Dispatches from No. 3 Equity Court

Dear Danny Hembree: A Letter to Death Row

2012-01-28T11:56:00.003-05:00

[Ed. Note: Danny Hembree is a prisoner on death row in North Carolina. In the fall of 2011, he was convicted a particularly brutal murder of a 17 year old girl.

Recently, he wrote a taunting letter to his local newspaper, the Gaston Gazette. He wrote about his good life on death row where he is a “man of leisure,” and how he watches color TV in the air-conditioning, takes a lot of naps, receives three balanced meals every day and has free health care. Danny made fun of the citizens for having spent $500,000 to put him on death row and closed with “Kill me if you can, suckers! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

I wanted to write a letter of encouragement to my buddy Danny.]

Dear Danny –

All of the guys got a real kick out of your letter to the Gazette last week. You always did have style, and you really pulled their tails this time! You hurt that family, and you have damn near everybody else foaming at the mouth. That one legislator who wants to bring back public hanging is a real loon. Way to go, buddy!

Honestly, we never did think you were going to amount to much. I know it bothered you when we called you a dopehead, but you’ve really showed them what you have. By the way, I’m sorry about the time I told you that there was a reason that they call it “dope.”

You’ve got it made, pal! You’re a man of leisure now. You can take all the naps you want, or sit back and watch color TV in air-conditioned comfort. (No HBO? Darn.) And just think – they put that all together for you in that neat little 10 x 12 cell on death row. I bet cleaning up is easy, it’s so small. Doesn’t all that steel and concrete make it even easier to keep clean?

No kidding, you get three well-balanced meals brought to you?! We are just green with envy, Danny. Out here in the world, we have to figure out what we want to eat and then go buy or maybe go to a restaurant and order it. You? They just bring it to you. What a life! On a hot summer day, I bet they bring you a nice cold brewski or two. Oh, right – it’s prison. Sorry.

That free medical care thing is really far out. I went to the doctor last week, and I had to drive myself there. Then I had to pay for it. You need a doctor, they take you! Okay, maybe you have to ask a prison guard, and I bet being handcuffed and shackled to go to the doctor is really inconvenient, but it’s still free. In fact, I heard that they don’t even let you out of your little room unless you’re handcuffed and shackled. At least you don’t have to go out very often. Your 30 minutes of recreation in a cinderblock room with a basketball and that one shower a week probably means the handcuff/shackle thing isn’t too big a deal.

To think about all the problems I have that you don’t. Social Security? What do you care? You’re not going to live long enough to retire. The interest rate on my car loan is killing me. You don’t even have to own a car.

We heard two guys talking about you down at the pub a couple of days ago. You know, I don’t think those guys minded the $500,000 of taxes spent on your trial. One of them said it was “money well spent,” and the other one hoisted his mug of the golden brew and added a “fuckin' A, bubba!”

I got to tell you, we all thought you were a real moron when you confessed, and when we heard the details we thought you were a warped & vicious puppy. You sly dog – you had this whole “man of leisure” thing planned all along!

Anyway, I have to close now - I have a hot date and ... oh, sorry, forgot. That’s the breaks, man.

Your buddy,
Roger Curry

[Further note: I've already gotten feedback to the effect that I'm a sarcastic SOB for writing this. (1) I really don't care. (2) I've never billed myself as Mahatma Gandhi. More Mahatma Kane Jeeves.]

Roger's 2011 Look-Back Good Book Canon

2011-12-31T21:02:00.002-05:00

It was an average reading year - the usual bell curve of quality and interest. In no particular order, let me give you the 2011 Look-Back Good Book Canon:

Ghost Country, by Patrick Lee (HarperCollins, 2011) - A nice “near” science-fiction. “Near” sci-fi is set close to the current era in time and culture. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the first movie reference that comes to mind. Patrick Lee postulates a multi-dimensional doohickey that delivers objects that defy known physics and materials science, and he deals with nice speculative political overtones. If you like sci-fi, it’s fun.

The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason, by Melville Davisson Post (Hyperion Press, 1975) and The Man of Last Resort; or, The Clients of Randolph Mason, by Melville Davisson Post (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1897) - The canon consists of things I discover or even reread in a year, not just what is published then. Melville Davisson Post was a West Virginia author of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His character Randolph Mason was a lawyer of great learning and stiff philosophy, who shamelessly applied the strict rule of law to achieve spectacular results. Members of the bar and law students will find a lot to enjoy and talk about here. Those outside that community likely would find it boring.

How to Build a Fire: And Other Handy Things Your Grandfather Knew, by Erin Bried (Ballantine Books, 2010) - They have a COMPASS AP for iPhone. No kidding. A picture of a magnetic compass appears on the screen, and the user is supposed to feel like Daniel-Damn-Boone. It’s sickening. Bried teaches skills that we have forgotten because we are lazy. Those skills work even in a power outage.

West Virginia: A History, by Otis K. Rice and Stephen W. Brown (The University Press of Kentucky, 1993) - This is a local thing. If you are going to be involved in business or government in West Virginia, knowing how the state’s unique culture has developed is helpful.

Inside the Giant Machine, by Kalpanik S. (Center of Artificial Imagination, Inc., 2011) - This author was an IT manager with Amazon. Have you ever wondered how Amazon has achieved the spooky ease with which it fulfills orders, gives relevant recommendations and expands products? A lot of it is in the IT. The author also dispels the notion that CEO Jeff Bezos is a benevolent Spirit-of-Christmas-Present. Amazon is the same kind of corporate eat-your-own-young culture that is found in lots and lots of other successful businesses.

Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy, by Robert M. Hazen & James Trefil (Anchor Books, 2009) - We don’t know shit about science. Hell, we BRAG about that. Oh, I don’t need to know how to do anything on my own, I’ll just sell stuff on eBay, buy real estate with no money down, and let the worker bees take care of the rest. Much of reality is science. A poor understanding science is a great weakness, and we are already paying the price.

The Fifth Witness, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown and Company, 2011) - Here is a “lawyer novel” of top quality. It’s a story of a trial lawyer (the same protagonist as in The Lincoln Lawyer) who gives a reasonably accurate and awfully interesting view of the thought process of trying a difficult case.

Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson - There is a reason that some things are considered “classics.” “Old” isn’t enough, or we’d all still be reading Wilkie Collins. (Who’s that? Quod erat demonstrandum.)

Do The Work, by Steven Pressfield (The Domino Project, 2011) - Pressfield does really great historical novels. (E.g., Gates of Fire, the story of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.) This is a short motivational work on getting off your ass and doing the work. I’ve purchased several copies to give out.

2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, by Albert Brooks (St. Martin’s Press, 2011) - The author could have played this one either as scary near sci-fi or as a predictive social work. He chose the latter. His conclusions and predictions are logical. On this course, the 20th Century was the LAST American Century. This is valuable for those who actually give a shit.

Hellhole, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (Tor, 2011) - Good, solid, old-fashioned science-fiction is alive and well and still being written today.

License to Pawn: Deals, Steals and My Life at the Gold & Silver, by Rick Harrison (Hyperion, 2011) - The TV series Pawn Stars has made the gloomy and glitzy pawn shop more socially acceptable. This is by the proprietor of that shop, and is informative about that business, about some general commercial principles and about human behavior.

Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris (Random House, 2010) - This is the long-awaited third and final installment of Edmund Morris’ three volume biography of TR. (The first two are The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex.) Have you taken a look at what passes for heroes these days? Less than 3 divorces, 2 or fewer rehab stays and no felonies, and you’re in. TR was the real thing.

The Final Storm: A Novel of the War in the Pacific, by Jeff Shaara (Ballantine Books, 2011) - Jeff Shaara has continued writing “you are there” accurate historical novels in the tradition of his father, Michael Shaara (The Killer Angels).

Eyewall, by H.W. “Buzz” Bernard (Bell Bridge Books, 2011) - This is a first novel of a retired hurricane hunter pilot. I like books that take you to worlds that I’m totally unfamiliar with, and this does it.

A Book of Burlesques, by H. L. Mencken (Alfred A. Knopf, 1916) - Another newly-discovered oldie. H.L. (Henry Lewis) Mencken was a curmudgeonly satirist-humorist-columnist for the Baltimore Sun. His writings pass the test of time.

Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2011) - One would think that a history of the 265 (or so) popes would be deadly dull. And yet, it is the eldest continuous political/religious office on Earth, and has been fraught with great stories of naked power.

God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales, by Penn Jillette (Simon & Schuster, 2011) - Penn Jillette is (mostly) an brilliant and outrageous guy. His commentary on atheism is worth the trouble for anyone to read. I didn’t abandon my faith after I read it, but I enjoyed the living hell out of it anyway.

Strong at the Break: A Caitlin Strong Novel, by Jon Land (Forge, 2011) - Land has written adventure novels for 30 years. The “Strong” novels are an excellent example of a fairly new angle, the use of strong and believable female protagonists. I don’t know if this sub-genre will become more attractive to women readers than the run of the mill adventure yarns, but there’s a possibility.

How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else, by Michael Gates Gill (Gotham Books, 2007) - Another worthwhile reread. Gill was a fat cat rich guy who was fired and left high and dry by his huge Madison Avenue ad agency. This is a transformative story, where he gets a job and Starbucks and learns what’s actually important. Hint: A Mercedes in the garage ain’t it.

The Race (Isaac Bell), by Clive Cussler and Justin Scott (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011) - For 30 years, Cussler has written the Dirk Pitt novels and co-written at least three other series. The Isaac Bell series is set in the early 20th Century, a unique time for a hero-centered adventure novel.

Built for Adventure: The Classic Automobiles of Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt (Putnam Adult, 2011) - Cussler is a prolific collector of classic automobiles, and he has woven some of them into his Dirk Pitt novels. Built for Adventure is a visual treat for lovers of old cars & engineering. This is the only "coffee table book" that I've purchased in years.

Only Time Will Tell (The Clifton Chronicles, Vol. 1), by Jeffrey Archer (St. Martin’s Press, 2011) - Archer really hit a slump after his stay as a guest of Her Majesty. It could be that he is back on track with a promised multi-volume history of families through the 20th Century. Shades of Ken Follett here.

In My Time, by Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney (Threshold Editions, 2011) - Dick Cheney has gotten a terrible rap. I don’t know the guy, so I can’t say how justified that is. But after hearing the guy’s own story, I regret forming a negative opinion based solely on hearsay. This is good history.

Supreme Courtship, by Christopher Buckley (Hachette Book Group, 2008) - Another reread. If you need something to brighten you up, go for a Christopher Buckley novel. The guy is outrageous. In this one, the President cannot get a decent nominee past the Senate for a Supreme Court vacancy, and so he nominates a “Judge Judy” type as a sort of joke. She’s confirmed, and the whole thing is just delicious.

The Litigators, by John Grisham (Random House, 2011) - After each of the last six or seven Grisham novels, I’ve sworn I wouldn’t read another. My problem usually has been that he has written one chapter too many and brought the stories to ridiculously improbable conclusions. The Litigators is Grisham’s best since The Firm and A Time to Kill.

Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate, by Juan Williams (Crown Publishers, 2011) - Juan Williams said on Fox that he was nervous around Arab-dressing guys in airports, and NPR canned him because he was intolerant, racist or some such bullshit. Muzzled is a bit repetitive, but still a strong call for reason in public discourse.

The House of Silk: A Sherlock Holmes Novel, by Anthony Horowitz (Little, Brown and Company, 2011) - The Sherlock Holmes character has become trendy for I-wish-I-could-write-that-well authors. The problems with those contestants range from inaccurate period language to sex-violence-horror focus that is foreign to Conan Doyle. Horowitz brings off Conan Doyle well, and is the first Holmes by someone else I’ve read that is worthwhile.

The Jones-Imboden Raid: The Confederate Attempt to Destroy the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and Retake West Virginia, by Darrell L. Collins ( McFarland & Company, 2007) - Here again is a purely local tome. The Jones-Imboden raid was a well-planned, so-so executed attack on the B&O Railroad bridges in Western Virginia which were, in the Civil War, a critical east-west transportation link. A battle in our home town is still remembered, and it is always interesting to read about what has happened on ground you have walked.

No. 9: The 1968 Farmington Mine Disaster, by Bonnie E. Stewart (West Virginia University Press, 2011) - Here is another local interest book, but it still has widespread value. The 1968 mine explosion was eminently avoidable, and Stewart does a nice job on both the technical and human details.

Heaven is For Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back, by Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent (Thomas Nelson, 2011) - Oopsie, how did this one get in here? Well, it will be the next book in the church book group discussions. That’s why I include it. And I must say, I have a problem. Heaven is For Real is a really cute story and in a macabre way it’s uplifting and encouraging. But it is hugely improbable, scripturally shaky and patently absurd as a factual account. My problem is that if I attend the book group and open my mouth, I may be burned at the stake. Is there a Roger-Doppelganger out there willing to attend?

New Coastal Times, by Donna Callea (Self-published ebook, 2009) - This was one of the real delights of the year. Callea is an independent author who has done a very nice job with a post-apocalyptic theme. The publishing industry is changing. It is MUCH harder for a merely good writer to become published. Publishers are looking for writers who already have a following to boost their own marketing strategies. It could be that a lot more real gems are going to be found in the indie world.

Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football, by John U. Bacon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) - WVU brethren: If you’ve already decided that Rich Rod is Satan’s Spawn, don’t bother. Bacon makes short work of the WVU debacle (and he’s very critical of West Virginia), but the great bulk of the book is a description of how Rich Rod got royally screwed by the Michigan Men.

R

One Hour Dry Cleaning and the Shroud of Turin

2011-12-21T23:07:00.004-05:00

I have awakened to the joyous news that well-qualified scientists now believe that the Shroud of Turin is authentic.

Authentic what?

The Shroud of Turin is a large cloth consistent with those used to wrap bodies in the Middle East in the first century. On the cloth, there is a negative image which appears to be that of a bearded man who fits the generally accepted images of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. Some contend that this image also depicts the wounds suffered by Jesus as set out in the biblical account of the crucifixion.

There has long been some controversy over whether this is the authentic burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified in Jerusalem (at the town dump, actually) some time between A.D. 25 and 35. (Archaeologists insist on using “C.E.” for “common era” rather than “A.D.” for Anni Domini. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.)

