Rudy the Libertarian?

If you are going to tout a candidate as libertarian, I am given to understand that the candidate should have a first rate “libertarian resume”. I have been informed by Eric Dondero, whose own “libertarian resume” is said (by him) to be impressive, that Rudy Giuliani is “libertarian”. Although Eric doesn’t think much of folks’ using their own judgment (https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=10883291&postID=1040062931335375543 ), I thought I would take a gander at old Rudy’s CV and how libertarian it is.

First off, I was going to give Rudy a plus on the libertarian ledger because of his draft dodging back during the Vietnam War. He bravely declined to be part of the federal government’s slave army, and he managed to avoid the draft thanks to a letter from his boss, a federal judge for whom Rudy was clerking. It’s hard to give Rudy credit for staying out of the slave army by sucking at the federal government’s teat as a civilian employee. I reckon the two cancel out from a libertarian perspective if I am to be as generous as I can.

After two years of clerking for the court, Rudy might have parlayed this experience into a legal job in the private sector as a productive member of society. Instead, he chose to remain a parasite on the taxpayers and work in the ironically named Justice Department. He worked his way down in the lowerarchy of the Office of the US Attorney to become chief of the Narcotics Unit. An enthusiasm for drug prohibition and a career as a bureaucrat are hardly indicative of a libertarian streak. Rudy was such a zealous bureaucrat that he landed a gig as Associate Deputy Attorney General.

He was parked at a big law firm during the Carter administration when he was displaced by Democrats at the patronage trough, but he was immediately brought back to Justice as Associate Attorney General when the GOP regained control of the spoils. He became US Attorney for the Southern District of New York where I recall his being a huge publicity hound. He was fond of the public “perp walk” when he had you arrested, but there was no equivalent publicity when he dropped charges. He was a drug warrior, among other things.

He was parked at some law firms after Reagan left office until he was elected mayor of New York City in which post he served two 4 year terms. From 1968, when he finished law school, to 2002 when he left the mayoral palace, he spent all but 9 years as a parasite on the taxpayers, hardly anything a libertarian would crow about. And his tenure as mayor is not regarded as a great flowering of individual liberty in the city. On the contrary, Rudy was an authoritarian prick. He was especially hard on sex workers and adult entertainment, and he was no friend of drug users. Marijuana arrests in NYC went from 720 in 1992 to over 60,000 in 2000.

Rudy got a lot of credit after the World Trade Center attack, and I got the impression that he believed that he had single handedly brought the city together in the wake of that tragedy. What a glory hound. I didn’t see Rudy running into any burning buildings or breathing a crapload of asbestos in the cleanup. One thing Rudy is good at is squeezing every ounce of attention and publicity out of a tragedy, and if he becomes President he will doubtless stand out in the role of publicity hound. There is nothing particularly libertarian about Rudy’s performance at the WTC.

Since Rudy left office, he has traded on his name and fame as a “security” consultant and investment advisor, although for the life of me I can’t figure out why anyone thinks Rudy knows anything in particular about either thing. I don’t know much about Rudy’s client list, except that it included the government of Venezuela, so for all I know he has worked tirelessly for personal freedom since leaving government employment. He wanted to be a Senator at one time, so he clearly wants another government gig.

Rudy doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would let the bloated powers of the presidency diminish on his watch. On the contrary, Rudy might turn out to be the last president ever elected.

Think of the Children

According to Digby (http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/saving-children-by-digby-last-refuge-of.html) The AG can’t quit because then nobody would be there to look after the children or to protect us from “illegal immigrant porn moguls”.

Paul the Spud (http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2007/03/very-definition-of-grasping-at-straws.html) takes up the theme of how the “think of the children” argument is reserved for the indefensible or desperate cases. He reckons that the AG will next claim that he “needs to spend more time with his family”. I lifted this image of Helen Lovejoy (the “won’t someone think of the children” lady from the Simpsons) from Paul’s post.

It turns out the AG reckons he is indispensable to the welfare of America’s children. Accordingly, how could he in good conscience resign?

The trouble with the “think of the children” argument is that it works all the time with lots of people, even those who should know better. In the AG’s case, however, the child welfare meme is probably so far removed from his situation that it won’t be what saves him, if anything does.

Consider all the regulations of our activities that are predicated on what some stupid and poorly supervised child might possibly do. There are serious calls for more regulation of the internets because some parents are too indolent to counsel their children about making dates with pederasts on line. My TV viewing options are restricted because some child somewhere might see a nipple. I can’t release Siberian tigers on my property to control the deer population because some parents are too lazy and neglectful to keep an eye on their toddlers.

Predicting the Future

On the O&A radio program this morning (it is one of my guilty pleasures), there was a repeat of an old bit about predicting the future and getting it wrong. Anthony read from a list of predictions that did not pan out. Some examples: Lord Kelvin’s announcing the impossibility of heavier than air flight in 1899 and the likelihood that X-rays were a hoax. The CEO of IBM declaring that there was a world market for at most five computers. A silent movie mogul’s wondering who might possibly want to hear actors talking. A Boeing engineer’s prediction that the 10 seater was the biggest aircraft that would ever be built. In each case, credible people with some degree of authority or expertise were incredibly wrong.

When I think back to my childhood in the 1960s, it was widely assumed that we would all have hover cars and live in underwater habitats by now. There would be colonies on the Moon and on Mars and even interstellar travel. Most diseases would be cured or curable. I’m still waiting for my hover car. On the other hand, the more pessimistic predictions of an overpopulation or nuclear war induced dystopia have not materialized either.

In the 1970s, there were a lot of End Times predictions based on the geopolitics of the moment. Hal Lindsey achieved some fame by pitching the idea that the apocalypse was right around the corner and that the US and the USSR were the major players. The collapse of the USSR was not part of his scheme, nor did he predict the current “clash of civilizations” so dear to apocalyptic preachers these days. I suppose one of these days some preacher will come close to getting something right. You’d think that the Millerites’ Great Disappointment would have made folks leery of preachers who make a living out of telling folks that God is fixing to kill them.

A lot of people make predictions all the time and are even paid to do so, but it seems to me that a lot of them are not held accountable or tracked in terms of their success or failure. Economists, for example, don’t have batting averages, so to speak, to indicate how often they have gotten it right. Pundits and politicians can get it wrong time and time again without being called on it. The promoters of the war in Iraq, for example, are still making predictions and being published in major media outlets. Shouldn’t their columns be labeled with some indicator of how prescient or misguided they have been? Shouldn’t government spokescritters have to wear a placard showing their percentage of truth telling?

If I were a futurist, I would be sure to make my predictions far enough ahead that I won’t be around to be called on them. “A billion years hence, we will no longer use hover cars but travel through the medium of pure thought.” I could also make them vague and ambiguous enough, like Nostradamus, that they can be made to fit any circumstances that arise. “A ruler will emerge who will call himself a peacemaker but who will do battle on the ancient plain.” I could also make lots of inconsistent predictions in the hopes that one of them will pan out and I will be cited as prescient. “The Democratic/GOP candidate will win in 2008.”
Or I could just start calling myself an economist or a pundit, in which case I need not concern myself with my accuracy.

Good Post at Upaya

MDM at Upaya has a thought provoking piece on how a “thick dialectical libertarianism” might deal with “exploitation”: http://upaya.blogspot.com/2007/03/exploitation.html

DeCoster versus Postrel

Karen DeCoster takes on Virginia Postrel at Lew Rockwell’s blog: http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/012533.html#more

Postrel dumps on “deductivist” libertarians while praising “empiricists”. http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/03/18/virginia-postrel/an-18th-century-brain-in-a-21st-century-head/

This issue, or rather a closely related issue, is very close to my heart. One of my ambitions in life was to be an “applied anthropologist”. Even my choice of a career in law was driven by a desire to be a social engineer. Anthropology, I reckoned, would better inform my understanding of human nature and how to engineer society for the betterment of mankind. The promulgation and implementation of public policy was the highest calling. In sum, I was a wanker.

My career path was derailed on a couple of accounts. In the first instance, I came to believe that cultural and social anthropology as these are presently constituted have no useful or beneficial application. Secondly, I came to understand what Weber meant when he wrote that social science cannot tell anyone what he ought to do. At best, social science can make predictions about the consequences of a particular public policy. In the end, human values and goals are predicated on underlying metaphysical assumptions, not on anything that can be empirically derived. Social scientists cannot legitimately counsel anyone on what they ought to want or what values to adhere to. At best, we can give advice on how to achieve our goals or what the likely outcome of the application of a value to the social order will be. Thirdly, any work in this arena by a social scientist is most likely to be deployed in the interests of ruling elites and maintenance of the established order.

I value liberty for its own sake. I derive this value primarily from my religious convictions. These convictions are not subject to any empirical test. For me, liberty is the end. For Postrel, liberty is the means to achieve some other ends. Presumably, to her way of thinking, too much liberty would be a bad thing if it led to a deviation from her vision of the good society. Even the state deploys such reasoning when it decides that giving its subjects more liberty through lower (but not too low) taxes will result in more revenue to the state.

Perhaps I am reading too much into Postrel’s essay. It is possible to read it as simply calling for more pragmatism (assuming you didn’t know any of Postrel’s other views). Maybe it isn’t much different to say that liberty leads to the desired end state than to say that liberty is the desired end state. Then again, in the former formulation, there might be an optimal level of liberty that falls well short of what most libertarians I know see as desirable. What is optimal depends on what you are trying to accomplish. If I am a ruler, I will want to give my subjects as much liberty as necessary to keep them governable and productive at minimal cost and maximum profit, but not so free that they overthrow me. Would I then be a “libertarian” despot? In such a formulation, anyone is a libertarian who advocates any freedom at all. If I allow my slaves to breathe as they see fit so that they might be more productive, then I am quite the liberal.

