Archives for July 2007

What do they have in common?

Well, it seems to me that if enough people could believe that their plastic water bottles are causing global warming, then there’s easily enough to believe that Christopher Jones caused those two news helicopters to collide, crash, and kill four people. Not only that, but they’ll even buy first degree, i.e., premeditation.

Apparently, prosecutors are going to try everything they can to charge and convict the man of murder. If you read that article, you’ll see that there’s a really good debate over the whole issue. No legal stone goes unturned, and it turns out that while nothing exactly like it has ever happened, there is appellate-affirmed precedent for convicting people of murder who didn’t murder anyone, so that’s good, right? But it’s interesting, and it really highlights the value of brilliant legal minds. Hell, there was a time when people far less socially evolved than ourselves could never have made sense of charging, convicting, and electrocuting people for murdering other people when they haven’t, in fact, murdered other people. Simpletons! They just didn’t have enough brilliant legal minds and prosecutorial fervor. Thankfully, we’ve evolved past the point of plain facts to where the meat is: nuance.

I’ve got two freedom updates from Radley, the first here. Twenty-five year jail sentence
for Mark O’Hara for possessing 58 Vicodin tablets for which he had a
legal prescription. Prosecutors admit he wasn’t selling them, but the
law provides for a de facto charge of trafficking based solely
on quantity. The law said they could get him, so they did. I’m sure it
looks great on their resumes. Let freedom ring.

Next up, 140 years of jail for four people wrongly convicted,
two of them now dead. Small price to pay, since in in keeping them in
jail, the State was better able to maintain the integrity of a mob
investigation it had going that I’m sure reaped just tons of the one-two punch tough-on-crime and we-protected-you political clout, not to mention ladder climbing and opportunities for appointment to high posts for some of the investigators and prosecutors involved. Upholding freedom for all is a trough job, but thankfully not thankless, anymore.

Indeed, it must have been important, since the FBI
commended and paid bonuses to the guys who did it — and later, for
keeping it hidden — clearly, so as not to tarnish the FBI’s good name as defenders
of freedom. It’s a thin Blue line, you know. It’s also nice to get a
little honesty from the Bureau, eh? In spite of being able to cover up their gig for 35 years, they unexpectedly don’t even deny the men were
innocent and went to jail anyway. But, see, the law says that they
don’t have to give up information that would prevent an injustice, such
as a false imprisonment and 40 wasted years of a life. I guess they
ought to know, since they’re the Justice Department in this here free country. Billy weighs in on this one, too.

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When I lived in Japan from 1984 – 1989, I never once locked my house (blue roof in the center) on the beach in Hayama, about 50 miles south of Tokyo on Sagami Bay. Sometimes I was gone, at sea, for two and three months at a time. Never locked my car, and I probably could have just left the keys inside.

I used to say that you could leave a pile of cash in the middle of a busy train station, come back and hour later, and retrieve it.

I wasn’t exaggerating.

You know why it is, don’t you? They think too much of themselves to take what they haven’t earned.

Back when China used to export grain in order to demonstrate the economic viability of communism — all while their people starved to death (20 million is a low estimate) — they were heralded by the "intellectual elite" as the Truly Enlightened.

Now they’re producing and supplying inexpensive goods to the entire world, feeding their people, and ushering in economic freedoms and low taxation that’s making it — in practical terms — an economic model to the world. Now, millions of their people each year are attaining middle-class lifestyles and several hundred thousand millionaires roam freely seeking new and greater entrepreneurial opportunities.

Now they produce real economic growth in the double digits every year, as compared to the West’s pitiful 2-3%.

Now, at long last, our intellectuals finally hate China. Read it. That way, when you start hating China yourself for the good it began to undertake to do a couple of decades ago, and continues and increases to this day, you’ll know where the idea came from.

Heretofore, my support of China has been measured. They did a lot of evil for a long time and you don’t just forget about something like that overnight. But when they begin to do good and continue, and even increase, it’s to be acknowledged. I’m aware of no other path to redemption. So if the things highlighted in that article continue in the way they are, which they will, a day will come when rational people of moral fortitude might have to look around and assess which of the various world’s regimes constitute the worst evil.

I hate to consider it, but I see a future where Americans and Europeans sneer at China — not for the evil it perpetuated recently, but for its virtues today. Watch for it, because its coming to a neighborhood, union meeting, TV, and an election near you.

First up, I’m out of pocket at the moment. Overnight with family here in Vista, CA, and later today San Diego for a couple of days. We’re supposed to have a nice room with a view to the Bay, so if that works out I’ll post a photo.

What can you say about YouTube? What can you say when the most interesting, indeed captivating thing you saw or heard all day yesterday was a self-recorded video of some "nobody" sitting in his bedroom and coming awake to something he’s never had an interest in his entire life? Then note it’s been viewed 3,500 times in a few days.

Is he worth listening to? Well, you decide, but I say that things like this give me confidence in the human species. It’s not that he knows what he’s talking about — he probably doesn’t on any issue in the political spectrum you can name. But he does know that he’s never, ever in his life seen or heard an honest, sincere politician with the integrity to act always for his stated values without equivocation. He’s seeing it for the first time.