Some years ago, the Vatican permitted scientists to test (and destroy) a very small part of the cloth for radio carbon dating. The test showed that the sample tested was made from plant fibers which were harvested around the year 1300. (When plants or animals die, they cease taking in new carbon. The isotope Carbon 14 decays at a known rate, and how much carbon 14 is present gives a reasonably accurate estimate of age if the object is within a few thousand years old.)

The current claim that the Shroud is authentic is based upon a negative result and a theory. First, the scientists say that they cannot duplicate the image on the shroud by any currently know method. Second, they believed that the tiny sample tested years ago was from a patch used to repair the shroud, apparently around 1300.

These new conclusions are welcomed by many Christians who see this as anything from some welcome corroboration of Jesus to irrefutable proof of the historical accuracy of all parts of the New Testament, including those involving the supernatural.

To my brothers and sisters in faith: Come on, folks, if we end up making this some kind of a defining event, we're going to look like idiots.

Authentic WHAT?

Well, if the scientists are correct, it is a first century burial shroud with an image on the cloth put there by some process which they cannot now explain or duplicate.

That’s all.

It may indeed be the burial ground Jesus of Nazareth. The image may be on the cloth due to some flash of angelic light or something equally magnificent and holy.

Or not.

Or even if it’s authentic, it may be somebody else’s burial shroud with an unexplained image on it. It’s not autographed and it hasn’t come with a certificate of authenticity. Or we would have heard about it by now.

Even then, I would have to wonder. Every other commemorative doodad you can order off of TV or the Internet comes with a “certificate of authenticity.” It says, “This here’s an authentic doodad.” Is the certificate, well, authentic? Beats me.

Our faith would be pathetic if we needed the Shroud of Turin, the one true Grail, The Robe, a video, or any other physical manifestations in order to believe. And if we don’t have that, what do you plan to do, my fellow Christians? Say, “Oh, gee, must not be true! We’re outta here!”

As long as I can recall having read things about the Shroud, seldom have I read anything that was not shot through with “confirmation bias.” That’s just a label we put on the phenomenon celebrated in an old song lyric from the 60s, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

Those opposed to faith embraced with confirmation bias the news of the radiocarbon dating. “Aha, you superstitious nitwits! This proves that your whole Jesus thing is a fairytale.” And now, boy, are they getting their comeuppance: “Aha, infidels! They were testing the wrong part of the cloth! This proves that the whole Jesus thing from virgin birth to ascension into Heaven is objectively true.”

People really are this dumb. The truth of the matter is, it just doesn’t matter. There is an objective truth out there. What physical manifestations there ever were are hidden by 2000 years of deterioration. The rest of the objective truth is not subject to quantitative or qualitative analysis by any scientific process we now have.

In truth, not a whole lot of the obvious mystery of this universe is subject to any sort of rational analysis.

Attached is an image from the Hubble space telescope. The Hubble is able to see fainter objects in greater detail than any other telescope in history, because it is outside of the atmosphere. This particular image is known as the “Hubble Deep Field.”

There were parts of the sky which, so far as astronomers knew, were vacant. And so astronomers picked a little tiny postage stamp sized piece and pointed the Hubble at it for many days in order to collect enough of the extraordinarily faint light to make an image, in case there was anything there. To their drop dead amazement, they saw the attached photograph which shows some thousands of heretofore unknown galaxies.

Based upon the population of galaxies in that little postage stamp the sky, these astronomers extrapolated the data to come up with a rough estimate of how many stars there are in the known universe. Their rough estimate? 70 sextillion stars. That’s 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s a lot of stars.

Okay, lovers of science – explain that one.

For that matter, people of faith – explain that one.

Is it starting to make sense that there are lots of questions out there for which we do not have any answers, let alone answers that can be proven by a junior high school science project?

That’s why it’s called Faith. There is some part of our mind that accepts our faith, or you can call it spirituality or whatever you want. And, darn it, we are right. Or we are wrong. Or I don’t know. Or I want my mommy.

That’s why it’s called Faith.

I don’t care what the shroud of Turin is. I don’t need it to be “real” to prove my own faith to me. I don’t need some confirmation so I can stick my thumbs in my ears and waggle my fingers toward unbelievers with a “Nyah, nyah, nyah, you’re going to Hell and I’m not!”

It just doesn’t matter.

How many times do I have to make the point? Eye on the ball, people. Eye on the ball.

Mizpah! (Thanks, Oce.)

A Christmas Miracle?

2011-12-17T21:44:00.005-05:00

A reader cannot escape titles like “A Christmas Miracle”’ around this time of year.

There is a formula for those stories. It is Christmas time. Someone is having some sort of really big problem. God intervenes through some kindly agent, and something highly improbable happens which brings peace, love and cookies. Ideally, the reader will smile and tear up a mite.

Hey, I have no problem with formula. Look where formulae got Dickens and Michener.

What I offer you today is A Christmas Miracle with a question mark. I will lay out the facts of what actually occurred. I have always wondered if this was indeed A Christmas Miracle or A Christmas Darn-wasn’t-that-a-bunch-of-coincidences-that-worked-out-really-great.

I almost stuck in a “you decide” there. If you want to, go for it. But you are in no better position to make an objective judgment than I am.

The end of the story: I worked as an EMT and paramedic for many years. Most of that time we were an all-volunteer company which ran about 5000 alarms a year. (Later, that call volume necessitated converting to a career service.) West Virginia was a leader in EMS training and we put people on the street who were, for the time, very well-trained.

(Son Tim the Paramedic made a joking offer for me to go help him with paramedic testing today. The only skill I still have with any competency at all is in reading field EKG’s for dangerous dysrhythmias. But the treatment standards I know for dealing with them are nearly 25 years out of date. Believe me, EMS people today are much better trained than we were “back in the day.”)

It was a in December 1976. Three of us, John, Lee and I, picked up two patients from a motor vehicle accident, a young mother and a baby. We took them to WVU Hospital, the only trauma center in the region. After some weeks they both were released to continue normal lives. The doctors at the trauma center said that we got them there just in time. Had they arrived minutes later, they would have had really, really bad outcomes.

That part of the story really is not a big deal. We did what we were trained to do. When a trained singer sings a song well, that’s nice but not stunning. When a decent golfer makes a good drive, ditto. (When I make a good drive, it’s a fluke.) If an artist paints a nice picture, that’s just what they do. Just not a big deal.

The story, the miracle part, lies in how and when we got into position to do anything at all.

The accident took place at the county line, far from any rescue station. No ambulance could have gotten there within 15 minutes of being called. That would have been too late for these patients. We were on scene within about 3 minutes of the accident, and that’s what made the difference.

Several unusual things had to happen, in order, to put to us on that accident scene at the right time.

a - There had to be a special duty day at the station.

In 1976, the company was only four years old and was still in pretty rough rental quarters. Let’s see, an example of pretty rough – A couple of times, a particularly troublesome rat met his/her demise in the middle of the night by gunshot. If the neighbors called police, they would walk him on a bunch of totally innocent looking guys. That’s what I mean by rough.

We had a new chief, and he called for a G.I. Party to spiff the place up. A dozen of us showed up and were working around the crew on duty, painting and so forth.

b - A random emergency call had to come in.

The on-duty crew went out on a call.

c - A particular type of call in a particular place had come in.

Our station was in Fairmont. The iron-clad rule was that we were to transport any patient to the nearest available hospital, which was almost always Fairmont General. This second call was for a patient with some kind of mental health or addiction issue. The patient was located in the part of the county toward Morgantown, where West Virginia University Hospital is located. WVUH was the nearest facility which treated mental health/addiction issues at that time.

But we had that darn rule. So the way such a call typically would go was that the patient would be transported to Fairmont General, and a half an hour later Fairmont General would call us back to take the patient to Morgantown. But rules are rules, right?

d - It had to be as us who answered the call.

Those who know me might suspect that I chafe a bit over pointless rules. The three of us, dressed like painters (or bums), took the call. John and Lee likewise weren’t total by-the-book guys. I remember nothing about that call other than it was some mental health deal and we decided, screw the rule, we’ll transport this patient directly to Morgantown. We were sure we’d catch hell for it, but we didn’t really care very much. We wanted to get the painting done.

e - The charge nurse in the WVU Hospital Emergency Department was Ann, a member of our rescue company. She had to be on duty.

f - The Emergency Dept. wasn’t very busy. Ann room was a good friend to each of us, and so we had time to talk a bit. She had to be free, which was unusual in a large university hospital.

g - We had to take our time goofing off and talking to her. We sat in the communications room and shot the breeze for about 15 minutes.

Let’s see, that’s seven things that had to happen for the day to end well. From this point, the day was on automatic pilot and things just unfolded as they should.

We left the hospital and returned by the interstate toward Fairmont. About a mile from the County line, a car on the other side of the road flashed its headlights at us. It being a week from Christmas, we figured they were saying “Hi,” so Lee who was driving gave them about five cents worth of red lights from the light bar. Over the next 30 seconds, several more cars flashed headlights at us, and we started to wonder. No random bunch suddenly gets the Christmas spirit, so we figured something was going on. And if it was something that would cause people to flash their lights at an ambulance, it probably was something bad.

So I felt the rig pick up speed and about the time we were approaching Mach 1, John piped up from the back that Lee we might want to flick on the red lights. We crested a hill and could see the bridge at the county line on our side of the road. Traffic was at a dead stop.

A note here – I drive a lot. West Virginia has nice interstate highways. I will come to a dead stop on the interstate maybe twice a year. This is not the Washington Beltway. When you stop on an interstate in West Virginia, something bad is happening.

As we got closer, we could see two mangled cars. I called in to dispatch, asking if they had been notified of a bad accident at the county line. The dispatcher replied in a very deep base voice, “Negative, 23." As we pulled to a stop, I told dispatch, “You do now, send me everything in the station.”

A state police trooper (who became and still is a good friend) was on scene. He was an old ambulance man and he had quickly triaged the five patients. He pointed us to the two who needed immediate treatment and transport. I took the baby, John took the adult, and Lee turned the rig around for a quick trip to the trauma center.

A lady came along who identified herself as a nurse, and I put her in the ambulance with the baby after we discussed what needed done. (The Lord loves a volunteer, remember?) The baby was crying and while that’s disturbing to a lot of people, believe me, it is music to an EMT’s ears.

John had drafted a couple bystanders and was packaging the adult. I helped him finish, we loaded and in something under 5 minutes of getting to the scene, we were hitting Mach 2 going back up the interstate. There were limited things that EMTs could do in those days on a trauma call and we did them like we were supposed to. We arrived, the patients were swept into the trauma service, end of story for us.

But if we hadn’t been on that call or had left WVU Hospital earlier, the happy ending just wouldn’t have happened.

Here, a Christmas Miracle story is supposed to make a firm conclusion of divine causation. I’m not smart enough for that. I’m going to leave it there. I’ve seen no burning bushes nor heard any ethereal voices explaining what happened.

I have my theory. You now have the facts. Make of it what you will.

Pippa passes.

For the People of Central Christian Church -- So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright

2011-12-04T20:53:00.004-05:00

Not often do I target a blog post. But these precincts are more appropriate to share some thoughts, because here it is easy to quit reading them and even to say out loud that Roger is wrong.

By the way, it doesn’t bother me in the least when people tell me to my face that I’m wrong. Often, I am. And even when I don’t think I am, that good old First Amendment gives everybody the right to think and say that I am. It seems to bother people, however, to give voice to their disagreement at times. That’s okay, too.

After a four-year stint, Pastor Josh Patty has moved on. We all wish him well. I'll miss him, but he knows darn well that my reach extends to KC, so sooner or later some sort of gag will show up courtesy of moi.

I’m concerned that this whole search-for-the-new-pastor thing is taking on some kind of scary life of its own. And I’m also concerned that lingering disagreements about how former pastors or, for that matter, other people in church have done things in the past are getting in our way.

And so, some lessons!

(“And who is he to be teaching us lessons!?” Just a guy who pays attention and tries to learn things when life beats him about the head and body. And I’m not alone in that, we have a lot of savvy people at CCC.)

Lesson No. 1: Keep your eye on the ball.

Every beginning has living right within it an ending. The first time Josh walked through the door at Central Christian, it was guaranteed that there would be a last time he walked out the door. The same goes for every pastor the church has ever had. The same goes for me. The same goes for you. Pages in the book – you turn them.

A discussion of anything from the past which has present pain makes little sense. I’ve checked those beautiful new calendars that Karen has been selling. I really checked them over thoroughly. For the life of me, I cannot find a rewind button.

Quick, let’s do a prayer test! Right now, while you’re reading the blog, get out your watch. I want you to do an eyes-open test prayer. Look at your watch and pray with all your might that God will slow down the passage of time to 10% of the current rate. That should be easy, I’m not asking to stop time, let alone throw it into rewind. Remember, pray real hard! Ready? Go!

No, really – go!

Hey, obviously, you didn’t pray hard enough. Let’s give it the good old college try this time. Sacrifice something, burn a $20 bill! Ready? Pray!

Darn. What happened? The God who knows the falling of the sparrow, who created the DNA molecule, who put us around a star powered by nuclear fusion, He didn’t pull off a little thing like slowing down time when requested by really Godly people?

Well, no. I have no idea why. I’m nowhere near that smart. I just doubt that this particular prayer ever works under these experimental conditions.

With the assumption that is part of “The Plan,” what can we draw from that?

How about, don’t fret over the past, It’s DONE.

That doesn’t mean we ignore lessons. Josh was around when there were a lot of innovations, some of which were his idea. No doubt we'll keep some and alter others. I would like to keep the Tenebrae service. If we do, yippee. If we don’t, there’s not enough interest, and I’ll live with it. Not a big deal.

What else? Beats me. And if it takes until June to figure that out, no worries. If it turns out we don’t have the time, that means something wonderful will have happened and we didn’t need the time anyway.

Lesson No 2: See lesson no. 1. This isn't rocket science.

God bless the people who are doing the pastor search.

That being said: Relax. On the universal scale, it’s small stuff.

Do we need a committee to search for a dependable God? Nope, we got one.

How about a Committee to find us a Savior, a Christ? No, we already have the only one we’ll ever need.

Holy writ! We need the revealed word of God in English in our hands so we can become a little smarter in faith. Let’s get one of those, let’s appoint a committee!

Oh, yeah, that’s been done, too.

Music, that’s a hot button! We need music! A committee, committee! Oh, okay, I guess the hymnals do have a lot of pretty good stuff in them and we seem to have an abundance of really good musicians who are bringing in even more good stuff.

Maybe one of Christ’s messages is we don’t have to feel so serious and intense all the time.