I also see liberty as desirable for its own sake because I do not presume to know what is best for my conspecifics. Central planning in culture, religion, or other areas of life doesn’t work any better than it does in the economy. My species will probably do better in the long run if it is free to pursue diverse goals and follow diverse values. The more diversity the better. Someone is bound to get something right that way. If Virginia Postrel became queen of the world and could impose her vision of the good society on every human being, who is to say that that would be a good thing? Her utopia could very well be my dystopia.

I agree with Postrel that libertarians should be willing to ally themselves with those who move in the direction of more liberty. Tax cuts are a good thing, but taxation is still theft. I prefer the thief who takes less to the thief who takes more. Public policy is important, but why would a libertarian look first to solutions based on violence and coercion? Wouldn’t a libertarian want to exhaust the possibilities of peaceful, voluntary methods before calling in government goons? It had better be damned important to do so and all but impossible to deal with any other way.

Let’s face it. The libertarian utopia is a long way off. We have to deal with the state as a social fact or risk being killed or imprisoned. We acquiesce in it because we are pragmatists, even though we deny it legitimacy. If we begin to grant it legitimacy, we have lost our souls, and to call ourselves libertarian is self delusion.

Dinesh D'Souza Critiqued by Slightly Less Nutty Guy

What does it take to make VD Hanson seem reasonable? His plucking the low hanging fruit of a D’Souza rant for criticism: http://www.reason.com/blog/show/119248.html
(Actually, low hanging fruit would be harder to pick than getting fodder from D’Souza’s ravings. It’s more like fruit that fell off the tree, was eaten by a lagomorph, excreted by said lagomorph and devoured again for double digestion before being redeposited. Seriously, D’Souza is crazy. Of course, this is the guy that gained his 15 minutes of fame by arguing that his fear of negroes was justified.)

I have one quibble with VDH, however. D’Souza may have been on to something when he suggested that right wing Americans form an alliance with traditional Muslims against liberalism. The Christianist right and Islamists are very much alike. They both decry the decadence of the West and long for an authoritarian state to enforce their religious strictures. VDH ought not to have dismissed this outright, given that most of the GOP core constituency wants to impose something very like sharia law. In a comical turn, VDH remarks that he feels more akin to those dirty hippies Christopher Hitchens and Joe Lieberman than to any of the ayatollahs.

Who is a LIbertarian?

Who gets to decide who is ideologically pure enough to be called a “libertarian”? Nobody and everybody. The meaning of the term is, like most words, contested. It, like many words, can be bandied about so indiscreetly that it loses its descriptive power. It can be an epithet on the one hand and a badge of honor on the other. I find myself thinking at times when someone claims to be a libertarian or describes someone else as such: “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

I have come to accept that the term “libertarian” can be used in a relative sense. You can be a Stalinist in every respect but if you also advocate decriminalization of marijuana, you are more “libertarian” than the Stalinist who supports the prohibition of weed. An outright fascist who advocates for the freedom to gamble is more “libertarian” than a fascist who supports the prohibition of gambling.

For me, one test of whether you are really a libertarian is a commitment to the principle of limited government. If you advocate decriminalization of marijuana but at the same time acknowledge that it is within the state’s legitimate police power to criminalize it, then that is rather different than claiming that the state has no legitimate business regulating pot in the first place. If you buy into the notion that the state can legitimately do as it pleases without any inherent limits, I don’t think you really qualify as a libertarian. There is a big difference between arguing that the state ought not to engage in an activity because it is not good policy to do so and arguing that the state cannot engage in it as a matter of principle.

A libertarian, in my view, has to accept that some undesirable situations may persist in the absence of regulation. I ask people to think about government by imagining whether the problem to be solved or the service to be offered is so important to you that you would be wiling to send goons over to your neighbor’s house to rough them up to make it happen. That is precisely what you are doing when you support a government program or regulation. You are resorting to violence, and many us have scruples about the use of violence. The trouble is that the violent nature of government is obscured, and many who would not dream of robbing their neighbors directly support taxation for their own pet projects and causes.

Libertarians can disagree on how much government is necessary and still be “libertarian” in the diluted sense that they support less government than someone else who is more statist than they are. If you support more government than I do, you are less libertarian than I am. At some point, you will cease to be a libertarian in my view and probably a lot sooner down the statist road than you might like.

I reckon it ultimately boils down to the non-aggression principle. For me, there are only extreme circumstances under which I would dispatch goons to my neighbor’s place. My religious principles dictate peacefulness and toleration in all but the most limited cases. I cannot love my neighbor and rob him or threaten or coerce him at the same time. I cannot love my neighbor and at the same time let my own cowardice induce me to rob him, restrict him, coerce him and send his children off on military adventures to address some minute risk to myself. If I support the so called “War on Terror”, that is precisely what I would be doing, using violence to mitigate a danger that is far less than the risk that I will be struck by lightning or killed in an auto accident. If I am a frightened bedwetter, that doesn’t give me license to infringe on the liberties of my neighbors to assuage my panic.

Let’s recap. If you advocate decriminalization of some activity as good public policy, for example because it will increase state revenues, you are probably not a libertarian in my book. If you deny the state’s legitimate authority to criminalize the activity in the first place, that’s libertarianism. I get to decide whom I think is a libertarian and who is not one. Maybe I will set myself up as the herald of the ideology and issue credentials.

Libertarian Comedian Eric Dondero Makes Me Laugh

I had to check out the pro-war “libertarian” Eric Dondero’s blogs http://libertarianrepublican.blogspot.com/ after reading some of his comments on Independent Country. I am convinced that this is a parody, and I find his postings comical. His schtick is to declare himself a true libertarian while espousing entirely statist viewpoints. This could be a swipe at Virginia Postrel and Tom Palmer and their ilk.

In a particularly hilarious post, he endorses Rudy Giuliani for President despite Giuliani’s fascist leanings because Eric thinks Rudy would be the greatest “warrior” ever in the White House. Even funnier are those who comment on his posts without seeming to realize that the site is not real.

Eric claims to have an impressive libertarian resume and to be the single most influential libertarian political consultant on the planet. He speaks “10-15 languages”, apparently so many that he has lost count. He says that Lew Rockwell is a lefty liberal and not a libertarian at all. He claims that Dana Rohrbacher was a founding father of the modern libertarian movement.

I laughed until I almost wet myself. Thanks, Eric, for your humorous take on libertarianism.

I Call Steve Scott Butter Because He is on a Roll

Steve Scott is on a roll http://fromthepew.blogspot.com/

In one post, he takes on what it might mean to be a “fool for Jesus” http://fromthepew.blogspot.com/2007/03/fools-for-jesus.html It means, per Steve, that the way of Jesus seems foolish to the world, not that followers of Jesus should act like idiots.

I have been thinking about how many passages in the Bible refer to foolishness in contrast to wisdom, especially the Proverbs. The formula is usually “the foolish man does such and such whereas the wise man does something else altogether”. The thing that troubles me is that I have come to believe that all of us are prone to folly to some extent and that some of us are destined to be fools by virtue of our stupidity. I do not equate intelligence with wisdom, but wisdom seems a lot harder to come by if you are stupid. A stupid man is more easily led into folly as he has not the discernment to know whom to trust. Witness the core constituency of GW Bush. Most of them purport to follow Jesus but have been led astray by evil men into following the very Prince of Fools and his ungodly agenda.

Do the proverbs invite us to hold fools in contempt? I know many who seem to think so, who speak of letting fools take “personal responsibility” for their folly, that is to suffer the dire consequences of it. I have come to believe that we should not be contemptuous of fools; rather, we should treat them with an extra measure of solicitude, instruct them if they can be instructed, and mitigate the consequences of their folly when we can.

I am relatively intelligent, but I do not claim to be wise. I have had to learn too many things by experience to claim wisdom as an attribute. I have done my share of foolish things and made many foolish choices, and I am not done yet. It is written that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and I trust that I have at least embarked on the path of wisdom in this regard.

Report from the Georgia Hills

My stepmother passed away last week, and I drove down to Georgia for the funeral and to spend some time with my father and siblings, some of whom were her children. I got caught in that snowstorm on my way home on Friday, and it took over four hours to get from Scranton to Stormville.

My visits to Georgia are so infrequent that I tend to forget just how southern fried my family is. Their accents are broad, and their tastes run to country and western music, car races, hunting and fishing, and ultimate fighting. They neglect their pets and indulge their children. They fry almost everything they eat, and they like their green beans cooked to a pulp with a slab of pork fat. It seemed to me that I was eating almost constantly. I had fried green tomatoes and butter beans for the first time in decades. Folks tend to be either obese or skinny as a rail, like one of those shirtless drunks getting arrested on “Cops”.

The funeral was in a tiny country Baptist church, and it featured shouting and old time preaching. I didn’t see anybody run the aisles, but I would not have been surprised by it. My stepmother loved that church, and the service was how she would have wanted it. She was laid to rest in a small cemetery across the road from a racetrack. The funeral goers ended up at the Western Sizzlin’ for supper.

My hometown has grown bigger and a whole lot seedier these last few years. Farms that used to raise corn now feature row upon row of manufactured homes. Housing is very affordable. It has to be since wages are so low. Some of the local carpet mills have recruited tens of thousands of Mexicans, many of them undocumented and in the country unlawfully, to work in the mills. This has the effect, desired by the mill owners, of suppressing wages and keeping the locals in their place.

