce his own sentence for a prior conviction. Our defendant – having only used, but never sold drugs in the past – was pressured into becoming a dealer by our own government. And many of our fine jury didn’t see much of an issue with that.

Juries, it seems, are often stupid. This should be no surprise. Juries are drawn from a larger population that has consciously gotten dumber over the past 50 years or so. Common sense, the spirit of law, the purpose of our legal system, and the responsibility they carry in the jury room evades them. It is much more important to be dressed stylishly, in tune with the latest pop fashion, and up-to-date on the latest entertainment figures and their nauseating “artistic” output. Reasoning crisply is taught by study, contemplation, and conversation, not by trying to ascertain whether Madonna’s howlings are art, commerce, or just bad manners.

So be afraid if you ever need a jury. Be very, very afraid. Unless, of course, you’re hurt while commiting a crime … in that case, you may just hit the jury lottery.

The Cure Is Worse Than The Disease

This story gave me pause:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,295432,00.html

It is, on the one hand, astonishing that our nation, with a 1st Amendment specifically protecting free speech and religious freedom, has descended to these depths. On the other hand, it is entirely predictable. Once tax money got into the education business, nothing but nonsense followed.  Who would have thought that we’d see a Constitutional Democracy with a government forbidding open religious expression?  But, when you take your neighbor’s money using government force to pay for “your” schools, you also take the government whip that goes with it.

Watch carefully. Our civil liberties will be further eroded by similarly covert means. Wait until (it is all but inevitable) the Sheeple decide that government is also the instrument best suited to dispatch healthcare. Do you smoke? Eat fast food? Drink alcohol?  Eat donuts? Love a good steak? Drink soda pop? Fail to exercise regularly? Once the snoopy Feds have their hands around the healthcare purse strings, they will then be enfranchised to incrementally dictate what should indisputably be personal choices.

Isn’t it interesting that the Western political Left is laser focused on trying to institutionalize healthcare as yet another government function. Yet it is just outraged by the perceived decline in civil liberties induced by covert wiretapping and surveillance directed at foreign nationals. Why no one seems to be able to connect the dots that these are all faces of the same dangerous coin is maddening.

Then again … I suppose the political players know exactly what they’re asking for. The Right wants a commercial oligarchy, the Left a political oligarchy. The Sheeple – as always – want Something For Nothing and serve as a gateway for the malevolent dreams of both political factions.

God help us all.  Oh wait - can I even say that?