Relax. Listen to the message. Feel Christ's message.

Just sayin’.

A touch of lyrical poetry from my misspent youth:

So long, Frank Lloyd Wright.
I can't believe your song is gone so soon.
I barely learned the tune
So soon
So soon.

I'll remember
Frank Lloyd Wright.
All of the nights we'd harmonize till dawn.
I never
laughed so long
So long
So long.

Architects may come and
Architects may go and
Never change your point of view.
When I run
dry
I stop awhile and think of you.

So long, Frank Lloyd Wright
All of the nights we'd harmonize till
dawn.
I never laughed so long
So long
So long.

To borrow from my brother Oce, Mizpah!

Crappy Old Buildings or Architectural Treasures?

2011-11-27T15:00:00.009-05:00

Are they old dilapidated buildings? Or are they architectural and historical treasures?

It really beats the hell out of me.

[For the “Where you been?” thing, see note at the end.]

The “old” Fairmont Theater is being torn down to provide a site for the new state office building. The need for the building came on rather suddenly. State offices were located in the old Hartley Department Store building, but unlivable and unrepairable structural issues forced a move.

Some fellow from Charleston wrote to the local newspaper on behalf of “the Preservation Alliance.” He touted the architectural value of the old theater and maintaining it in its rightful place as a historical landmark. The fellow strongly intimated that he had a good bit of expertise in this field and that the people in Fairmont making the decision to bulldoze the place were showing a “lack of wisdom and cultural refinement.”

I’ve never claimed wisdom and if someone attributes that to me, I’m flattered.

No one is their right mind would suggest that I have cultural refinement. If I ever suspected that I’d gotten any, I would look for a 12 step program.

The County Manager has responded somewhat angrily. He doesn’t see the architectural and historical value of the Fairmont Theater but then he may be as big a Philistine is I am. He does talk about the current commercial disinterest in a large single screen theater. He doesn’t like “out-of-towners” telling us what to do. And he points out that dumping a whole bunch of money into an old building that nobody’s going to use may not be the best use of public funds.

As far as the out-of-towner thing is concerned, we have to watch that, particularly those of us in West Virginia. We are awfully touchy sometime. People do not become elitists, idiots, snooty, or snooty elitist idiots by living somewhere else. Some snooty elitist idiots live right here! OK, lots of them live elsewhere, but that’s beside the point.

We should consider ideas from “foreigners,” applying the same criteria as those from local: What are their qualifications? (I’m talking REAL qualifications, not just the certificates framed and hung on the wall.) Do they have some unexpressed bias or interest in the outcome? Will they share in any down side or cost of their own idea? Does their idea makes sense?

And then we have to do the hardest thing of all – we balance the pluses and minuses of their schemes against the pluses and minuses of all the other competing schemes.

Once again, if you’re talking to someone who tells you “all you have to do is…,” you’re talking to a provocateur or a dumb ass. Or maybe both.

I like old buildings and I agree with the notion that many of them contain elements which you do not see in buildings today. The National Cathedral is the only place I know of the United States where actual operative freemasons are working; Those are artisans who carve building stones. Fine woodwork is almost unheard of. Decorative details, finials, gingerbread, that sort of thing are well-nigh non-existent unless it’s stuff made out of plastic.

There is a lot to be said for standing in the same place that something historic occurred, or being in a building that has memories. I like to do that, especially in the town where I live. I’d like to be able to do it a lot more.

I wish I could walk into Skinner’s Tavern. It was located on the west side of the Monongahela River at the bottom of where Madison Street now ends. It was built around 1820 and torn down sometime in the mid 20th century. A thoroughly undistinguished building for an Elks Lodge was put there and it was also torn down about a decade ago. I understand some people have found a few bricks down there from the old tavern. What a joy it would be to go there and have a quaff of whatever they were serving.

I would like to go to the house or pavilion or whatever it was where John Tyler gave a campaign speech in 1840, on the top of the hill near where Woodlawn Cemetery is now located.

I would love to see the 600-foot B&O Railroad iron bridge which was destroyed by Confederate raiders under Gen. “Grumble” Jones in April 1863. I would like to see where in Coal Run Hollow the running fight between the Confederates and the makeshift militia took place.

I’d like to go back to the Virginia Theater and the Lee Theater such as I did when I was a little kid. There are parking lots there now.

But things change. We can’t afford to decoupage everything and keep it in the same condition as it was in whatever we consider to be the “Good Old Days.”

I love history and I love to connect with history. If we start worshiping history, we may forget where the hell were going.

By the way, please God don’t name the new state office building for somebody who is currently alive. The only so-names structure I ever approved is the John Saylor Sewage Plant at Camp Mountaineer. At the time, that was a great joke, especially enjoyed by Big John himself.

I have floated my own idea to name the new building. Nobody has yet reacted with horror. Our current senator and former governor Joe Manchin doesn’t have stuff named for him, and I like that. His mother was an extremely hard-working and likable lady, and an excellent example of what women did despite their more restricted roles in society in the first half of the 20th century. So my proposed name for the new building is the “Mama Kay Manchin and West Virginia Women’s Office Building.”

You don’t like it? Suggest something better, don’t just bitch.

Where I’ve been:

I still really, really enjoy writing. Lately, I’ve been writing a lot, just not here. Much of it has been in petitions to various Courts, including two to the Tribunal in the Sky (U.S. Supreme Court). (That’s not all that impressive. They get thousands of petitions a year and grant maybe 100.)

I’ve also been working with and assisting my friend and brother Oce Smith in keeping his “Just Observin’ “ column going weekly in the Times-West Virginian. Currently, Oce is doing rehab at the Arbors in Fairmont, a nursing home/rehab place up on Watson Hill. Oce never got the hang of computers and hasn’t even used electric typewriters much. He writes on a manual typewriter, and right now doesn’t have the hand strength. So he dictates to me, I write, we both edit, and I’ve been learning stuff.

This is, to me, a graduate level writing course. Oce learned from old classic newspaper writers, and has a distinctive style. His memory of political and local events is phenomenal, and he has personal recollections of Truman, LBJ, JFK, Bobby Kennedy and lots of others. It is always good to be reminded that we can always keep learning.

And, to borrow from Oce,

Mizpah!

Words for Mr. M. Gadhafi

2011-10-20T13:39:00.002-04:00

alpha mike foxtrot

A Massive Dose of Good Sense?

2011-10-09T19:24:00.000-04:00

Yes, massive good sense. Perhaps that’s what we’ve got going on here today. Perhaps not. Do you agree? Wonderful. Do you disagree? Fine with me.

The sounds of silence –

I’ve had some comments to the effect “Where the hell is a new post?” In response thereto (Jeez, I love lawyer-speak, I sound like an idiot), I would say “Here it is,” and “Vishnu on a rotisserie, get off my case, I’ve been busy.” Indeed, I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately, but the great majority of it has been for work. Discussions of a case with legal authorities submitted to a court are called “briefs.” Briefs are not, well, brief. Over the years, I have developed a bit of a prose-centered style in writing legal briefs. Most places, that works. Or at least it’s what’s expected from me. But the West Virginia Supreme Court has recently adopted new rules which greatly formalize the appeal process and the United States Supreme Court always has had very formal rules, and I’ve had to write stuff for both places.

Diamonds and pearls in the dairy section -- Attention shoppers. There are no diamonds nor oysters containing pearls in our conveniently located dairy coolers. What we have there consists of dairy products. The milk is clearly marked as to fat content. The containers are conveniently and obviously sized so that you may quickly see the difference amongst one quart, half-gallon and gallon container. You will find nothing of greater value than a gallon of milk there. The labels are not great art and do not require extended examination to appreciate them. We recommend that you know what you’re looking for and what quantity you want, that you walk to the dairy case, you pick it up, put it in your basket, and then move the hell along so that others may do likewise. Thank you for your attention.

All my rowdy friends – Country music crooner Hank Williams, Jr., showed up on the Fox News last week to give us his particular political opinions. Hank Williams, Jr., is not particularly rule-bound in his musical offerings. His rhymes don’t exactly rhyme, the cadence or meter or whatever the hell you want to call it isn’t real smooth.

To the best of my knowledge, he has no particular education or study in politics other than the various places that rednecks go to get their opinions. (That’s not a pejorative – I enjoy going to some of the same places.)

As is the case with several country music singers, some of his work has been expressly patriotic. I for one particularly like his “America Will Survive” done right after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The line “No more Yankees, no more Rebels” is the first recognition in country music that the damn Civil War is over.

But asking him for political opinions has only the same value as asking any other quasi-informed citizen. In responding off-the-cuff to a question, he compared the much vaunted golf game between the president and the speaker to Hitler and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu playing a round.

Okay – references to Hitler are greatly overdone. If you want to say somebody’s bad, comparing them to Hitler is the ultimate verbal extreme, although it has become so common that is really rather silly. However, for uttering the name on television, Williams was inundated with criticism over what a nasty, insensitive jerk he is. Mind you, for all I know he is an insensitive jerk and sometimes that’s the appropriate response to certain stimuli. But the Hitler thing was just a blowsy comment and those objecting are having a great time because now they can enjoy being victims.

The Anti-Defamation League broke out in sweats, demanded that ESPN dump Junior’s music from Monday Night Football and maybe hang ol’ Hank from a gibbet. Jeez, guys, have a Coke and a smile and shut the hell up – Williams is an ignorant cretin, and you guys are well-educated cretins. I’ll take the former every time.

The sissies at ESPN did dump Hank’s music.

The Obama effect – President Obama will be nominated by the Democratic party for another four year term. Nothing reasonably foreseeable is going to stop that. The results of the election likely will turn on how big a whack job the Republicans nominate and who turns out their base best on election day. Well, that’s Politics 101.

Obama and the Great Republican Hope likely will visit West Virginia during the campaign only enough to say they have hit all 50 states. If the Great Republican Hope avoids getting caught with dead people in his/her bed, our five electoral votes are going with the Republicans.

My fellow Democrats, you can like it, you can dislike it and think it’s horrible to acknowledge it, I just don’t care. Reality is a bitch. This is reality. Where this becomes a big local problem is in the state and local races.

You can be sure that every Republican candidate for every office including the petty stuff will be calling their Democratic opponents friends of Obama, followers of Obama, lovers of Obamacare, blah blah blah. Now, in effect, Pres. Obama has the weakest following of any president or presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in any campaign I’ve been involved in since 1972.

The problem for state and local candidates is not whether they’re going to buddy up to Obama. Trust me, they are not. The issue is going to be whether they have the nerve and the guts to expressly separate themselves from him. And that’s not political opportunism, every new plan coming from Washington creates a “You got to be kidding me” response in West Virginia. The latest dead-on-arrival $447 billion jobs package is an example of trendy and unrealistic leadership.

We’re back to the days of Will Rogers: “I don’t belong to an organized political party – I’m a Democrat.”

Governing -- This past week, West Virginians elected the sort of incumbent acting governor as Governor for the 15 months remaining in the current term. In another eight months, there is yet another primary election.
This election cycle was unfortunate. The Titanic hitting an iceberg was a darn shame. The Apollo 13 flight could have been a bit smoother.

Gov. Tomblin won by one percent. Someone in his camp went babbling to the press that now they have a mandate. Great Caesar’s Ghoast, is anyone dumb enough to believe that?

2 ½ things bother me about the election. Number one is the heavy use of attack ads. Everybody talks about how little they like attack ads. So why are campaigns using them? Because they work. Because people respond to them. Everybody bitches about politicians buying elections. If there were not so many damn sellers in the market, the elections would not be for sale.

The one half is all the soft money that poured in. The best estimates are that the Republican Governors Association dumped in $3 million and the Democratic Governors Association ponied up $2 million. Of course, since that is soft money, those are at best estimates. But neither the Republican Governors Association nor the Democratic Governors Association really give a left-handed shit about West Virginia. It’s a head hunting expedition to put numbers on the board and control the financial destiny of our nation. And we the people are not the beneficiaries of their plans. Jesus in St. Louis, are we ever dumb.

And the other disturbing thing about the election is that it shows a great disunity in a state that has been fairly united in the past. The Governor absolutely murdered Bill Maloney, the Republican, in the counties south of Route 60. Maloney scored less drastic but still convincing wins in most of the counties north of there, and he swept the Eastern Panhandle. The Eastern Panhandle is the fastest growing area of West Virginia and in the future nobody who is going to win an election will be able to do so and also get buried by the other side over there.

Did we really need an industrial revolution? -- In the early 18th century, Britain had a problem. The society was fueled by wood. The population was growing and the need for fuel was growing. The need for fuel wood rose nearly to the level of the ability of the islands to grow and harvest wood. Anybody that does wildlife management knows what happens on those occasions – you get a sizable population die off.

And then the rock that burns, coal, took the place of wood. Methods of mining were developed which fed the fires with vast quantities of fuel.

Coal had so many advantages. First and foremost, there was a great deal of it. Second, the energy was highly concentrated. A pound of coal provided many times the heat energy of a pound of wood. On industrial scales, coal was easier to obtain, easier to transport and cheaper than wood. Finally, coal burns at temperatures much higher than wood, so it is suitable for more industrial purposes.

Part of the downside was immediately apparent. In the 18th and 19th centuries, coal was burned in open furnaces or furnaces with straight stacks. Coal burns dirty. There is a lot of particulate matter, soot, that comes from coal fire. As chemical tests were developed, scientists discovered that burning of coal was releasing sulfur, heavy metals and other products into the atmosphere, soil and watersheds.

More recently, the fact that coal liberates a lot of carbon that was bound up underground has become a concern.

But coal still fueled Industrial Revolution. Without coal, we would not have automobiles, steel, computers, petroleum products, or lots of other things, and the population would be a great deal smaller.

So does the United States need to transition away from coal? Yes, for that matter the whole world does. But those who say that we should fundamentally change the way we use it, curtail its use, make power from burning coal much more expensive, are using intentional ignorance to advance ideology.

Burning coal furnishes 50% of electrical power in the United States. Terminate the use of coal right now, and then you’re going to have to decide how to live with half as much electricity. Air conditioning would have to go. Our ancestors lived without it, we will just have to suck it up. Steel manufacturing will plummet and what is left of manufacturing on this continent will take significant reductions – what you think those factories run on?

There’s always somebody who says that the scientists have always figured something out, so they’ll figure something out this time.