My people are staunchly anti-immigrant and are looking to the federal government to control the border better. It’s not so much that they don’t like Mexicans; rather, they resent the suppression of wages and rising tax burdens. The Mexicans have relatively larger families and have filled up the public schools so that new schools must be built. They also use the public health facilities and other government services without a concomitant contribution to the tax base.

Dalton has a lot of pawnshops, check cashing businesses, and easy credit providers to cater for the working poor. Many folks have more than one job to make ends meet. My sister has three jobs. My mother bakes wedding cakes on the side. Nobody ever gets ahead or out of debt. They are always one illness or injury away from financial disaster.

My people are likely to vote for a Republican for president in 2008. They don’t care for Clinton, partly because she’s a woman, or for Obama, mainly because he’s black, and they reckon one of the other of those senators has a lock on the Democratic nomination. If a Republican candidate is “right” on immigration, they will vote for him despite his positions on anything else and despite the GOP’s platform being against their interests in almost every respect.

There are “more churches than people”, as the saying goes, and frequent schisms over minutiae have led to a proliferation of tiny churches, mostly Baptist. These feature rather lively services with much outpouring of emotion and demonstrations of religious ecstasy. Ecstasy is otherwise forbidden, so you have to have it in church. In principle, most forms of pleasure are sinful.

I am glad that I was able to visit, but I am equally glad to be back to my life as an expatriate here in New York. My accent will go away in a few weeks, and I will get all the gravy out of my system in a month or so.

China Wants to Invest a Trillion Bucks

WaPo reports that China is looking to increase the return on its trillion dollars of foreign currency that it holds in reserve: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030900194.html

Currently, China buys US bonds, but they plan to diversify. We are assured by the Minister of the Treasury that this will not impact the market in US bonds.

Stop Slandering God, John Hagee!

The false prophet John Hagee reckons that the state is God’s instrument for bringing about Judgment Day, so he aims to influence the US government and the Israeli government to make war in the Middle East and incite Russia and the Arabs to nuke Israel. http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2007/03/07/aipac-defines-acceptable-discourse/ This will set the stage for the Tribulation and the return of Christ to judge the quick and the dead. Those Israelites have got to be murdered en masse as part of God’s plan, and the sooner the better for Hagee.

Hagee claims the Third Reich was God’s instrument for chastising the Jews and setting the stage for the return of the remnant to Palestine. I suppose this means that Hagee would have advocated for Nazi genocide if he had been preaching back in the 1930s. After all, it was God’s plan unfolding, and collaborating with God is always a good idea. You could presumably have worked at the death camps and still have been a member in good standing at Hagee’s church, what with doing God’s work and all.

I suppose that you can argue that everything that happens is an unfolding of God’s mysterious will, but I don’t reckon that it is at all sensible to opine as to what God’s purposes may be. You are more apt to blaspheme than to prophesy. The attack on the World Trade Center, for example, may very well have some divine purpose, but there is no basis for attributing it to the treatment of homosexuals in America as some false prophets did. Of course, every unfortunate event is due to gays in some crazy preachers’ fantasy worlds.

In any event, letting those who would somehow hasten the end of days influence foreign policy to that end is insanity. For one who claims to be a follower of Jesus to advocate war and mass murder and to work to bring these about is obscene. If God uses catastrophes in His plan, He certainly does not mean for Christians to cause them or to participate in evildoing. There are enough evildoers in the world to go around.

When you announce what you think God is up to in the wake of tragedy, you are telling us about yourself, not about God. Hagee is telling us that he is bats**t insane or satanic or both.

Gaydar Deficiency

I don't have gaydar. I am usually the last to know whether someone is gay. Quite a few of my high school and college friends turned out to be gay, and I never suspected. It wasn't really safe to come out in my home town, especially in high school.

I suspect that my cluelessness has contributed to some awkward situations over the years where gay men have assumed that I was also gay and came on to me. As flattering as this can be, it can also be a bit shocking as when one man planted a big wet one on me out of nowhere. I don't know what signals I was putting out, but nowadays I don't get out much and don't have much of an opportunity to get into "I thought you were gay" scenarios.

I have never been homophobic or concerned that I might be gay. Presumably, I would know if I were sexually attracted to other men. I am attracted to women, so that rules out gay. I don't enjoy gay porn, so that rules out a career in conservative political circles.

One of my conspecifics doesn't want his kids to have gay teachers or to be exposed to homosexuality. He fears that if they find out that homosexuality is an option, they will decide to be gay! He would rather his sons repress their true sexual preferences, if they turn out to be gay, and pretend to be straight, no matter how miserable this makes them. I don't know why he feels this way. I bet he would love his son anyway.

Best Uncle Ever

If your kindly and attentive uncle bothers to teach you to smoke weed at a young age, you are lucky indeed. I wasted a lot of good weed through improper technique when I started using and could have used some avuncular advice. I still can’t roll a joint if I were to use weed now, which I don’t what with it being illegal and all. Also, I did not use weed until I was an adult, so I missed out on a lot of pleasure for many years. Thanks for nothing, uncles!

The solicitous uncle in Texas that I heard about on the radio has come under fire for teaching a 2 year old and a 6 year old how to smoke weed. I have not heard anyone fault him for the technique he imparted or his teaching style, and he was probably correct in his assertion that the youngsters would eventually smoke weed sooner or later. Better to show them the right way so they don’t hurt themselves or waste any valuable buds. Taping the session would be helpful for the kids to review the lesson later on.

Gatekeepers Schmatekeepers

JL Wilson (http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2007/03/high-price-of-distrust-and-fear.html) and Lew Rockwell (http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/012462.html) both posted about gatekeepers today, albeit in different contexts. Wilson problematizes regulators and credentialing agencies as stifling creativity and limiting workers’ opportunities, and Rockwell defends Wikipedia against criticism about its editors’ lack of credentials.

I learned from a comedian last weekend that strippers in Texas must be vetted and licensed. She had had a DWI conviction and was ineligible for a license. In some places, you need a license to arrange flowers. These barriers to entry into such occupations serve no useful purpose. All licensing and credentialing bodies serve only to increase costs and rob folks of opportunities. Who thinks for a moment that a medical license is a guarantee of competence or that bar membership indicates a brilliant legal mind? These professions use licensing to maintain a monopoly for their guilds, not to protect consumers of medicine or legal advice. It would be one thing if membership in a professional association were voluntary. The association would have an incentive to keep as members only the most capable practitioners so that membership might be used as a marketing tool. As it stands now, membership does nothing for the consumer.

As for Wikipedia, I don’t care if the editors have degrees or are approved by the establishment. What do credentials matter as long as the information and knowledge provided are useful and fairly accurate? The establishment’s knock on Wikipedia is that anyone can contribute to it, even if they have not been through the establishment’s vetting process. The same goes for journalists’ disdain for bloggers. I find bloggers’ reporting useful and informative, and I have enough sense to know how credible any particular blog might be. It’s the “professional” journalists that fail to inform and who pump out endless streams of vacuity. The academy does not produce anything comparable to Wikipedia or otherwise do anything for me as a seeker of information or knowledge.

First Plural is a Perfectly Cromulent Person

Jomama links to an article by Jim Davies: http://djomama.blogspot.com/2007/03/why-i-not-anarchist-any-longer.html

The gravamen of the article is that tribalism is bad, any form of tribalism, and that anarchists seek to live as individuals and to see others solely as individuals.

I reckon tribalism can be bad and often is, but it doesn’t have to be. Voluntary associations of people can be a good thing. I am happy to be part of a family, and I voluntarily choose to participate in family life to some extent. I am happy to be part of the church and to assume responsibility for the welfare of my coreligionists as long as there is no compulsion involved. I am happy to live among cooperative and friendly neighbors and to be part of a neighborhood. I am lucky in that my coworkers are mostly amiable, and I am happy to serve in harness with them. When I have been on sports teams or in clubs, I have been happy to do so. I love being in the choir and singing together as with one voice.

The key is that I am not compelled to do any of these group things. The relationships are largely negotiable, but I accept that participation may give rise to certain kinds of claims on my time and resources. These are voluntary groups, and what makes them work is love, not compulsion. The introduction of violence into any of them would render them valueless and a misery.

Davies’ article focuses mainly on what are more properly called “categories”, i.e. collections of people sorted on the basis of one or more characteristics but having no organization or function as with a “group”. Races are categories, not groups. It is more proper to speak of ethnic categories instead of ethnic groups. Gender is a category. American is a category.

Manipulative bastards work to reify categories and to base claims on them, to imbed the notion of category into individual identity. My nationality is American, but that does not mean that I have any particular duty to or expectation from anyone else having the same nationality solely on the basis that we are subject to the same rulers. I do not regard an American as more or less valuable than any other human being. The same may not be said of voluntary associations. I hold my kinsmen in higher esteem than others. I have special affection for my coreligionists and fellow choir singers. They are my friends and family, and we share more than a set of arbitrary characteristics.

It is okay to speak in the first person plural when you are talking about the groups you belong to. Here are some more examples of the category/group distinction:

Category /Group

Irishman/ Michael Flatley fan club
Women /The Junior League
Christian/ The church
Veteran /VFW Post 1217
Anarchist /East Fishkill Anarchist Society
African-American /NAACP
Dog owner /Friends of the Yonkers Animal Shelter
Gays/ GLAAD
Cheese eaters /Danbury Cheese Lovers Club
Working Class /UMWA Local 12
Children /The Lee Family
Actors /Cast of Battlestar Galactica
Old people /AARP

Dying Republics as Entertainment

Mrs Vache Folle and I have been watching DVDs of the HBO series “Rome”. If you can live with some considerable historical inaccuracy, it’s an entertaining series. The set design and costumes are fantastic, and the producers have tried to be true to Roman culture of the late Republic.