(rockwell)

Just last night, Bea and I walked down the San Jose Improv to see Richard Lewis and meet some of her family ahead of time for pre-show dining. We got on the subject of some of the timeless things teenagers do, and Bea’s brother-in-law remarks that in his day when the cops caught you and your friends with booze, they’d just pour out your supply and send you packing home. Now they cart you off to juvenile hall and put you and your parents through a Technicolor living nightmare that’s going to eat up enormous time, expense, and leave everyone pretty much mangled beyond recognition for years to come.

But on the bright side, said cops are that much closer to their next "meritorious" citation; lowly prosecutors are that much closer to becoming assistant DA; and everybody involved gets to claim the "tough on ‘crime’" nod as department SOP.  And nobody even had  to get shot at or take a no-shit risk helping an innocent to do it. But what’s a little theft of a teenager’s best years and spirit for life when there are "cases" to "aggressively pursue?"

The two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School
after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran —
what some kids later said was a common form of greeting.

But bottom-slapping is against policy in McMinnville Public
Schools. So a teacher’s aide sent the gawky
seventh-graders to the office, where the vice principal and
a police officer stationed at the school soon interrogated
them.

After hours of interviews with students the day of the
February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda
rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail,
where they spent the next five days.

Now, Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, both 13, face the
prospect of 10 years in juvenile detention and a lifetime on
the sex offender registry in a case that poses a fundamental
question: When is horseplay a crime?

When? Read the second paragraph, again.

"Land o’ the Free," baby; we’s livin’ the Land o’ the Free. Oh Beautiful…

(beck)

Billy asserts:

In any case, people just don’t want freedom, now.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: "sure they do; this is America." But that only means you don’t grasp the distinction he’s making in that statement. He’s not asserting that people don’t think they want freedom; they most certainly do. After all; do we, or do we not live in "The Land of the Free?" You’ve heard me say it, but always in scare quotes.

What Billy is really asserting is that people no longer have a clear grasp of what freedom is. They literally can not properly define it, and I could bet my life on that with little fear. I think he’s right about that. I also think that state of affairs will perpetuate politically until such time as people, one by one, understand that they are not remotely close to being free. That happened for me nearly two decades ago, now. For most born here in the last few decades, it will be the realization that they were never fee in the classic American sense of the term. Most people alive today have never known true freedom. They have been fed two lies. The big lie from the left is that "true" freedom is to be found in reaping all possible benefit from the most productive, but on terms exclusively dictated by the least productive, non-productive, or parasitic. The big lie from the right is that we’re already — Bless Jesus and praise the Lord — "free," and putting them in power will hold the forces of [ungodly] evil in check.

Everyone in the pursuit of "freedom:" the world’s greatest-ever spectacle of the blind leading the blind. Bea asked me last night, as we walked through St. James Park, why the bums often seem happier that "normal" people. My reply was that for lack of everything in life they might desire, they’re free compared to most people. They live outside the system, so that’s not much of a bother to them, and they haven’t done all the things people are "supposed" to do like wrap themselves in a highly leveraged mortgage, take on 50% of their annual pay in credit card debt living above their means, or taking on a lifestyle that leaves them perpetually two paychecks from the streets.

Being poor and at the mercy of good will is not exemplary freedom, but it’s closer than the idea most people have in their heads.

At the end of the day, I think the only thing left to do is illustrate what real freedom is. Of course, if we were to do that, it might make it worse. I think most people would find themselves afraid of it. In fact, I’m certain of that. I think the bums are the only ones not afraid of true freedom, anymore, and that’s damn little to start a revolution.

Here’s the sort of thing to be on the lookout for as signs that a top may be approaching in stocks.

The bull market on Wall Street is giving Americans greater
confidence prices can go higher as expectations for stock gains reached
a five-year high in July, a consumer survey said Friday.

Consumers
in July thought that there was a 64 percent chance that a diversified
stock fund would increase in value, up from 54 percent a year ago and a
low of 41 percent in early 2003, according to the Reuters/University of
Michigan Surveys of Consumers.

Of course, that doesn’t mean to sell current positions, or, God forbid, short the market. Just a data point and far more important than the actual number is the building confidence measured year after year. It could takes months or even a year or more to get sufficient retail money into the market to create a top. It was just about a year ago that I observed to a friend that since real estate was on the wane, fund managers are going to do everything possible to keep this market climbing in order to gradually woo that capital into the stock market.

The problem, from the perspective of large investment banks and funds of all sorts is that it’s very difficult to take profits and get out of the market when you’re sitting on billions of capital and hundreds of millions of paper profits. You need someone to distribute those shares to, eventually, and that would be the retail investor. In 1998 and 1999, it was the retail investor driving up the market as people couldn’t get in fast enough.

The quote is Ron Paul, according to his spokesman Eric Dondero, spoken as "one of the first things he said" after 9/11. This, from a substantial Christopher Caldwell piece on Ron Paul in today’s The New York Times.

Dondero parted with Ron Paul on bad terms, so the story goes, and is opposing Paul in his simultaneous Congressional run.

Dondero’s reciting of the quote and Caldwell’s reporting of it is intended to be an indictment of Paul.

Here’s how we mostly get around downtown San Jose these days.

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