Clean coal technology, let’s look at that. Not yet. Current clean coal technology means that you incur an expense and reduce the energy available in a quantity of coal in order to eliminate some combustion products. Every bit as much carbon is still going to be liberated.

And then there are those who say that we’re on the verge of fusion reactors. Yeah, right, just soon as we figure a way to contain something burning at 40,000,000°.

Hysterics doesn’t make people part of the solution. It just makes them an annoyance which adds to the problem.

Of all this and other stuff, more later.

R

God, Obama or Glenn Beck: Who Caused the Earthquake and Hurricane?

2011-08-31T19:10:00.001-04:00

An earthquake? A hurricane? Someone out there is sending us a message!

I guess.

Two questions come to mind: Who is sending the message? And what is the message?

The most popular suspect as the perpetrator of last week’s East Coast earthquake and the East Coast Hurricane Irene that followed it is God. As the Almighty, the All-powerful, and the All-knowing, it makes sense that He’s the one who commands sufficient tera-joule level power resources and Cray-Computer-on-Steroids targeting finesse. Oh, I suppose humanity might whip up a good bit of power with a whole bunch of nukes, but tuning a large explosion into causing an earthquake far beneath the Earth’s surface or sparking an Atlantic hurricane seems beyond the current level of human science.

The hurricane missed our mountains, but it did play havoc with one of my favorite places, North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Whoever was directing the storm caused it to punch through the North-South Highway and, in places, the storm punched the ocean clean through the narrow barrier islands. To be anthropocentric about it, you have to think that the message associated with that must be pretty drastic.

The earthquake did catch the mountains, but only shook already-loose bricks or stones off of buildings. I was in the middle of jury trial in Clarksburg, and the courthouse suddenly began shaking. There was a “What’s that?” moment, and the judge sent the marshals to see what was going on. Under the circumstances, a structural engineer would’ve been a better choice, but none were handy. In any event, we went ahead with the trial, because it was just nothing to freak about. I did – and I do – marvel at the amount of energy it takes to shake a steel-stone-concrete building 200 miles from the epicenter. That, together with the fact that there was no loss of life or injury, strongly supports the God hypothesis. (God is all-loving, remember?)

Of course, everybody with an agenda and a personal hotline to the Cosmic Seat of Power announced that God was sending a message (and in some instances, a punishment) and they very kindly interpreted the message for those of us not tied into the Good-Ol’-Deity system.

A notable whack-job rabbi in New York slobbered all over himself as he ranted that this earthquake very clearly was a message that by permitting gay marriage (or, for that matter, gay anything), we were exposing ourselves to tectonic terror which would terminate our time on Terra.

We can always count on the wacky Westboro Baptist Church to give us the low down on God’s private thoughts. Moreover, when they do so they grin and chuckle and wring their hands with a good deal of malicious glee about the Lord’s no-nonsense approach to smiting the wicked. Hurricane Irene, to the Westboro sprites, was a very overt signal that the Lord God of Hosts is very annoyed about gay people.

One thought I have about Westboro, however, is that they may be misreading the extremity of the so-called punishment which is being inflicted. A hurricane? Really that’s a lot of rain and a lot of wind. The death toll was in double digits and property damage was in the mere single billions. Compared to some of the other remedies used by the Ultimate Magistrate, a worldwide flood, drowning armies in the Red Sea, plagues of locusts, frogs and so forth, this level of a hurricane seems rather weak tea in tepid water.

Pat Robertson, notable for his interpretation of God’s message about the vastly more severe earthquake in Haiti, got an entirely different message this time. Far be it from me to say that any of these holy receivers are wrong, perhaps God is just multitasking. To Robertson, the earthquake was a clear sign of the Second Coming of Christ. Even if you took the Book of Revelations completely at face value (sorry, that’s a bit of a stretch for me), I can’t make that connection. Of course, I’m reading it in English rather than the original Greek so I could be wrong. If I see Heaven opened and behold a White Host, boy am I going to come around to orthodoxy quickly.

One of the most notable interpretations of the disasters came from presidential candidate Michele Bachmann:

"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending."

Later, a campaign spokesman observed: "Obviously she was saying it in jest.”

Hats off to Rep. Bachmann. I think about 50% of her political opinions are pretty strange, but she has a really dark sense of humor and my book that’s a big positive. And let me say that her statement was absolutely brilliant sarcasm, sarcasm of the highest order. When your listeners aren’t quite sure whether you’re serious, you are so subtle, so nuanced, that you truly get the blue ribbon. (Now I know some of the Representative’s political enemies will say “Of course she was serious, and her campaign is just covering.” Well, how the hell do they know?)

Glenn Beck also interpreted these events as the work of God. The message he perceives, however, is a good bit more practical than the others. Beck is a convert to Mormonism. Among the important teachings of Mormonism is the encouragement of preparing for long-term self-sufficiency, including having an adequate stockpile of supplies to live without grocery stores, etc., for several months. That was the message Beck received, that the Lord God was telling us that bad things can happen and we need to be prepared for them.

Nobody is really saying that Obama caused either the earthquake or hurricane. Yet. I have to say, people accuse him of some of the weirdest stuff. This week I received a mass e-mail from a nutty website which promised to “Expose Obama’s plot to destroy the Constitution.” Goodness, I hope he doesn’t have such a plot.

However, the President took little bit of ownership, at least in the hurricane. In a speech on the White House lawn on Sunday evening, President O reminded the country that the hurricane was still a dangerous storm, that the federal government cares and would do all it could, blah, blah, blah. Mostly, it was paternalistic nonsense, and unnecessary blather.

Representative Ron Paul who, God willing, will never be the bride, has called for the dissolution of FEMA. He’s just wrong. FEMA, as the “point of the spear” of the Federal government does have an important role in emergency management. If we start with the presumption that we will respond to citizens who have catastrophic losses with something other than “too bad, so sad,” true disasters will exceed local resources and Federal resources will be required. The Feds provide money and provide supplies. When local control becomes impossible or ineffective, FEMA or other Federal agencies can provide leadership and management. But that is not the preferred model. The preferred approach remains one of local or state-level management.

One of the best things that FEMA does is train local managers to deal with disasters. FEMA trains people in the National Incident Management System (NIMS) which is a systematic and rational way to handle the demands of the mass of issues in a disaster. By the way, much of NIMS is available for study by anyone online at the FEMA website. The people who developed NIMS have the most important qualification of all: They all have ridden in vehicles with flashing lights to real emergencies.

Bad things happen. Sometimes they are ordinary things (rain, wind) in massive doses. These days, areas which are going to be pounded by a hurricane have 24 or 48 hours’ notice. The biggest urgent decision to be made by emergency managers is what areas to evacuate and when to do it. I can argue mandatory evacuation either way. If you’re dumb enough to stay for a hurricane, screw it, take your own chances. On the other hand, if by staying, you expose innocents (family) or rescuers to danger, you’re going beyond your personal rights. Evacuation prevents a great majority of what would otherwise be the loss of life due to a hurricane.

I am sure that there are a lot of county emergency service directors who are “wargaming” earthquake scenarios in Eastern United States this week. The Eastern earthquake provided a much better lesson than the Eastern hurricane. With a hurricane, you have warning. With an earthquake, within a span of 5 minutes you can go from normal life to near-complete destruction of infrastructure as well as loss of life and mass casualties, all over a wide area. As it is, the little earthquake last week reminded us that things can go to hell right quick.

It also reminded us the big dog of earthquakes, unreinforced masonry construction. The national Cathedral in Washington suffered some millions of dollars of damage. The Washington Monument was cracked. Around here, a chimney collapsed on the Barbour County Courthouse. The common theme? Stones or brick stacked on top of each other: Unreinforced masonry.

I do wonder that we’re not very good about learning lessons. Putting New Orleans where it was in the beginning wasn’t a fantastic idea, what with it being right by the Gulf of Mexico and partially below sea level. Massively rebuilding it in the same place is another head-scratcher. I’m sure that they will rebuild the National Cathedral with stacked stone, and that when the beaches and bridges are put back on the Outer Banks, people will build those beautiful coastal homes right up next to the ocean.

Of all of God’s interpreters, Beck gets closest to reality. That’s because he gives at least a partial solution, and rational reasoning. No matter what you think about this notion that it was the hand of God at work, the idea self-reliance and neighborhood reliance is long overdue for a resurgence. In North America, we have developed very effective response systems to handle most emergencies in a reasonably efficient fashion. One definition of “disaster,” however, is an event of such magnitude that it overwhelms local and regional response resources. When that happens, “they” may not be coming for a long time and it’s up to “us” to suck it up and take responsibility.

Penn Jillette & God, No!: Chill, People, It’s the First Amendment

2011-08-19T05:54:00.003-04:00

Penn Jillette self-identifies as an asshole atheist libertarian. He has written a new book, God, No!: Signs You May Already Be An Atheist and Other Magical Tales, a fast, funny and persuasive promotion of atheism. Lots of believers, mainly Christian, are (to use a Jillette-ism) going “batshit crazy.” I doubt that God with smite him, but I could be wrong.

Jillette’s opinion starts out deceptively mild: “You don’t have to be very smart, fast, or funny to be an atheist. You don’t have to be well educated. Being an atheist is simply saying ‘I don’t know.’ “

Later, he expounds: “Once you’ve answered ‘I don’t know’ to the existence of a god, the answer to whether you believe in god pretty much has to be no. That doesn’t mean you’re saying it’s impossible for there to be a god, or that we couldn’t have evidence of a god in the future. It just means that right now you don’t know. Believing cannot rise out of ‘I don’t know.’ “

He’s right. I don’t know if God is there from objective evidence. As for me, I believe in God and in Jesus, the Christ, but I do not have objective evidence. And I don’t plan on getting irregular about this book.

After all there IS an objective reality. The God, A god, a FEW gods, another power (“The Force”?) or none of the above exist or don’t exist. Jillette’s statements, my rambling, the Pope speaking ex cathedra, and burning bushes (which we only know of through hearsay accounts) will not change the objective reality. So, for Heaven’s sake (my phrase), RELAX.

A favorite hymn is “I Know That My Redeemer Lives.” There, “know” is not meant in the mathematical or Boolean sense. If I drive past a farm and see a shorn sheep standing there, what I KNOW is that it is shorn on one side. However, that it is shorn on the other side is way I’ll bet. I KnowThat My Redeemer Lives is a statement of the strength of faith, that I have a strong faith which nourishes me and brings me peace, even absent objective data. Don’t get confused by song titles, nor impeach me with them: After all, One Night in Bangkok does NOT Make a Hard Man Humble. My “knowing” reality is really more like another favorite hymn, It Is Well With My Soul.

Why religion? Well, because it’s true. But there are so many religions out there and they contain lots and lots of mutually exclusive tenets. In any event, that’s the bootstrap argument from Hell. (What is objective is that our language is peppered with religious references.)

A better answer is to look at society or civilization in light of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, food, shelter, safety and so forth, and the human desire to continue to improve how we meet human need and develop an human culture. The presence of and absence of religion has, at various times, helped and hindered those goals. Religions teach various precepts, the most basic of which usually promote ethical and peaceful interaction. Religions have other rules, and Jillette liberally illustrates God, No! with examples of the silly ones which are at the very least neutral in meeting human needs. My favorite example from the book is the ban on the bacon cheeseburger to the Orthodox Jew. I could add things like the drinking of poisons and handling of poisonous snakes because one of the gospel writers made a single throwaway reference. Pretty clearly, the argument that religion – any religion – has a 1:1 correlation with meeting the basic benificent goals of society is pure bullshit.

Other paths can lead to the same behaviors that society should affirmatively sanction. Eastern religions such as Buddhism promote remarkable peace and order. Humanism and atheism can contain just as beneficial and ethical instruction as any religion toward the goal of advancing down Maslow’s hierarchy. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment gives us the power to practice the system of moral beliefs which works for us, with our own personal freedom.

Locking religion out is just as dumb locking people into religion. Some months back, there were press reports of a judge in Arizona who assigned criminal offenders the task of reading a certain book. This was a book on ethical and moral and LEGAL behavior and was written from a Christian faith-based perspective. Obviously, the government requiring someone to read a single religion-based volume is not a good idea. Simply abandoning the whole book report idea, however, was just about as dumb. There are lots and lots of other good books out there on decent and lawful and productive living from various faith and non-faith perspectives. Among the best are the books of Larry Winget. His specific faith perspectives are the vermouth in my martini – the bottle may be there in the room, but it doesn’t come near the glass.

In addition to the benefits that society receives from those who will follow faith as a path to progress in behavior, religion likewise is a path to internal/personal improvement. The greatest improvement is that of eternal life, but there we’re back to a fact for which there is an objective truth which is currently unknowable. Personally, I think Gandhi made the cut but I know a lot of religions disagree.

Ritual is good for turning one’s mind inward. I am part the denomination known as the Disciples of Christ. One practice of the Disciples is that we come to the Lord’s table (practice communion) in every service. That has great meaning to me. That’s about all I can attest to personally. I do not go with the transubstantiation thing, I do not believe that the wafer becomes human flesh or that the cup turns into human blood or that there is anything else of the magic show to it. It turns my thoughts to this guy whose example should be the rule and guide of my own life. I’m glad we repeat the coming to the table a lot because I never seem to get it right. Jillette talks about a ritual within his own family, annually releasing balloons in memory of family and friends who have died. This is really a touching account in the book. It’s his ritual, and it works for him.

Notwithstanding our disagreement on the “ultimate question,” I cannot help but like Penn Jillette. Oh, he’s an asshole, but so am I. I admire people who fly their own flag. If someone is an asshole, what the hell, just hoist the Jolly Roger. Jillette does.

This is a brash, vigorous offering in the marketplace of ideas. Its presence is a celebration of the First Amendment. I don’t expect to see an Arabic edition published in Saudi Arabia or an Iranian one in Farsi.

Five stars.

The Debt Limit: A Pox on Both Their Houses; No, Make that ALL Their Houses

2011-08-01T20:09:00.007-04:00

We have been stupid enough to buy into the Congressional/Presidential Create-a-Crisis bilgewater, and now we are supposed to be pathetically grateful that our ever so wise political leaders have resolved the “Crisis.” That is, they’ve resolved it long enough to delay their next crisis until election time, when a new round of “blame the other guy” will take off in full force.

And yes, we really are dumb enough to be buying into this. We really are taking sides: Oh, the poor president! Oh, thank you Jesus for our conservative sentinels! Blah, blah, blah.