The Julio-Claudian gangsters that started the Empire and destroyed the Republic kept the corpse of the Republic around for many years to lend themselves some kind of “legitimacy”. There was still a Senate to legislate, albeit as long as the legislation pleased the Emperors. There were still Republican offices of tribune and consul and such like, albeit filled with Imperial lackeys.

I am reminded of the times we live in now. In the US, we keep the Constitution under glass and appeal to it often. Some folks keep little pocket sized Constitutions on their persons, presumably so they can wipe their arses with it in the case of politicians. But the Constitution has lost its meaning. The US government does not remotely resemble what the founders designed.

Of course, the Roman Republic was ripe for corruption. It seemed to function mainly to maintain the patrician class’ privileges and wealth, and the Julio-Claudians used their popularity with ordinary people to secure and maintain power and cow the Senate. Likewise, the American electorate has acquiesced in and supports the massive federal governmental apparatus we now enjoy. Ordinary folks have voted for tyranny consistently, believing in politicians’ promises of a New Deal, a Great Society, and a New World Order.

JIm Norton Killed at Bananas

Mrs Vache Folle and I went out Saturday to the comedy club “Bananas in Poughkeepsie. It’s not so much a club as a conference space in the Best Western where they stuff in plywood tables on weekends and have comedians come in. The patrons are packed in like sardines, and you are lucky if you get anyone to sell you a drink. Nobody served us on Saturday. So we saved a few bucks.

The featured performer was Jim Norton, whom we had seen down in Greenwich Village back in 2001 and who had been a regular on Colin Quinn’s Comedy Central show “Tough Crowd”. Lately, Jim has been sitting in with Opie and Anthony, a couple of clowns with an entertaining radio show during the morning drive time. I listen just about every day since I can’t get Air America any more, and the news is too damn depressing. It is a guilty pleasure, and I usually claim to listen to NPR. It is a seriously puerile show, and the crowd at Bananas was composed mainly of an unsavory collection of what I figure is the typical Opie and Anthony constituent. Twenty-something, mostly dateless white blue collar guys with baseball caps worn askew. Salt of the earth, if you will.

Jim killed. His performance this time centered almost entirely on sex, and it was very graphic and very funny. Jim’s comic persona, and perhaps Jim in real life, is a sex maniac, and he is absolutely unapologetic about it. His shamelessness and vulnerability are key to his performance. He speaks of the unspeakable without hesitation or embarrassment, and this leads to some of the funniest observations ever about human sexuality.

Jim handled a table of chatterers in an entertaining manner, much to the room’s delight. He called them out and booted them from the show, even though one of them was proclaimed to be a “breast cancer survivor”. She supposed that this status entitled her to talk incessantly during the performance. Jim skillfully deflected the breast cancer survivor card and a claim that he liked to belittle women with wit. It was an uncomfortable moment, and I fretted a little that a Michael Richard’s moment was unfolding with the “C-bomb” instead of the “N-word”. But it passed quickly without escalating. Kudos to the Bananas staff for ejecting them.

I laughed until tears ran down my face. I was exhausted from laughter by the time the show ended. I wish Jim got to speak more on Opie and Anthony.

There is No Such Thing as an "Illegitimate" Child; They're Just Bastards

In a discussion with the conspecifics the other day, the normative proposition that “children do better in intact families” came up. What this boiled down to in the end was that intact families generally had more money than non-intact families. The male role model thing could be tacked on to bolster the argument, but the main thing was financial stability. A related proposition is that “women who are not married should not have children”, presumably because the offspring will often not be as well off as they might with a husband in the picture.

But how perfect does the situation have to be before it is morally appropriate to reproduce? Children with nannies are better off than children without them, so should everyone wait to reproduce until he or she can afford a nanny? Children with loving extended families are better off than children in mere nuclear families, so should those who are estranged from their kin eschew reproduction until reconciliation? At some point, the situation is presumably good enough since the anti-bastardy advocates among my conspecifics all have children even though their situations are not perfect in every particular. And they had children even though they knew that one of them might die or that a divorce might ensue, in which cases their children would be less well off and better off never having been born.

For my part, I am indifferent to bastardy. If you don’t expect me to pay for your childrearing hobby, then I don’t care if you are married when you have a child. Alas, money is extorted from me for the support of other people’s children, and most of them are not even bastards. They were whelped by married couples and live in intact families which, despite being able to afford to take care of their own children and to educate them, nonetheless demand by force that I pay for public schools and other amenities for their kids. When they stop robbing their neighbors, I will listen to them moralize about bastardy. Until then, their moral credibility is strained to the breaking point.

East Fishkill's Extortion Demands Increase Significantly

We were just informed that our real estate taxes are going up to almost nine large. By New York standards, this is still a bargain. If I still lived in Westchester, I’d probably have to pay $20K a year for the privilege of living in my own house. But this is East Fishkill, Dutchess County for crying out loud!

My mother in Georgia pays a small fraction of what we pay in real estate taxes and gets just about the same level of “services” as we do, so what is East Fishkill doing with all the extra money? It can’t be snow removal, can it? As far as I can tell, that’s the only major difference in “services”. We have a well and a septic tank, so we don’t get water and sewer service. The road hasn’t been repaired in three years we have been living on it and, judging from its condition, many years have gone by without a visit from the highway department.. I never even see a cop unless I’m at the police station. The fire department is volunteer and supported by donations. The town website does not have budget information, so I don’t know what the city fathers are squandering our money on.

A big chunk goes to the schools, of course, but even there my mother’s county is apparently way more efficient at educating the youngsters than ours is. We pay over twice as much per pupil!

We can’t move further away from the city or our commutes would be prohibitive. They are a real strain as it is. Perhaps we can start a revolt and take a stand in East Fishkill.

Fashion Police Want New Uniforms

Death Wore a Feathered Mullet is dead on in asking why the fashion police are such wierdos: http://vivalasvegass.blogspot.com/2007/03/these-are-people-who-set-beauty.html

Fashionistas heal thyselves.

Krauthammer to the Moon!

I nominate Charley K as the first lunar colonist, and I would contribute to sending him to the moon ASAP: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/01/AR2007030101291.html

No Accounting for Taste in Songs

Some songs, no matter how awful, are beloved because I associate them with some happy time or event. Others, no matter how good, are hated because they coincided with some unpleasantness.

I spent a glorious summer when I was 13 or 14 (I’m no longer sure what year it was) on Lake Chatuge. The local radio station seemed to have only a handful of records that they played over and over again ad nauseam. Because I was so happy at the lake, I love these songs. I even sing them from time to time. They included such masterworks as “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”, “Lime in the Coconut”, “Paper Roses”, “I Can’t Stop this Feeling (with ooga chakas)”, and “Sooner or Later”. My cousin had an 8 track tape of Steppenwolf that we played repeatedly at full blast. “God Damn the Pusher Man” still makes me smile. “Born to be Wild” is my personal theme song that plays in the opening credits of the imaginary movie about me.

On the hated song front, Meatloaf’s “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” reminds of getting dumped. “Tainted Love” reminds me of getting dumped again a few years later. Luckily, these songs suck anyway so I’m not losing anything through the bad association. I would probably have hated them in any event.

My kid sister was a big fan of American Top 40, and she would spend her allowance on hit 45s which she would then play until you wanted to scream. “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” still makes my skin crawl. “You’re So Vain” likewise was played to death. On the other hand, I can’t get enough of “I’ve Got a Brand New Pair of Roller Skates” and “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl”. Go figure.

Some songs just sucked, no matter how I felt when they played. “Muskrat Love”, “Afternoon Delight”, “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero”, “The Night Chicago Died”, “Seasons in the Sun”, and “Daisy a Day” come to mind.

Other songs were awesome: “I’ve Got a Name”, “Crocodile Rock”, “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road”, “Knowing Me Knowing You”, “Thunder Road”, “Those Were the Days”, “Don’t Play B17”, “Nights in White Satin”, “Maggie May”.

They stopped writing songs after the 1970s.

Swiss Invade Liechtenstein by "Accident"!

It seems that World War III was narrowly averted: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Mistaken-Invasion.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

The Swiss Army “accidentally” invaded the Principality of Liechtenstein. I’m not buying it. This was a scouting mission, and next time it will be for real. Switzerland has always coveted its neighbors’ lucrative postage stamp business.

Home Depot Sucks

Home Depot sucks for several reasons: there are never enough registers open; our local HD has been out of DuraFlame logs for 6 weeks; they don’t sell pet friendly de-icer; and almost everyone who works there is a complete ignoramus about HD’s wares. Moreover, the associates, or whatever the clerks are called, are decidedly unhelpful. I understand that the company treats them like crap, so it is not surprising that this gets paid forward to the customer.

Occasionally, a TV ad for HD comes on. The delighted customers are shown being helped by knowledgeable and enthusiastic workers. This must be the Home Depot in Bizarro World, because it doesn’t resemble any Home Depot I’ve ever been in.

Murphy Brown Still Pisses Off Some Folks

The conspecifics astonished me today at lunch by announcing that Dan Quayle had been right about Murphy Brown. How so, asked I? She was a role model, and it was her obligation to set an example for the lower orders.