In point of fact, Congress knew this particular “crisis” was coming, the President knew this particular “crisis” was coming and so did everybody else who'd had grade school arithmetic. Rather than dealing with the issues, everybody decided to play a game of political Who-Has-The-Biggest-Weenie. (Yes, I know that’s gender-specific. When people of both genders in government quit playing that game, I’ll quit talking about it. In the meantime, it’s a fair description.) I think it’s fair to assume that the government “Mastercrats” were taking a minute now and then to detect when the Treasury was going to run out of money. It wasn’t rocket science, but they had allegedly neutral public agencies (Office of Management and Budget, Congressional Budget Office) to help them count. And then, suddenly, it was crisis time, and in every instance it was “their” fault. If only “they” would quit being so rat-bastard stubborn, we could all enjoy the second coming of George Washington. Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.

In order to blame “them” and promote the Glorious Ascendance of “us” in the 2012 elections and after, the Mastercrats played Chicken with United States government obligations and with the very real opinion of the market regarding the quality of government debt instruments. In doing so, the Mastercrats created and depended upon raw fear, in order to gain so-called grassroots support from people who were scared shitless that their military wages or Social Security benefits were not going to be paid. In doing so, the Mastercrats buried the real issues of spending and the debt rating. The latter has as far-reaching economic consequences for the United States as the former. Remember free enterprise? Even if we don’t believe in it, we sure as hell worship it. The debt ratings are standards by the marketplace of how secure treasury bills, bonds and debt instruments are for investors. If they are less secure, the investors are going to want higher returns, meaning we will be paying more interest for government borrowing. More expensive borrowing by the government means more expensive borrowing for everybody else which means fewer houses and cars sold, fewer jobs to manufacture and sell the capital products, more unemployment – but that really doesn’t matter to the Mastercrats as long as their weenies measure longer than the other guys’.

The raising of the debt ceiling is nothing new. Ronald Reagan did it 18 times and on one occasion described to Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (a Republican) the bad consequences in the event of a default:

Dear Howard:

This letter is to ask for your help and support, and that of your colleaques, in the passage of an increase in the limit to the public debt.

As Secretary Regan has told you, the Treasury's cash balances have reached a dangerously low point. Henceforth, the Treasury Department cannot guarantee that the Federal Government will have sufficient cash on any one day to meet all of its mandated expenses, and thus the United States could be forced to default on it obligations for the first time in its history.

This country now possesses the strongest credit in the world. The full consequences of a default -- or even the serious prospect of default -- by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and on the value of the dollar in exchange markets. The Nation can ill afford to allow such a result. The risks, the costs, the disruptions, and the incalculable damage lead me to but one conclusion: the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns.

I want to thank you for your immediate attention to this urgent problem and for your assistance in passing an extension of the debt ceiling.

Sincerely,
Ronald Reagan

Conservative icon Ronald Reagan apparently didn’t see raising the debt ceiling as a big problem for America. His was the administration that continued large deficits, his directed at the military expansion that outspent and eventually destroyed the Soviet Union’s economy. Most people (me included) don’t see that as a bad thing.

More recently, the debt ceiling has been raised repeatedly without the disgusting and dangerous spectacle we’ve been treated to this year. In 1997, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2006 (Republican presidential years), the debt ceiling was raised with between 193 and 214 Republican votes. In 2007, 2008 (Republican presidential years), 2009 (twice) and 2010 (Democratic presidential years), the debt ceiling was raised again, but only in 2008 did the bill have any Republicans on board.

So let’s not continue with this “it’s the other guys fault” bullshit. Every Mastercrat wants to spend money. Nobody really wants all-out frugality. Everybody wants savings for all spending except spending for them and for those whose asses they must kiss to advance their own personal interests. All of the Mastercrats are speaking piously about their love for America and the tough choices they are making and their bravery, love of God, and sleepless nights. This is showmanship and bad theater. Author Robert A. Heinlein (among others) identified the correct way to get cooperation from most people: Don’t bother looking for their better nature, because most of them don’t have one. Look instead for their self interests, because everybody has those.

I do not exclude the Tea Partiers from the Mastercrat ranks. They were willing - no, they were downright slobbering - to crash the ship rather than compromise AT ALL. They were willing to cut any and all spending that didn’t fit their own worldview without discussing the effect on anyone. Screw ‘em. Moreover, they have the temerity to compare themselves with patriots who actually did something courageous in the Revolution. Screw ‘em, the hypocritical bastards.

A single example among the thousands of economic hypocrisies is the flap last February over the F35 Joint Strike Fighter engine. The F35 is a fifth-generation attack/fighter aircraft which incorporates the latest in stealth technology. It comes in a conventional version, a short takeoff and landing (STOL) version, and a carrier version. The idea was to incorporate the latest technology and save money by using a single basic design with many common components. The engine for the F35 is built by Pratt & Whitney, a longtime builder of jet engines. But wait, some of the Mastercrats screamed: The other manufacturer in the competition to build the engines, Rolls-Royce/General Electric, designed and built their own pretty good engine, and we need to buy that too so we have a spare engine, just in case the Pratt & Whitney doesn’t work. Horsefeathers, said the Department of Defense, we do not need it. But Mastercrats from states where that engine would be built chimed in that it was a necessity and not a waste of money. And so, they reasoned, $450 million in the current fiscal year was a cheap price to pay for a spare engine that nobody needs. Notably, the people pushing for this expenditure came from both parties. Leading the pack was none other than Speaker the House John Boehner, a Republican from Ohio (where the engine would have been built), the same guy who was leading the Jesus-Loves-Thrift money forces in the fake crisis.

The double shuffle and doublespeak associated with the spare engine would’ve shamed the town drunk showing up and insisting that he lead the church choir. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R – CA) reasoned (?) that a second engine would actually save money because then manufacturers would be in competition. In other words, they could build two for less than the price of one. No kidding, he really said that.

And so, we stumble on, the debt limit will (probably) be extended, most of the promised savings ($1.5 trillion) are as-yet unknown but “to be announced” by November and among the only people not buying this snake oil are the bond rating agencies who are about to stick it to us.

And as long as we participate - as long as we oooh and ahhh the latest Mastercrat toy store in our neighborhoods, as long as we sell out to the Mastercrat buyers, we’re going to get the same turd again and again, just in new and better Christmas wrapping.

It’s not about throwing tea into a harbor. It’s about telling the screamers to Shut the F**k Up so we can apply REASON for a change.

Jeez, are we ever dumb.

Pippa passes.
R

Further Praise and Praise Music

2011-07-24T21:13:00.003-04:00

The post of 22 July concerning praise music excited a touch of comment. Mostly, it was verbal and opinions were mixed. That’s a good thing. If there were only one available opinion and one available set of important or relevant facts, we would only need one blog and that would hardly constitute a thoughtful discussion at all.

So let me continue a more interactive version of these Dispatches. Perhaps this, too, will be another beaker on the burner in the laboratory of human behavior.

Take one of my customary detours, let me note that on some topics we bring strong feelings. Strong feelings and strong opinions are neither inherently good nor inherently bad except insofar as they prove that one cares and is showing interest. There’s one intellectual challenge similar to what you go through reading good fiction, which requires a willing suspension of disbelief. In discussing the controversial subject or for that matter anything where there are a number of viewpoints, it is helpful to be able to willingly suspend judgment until you have “downloaded” to your mind the information or even opinions offered. Of course, then we have to analyze what we have heard.

By the way, the best jury theory I know (and the one that I practice) is based upon the presumption that jurors do not suspend judgment until all the information is imparted. One great teacher of trial lawyers, Herb Stern, tells students that in the trial, you “hit them the firstest with the mostest,” thereby getting the jury on your side and prone to listen to the remainder the evidence while rooting for you.

Mere words about music don’t work well or tell us much. Neither do mere words describing art or nature. The words are not the reality, and the words can only feebly describe the reality. So we have to take the time actually to look at the music performed.

So, let me offer a YouTube audio/video of the untitled hymn by Chris Rice commonly referred to as “Come to Jesus,” to which I referred on the 22nd:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjZEDg9ZGKQ

A short & sweet commentary: The purity of Rice’s voice strikes me. For that matter, when the musical worship leaders at our church perform this, the purity of their voices strikes me, too. The range of the song is fairly broad. And the lyrics, beautiful: “Come to Jesus… Dance with Jesus… Fly to Jesus.” These generate a response in me.

Another example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mczwR8Rp2g&feature=related

What excitement and what joy these performers and listeners alike have. Those lyrics don’t say a whole lot to me and the music doesn’t get in the stir me at least the extent of those in that video. Do they need to? Is it enough that it stir someone and add to their faith experience?

A nonmusical (or at least non-melodic) example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUQYJ77qa50

This, to me, is ultimate cutesy. It doesn’t speak to me, mostly because I lack a lot of the modern cultural references. But as you can see in this live performance, a lot of the audience does react strongly. I’m going to refrain from much discussion about the content. I think I get the message that modern cultural references are not nearly so important as “timeless values.” But I’ve never talked to the author of this one minute sermon, and she may have another point entirely.

Which is yet another point about worship styles and methodologies. Does it matter what the intent or detailed theology of the creator of the work might be if it produces a positive result? And that, my friends, is not an expression of an opinion, it’s a legitimate question.

And finally:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTJqndfHEJs&feature=relmfu

My commentary? None. And that’s the point of this little essay – you listen, you decide. If it brings you closer to your faith, my opinion really doesn’t matter as much as either the vice presidency or a warm pitcher of spit, to quote John Nance Garner. Pick one.

I do know that I enjoy music, but I don’t know why. How do tones, vibrations in the air really, from different devices which create those tones bring me pleasure? I don’t know why verbal material presented at various differing frequencies and in various patterns give me pleasure or inspiration or even information. Is this is purely a learned behavior? After all, we can quickly recognize the music of other cultures because sometimes it sounds strange or even cacaphonous to us. And the rules of how these tones are arranged and what devices/instruments are used are very detailed and yet from this learned behavior somewhat common knowledge to the point that we can remember lots and lots of different patterns (musical pieces) or even styles. For some odd reason, I can usually pick out Russian orchestral music. What is the common feature of that music that makes it recognizable to my brain? Go figure. How is it that these things create an emotional response? Honestly, I do not understand it.

Perhaps there’s something instinctive about all this. Parents know that strange phenomenon of sleeping through all kinds of noises and yet when your baby makes a noise, even a soft one, you snap awake immediately. What is the filtering process that goes on in the mind?

Other sounds bring associations. To me, hearing dispatch radio tones brings a strong association and I’m always up for that sweet blast of mechanical siren. Those are my associations. Others find them confusing or even annoying.

Were trying to find beauty here. I don’t know how.

Can anyone help me out?

Pippa passes.

R

Praise Music: An Amateur Deacon Ruminates

2011-07-22T20:22:00.006-04:00

There is a collection of church music commonly called “praise music.” I can’t call it a “school” of music even though it may be such to those who really know what they’re talking about nor can I define any boundaries of where it is or where it isn’t. Praise Music doesn’t appear in most hymnals, that’s about the best way I can describe it.

My dear friend and brother Parson Jim N. just published a fascinating blog post on his reaction to praise music as being something other than admirable Christian music. I would note at the outset that appreciating this Dispatch From No. 3 requires that you follow the link and read Parson Jim’s post. I may reprise it just a bit, but it’s well worth the effort to see what Jim says:

http://latemeanderings.blogspot.com/2011/07/thoughts-on-why-praise-songs-are-not.html

A quick detour – in a comment to my immediate past post, on open carry of firearms, a commentor (who disagreed with most of my opinions) reminded me that it is most convenient to post the link when I’m discussing someone else’s work. A lesson: Always mine the opinions and comments of others for good ideas. Ignoring someone’s good idea someone because she disagrees with you on other things Not Very Bright.

Okay, have you read Parson Jim’s post? No, really – read it. I’ll wait. I’m not in a big hurry.

To me, the heart of his opinion is in the fourth paragraph:

Except for one of these songs in this category I can recall singing, they are all about an unholy trinity of “Me, Myself and I.” It almost seems as if we imagine by singing such words that God is so pleased at the sound of our melodic flattery that the Divine Being surely must bless us with some sort of special or chosen status for our feel-good blather.

And so, his observations center around the lyrics as has his and my conversations on the subject.

The entire “Me, Myself and I” school of preaching is, I find, a touch annoying. My gradual return to a church life began through the “Red Letter” process. In some editions of the Bible, the quotations ascribed to Jesus Christ are printed in red. This, it would seem, would be the central part of Jesus’ teaching and, thus, his church. I’ll stay away from the entire yes-he-said-it-no-he-didn’t-history-says-doesn’t-say-whatever mud pit. I don’t really connect with a lot of the early church interpretation scholarship, probably because I know so little about it. I largely put the history on the back burner as I look for divine inspiration, and consider the words themselves. They make sense to me. They speak to me. I hope they speak to you. But if they don’t, there’s not a great deal I can do about it, we all have to row our own boats.

Another little detour – to the half a dozen people who get annoyed at the “ascribed” thing: Get as annoyed as you want, I can live with it. The one thing I’m certain of is that Jesus never said “No man comes to the father except by me,” or any of the other things ascribed to him in those words in the English language. Nor in the language of 17th century England (the King James version). Nor in Latin (e.g., the Vulgate). And I doubt if he said these things in Greek, although I could be wrong. Assuming for the moment that he expressed the quoted thoughts, it was likely in Aramaic. I have no clue what Aramaic syntax is like, but I doubt if it is a word-for-word translation. And so, back I go to reading the words in the only language I really know and listening for their inherent Truth to me.

I am inclined to doubt that my prayers induce the Lord to buy me things, give me great (and probably undeserved) health or lead him to smite my enemies. (There, I remember the “weather prayer” recited by George C. Scott in the movie Patton.) Usually, the best I hope for is understanding or, failing that, patience and acceptance. I find that placing a purchase order with God or giving him a to-do list is pretty cheeky. Sorry, Joel Oesteen, I won’t be there next Sunday or the Sunday after that or the Sunday after that.

Song lyrics range from the deeply meaningful to the idiotic. Much of the music of my youth, around 1970, contains lyrics which are excellent poetry. Simon & Garfunkel (and others who wrote the songs they performed) were pretty good poets. Ditto James Taylor. Ditto Carly Simon on a good day. Okay, a really good day. Some of this poetry set to music conjures up images and, as importantly to me, feelings of well-being or energy or excitement.

A lot of the old hymns have good poetry although sometimes gets lost in period vernacular or obscure references. “Amazing Grace” is a widely sung hymn particularly favored by folk bands and by police and fire department funeral bagpipers. So the lines are quite familiar:

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
was blind, but now I see.

Putting it in some historical context helps out a lot. That central lyric, “saved a wretch like me” is the key to the hymn. That line was written by the captain of a slave ship who reformed and repented of the terrible things he had done – – thus, his gratitude and even surprise that God saved “a wretch like me.” One of my favorite hymns, “It Is Well With My Soul” also becomes a little clearer in context. It was written by Horatio Spafford, a lawyer in Chicago at the time of the great Chicago fire. His family escaped harm in the fire but his extensive property was largely destroyed. He sent his family on a trip to Europe while he took care of his business affairs. Their ship sank in mid-ocean, killing all aboard. He took another ship to Europe and when the captain of that vessel informed him that they were passing the spot where his family perished, he retired to his cabin to pen words which I find beautiful and thoroughly Christian, that even when things are extremely bad, nevertheless I am given peace and “It is well with my soul.”

Other lyrics speak to me at times, both within and without a religious context, although with often with a spiritual one. Right now I am thinking of “My Home Among the Hills,” which is a lyrical journey about the hills of West Virginia:

"There autumn hills sides are bright with scarlet leaves,
and in the spring, the robins sing,
and apple blossoms whisper in the breeze,”
and so forth.

Certainly, that lyric and a beautiful yet hard-to-sing melody moves me.

But the music itself also creates a mood, creates an emotional or even physical reaction, a “filling of the Spirit” or a spell of just feeling good. You don’t have to have good lyrics nor even lyrics which make sense. There is the old traditional spiritual “Kum-bay-yah,” now heard more as a punchline to jokes than as a song. For every stanza, you get five syllables (e.g., “someone’s singing, Lord”) and a lot of the nonsense words “Kum-bay-yah.” Once I heard that it that was some sort of diminutive of “come by here,” but when you sing the song it’s just a repetitive chant. Babble-babble, chant-chant, feel good. Other lyrics may be utter nonsense, may fit the music and yet be utter nonsense which means nothing:

“One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble,”

or

“Yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip,
moo-moo-moo-moo-moo-moo-moo-moo,
get a job.”

The ballad form can be pure but even there we may indulge in some lyrical obscurity. The “Via Dolorosa,” popularized by modern day Christian artist Sandi Patty is an information-light story of Christ’s journey to the Place of Skulls. (Nickel knowledge: Actually, it was the town dump.) I think it was written in English, but part of it is been transliterated to be sung in Spanish. Well, if you want to add a little bit of the exotic to a song, throw in some language that your listeners don’t speak.

When I start to talk about the music itself, I’m going way out on a limb, because I really don’t know a hell of a lot about music. I confess that I have the rich envy of a person with a merely-adequate voice for those with true musical gifts. Some months ago, I had a really fascinating conversation with the organist of our church, a professional musician, about how good “elite” (my word, not his) musicians really have to be. And there is a gulf between the willing singing parishioner and the true musician that I, for one, will not bridge.

The problem I encounter with praise music in church is not so much the lyrics, because I don’t listen to the lyrics as closely as I do the ballads in using my youth. For one thing, I have much less exposure to each bit of praise music. Where I encounter problems is that the music has been written by really talented musicians to match their really high-level abilities. On the rare occasions that the music is printed, I have a really tough time following it. And even if I can follow it, the darn stuff is hard to sing without a really good voice. One of the really pretty pieces of modern Christian music I enjoy is an untitled hymn sung by Chris Rice commonly known as “Come to Jesus.” The lyrics are beautiful, the music is beautiful and it all speaks to me. And if I could put the music into a key that straddles my limited range, I might be able to sing it halfway decently, but only if I could do away with the key changes that confuse the hell out of me. And there, I think, is something that has led to the acceptance of some of the old hymns, fairly average voices can (mostly) sing along.

On the other hand, my brother Dave’s dad’s funeral a couple of weeks ago was at a Methodist church. Oh, I do find that modern Methodism must be theologically sound. I conclude that because the hymnal did not burn my fingers when I opened it. God talks to me that way, you know. But when they did “Amazing Grace,” I found that whoever arranged the song for the Methodists wrote a bass part that I could not have followed with a compass and a troop of Boy Scouts.

Oh, well – I’ praise God my way anyway and just try to get by.

And so, I’m neither I neither strongly support Parson Jim and everything he says nor strongly dissent. I find his opinions thought-provoking. In matters of faith, I cannot ask for any more than that.

Thank you, Jim.

Pippa passes.
R

Open Carry of Handguns: Just Dumb?

2011-07-09T20:35:00.003-04:00

We visit again that peculiarly American issue, the possession and use of firearms.

Today, the focus is upon “open carry,” the practice of “strapping on a hog leg” (to use the parlance of the nonexistent old West) or putting a hand gun in a holster and wearing it when you go about your daily business in public.

Like all formulaic essays, let me begin this one with a very dear thesis statement: Strapping on a hog leg and walking down the street is a really, really bad idea.

“Walking down the street” – that’s important. In rural areas, in the woods, I still regard it wise and perfectly normal to carry firearms.

What prompts today’s pique is news of a “civil rights” lawsuit filed in the Northern District (Federal) Court in West Virginia. A lawyer and his father went into the local Kentucky Fried Chicken for a meal and the lawyer was toting a holstered pistol. (This gentleman is not listed in the bar in West Virginia, but is a trial lawyer practicing elsewhere.) Presumably, someone in the restaurant took note of this singular occurrence and, after a Wheeling (WV) police officer appeared. The officer requested identification from the gun-toting fellow, took the weapon from him and ran the serial numbers through his dispatcher. The gun-toting lawyer says that he was de facto detained and at least insofar as he wanted his pistol back, that’s pretty obviously true.

After finding that the weapon’s history was “clean,” the officer offered the weapon back to its owner. According to the press report, the owner demanded that the police officer return it the way he got it, and that the police officer personally replace the firearm into the owner’s holster. (A gun owner also complains that the police officer did not handle the weapon skillfully, including hanging up a round when he cleared it.) As a result of this event, the owner has filed suit in federal District Court where he seeks money damages for his suffering (Inconvenience? Annoyance? Persnicketiness?), an order that the police be given mandatory training on how to interact with (ignore?) persons lawfully carrying firearms, and that he’d be awarded his attorneys fees, courtesy of the taxpayers of West Virginia.

Chief Robert Matheny of Wheeling (a decent fellow and a good lawman) has responded to the publicity sharply. He says that until some Court orders otherwise, his officers are still going to stop people openly carrying firearms to make an inquiry about their business. The Chief terms the act of carrying a hog leg “unnatural and uncommon.”

Why do people carry firearms? “Because I can” certainly is one answer commonly heard, which is a variation on “Mind your own damn business.”

The law regarding firearms is peculiarly American. It is based first on the Second Amendment:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The United States Supreme Court was long loathe to touch Second Amendment issues. Over the years, regulations and limitations increased steadily, although nowhere nearly to the extent sought by people who oppose firearms in civilian hands. Under current law, occasional private sales between individuals are unregulated. Commercial sales may only be done by persons who have a Federal Firearms License, which places upon dealers strict record-keeping requirements and penalties for selling firearms other than provided by law. A buyer from a dealer must present identification and must be cleared in a telephone background check. Convicted felons, those convicted of domestic violence offenses, persons with dishonorable military discharges, persons addicted to drugs or alcohol, and persons adjudged mentally incompetent may not possess a firearm. Some states impose a waiting period between beginning to purchase a firearm and acquiring it and others fiddle with regulations which approach the level of out and out bans. The United States Supreme Court barred the District of Columbia from enforcing a complete gun ban in the Heller decision in 2008, and in the 2010 case McDonald vs. City of Chicago, the United States Supreme Court declared that the Second Amendment creates a personal right which is extended to all state action through the 14th amendment. Thus, the right to possess a firearm joins free speech, free exercise of religion, free assembly and so forth as individual rights. (I am aware of the interesting discussion under the 9th amendment that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are not exclusive but set out rather by way of limitation on the power of government.) There will be more to come from the federal courts as they build on the McDonald decision and respond to the ways that state and local governments are now regulating firearms. For example, the City of Chicago has placed such extreme limitations on firearms ownership that we must wonder if it is equivalent to another ban.

In West Virginia, firearms have both constitutional protection and traditional respect. The West Virginia Constitution provides:

A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and state, and for lawful hunting and recreational use.

Under legislation in West Virginia, one may carry a firearm openly and if one meets a training requirement, the Sheriff of each county will issue a permit to carry a concealed pistol.

The status of firearms ownership is a tradition extremely well-established in West Virginia. There is a “frontier tradition” which is ever present. The State seal depicts a farmer with his ax and miner with his pick and before them are crossed long rifles upon which lays a Phrygian cap. West Virginia is still reasonably wooded, and hunting and other shooting sports are popular. And the concept of personal armaments for personal defense is well ingrained.

But carrying openly? Bad, bad idea.

Let’s face it, strapping on the old hog leg is indeed “unnatural and uncommon,” and just inherently suspicious. We do not need to put our common sense on hold here. When one openly displays a weapon, one is doing the equivalent of being that guy going to the gym wearing a “muscle shirt,” which gives everybody the message, “I’m a tough, baaaaad man.”

Proponents say, correctly, that open carry is lawful in West Virginia. They add that the rest of us had better just get used to it. Does that mean we have to park our brains at the door when we go into a restaurant? How about when dirtbags carry openly rather than (illegally) concealed? This is not to say that only the polo shirt crowd can be trusted with a firearm. For that matter, some of the polo shirt crowd look quite rustic on the weekends. There are simply people who will be carrying firearms for criminal acts. Moreover, the ones who are intelligent and continue to do so the way they always have, in a concealed manner.

My biggest problem with open carry is that it is ineffective. Look at the purposes of going armed as set out in West Virginia Constitution. We use firearms for hunting, for sport. There is a small community of ultra-high precision shooters for whom long-range accuracy is a self sustaining, no-other-purpose passion. Fine with me. By the way, I’m not one of them, I must confess my own marksmanship is fairly average on a good day.

For all of the sporting uses, when one talks about handguns, one is talking about a weapon intended primarily for use against people. And, frankly, some gun proponents shy away from talking about the primary anti-personnel purpose of a pistol, and that is so patently obvious it weakens their otherwise justified position.

Carrying a firearm openly does not promote personal protection. The open-carrier says to the threatening world, “Shoot me first, take me out of the fight.” Perhaps carrying a concealed weapon makes for an “unfair fight,” but if one is in a fight which is just, why in the hell would one want it to be fair? There is, after all, darn little future in a fair fight.

So what’s the other side of the coin? What’s a good reason to carry openly? Well, by God, it’s my constitutional right. Perhaps, proponents would urge that the conversation ends there. But in any thinking, reasoning and rational society, our discussions and our individual decisions should be reasoned rather than knee-jerk. Simply “it’s my right!,” carries with it a refreshing and manic defiance, the “I am a free man!” approach. (Here, I picture the open opening sequence of the 1960s cult television series The Prisoner. Also, I must note that the defiance literature and tradition seems predominantly male in American culture. Ladies, please pardon me if I follow that convention for a bit.)

Another point supporting the idea of an act of defiance is that we are “raising awareness” of the right openly carry a firearm. This argument is the old paper tiger. Do we really need to raise awareness of weapons? Hardly. The awareness we may indeed want to raise is that the criminal element cannot tell who are the “unwise targets,” who have the capacity for violence which will come as an unpleasant surprise. Defiance to “raise awareness” simply prompts counter defiance, and the discussion degenerates to a “Oh, yeah?” “Yeah!” quality which virtually guarantees that we’re not going to come to synthesis or resolution or, God help us, synergy.

In the Wheeling case, I am willing to criticize the police in one respect. I think it was a significant mistake to cater to the gun owner’s demand to put the weapon back in the holster. In doing so, the police catered to the gun owner’s petulant control game and succumbed to a bit role in the owner’s ridiculous Kabuki theater. “Here is your firearm, do you want it back?” And if the owner didn’t want it back from the officer’s hands, screw it, he wanted to make a point more than he wanted his property.

In a broad sense, we have seen political changes and policy changes. One challenge is channeling change in a way that we adapt to needs without sacrificing principles. The siren call of extremism in the firearms debate beckons us to abandon reason. Responsible policy development does not happen on the streets or in parades. Not even on the front pages of newspapers or in lawsuits. Changing growth happens in the back rooms. And in the front rooms, and the hallways, and wherever people – not “activists” – gather together and abide by the dictates of the Book of Isaiah: Come now, let us reason together.

Honest and reasoned discussion does not get the headlines. But I’ll take it as the method of responsible citizenship every time.

Note reference the old West: I was reading an interesting notion by Historian David McCullough in Mornings on Horseback, a biography of the early life of Theodore Roosevelt. He credits the writings of Eastern Ivy educated elite with magnifying the small segment of Western society from the west central and southwestern United States to full-blown myth status. He singles out The Virginian, by Owen Wister, and the accounts of ranch life, by Theodore Roosevelt.

R

The Passing of a Man's Man

2011-07-01T12:46:00.001-04:00

This morning, Donald Born of Pleasant Valley was called Home. Mr. Born (we always called him that) was 83.

Mr. Born was our Brother, Judge David Born’s Dad, as well as Dad to my friends Don Born and Doug Born. Dave’s wife Beverly and Don’s wife Liz were loving daughters to Mr. Born, and cared for him lovingly in his last illness.

Mr. Born was an engineer; an outdoorsman; a Navy veteran; a man of God and of Family. He worked hard all his life and kept working hard well into retirement. Up until a couple of years ago, he and his buddy still went into the national forest to do volunteer trail maintenance.

We know of no greater appellation: There was a Man’s Man.

R

F Bombs & Butterflies: Go The F**k To Sleep Collides with Good Sense

2011-06-21T22:19:00.002-04:00

There is a new proto-juvenile book just published, Go The F**k To Sleep, written by Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Ricardo Cortés. Oh, that’s the way it is billed, with all of the asterisks intact. That is the way we show “concealed profanity,” or for that matter, any of the concealed nasty words (the N-word, the B-word, and for all I know the Ψ-word.)

And no, at this point, I will not fling out some “forbidden words” to demonstrate my already well-documented fluency in profanity and demonstrate how I can flout convention and decency with the very best of them. Right at the moment, those simply do not belong in this context. Maybe later.