I reminded them that Murphy Brown was a fictional character, but they replied that the TV show sent a message in the “culture” that it was OK for unmarried women to reproduce. I pointed out that Murphy Brown was wealthy and perfectly capable of bringing up a child with every advantage, more so in fact than most couples of modest means. A child is generally better off in a two-parent family, they insisted, and poor women might see the show as validating bastardy in their case.

In a nutshell, a wealthy woman who wants a child (but who is not keen to marry) is supposed to forego motherhood as an example to poor women who can’t afford children on their own without husbands. By the same reasoning, I should not buy a stereo, because a poor person who can’t really afford one might try to acquire one based on my example. They might be tempted to rent a stereo and pay too much.

By this reasoning, I shouldn’t engage in any hobbies or consume anything beyond the bare necessities because I want to set an example for the poor.

Bad News and Good News

The bad news is that the universe is going to expand to a point where matter and energy are so thinly spread that everything fizzles out in the “heat death”, or the expansion will reverse with the universe falling back into an information destroying singularity. The good news is that this is more than 10 billion years away, so we still have time to plan.

The bad news is that long before the universe dies, the sun will explode and wipe out the inner planets, including Earth. The good news is that this is still at least 5 billion years from now, and humanity should be able to find new digs before then.

The bad news is that long before the sun blows up, the moon will escape from Earth’s gravity and fly off into space. This will mean that the stabilizing influence of the moon will be gone, and Earth will wobble on its axis and experience hellacious shifts in climate such that complex life forms will not be able to survive. The good news is that this is still over a billion years away.

The bad news is that an asteroid is probably going to smash into Earth and cause another mass extinction at some point in the next few hundred million years. The living, if any, will envy the dead. The good news is that this is not likely to happen within the next century, except for that thing in 2036, so we have time to work out an asteroid deflection system.

The bad news is that humans have developed weapons capable of killing everyone on Earth but have not evolved moral capacities beyond those of their hominid precursors. The good news is that these will not become widely available for another thirty or forty years, and then nutcases will only be able to afford a few such devices. Accordingly, there will be substantial numbers of survivors.

The bad news is that environmental degradation due to global warming, the detonation of numerous nuclear devices, and other causes will result in widespread famine, disease, and pestilence. Weakened humanity will fall prey to new strains of microbes and viruses. The good news is that a remnant will survive, albeit with primitive technology.

The bad news is that the remnant will not be able to deflect asteroids and will be wiped out in the mass extinction event described above. The good news is that some life forms will survive, and Earth will become replenished. The Age of the Slime Mold will begin.

The good news is that there are alternate universes in which this fate is avoided.

Conservapedia Rocks

Tom Tomorrow reckons “Conservapedia” is awesome: http://thismodernworld.com/3584. I agree.

I can’t figure out if it’s for real or is a parody. Would anyone be able to tell the difference? Dinosaurs on the ark, indeed. Everyone knows that the velociraptors would have gotten loose and eaten all the other animals plus Noah and his family, except maybe the Tyrannosaurus would have survived.

In addition to the one describing Noah’s exciting visit to Australia to gather up the marsupials and monotremes, I would love to read the lost books of the Bible that describe Noah’s trip to the New World to collect the llamas and New World monkeys and other species indigenous to the Americas. I speculate that he must have sent his sons on these amazing expeditions.

Presidential Prognosticating

I’ve decided to do some early presidential prognosticatin’ in the wake of Tom Vilsack’s withdrawal from the race. I reckon it was a good idea to call it quits since his election would have been unprecedented. The American people have never elected anyone president with “sack” in his name. We’ve had adopted presidents before, such as Leslie King a/k/a Gerald Ford, but none of them was saddled with a “sack” in his surname.

One assumption I make in my predictions is that the unprecedented will be avoided.

No Mormon has ever been elected, nor has a publicly announced follower of Reverend Moon, so I don’t expect that to happen in ’08. (Although having your Messiah handy to talk to on the phone regularly could be a real plus). JFK opened the door for the Roman Catholics, so I don’t see Catholicism as a bar to the office, as long as the candidate isn’t one of those really Catholicky Catholics. It will be some time before we see a Scientologist in the White House. Still, my money is on a mainstream Protestant in ’08, and I imagine that the more credible candidates will belong to Protestant denominations.

Nobody with a vowel, other than a silent ‘e’, at the end of his name has ever been elected, that is to say we have never had an “ethnic” president. I don’t really count Irish as ethnic since there have been Irish and Scots-Irish folks in America for centuries. Accordingly, Guiliani’s election would be unprecedented, and I am hopeful that his political career will come to a close soon. The only way we’ll have an Italian-American president any time soon is if Nancy Pelosi succeeds Bush and Cheney after they leave office early for some reason. Bill Richardson, being 75% Mexican, is out also.

No woman has ever been elected (tough luck Senator Clinton). Nobody of admitted recent (within the last three centuries) African descent has ever been elected (so long Senator Obama). Nobody over 70 years old has ever been elected (sayanara Gravel and McCain). Nobody under 42 years old has ever been elected.

Since the War Between the States, nobody, other than Herbert Hoover, who was not an incumbent or a sitting or former Vice President, Governor, Senator, or war hero general officer (Grant, Garfield, Eisenhower) has been elected. There are lots of general officers running around, but none are what we might consider “war heroes”. The incumbent is ineligible, and Cheney is slightly less popular than the BTK murderer, so we are looking at a former VP (Quayle and Gore are all that fit the profile), a current or former Senator or a current or former Governor, between 42 and 70 years of age, male, of Northern European descent, mainstream Protestant or Roman Catholic. Others need not apply.

That means the only Democrat candidates (mentioned so far) who can be elected are Biden, Dodd, and Edwards. (I reckon a draft Gore campaign is in order.) The GOP so far has Brownback, Gilmore, Huckabee, Thompson, and Hagel who could be elected without setting a precedent.

Maybe this would be a good election for something unprecedented after all.

Boycott Evil Connecticut

The Poughkeepsie mall and the Danbury mall are about the same distance from my house, and the latter is a hundred times nicer. I will not shop there, though, because I am boycotting Connecticut. I decline to visit Connecticut or buy anything from there or support the Nutmeg State with my consumer dollars until the denizens thereof repent of their evil ways. I am slapping sanctions on Connecticut because of that state’s evil fruits, the evilest of which is Joe Lieberman. I urge my fellows to follow suit and shun Connecticut until the Nutmeggers recall or otherwise stop inflicting Joe Lieberman on the world.

In fact, from now on, let Connecticut be known as the Nutbag State and its denizens Nutbaggers as long as Joe Lieberman holds an office therefrom. There is something seriously wrong with the Nutbaggers for them to have returned Lieberman to the Senate as he has no redeeming qualities. I have heard that he was not even cute when he was little.

Where Political Power Comes From

The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, "I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So if you worship me, it will all be yours."
Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.”

- The Gospel According to Luke

This was part of one of the readings on Sunday morning. The part where the devil claims that all earthly government is in his gift really stood out for me. Note that Jesus does not dispute this claim, but declines to worship the devil. How are we to interpret this? I don’t reckon that there is any inducement the devil could offer to entice Jesus to worship him, but it would be a feeble temptation indeed if the devil were lying about his ownership of earthly government. I reckon that the devil spoke truly in this instance and that this represented what would have been a great temptation. So, I conclude that political power derives from the devil, and those who seek it must somehow please the devil to gain it.

The Solution is to Disqualify Evil and Stupid People from High Office

I have been thinking about whether people are mostly evil and stupid and what the implications of the distribution of evil and stupidity within society might be. For my part, I am not entirely misanthropic. I recognize that all of us are sinners who fall short of the glory of God, but folks seem to me to lie somewhere on a continuum between complete depravity and saintliness. I tend to think that their level of goodness/evil is normally distributed with most folks clustered around an average that is more or less honest and peaceful but not perfectly or consistently so.

It has also been my experience that cleverness/stupidity and goodness/evil are independent variables. Accordingly, you can be evil and smart or evil and stupid or good and smart or good and stupid.

Now, the proportion of the population that is very good and very smart will be very small indeed, and they would be just the kind of folks that would make a good ruling elite. The trouble is that the rest of the population will probably not be able to distinguish among the smart folks who are evil and those who are good and there won’t be any way to make sure that only the smart/good combination acquires power. By what principle will the rulers be chosen? If it is the hereditary principle, what is to say that the heirs of the good and smart will in turn be both good and smart? I reckon intelligence might be hereditable, but goodness/evil surely is not. If the people choose, they won’t be able to choose wisely because the evil candidates will pretend to be good. Moreover, actually good folks might well want to avoid positions of power and wouldn’t seek office in the same numbers as evil pretenders. The government will, therefore, inevitably be evil.

How can a government be chosen that would give goodness a fighting chance? First off, you would want to disqualify the evil and stupid quarter of the population right off the bat. The good but stupid fourth is a little harder to cope with. Do you disqualify them because they might easily be manipulated, like Jar Jar Binks when he was inexplicably given Princess What’s Her Name’s proxy? It should be easier to distinguish between the good and evil among the stupid because they may be less adept at concealment, and I would recommend trying to devise a way to keep the good but stupid eligible for public office. This would mean that there would be twice as many good people as evil people eligible to govern and twice as many smart people as stupid people in the candidate pool.