I have some heartburn about Go The F**k to Sleep. My reservations cover a couple of major areas, proliferation and context. “Nasty words” are used more and more (proliferation) and for more and more reasons and in more and more places (expanding context). The book itself is indeed cute and funny. (Mind you, at $14.95 for 32 pages, it is rather overpriced.) Mansbach touches a humorous if sensitive nerve as he expresses the frustration of parents of little children as they do little-child-frustrating things like refuse to go to sleep and eternally bug you late into the night.

But there are simply some places we don’t want to go because it is unwise to do so. Sometimes there are places we don’t want to go in thought or verbally, not because it’s “bad” or “immoral,” but because it is simply unwise and somehow damages us and our surroundings. This is not a legal concept, this is a responsible social and moral concept. The First Amendment protects speech and speech-like symbolic action. Do you want to burn a flag? Okay, go right ahead, you can do so, that’s the law. Now people who do burn flags are flaming assholes, but they are exercising their First Amendment constitutional right to that speech. [There is an example of “nasty words” used in what I believe to be the proper context. Obviously, that is a metaphor. Those who burn flags may have about them the anatomical feature “anus,” but they are not in the literal sense that anatomical feature. Rather, the use of the word denotes disgust and association with foul things. In other words, they are assholes.]

We would never tell a little child “go the f**k to sleep,” would we? Now here is some news from my world, from the world of the courts of our land. Very sadly, some children – many children – are subject to just that and much more. If you shop at Walmart, it’s difficult to fill up your cart without observing some examples of really miserable parenting. You are also apt on occasion to see just plain piss-poor and abusive parenting. [Again, the excretory reference is a metaphor, although since it is urological and not scatological, it denotes some lesser degree of disgust.] It’s rather sad that some of these people are so nasty that many people hesitate to intervene.

Sometimes the reviews on Amazon can be quite humorous. To Go The F**k To Sleep, there are couple of the ilk “I read this book to my daughter and it really scared her” variety. That concept is funny because it’s so outrageously stupid. And yet, there are parents who absolutely don’t know any better. For the responsible parent, you just know that there are some lines you don’t cross. Now this doesn’t disturb me in such a way to call to “ban the book,” but to suggest that we should be thinking about making affirmative decisions about what is and what is not in good and bad taste. And, yes, “taste” is a valid consideration for taking or refraining from taking action. Life is not a Jackass movie. (Yes, I know that one of the stars of the movies recently died. That is unfortunate. That should not affect our qualitative opinions of the so-called artistic work.)

Each of our lives is a wall made up of lots and lots and lots of bricks. Everybody has some bad bricks, some weak bricks, some bricks which just don’t match and which are covered with distasteful graffiti. I sure do. Indeed, we’re suspicious of somebody whose wall is just too perfect to straight and too uniform, the people who have made no missteps and who have not endured the bitter which comes with the sweet. But when you get too many bad bricks, your wall is weak, or it just plain falls down.

Crossing the line, mixing F-bombs and our babies, mixing the profane with the beloved, weakens you. And so this is not some magnificent, stirring call to save society by this one thing of watching our language. I’m just suggesting we use better bricks.

I have a couple more comments that may be relevant. If you watch the If you watch the Naudet video of the first airliner hitting the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, you will see stress in action and a touch of profanity. Filmmakers were with New York fire crews making a documentary when they heard the plane fly over at low altitude. The camera caught the plane hitting the tower, and one of the firefighters immediately exclaimed “Holy shit!” Then that is repeated. [See note below to those who think that the fire department was in on the attack, that the building was stuffed with "thermite" and so forth.] Here was an instance where those firefighters knew in the space of less than 5 seconds that they were right there at “The Big One,” the single incident which would largely define their entire careers. They had fire on about the 80th floor of a very tall building, obvious major loss of life already, and even without knowing that the buildings were going to come down, they were at the cusp of a nightmare. The reaction? “Holy shit!” Under the circumstances, that was pretty weak tea. They didn’t even need to “drop an F bomb.”

Those who know me also know that my own “command” of “colorful language” is at times prodigious. It’s still a bad idea. Here at No. 3 Equity Court, we’ve started a little reminder. On the desks are cups with the legend “Temperate Language Encouragement Depository,” into which goes a nickel for the animal shelter every time profanity is used. I know that sounds absurdly simple and even quite juvenile but, indeed, it is had a salutatory effect on the tenor of the verbal communications ‘round No. 3.

Old dogs and new tricks? Or good sense for a change?

[Note to the 9-11 conspiracy theorists: Do you think that the Fire Department was in on it because of the guys checking a possible gas leak were not wearing bunker gear [Coats and helmets and so forth)? Do you think that the buildings were stuffed with “thermite” and that’s what brought them down? Okay, a final question: Do you know the difference between ignorant and stupid? Ignorant means you’ve never heard good sense. Stupid means you’ve heard but you don’t have the capacity to process the information. Those of you who believe in the 9-11 conspiracies are suffering from malignant, refractory, can't-pour-piss-out-of-a-boot-with-the-instructions-written-on-the-sole stupidity. Your ideas defy physics, metallurgy, fire science, and reason. Those few pathetic nitwits who have military titles or degree letters before or after their names are simply people suffering from malignant and refractory stupidity who have titles or letters. The First Amendment protects their goofy beliefs. They are still goofy. Please do me a favor and Shut The F**k Up.]

R

New York After Plaxico Burress - No Guns, No Guts, No Common Sense

2011-06-15T21:17:00.003-04:00

A minor news story this week concerns Plaxico Burress, a top rank NFL receiver. He played for a while with the Steelers and ended up with the New York Giants. He was released from a New York prison this week after serving 20 months. His crime? Possession of an unregistered pistol. Burress intends to return to the NFL. He is now on the speaking circuit on behalf of the Brady campaign and other anti-gun groups.

His “offense” occurred in the fall of 2008. Burress was at a nightclub in New York. He had concealed in his waistband a semiautomatic pistol, a Glock .40 caliber. Witnesses saw Burress “fiddling” in his waistband, they heard a “pop,” and Burress fell to the floor exclaiming “take me to the hospital.” He had shot himself accidentally in the leg.

The Glock is a high-end Austrian pistol used by a lot of law enforcement agencies. They are relatively light because the parts not exposed to high friction/high temperatures are made from a polymer. They are easy to disassemble for cleaning and lubrication. Semiautomatic pistols have “safeties,” devices which prevent them from firing unless one intentionally pulls the trigger. Most use some sort of lever manipulated with the thumb. Glocks use a safety within the trigger mechanism. A friend who is a Glock “armorer” (meaning he has graduated from the manufacturer’s course) swears that the Glock safety mechanism is superior to the more common lever-type safety. He deems it safe to have a round chambered, that is, in the barrel ready to fire. Personally, I have some reservations about that, but that is my civilian viewpoint and the entire discussion is a bit esoteric. In any event, there has been no suggestion that Burress’s weapon is misfired, only that his “fiddling” caused an accidental discharge.

Let me give you the West Virginia reaction to the event itself. (I call this the West Virginia reaction because this is an area where many people are familiar with firearms.) Taking a firearm into a bar is dumb. I do not know if Burress was drinking. I certainly hope not. Drinking while armed is stunningly stupid. In any event, thank God his “fiddling” resulted in him shooting only himself and not someone else. Dumbass, if you are carrying at chainsaw, wouldn’t you have the common sense to be more careful?

When this occurred, Mayor Michael Bloomberg went all Neanderthal. He was all over the hospital for not reporting a gunshot wound timely. He also ranted at the New York Giants organization for not reporting this criminal activity of their own player/employee. He vowed that Burress would be prosecuted “to the fullest extent.”

Indeed, Burress was prosecuted. He entered a plea of guilty to possession of and unregistered pistol. So why did someone who had not been in serious trouble before end up in prison and out of work for 20 months? Answer: In New York, the prison term for possession of an unregistered pistol is mandatory. A judge does not have the discretion to place such a defendant on probation even if he or she wants to.

New York uses a sentencing chart which determines sentencing ranges based on the degree of the offense committed in the defendant’s criminal records. There are lots of examples of people doing pretty bad things and getting fairly easy sentences. (These are examples. To be fair, there are also examples of long sentences. Extremists on the left and right tend to cite examples which make their point and suggest that nothing but the best or worst, depending on their viewpoint, ever happens.)

Just a sampling:

Bath, NY, 27 March 2011 - A burglar and forger sentenced to 2-1/2 to five years. He actually broke into a business and stole things.

Pomona, NY, 30 March 2011 - A burglar sentenced to 3 to 6 years for 4 counts of burglary

New York/Brooklyn, November 2010 - a youth court counselor found guilty at trial of two sexual assaults of teen age girls and ten counts of sexual abuse of the teens, sentence to 4 years.

20 April 2011 - One year for a man originally charged with attempted murder for holding a knife to a former girlfriend’s throat, telling her “If I can’t get you, then no man can’t,” then cutting her face before a Good Samaritan intervened.

Why does New York will provide for such severe sentences for people possessing a firearm (a personal Constitutional right affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in the recent case of McDonald versus City of Chicago)? Obviously, the state wants to discourage that conduct.

Well, there’s lots of conduct I would like to discourage. Take drug dealing and commercial activity in aid of drug dealing. Right down the street is a commercial establishment which was raided three or four years ago for selling drug paraphernalia (“glass tobacco pipes,” ho ho) and which is now selling, guess what, the same thing. A prosecution and fine didn’t seem to change their behavior. Okay, how about jailing some people, such as the people who decided to sell and make money off of that shit? I don’t have a lot of problem with that because they’re not just hurting themselves. In fact, that trade helps them and hurts others. Intentional, malicious libels – nobody goes to jail for that these days. And yet the harm one can do with the written word is considerable. Child neglect, that’s behavior I’d like to see more severely discouraged. Maybe a stay at the Crossbar Hotel will wake up Mommy and Daddy Dumbass. Intentionally dumping harmful chemicals – that causes harm to people, but when’s the last time you heard of anything other than a fine for that? Even for direct person-on-person crimes, there is a disturbing lack of energetic discouragement of conduct.

Mayor Bloomberg thinks that the citizens can rest well by trusting the police to come very quickly. Of course, he doesn’t have to: As mayor, he has armed guards with him all the time. As an extremely rich man, he has had armed guards with him all the time for a very long time. He does not and has not had to depend on the time it takes for police officers to respond. Do as I say, not as I do. I don’t need to dirty my hands with evil guns, my guys take care of that for me.

Mind you, Plaxico Burress should not be carrying a firearm. (And now that he has a felony record, he cannot, ever again.) He has demonstrated that he is totally inept at it, perhaps as inept as I would be trying to play receiver for an NFL team. But what he did was stupid, not inherently bad, or, to use the Latin, malum prohibitum rather than malum in se.

You see, guns are indeed dangerous. Handling them requires extraordinary care. It requires training, concentration and alertness. But guns are not unique in that respect. A whole lot more people are killed and injured with automobiles than with firearms. Of course, there are a whole lot more automobiles and they are used infinitely more. But because they are so widely and routinely used, the users are trained and as youth look forward to becoming trained in the safe and effective use of automobiles. If you’re driving down a two-lane road in traffic, all it takes is a little flick of the wrist of any of the drivers coming at you to cause a fatality or serious injury. And yet, likely you are not quaking in fear every time you get on the road because you know people are trained to handle automobiles. Chainsaws, those are dangerous and not very common. That’s why every fourth person who picks one up without knowing what they’re doing ends up in the emergency room. Have you ever been around people who handle explosives? One mistake can kill many people, and yet they are not sweating, nervous and jittery. That’s because they know what they were taught, they’re paying attention, and they’re being careful. Hell, for that matter Boy Scouts are trained to be careful with their knives.

Firearms are particularized tools called weapons. They have a purpose. That purpose is not pleasant to contemplate and yet others have the power to impose the necessity of using them upon you.

You see, the implement is not the evil. The use of the implement, that is the evil. Criminality is not based on the arms. Criminality is based on someone’s intent to harm others secondary to passion or personal gain. Eliminate the arms and you deprive the criminal of some effective tools, but you did not rid the criminal of the evil intent.

I really wanted to tell a secret here. I wanted to be the first one to let you know. But last night, the Wisconsin State Senate passed a concealed carry permit bill. Wisconsin State Sen. Dan Kapanke stole my secret and was quoted giving my secret out to the public on Reuters: “We already have concealed carry. Those bent on criminal activity have been doing this for a long, long time.”

I used to regret never having been to New York. Well, now this old country boy has no regrets about it all.

Keep your powder dry.

R

Demonic ..., by Ann Coulter - Half Right, Half Wit

2011-06-12T17:34:00.003-04:00

A book review:
Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America, by Ann Coulter (Crown Forum, 2011)

Coulter’s two-part thesis: (1) Liberals (read “Democrats”) stir up unthinking mobs deliberately, tell lies to do so, and encourage the mobs to do violent and immoral acts. (2) Conservatives do not stir up mobs because they are too honest and too moral to do so.

Over 300+ pages, Coulter assails us with strange arguments and odd facts. My own threshold question is whether Coulter really knows how unsupported and silly her ideological propositions are. Mind you, Coulter is a brilliant person. She graduated near the top of her class from the University of Michigan Law School. She clerked at the Federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. Dummies don’t get to do that. Her schedule and, for that matter, her apparent robust health bespeak great personal discipline. Does she just wear ideological blinders? Is she intellectually sloppy? Or is she pandering to an already highly politicized body of readers, feeding them what they want to hear and will accept without question?

Oh, part of Coulter’s thesis is correct. Liberals do indeed use “the mob” and mob psychology to generate support, ultimately in the form of votes. And money, don’t forget money. So do conservatives. And advertisers. And religions of all stripes. Damn near anyone who knows The Truth is willing to abandon the conversational voice and go straight to the emotional ramjet.

I wonder - did Coulter watch a particularly disturbing movie about the French Revolution as a child? She uses a lengthy and graphic (and accurate) description of the viciousness of the French Revolution to support her belief that Liberals were behind the French and Liberals want to do the same thing today. She wants to make a cosmic connection between Marie Antoinette and Sarah Palin, even though their outcomes have been rather different. Coulter ignores little facts: Modern “liberalism” did not exist in the 18th century; the regimes which use such extremes of violence these days really have nothing to do with modern concepts of either Liberalism or Conservatism. They’re just nasty-ass people.