If the legislature were chosen at random from the eligible population, then you would be likely to have one that is two thirds good and only one third evil. Of course, all the evil legislators will be smart, while only half the good ones will be, but there will be just as many smart good legislators as evil ones. I reckon goodness is more important than smartness in any event. Also, the smart but evil will probably have to pretend to go along with goodness because they won’t be willing to identify openly as The Evil Coalition. Besides, each evil legislator will be absorbed with self aggrandizement more than the good ones and might not be able to come together to do organized evil as they do now in the mostly evil Congress and state Capitols.

If we could come up with a way to identify evil, in crafty smart folks, then we could get them out of the picture altogether and limit positions to the good no matter how stupid they might be.

Of course, this scheme will only work if I get to set the criteria for what is evil and what is good.

Miscellany and Progress Report

I was doing great on my diet and exercise regimen until I had to go to Montana for two weeks. The gym in the hotel sucked, and I contracted the Norwalk virus and just didn’t feel like working out. On the positive side, I didn’t feel like eating either, so I didn’t gain any weight. I actually lost three pounds and found myself at 232 when I got home. I worked out for a week then contracted a lingering case of bronchitis and missed another week and a half of working out. Because I was down about being sick, I ate too much comfort food and gained back the three pounds I lost in Montana. Now I’m better and have been to the gym three times this week and am getting back in the swing of things.

The bathroom remodel has been something of a nightmare. The downstairs bathroom is almost done and is usable. The steam generator is great, especially if you are stuffed up. All that is left is to install the shower door (we are using a curtain for the nonce) and to put up two square inch finishing tiles in a couple of places. We painted last weekend, but Mrs Vache Folle is going to want to put on another coat. She always does. Of course, all this took a month to accomplish and went way over budget.

The upstairs bathroom has been gutted. The contractors came over late last week, gutted the room, and disappeared for several days. As of last night, we had a whirlpool tub sitting on the living room floor and a lot of questions about just how the contractors are going to get that behemoth up our narrow stairway and into the bathroom. I’m betting they will have to remove an exterior wall and bring it in from outside as the contractor suggested might be the case. They had to saw the old hot tub into pieces to get it out of the room.

We are very happy with how the downstairs turned out and are keen to see the upstairs completed. All the dust that is getting kicked up is killing my lungs and contributed, I suspect, to my bout of bronchitis. I have been sneezing and dripping nonstop for weeks.

In the “it’s always something” department, the new shower drain has started giving off the odor of sulfur. Either we have inadvertently tapped into a wormhole straight to hell, or there are some sulfate reducing bacteria somewhere in the system. I poured bleach down the drain to some good effect, but we are having the Culligan people, the contractor, and the boiler maintenance folks take a look at various parts of the system to try to find out where the bacteria dwell. The problem seems limited to the shower drain so far. The water tank may be the culprit, or even the water softener. It might even be the well, in which case we’ll want to shock it with some chlorine.

The most recent storm buried the pond deicer under two feet of ice, so I unplugged it. I hope the fish make it.

We actually socialized with other human beings this last weekend. On Saturday, we met some other couples at a bar and listened to a pretty good jazz trio. On Sunday, we had a couple Mrs VF knows from the train over for dinner and cards, and a good time was had by all.

A Person of Faith in 2008!

Mitt Romney reckons that the next President should be a “person of faith”. It doesn’t matter what irrational belief incapable of demonstration the candidate harbors, as long as he has “faith”. A scientologist would do, as would a follower of Ramtha. The latter would at least have the benefit of the wisdom of the spirit of a warrior dead for millennia conveniently channeled by some woman out west. Talk about historic perspective! A candidate who believed in the “Left Behind” eschatology would know just what to do to hasten the end of the world. A follower of the Christian Identity Movement might have some new ideas, let me tell you. Whatever the faith of the candidate might be, the country stands to benefit, albeit in dramatically different ways. In Romney’s favor, he will have the infallible guidance of the President of the LDS church to fall back on, and that has got to be a comfort to his supporters. I’m holding out for a Tiplerite who will devote the resources of the country to the colonization of space and conquest of the whole universe. A snake handling, poison-drinking President might be a refreshing change.

Wherein I Pile on that Wanker George Will

bk marcus reports that George Will had a cup of coffee with libertarianism before he went to England and became an authoritarian twit: http://bkmarcus.com/blog/2007/02/george-will-libertarian

I wonder if Will likens himself to an old style aristocrat or if he just acknowledges his inferiority and the necessity for the world to be ruled by his betters. Perhaps Will fears that he will run wild if he is afforded too much freedom. I read Will’s “Statecraft as Soulcraft”, and I resent that I will never get back the hours I spent doing so. The basic premise is that most folks are evil and stupid and must be ruled over strictly by the small minority of worthy elites. These elites should, as part of statecraft, cultivate in their subjects desirable ways of thinking and moral values, the “soulcraft” part. This requires a pretty substantial apparatus for propagandizing and surveillance of the riff raff.

I confess that, in some misanthropic moments, I have flirted with this notion from time to time, but I always come back to the realization that I am the riff raff the elitist authoritarians are talking about. To adopt their position would be to embrace my moral inferiority and accept that I should be made to pay for regulation and surveillance by my betters. Liberty should be defined as the right to do and think as my betters decree, not as the right to do and think as I wish. The latter is the dreaded “license”, the giving in to which would see the ruling elite cast aside.

Of course, if I could delude myself into identifying with the ruling elite and thinking that I am one of them, I might be able to adopt the authoritarian elitist mindset. I know some folks who have managed to convince themselves that they are more like the robber barons than their working class neighbors, and they manage to hold on to this delusion despite their complete lack of influence in the world and their sharing much more in common with working folks in the way of concerns and lifestyle and what have you.

The worthy elite that Will and his ilk lionize do not exist, and there is no way to manufacture an appropriately public spirited aristocracy. Jet setters can’t be bothered with surveilling and regulating the hoi polloi, and no true gentleman would want any part of politics. The ideal of the aristocrat with his sense of noblesse oblige has never been found in nature except in isolated cases. It is nothing more than a part of the legitimizing discourse by which would be elites claim authority.

The authoritarian elitist position has at its core a paradox. If humans are naturally evil and stupid, then their human rulers will probably be evil and stupid as well. Accordingly, any government constructed by humans will inevitably be the fruit of evildoing and stupidity and not a check thereon.

If I Denied the Holocaust, it was Accidental

JL Wilson reports on Canada’s sending a resident to Germany to be prosecuted for holocaust denial that took place in Canada: http://independentcountry.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-they-will-extradite-blasphemers-to.html

I don’t have any reason to believe the Holocaust didn’t happen. Sadly, genocide is not all that unusual. My uncle was in on the liberation of a concentration camp and told me what he saw. I visited Auschwitz. I watched a TV miniseries back in the 1970s. I have spoken with some survivors. I’ve seen some documentaries on the History Channel. That’s all I really know about the Holocaust. I’m pretty sure it happened. I wish that it hadn’t.

I’m a little worried about Canada’s dealings with its resident, though. I could be inadvertently in trouble if the US follows suit. If you take my Last Thursday Creationism Theory, wherein I speculated that the universe was created last Thursday complete with memories and records that give the appearance of a prior history, I suppose that might constitute holocaust denial. It denies all history from before the Creation. Then again, I don’t really advance this theory as being true, only that it is an extremely remote possibility, one that cannot be proven either to be true or false. Would this get me jail time in Germany? If this blog is available in Germany, can I be extradited to Germany for holocaust denial based on the Last Thursday Creation concept?

I suppose that I could change the concept to the Creation Just When the Holocaust Started Theory to get around this potential legal problem. I would point out to the authorities that the Holocaust is not singled out in the Last Thursday Creation Theory as being more of an apparition than any of the rest of history. If any of the rest of apparent history happened, so did the Holocaust.

Wherein I Admonish the Religious Right

Is the United States a “Christian nation”? No, the USA is neither Christian nor a “nation”. The USA is a fictitious entity, an organizing principle around which the powerful legitimize their claim to rule over some 300 millions. Its subjects are of many nations. Some of its subjects are Christians, but the USA itself is by no means Christian. Behold its works. The emissaries of the USA kill and maim people in Iraq and elsewhere and provide no witness of the Good News of Jesus Christ. The agents of the USA and its subordinate political units imprison many thousands of its subjects. They forcibly extract wealth from its subjects and burden them with countless regulations and surveillance. These are not the fruits of an organization inspired by Jesus.

There are among those who call themselves Christian who support the USA in its acts of violence and its plunder of the people. They are the religious right, and their influence is great. If they will repent and recall that Jesus said “blessed are the peacemakers”, they can put an end to war and serve as a blessing to the whole world. They can be a great witness of the revelation of Jesus Christ to the Muslim world if they will open their hearts and submit themselves to Jesus’ teaching and the transformative workings of the Holy Spirit. I pray that God will convict them of the error of their ways and that a great awakening will occur among them so that they may become the light of the world and not bringers of grief. But they are burdened with false prophets who preach war instead of peace, hate instead of love, judgment instead of mercy, slavery instead of freedom. May God grant the people the discernment to cast out these spawn of serpents from among them.

When Jeremiah spoke the truth that the Chaldeans would destroy the city, he was called a traitor and an abettor of the enemy. They cast him into a cistern to die because his words might make the doomed warriors’ courage fail them. So it goes with prophets even now. They who speak out against war are called abettors and comforters of the enemy and demoralizers of the warriors even though they speak the truth. The warriors cannot be trusted with the truth. War cannot be sustained without falsehood. The warmongering preachers of the religious right are the guiltiest liars of all, for they libel God with their lies and are responsible for so much grief. I pray that the people turn from them and turn to Jesus. They have a tremendous opportunity to bring peace and to secure the blessings that inure to peacemakers.

GOP on the Horns of a Dilemma

How can a GOP presidential candidate win in 2008? Nominate someone who will pander to the Christianist authoritarian base of 25% who will then convince more than third of the rest of the electorate that he was just pandering to those nutjobs and didn’t really mean any of it. It would help if the Christianists played along and pretended that they were unhappy with the candidate’s positions but would vote for him anyway while holding their noses. That’s the tried and true method that has worked so far since 1980. Of course, in 2008 there will be the Bush fatigue factor to reckon with, and anyone who can be tied to Bushevik policies will have a hard row to hoe.

The dilemma facing the GOP is that a peace candidate or a libertarian leaning candidate might have a genuine shot in the general election, but the Christianists are rabid for war and hate freedom and wouldn’t support him in the quest for the nomination. Accordingly, the GOP must pin its hopes on (a) a favorable outcome in Iraq, something they aren’t going to be able to bring about; (b) some way to blame Democrats for the unfavorable outcome, something that we have to hope the Democrats will be able to fend off; or (c) a dramatic escalation of the conflict that will make the electorate nostalgic for the current debacle. A monumental disaster of epic proportions may be what the Busheviks are building up to, because they know that massive failures by government are often rewarded and that a frightened populace will act irrationally and against its own interests. If the Busheviks can put us all in some kind of real danger, the fear factor may throw everything wide open. The electorate won’t be looking for a capable statesman, but will be looking for an apparent action hero.

"What Paul Meant"

I was blown away by Garry Wills’ “What Paul Meant”: http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780670037933,00.html .
I have always felt uncomfortable with some of the utterances attributed to Paul as being inconsistent with his overall program. It turns out that almost half of Paul’s letters were definitely not written by him, but were written later by unknown authors with theological agendas. Moreover, a few items in the genuine letters are generally regarded by scholars as interpolations.

An exciting aspect of “What Paul Meant” is the invitation to read the authentic letters of Paul for what they were. They were letters to particular gatherings dealing with specific crises. Paul didn’t set out to write books of a Bible but to deal with immediate issues which arose in the various gatherings. His views appear to have evolved over his 17 year ministry and can be related to the unique circumstances of the gatherings he was addressing. Your theologically smug Corinthians wanted different advice than the Romans with their clashes between Jewish and Gentile believers.

A point I had never reflected upon before is that Paul’s letters preceded the Gospels by decades and reflected concepts in circulation immediately after Jesus’ ascension. By the time the Gospels were composed, Christianity was becoming more institutionalized, and the authors may have had an interest in bolstering emergent ideas about church governance and hierarchy and precedence. Even if this were not the case, a reader in the present century brings a lot of institutional baggage to the terms Paul uses. For example, the concept of a “church” is loaded with two millennia of semantic additions when Paul was referring simply to a “gathering” or assembly of believers. The “offices” familiar to us today were “functions” in Paul’s day.

Another intriguing aspect for me of “What Paul Meant” is the author’s problematization of the emphasis in modern Christianity on “personal salvation”. When Paul wrote about rescue, he was writing about the rescue of nations and the whole of Creation. The life in Christ was a life in community, not one of isolated individual personalities in separate communion with God.

“What Paul Meant”, especially when read alongside “What Jesus Meant”, is liberating. If I am willing to accept responsibility for interpreting Scripture in the light of the authors’ likely intentions and the context of authorship, I am rewarded with new insights and wisdom. I have come to have a new appreciation for Paul and the beauty of his letters and the significance of his mission.

Steve Scott Makes Me Think on a Monday

I’m a faithful reader of Steve Scott’s blog “From the Pew”. Steve writes about Christianity from the perspective of a layman and struggles with many of the same issues that I do as a churchgoer and believer. Two recent posts were intriguing to me. In one, Steve wonders why the Lord’s Supper is so skimpy and formalistic:http://fromthepew.blogspot.com/2007/02/jesus-stuck-in-my-molars.html. In another, he suggests that the doctrine of “justification by faith” has become a kind of gnosis: http://fromthepew.blogspot.com/2007/02/reformed-gnostics.html.

I’m with Steve on the Lord’s Supper. Once a month, our church hands out little cubes of white bread and mini shot glasses of grape juice, and we celebrate “communion”. I reckon we “commune” with Jesus and one another every time we gather and that we might do better to have an actual meal together, during which we would remember Jesus and the sacrifice of His Body and Blood. The ritual itself seems like an afterthought.

I’m not so sure I follow Steve on the doctrine of “justification by faith alone”. He does not seem to view it as central. I am a firm believer in the sufficiency of grace and that repentance and right living flow from grace, not the other way around. No amount of righteousness or law abiding will ever render any person deserving of salvation. On the contrary, we don’t “deserve” it, not one of us. There is nothing any of us can do to earn it, and if we become loving and faithful followers of Jesus, it is the Holy Ghost at work within us that brings this about.

This point is central for me. The grace of God frees us from the power of sin and enslavement to purity codes. It in principle allows us to live in perfect freedom and unity in Jesus and not subject to any earthly authority. I recall a discussion with a Baptist acquaintance who argued that my conception of grace did not provide an adequate basis for social control of the people! I don’t reckon Jesus was about granting some men power over others. I concede that my view of things undermines claims to authority, but I don’t have a problem with this.

There are lots of “Christians” who reckon that they have earned their salvation and that they are, therefore, justified in imposing their codes of righteousness on their fellow man. They are entirely comfortable declaring who is in and who is out, who deserves salvation and who does not. They regard my idea of a completely sufficient grace as “promiscuous” and a scandal. This leads them to authoritarianism and enslaves them to impossible standards of righteousness in the confines of which they can scarcely move. Their Jesus is wrathful and judgmental and unrecognizable to me. Their religion has little resemblance to mine. They might as well be followers of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god of the Aztecs, such is the magnitude of the difference as I see it.

A problematic aspect of my view of grace is that it does not necessarily translate into the individualistic type of Christianity that has become so prevalent in America. If the emphasis is on “personal salvation” or a “personal relationship” with Jesus, the focus tends to be on self improvement and self criticism, and this gets you back to codes of righteousness and measuring how much Bible study and quiet time you squeeze in. If the emphasis is on the community of believers, on the gathering and how we love one another and interact in unity, then my view of grace is easier to absorb. We love others as ourselves because they are ourselves, our being one in Jesus. We are siblings in Jesus and stand in perfect equality one to another, the highest calling’s being to serve not to rule. What could be less loving than self righteous condemnation of our neighbors and fellow believers? Doesn’t self righteous condemnation minimize the sacrifice of Jesus?

If I understand Steve right, he is problematizing an attitude about the doctrine of “justification by faith alone” wherein the faith itself becomes secondary to knowledge of the doctrine or is replaced by this knowledge, in which case the knower of this knowledge can go about his business more or less untouched by it. The knower can know the doctrine and yet decline to live the faith, comforted in the assurance of his personal salvation. I confess that this may well be one of my failings. I struggle with a sort of social phobia and have to force myself to get out of my cocoon and enjoy fellowship or seek opportunities to be helpful or supportive of others. A lot of this is because I am tired after work and a long commute, and I fail to recognize how rejuvenating fellowship can be. “Good thing God has extended His grace to me since I can’t be bothered to expend any effort on behalf of my fellow man.” I am grateful to Steve for inspiring me to think this through.

My Purpose

We filed our tax returns this week, and this reminded me of my true purpose in life. My primary function is to finance six levels of government. I serve the state. I am a serf. In return, the state lets me keep a portion of my earnings and to maintain a household. The state has calculated how much to let me keep so as to maximize its return from me. It does not let me keep too much, for that would mean less money in the hoard; rather, it lets me keep just enough that I have an incentive to be as productive as I can.

My secondary function is to feed an army of contractors. The bathroom remodel has progressed glacially. Four weeks in, and the downstairs bathroom is not done, and the upstairs one has not even been started. We ran out of wall tile and had to order more from Italy. The commode hasn’t been delivered. The vanity is sitting in the middle of the room. The shower fixtures are in boxes in the foyer, and the shower door hasn’t even been ordered. The floor has not been grouted, and we have had to go to a Laundromat the last couple of weeks because our washer and dryer are in the foyer. On a positive note, the tile we picked out looks great, and the oversize shower promises to be quite satisfactory. The floor is no longer on the verge of collapsing and is level. The room is warm thanks to an expansion of the radiator and a heating system under the floor tiles.

My tertiary function is to satisfy the desires of my canine masters, Jasper and Jesse. I walk them. I pet them. I play ball with them. I let them in and out a hundred times a day. I share my meals with them. I maintain a large fenced yard and pick up their feces for them. I put up with dog hair in my ice cubes.

My quaternary function is to keep the 35 plus species of birds that visit my house well supplied with bird seed and suet and to maintain the pond for the benefit of the goldfish, shiners, crawdads, water snakes, frogs and salamanders who dwell therein.

Why Conservatives Aren't (Intentionally) Funny

Why aren’t “conservatives” funny? http://www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=it%E2%80%99s_time_for_conservatives_to_take_comedy_seriously&ns=DougGiles&dt=02/04/2007&page=full&comments=true

The answer seems obvious to me. It’s not, as Doug Giles suggests, that they are too nice. On the contrary, they’re mean, and mean is rarely funny. They like to bully, and bullying is rarely funny. The butts of their jokes are often the poor and the oppressed, and that’s just not funny most of the time.

“Conservatives” are funniest when they are just being themselves, when they don’t intend to be funny. What could be more comical than Ted Stevens’ explaining how the internets work, for example? The linked to column by Doug Giles is also a hoot. Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly are veritable self-parodies. Nobody is more uncomfortably hilarious than William Donohue, self appointed defender of Catholicism. "Conservatives" can't tell a joke, but they can be a joke.

I put “Conservative” in scare quotes because I don’t think the label means what it might once have meant. In fact, one of the funniest things about the “Conservative” movement is how radical it is. How is it that big government, interventionism, authoritarianism and such like came to be an integral part of the “Conservative” agenda in just a few decades? Hypocrisy is fodder for comedians, and “Conservatives” have taken hypocrisy to a whole new level. Using the label “Conservative” as it is used nowadays is analogous to calling oneself a vegetarian even though one eats meat or calling oneself a libertarian even though one supports a massive federal national security and surveillance apparatus.

All my life, “Conservatives” have seemed a mirthless lot, tolerable only because of their unintentional ridiculousness. They were the crotchety old fart who would shoot at us schoolchildren if we wandered onto his land and who railed against the Jews at every opportunity. They were the geeky dateless guys in YAF in college that didn’t have the social skills to get into a D&D game and hung out together and rooted for their favorite Central American death squad. They were my Idiot Brother In Law ™ who destroyed almost as many brain cells listening to Rush Limbaugh as he did by drinking and who, while employed by the County, railed against those “tax eating parasites” in government. They were fat little fundamentalist preachers who, with a straight face, proclaimed from their pulpits (or cushy couch on a TV set) that Jesus had sent some catastrophe somewhere to kill a bunch of sinners, because that’s what the Prince of Peace is all about, killing people.

Maybe some real funny comedians have “Conservative” political leanings, but they aren’t making a living by being political in their acts. Dennis Miller became a lot less funny when he became a warmongering stooge. His rants are just mean spirited now.

“Liberals” are generally better at humor. Of course, there are joyless nannies on the “Liberal” side that are as authoritarian as any “Conservative”, just about different things. Nannies have no sense of humor, but they can be made sport of just like “Conservatives”.

Incitement to Genocide

The indispensable Wm Norman Grigg problematizes an evil neo-con cabal’s efforts to bring about war on Iran under the pretense of enforcing the Genocide Convention: http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/02/genocidal-war-to-prevent-genocide.html

It seems that some of the neo-con ilk reckon that the Iranian president’s advocacy of destroying Israel amounts to “incitement” to genocide and that the rest of the world (the US and Israel) should invade Iran to apprehend its president and to try him for that crime. If necessary, the US and Israel should kill every last Iranian to accomplish this. Mr Grigg aptly points out the irony of advocating genocide in order to punish advocating genocide.

Let me add my two cents. Alan Dershowitz is one of the jackholes making this argument. He is a lawyer and should know that advocating something and inciting it to happen are not the same thing. If he does not know this, he is a bad lawyer. If he knows it and advances this idiotic argument anyway, he is a bad person.

If I say that the Amish are a scourge on the land and ought to be dispersed or destroyed, this is not incitement to genocide. I don’t have the means to bring this about, and I am not addressing anyone with the means or will to bring it about. Moreover, in order to count as incitement, the action I am inciting should be capable of being carried out imminently and there should be a strong likelihood that it will be carried out imminently. Suppose I urge the Adjutant General of the Pennsylvania National Guard to wipe out the Amish. The Guard certainly has the means to carry out my plan, but there is very little probability that they will do anything of the sort based on my say so. Accordingly, I have not committed incitement to genocide. If I am part of an angry Amish hating mob marching on Lancaster County and I give a rousing speech exhorting mayhem and murder, that might be an incitement to genocide even if it does not come off.

The president of Iran has allegedly argued that the destruction of the state of Israel would be a good idea. I don’t know if he advocates killing Jews. He apparently does not have the means or inclination to attack Israel or to commit genocide, nor does anyone whom he was addressing. Those entities with the means to commit genocide against Israel are ostensibly allies of Israel or, at worst from the Israeli standpoint, indifferent to Israel. There is no basis to argue that imminent genocidal action based on his words was likely, especially since no such action has yet occurred. Accordingly, the Iranian president is not guilty of incitement to genocide, and no indictment should be returned against him.

There is a better case to make against Dershowitz for inciting genocide against Iran. He has influence on the Bush regime and its main constituency, the insane religious right, and the Bush regime is itching to attack Iran.

Look at Me; I'm Dancing!

I attended my first ballroom dance class last night with Mrs Vache Folle. I missed last week’s class, so I was at a severe disadvantage. At least I hope that is why I was so hopelessly clumsy and singled out by the instructors several times for remedial instruction and to serve as a cautionary example to the other students. At one point, the lead female instructor had her hands around my throat. Despite my ineptitude, I had a very good time and look forward to the next class. I now have a rudimentary command of the waltz, box step, foxtrot, rhumba, and meringue.

I reckon my main problem, besides my being rhythmically challenged, is that my movements are too broad and dramatic, a legacy no doubt of having come of age in the disco era. I aim to take smaller, more controlled steps from here on.

I’m not looking to dazzle anyone with my dancing skills, just to keep from embarrassing myself on social occasions when dancing is called for. Until now, I couldn’t dance a lick and had to content myself with “free style” or disco moves that, now that I think of it, must have looked ridiculous.

When I was in Barbados, I recall feeling very awkward when people were dancing (as they usually were at some point in social gatherings). The popular dance at the time was “wukking up” which looked a lot like vertical dry humping from the back. I figured that I could perform the moves, but I didn’t know the etiquette. How do you ask someone to “wuk up” with you? “Pardon me, Miss, but would you like to simulate anal intercourse on the dance floor with me?” And are you supposed to remain flaccid or to manifest turgidity? Maybe my classes will get to “wukking up” later in the course, and these mysteries will be solved at last.

Once again, I blame the Baptists for another of my shortcomings. Dancing was evil, you see. This was because it was fun, for one thing, and all joy was forbidden. We were supposed to live joylessly and look forward to the release of sweet, sweet death. Secondly, dancing was seen as an occasion for other sins. Dancing would lead to lust, which was bad enough in and of itself, but this might also lead to sexual contact, than which there was no worse sin. Thanks a lot, Baptists!

Security Overkill

In going to court every day over the past couple of weeks, I was vexed by the security measures at the federal building. At the main entrance, we had to empty our pockets, have our bags x-rayed, and walk through a metal detector. If we made it beep, we had to be examined with a wand by a security officer, one of three or four on duty in the lobby. Then we had to show ID and have our name, address and phone number written down. Finally, we were issued numbered badges. When we got to the floor where the court was, we had to go through security all over again, this time under the aegis of federal Court Security Officers, four or five of whom appeared to be on duty at all times, doing a whole lot of nothing. Metal detector, x-ray, and wand all over again.

This added a lot of time to getting in and out of court and doubtless represents a large expenditure of tax dollars. On the other hand, I am heartened by the idea that it might reflect a healthy contempt on the part of the public for the federal government. In any event, the federal government, particularly the judiciary, is so fearful of the public that it finds it necessary to screen everyone who has business before it and to deploy a squad of goons to protect itself. This fear is not, I hope, entirely misplaced. Unfortunately, the security measures taken are probably disproportionate to the actual threat.

I reckon the most likely threat to the court is from accomplices of detained criminal defendants who might attempt to liberate their colleagues by force during a court hearing. Such defendants are usually accompanied by law enforcement officers who ought to be able to fend off all but the most organized and well planned of such attempts. Moreover, armed rescue attempts seem to be mighty rare and were extremely rare even when courts had little security besides a somnolent bailiff or two. Accordingly, we ought to be able to dispense with one or both of the screening operations and to make do with one or at most two security officers. Spread out over the whole federal judiciary, this would represent a substantial cost savings and free up thousands of bureaucrats for productive employment. The only downside to these cuts would be a marginally increased risk to court and prosecutorial personnel from what is already a miniscule threat. If these cuts result in a lot of killings or hostage takings, then they could be revisited.

Gentlemen of the Bar

I had the misfortune of spending the last two weeks in a civil trial and in the company of an army of lawyers. I am not so naïve as to believe that lawyering is a gentlemanly profession (or that it ever was), but I have become spoiled over the years by my association with lawyers who, without exception, have represented my employers with honor, integrity and honesty. It is a testament to my employers that we retain only the most gentlemanlike of counsel and we avoid spurious arguments and dishonorable or misleading tactics. This is, on the one hand, a tactical decision since we have determined that civility, integrity and professionalism play better with jurors. On the other hand, it reflects the moral and ethical ideals of the folks with whom I work, and I could not imagine any of them tolerating any sharp or dodgy practices by our lawyers.

At trial, our lawyers were their usual civil, honest, and honorable selves and put on a hell of a case. Argumentation was genuinely helpful to the jurors. In contrast, most of our opponents’ lawyers were ill mannered, contentious and devoted to sowing confusion. They were partners in a large “respectable” firm from Chicago, but their conduct in the trial was deplorable. They took every opportunity to confuse and mislead. Fortunately, this seemed to be transparent to the jury. That the judge seemed to condone this conduct was disappointing to me, but I suppose that this is the state of law practice these days. That judge usually hears criminal matters, so I reckon he was used to shady practices by prosecutors and probably didn’t even notice what was going on.

If I ever have to go back to practicing law, I hope I manage to do so in a gentlemanlike manner. I know that it can be done.

Out of Touch

I'm in Montana for two weeks from last Monday and may not be able to post.