Coulter throws in attacks on the raging, bad-hair stumblebum of the Democrats, Al Sharpton, as a principal instigator of the mob. Good Lord, I hope that people aren’t stupid enough to listen to Al Sharpton these days. (Or Ann Coulter. Or ... oh, hell, it’s quite a list.) Coulter dwells on the mishandling of the reopening of the Central Park Rape case as further “proof” of the Liberal mob conspiracy. Makes no sense to you? Now you are getting her real message.

Some facts get a workout. I didn’t know that the Burr-Hamilton duel had a Conservative-Liberal cast applicable to today, but there you have it. Oh, and Coulter asserts that Hamilton threw the duel on moral grounds. What probably happened is far more complicated, buried in the arcana of Code Duello and the fact that Hamilton’s son had been killed in a duel. But something of the “He threw the duel and the bastard killed him”-variety is a much more exciting read. (Ironically, Coulter does a stirring description of Paul Revere’s ride, unlike her amiga simpática Palin. Could her true calling be as an historian?)

And then there are a couple of head-scratching-you-gotta-be-shitting-me places. Per Coulter, 40,000 black men rape white women every year, and less than 10 white men rape black women. This seems unlikely in a population of 300 million but, indeed, some years’ FBI statistics support that. On the other hand, the statistics are so far all-over-the-map, they are simply lame if one has studied, say, arithmetic. In 2002, white-on-black rape happened 8,400 times, according to the FBI; in 2003, none. Maybe, just maybe, the figures are suspect. If the point were that there’s lots more black-on-white rape reported, that’s accurate. It’s just not as shocking and doesn’t - dare we suggest - motivate the mob nearly as well. And the website of James Von Brunn, the National Holocaust Museum shooter, was sold to AOL for $315 million. No kidding? Come on, maybe that’s sloppy editing and she really meant $315 thousand? But AOL can’t be that dumb, either. Pull the other one.

My favorite minor silly conclusion was that Jimmy Carter’s abandonment of the Shah of Iran “gave rise to the global Islamofascist movement we’re still dealing with today.” Right, had Carter shown some cojones, the Islamic nutjobs would have gone right home. (By the way, “fascist” doesn’t accurately describe Islamic governments, except insofar as it’s used these days like “Nazi,” a pejorative meaning really bad people.)

Coulter concludes, “Why Would Anyone Be a Liberal?” She makes a strange brew of whining “Please Like Me” milquetoasts who “admire marauding criminals,” balancing them against the “manly” conservative ethic. Huh? Why would anybody be Coulter's cartoon-anything?

Come on, time for Dr. Reality: In a society of one-man-one-vote, everybody who wants/needs the votes will turn to inciting “the mob,” whoever they think the mob may be. That applies to EVERYONE. Think the Tea Party - a self-righteous mob. AARP - Silver haired mobsters. Pro-Choice - mobs. Pro-Life - mobs. Does this mean that they are wrong? No, has nothing to do with right/wrong. Does it mean that they are insincere? Quite the contrary - The True Believers think it’s moral and justified and necessary to arouse the Mob. (Note: I don’t include the ACLU - they do such strange shit that they piss everybody off.)

Coulter decries the Liberals’ “Toxic Rhetoric.” Her latest book is toxic rhetoric to goad her own version of the mob. It’s easy to stir things up. It’s DAMN hard to reason things out.

R

The Chinese are Killing Our Economy, and It's Our Fault

2011-06-07T19:01:00.003-04:00

I don’t like it anymore than you do. But the fact is, that so-called backward bunch of peasants in China are kicking our economic asses. While we sit back and talk about the superiority and the glory of the Land of Liberty, the Land of Regimented workers is cleaning our collective economic clock.

I am not a fan of China. It is a land of repression, inhumanity and a 1984 group think. China has built itself with slave labor and intellectual rigidity. Hooray for us – they’re still kicking our asses.

American factory worker makes $12 - 20 per hour, with at least another $3 - 5 dollars going to generally accepted minimal benefits such as health insurance and something for a retirement. Add to that labor cost the expenses of maintaining a safe workplace. Some of those are eminently reasonable, but they are still costly. The Chinese factory worker makes the equivalent of $2 per hour. There is a basic social system which provides medical care and old-age pensions to maintain retired Chinese workers at the low standard of living they enjoy during their working lives. (The Chinese worker’s $2 has greater purchasing power in China than it would in the U.S., but to a U.S. manufacturer or buyer, it’s still $2.) This assumes, of course, that they get to retirement age - The Chinese are fairly blase about worker safety.

As a result partially of the cheap labor, in-country materials cost in China is also low. Essentially identical fabrics cost American manufacturers nearly twice what they cost the Chinese. Similar cost savings run across the board: Steel, forest products, plastics and other raw materials. Chinese energy costs are minimal, again because of cheap labor and cheap materials, together with a willingness to burn coal without remediating significantly the release of pollutants.

So, China produces goods so cheaply that China can afford to load everything onto container ships to sell in the United States, still far cheaper than the identical items which were produced here. It torques me. For instance, I will no longer purchase from my former favorite manufacturer of fine knives, Buck Knives. They took their fine Idaho factory and off-shored their production to The Land of Green Ginger.

So significant is the advantage China (and, for that matter, the rest of Asia) has in manufacturing is that they even screwed the Mexicans, who a few years earlier had screwed the United States out of manufacturing jobs with low-cost Mexican labor.

Every politician promises to revamp American manufacturing and create jobs, jobs, jobs, all without any increase in taxes. Bullshit. It’s just bullshit. When the jobs left, the infrastructure left. Some American workers were given the demeaning task of dismantling their own factories to send manufacturing machinery overseas. (You can find an interesting discussion of the permanence of factory job losses in The Day After the Dollar Collapses, by Damon Vickers.)

And every politician has an easy answer. Now, the easy answers vary. Dismantle the unions. Provide greater tax incentives to corporations. Abolish the EPA or OSHA or even the DAR. Raise tariffs. With respect to tariffs, that is one of the most commonly misunderstood “just one thing will fix it” hobby horses. Raised tariffs raise prices on imported goods which, presumably, make domestic goods more available. Did you hear the keywords? “Raise prices.” Tariffs are not paid by foreigners. Tariffs are paid by domestic consumers - us.

We talk about United States becoming a service economy, but I don’t think we understand how extreme that is. As a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), the industrial sector is 22% of the American economy and the service sector 76%. By comparison, the Chinese industrial sector is 47% of its GDP and service sector only 43%.

Another player to consider is India which has been a 28% industrial sector and a 55% service sector. However, remember the off-shoring of service jobs? The last time you called customer service for just about anything, where do you think you were calling? India is the hot call center site these days, so India’s service sector is soaking up a lot of our money serving us.

Attitude:

20 years ago, West Virginia’s junior senator, Joe Manchin, handed out a whole bunch of lapel pans – I still have mine. It consists of the word “ATTITUDE” in block letters. If you can think of a better one word recipe for progress and success, I’d like to hear it. It’s easy to poo-poo those who a call for a change in attitude by asking for specifics, specifics. That is even valid. But the truth is, we pretty well know what constitutes a good attitude, and know that it goes a very long way in progress, whether it be national or personal. Part of a good attitude is a respectful attitude. Consider the comments from the China Daily News (US edition) this week about a student putting himself through school as a cafeteria worker:

“Unlike some rich young men who attract attention online by showing off their families’ wealth, Chen is widely praised by the netizens for his struggle. People know that he is hard-working, committed and dedicated, traits which are becoming increasingly scarce in society. Also, diligence and optimism among youth are not easily found in society today.

“As a poor young man in a society with a wide wealth gap, Chen has to put in a lot more effort than others to achieve success. That compels him to struggle with more firmness and confidence. It is this spirit that has enabled him to support himself to acquire higher education.

* * *

“We cannot change our family backgrounds but we can change our fate through hard work. Chen has won for himself dignity and hope and reminds us that labor in all its forms deserves our utmost respect.”

A respect for education matches a respect for work. That backward land of peasants, China, is attaining a literacy rate (95 to 96%) comparable with that of the United States (97 to 98%). (The United States is still about 50th among the nations of the world, nations as to literacy rate.) (By contrast, India has about 74% literacy rate.)

If I had a quick fix, I’d tell you what it is. Perhaps that’s the point: While we’ve been yakking and slapping ourselves on the back about what free and superior people we are, we have been overtaken by those we have long considered simple and ignorant peasants. I am reminded of a original Star Trek episode from the 1960s where legendary trial lawyer Melvin Belli portrayed some kind of minor demi-deity. He kept repeating, “As you believe, so shall you do, as you believe, so shall you do.”

And it works both ways. If you believe in work and respect, and act on that belief, you get different results than if you believe in sitting on your ass and consuming.

That is the lesson we teach young people today, how to sit on one's ass and consume.

Eye on the ball people, eye on the ball.

R

Picayune Idiots, Delicate Birthers and How to Drop the Ball as You Whine

2011-05-30T14:20:00.003-04:00

I wonder – is acting a touch victimized good for business? And does it make extreme or improbable political views suddenly more mainstream and believable? After all, if you weren’t making a point, “they” wouldn’t be picking on you, would they?

I received today an urgent e-mail from the World Net Daily, a net publication edited by right-wing writer Joseph Farrah. The subject line of the email is “WND to take on The Hearst Corporation,” the obvious implication being that this is a terribly brave David/Goliath battle with God personally endorsing David/WND.

(I cannot help but note I have written elsewhere that the story of David and Goliath teaches lessons which should be taken, at the very least, with caution.)

The reason that WND is “taking on” Hearst Corporation is that Esquire magazine published a satirical column by Mark Warren concerning Jerome Corsi’s new book, Birther Bullshit. (Okay, okay, the actual title is Where's the Birth Certificate: The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible To Be President.) Warren purports to quote Farrah as having found out that the book was written before President Obama released the “long-form” birth certificate and that WND had ceased selling the book and was offering refunds. Warren “quotes” a source at WND saying,

"I mean, we'll do anything to hurt Obama, and erase his memory, but we don't want to look like fucking idiots, you know? Look, at the end of the day, bullshit is bullshit."

The satire was too subtle for some people and a couple of hours after the article was first published, Warren published a clarification online saying,

“for those who didn't figure it out yet, and the many on Twitter for whom it took a while: We committed satire this morning to point out the problems with selling and marketing a book that has had its core premise and reason to exist gutted by the news cycle, several weeks in advance of publication.”

I have to wonder where my own opinion that Corsi is a (literate) whack job comes into my thoughts about the satire. Nowhere, I think. I do so love satire. But make no mistake: I do think that Jerome Corsi is a (literate) whack job. He (among others) has such genuine hatred for Barack Obama that they will believe, repeat, exaggerate or concoct the most idiotic bullshit to end his presidency. (Guys, ever heard of an election?)

(This is also not to say that I’m a great fan of the current administration, Democrat though I may be. Okay, Bull-Moose/Democrat. The concept, for example, of overcoming crushing debt by spending $1 trillion of borrowed money escapes me. On my office wall, I have a $100 trillion bill. Oh, it’s Zimbabwean money, but I think Congress and the president are using American bucks.)

Satire is one of the most enjoyable humor forms, perhaps because you must work just a little to “get it.” The very best satire is that which leads people to think “Oh, no, surely that can’t be right ... can it?” Mind you, some people are little slower than others to get it. The father of modern satire, Jonathan Swift, wrote A Modest Proposal (A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick) in 1729, where he proposed that the way to solve Irish poverty and hunger was to serve up Irish children as the main course at lunch. There were (and are even today) some folks dumb enough to take that seriously. But the oooh-he-hurt-me crowd are indulging in their own political correctness when they complain about satire. “You must,” they reason, “dumb down your writing to my level or you’ll hurt my widdle feewwings.”

So, if WND goes ahead and files suit against The Hearst Corporation, the lawsuit will slog its way lackadaisically through a federal court somewhere, courtesy of your tax dollars, and some judge will, with a mixture of boredom and pique, dismiss the case after the litigants have worn themselves out with posturing and rhetoric.

There are 4 responses available to one hit with satire:

1 – Ignore it. Do you really care that the excessively dumb will sometimes believe sheer bilgewater?

2 – Laugh along with it. Demonstrate that you have a brain and a sense of humor. If you do.

3 – Write your own satire. Be sure it’s better and subtler than what “they” wrote. If you can.

4 – Complain to Daddy. “Daddy, they hurt me. Daddy, fix.”

We are in the midst of a war that civilians are largely ignoring; our energy needs, energy production and mid-term energy prospects are chaotic; we have national debt of trillions to foreign nations; and yet allegedly responsible and self-proclaiming patriotic people are screwing around with this picayune bullshit.

Eye on the ball, people, eye on the ball.

Pippa passes.

R

Governor’s Election Redux; Every Voter got 10 Votes!

2011-05-14T22:45:00.003-04:00

The latest in the stunning (or mindnumbing?) series of elections is the books.

Acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin cruised to the Democratic nomination, and first time candidate businessman Bill Maloney upset former Secretary of State Betty Ireland for the Republicans. This sets up a hammer and tongs, knives in the night general election for October 4th.

The Democrats:

Gov. Tomblin, ran a smart campaign. By far, he was the most organized and had the most effective staff. Of course, he started out with some minor “incumbent points.” It’s easier to run a good campaign when you’re out in front. It was good campaign anyway. He stayed on message and did not react in effectively when his opponents got squirrelly.

Gov. ERT’s challenge for the October general election will be to ward off a vicious Republican attack which will be both direct (his known advocacy for dog racing, gambling and so forth) and by innuendo (he’s an old-time political leader from Logan County). The Republican candidate demonstrated his willingness to go to both hammer and knife in his own primary.

Another challenge which Gov. ERT has is to unify the Democratic Party behind him, to the extent the Democratic Party ever gets genuinely unified. The also-rans cooperated on an “Anybody but Earl Ray” campaign theme the last couple of weeks of the election and although their blades were not all that sharp, nor wielded very intelligently, they still created a good bit of dissension.

At the Democrat Club in Fairmont tonight, I had a couple of interesting conversations about whether Gov. ERT will extend some sort of “amnesty” to the people who attacked him and not administer the considerable paybacks that a sitting governor can in exchange for their getting on board.

Okay, so that sounds crass. This is politics, not teatime at the Little Church in the Valley.

House Speaker Rick Thompson ran a decent campaign. As I’ve written before, I thought the guitar strumming and singing on the log cabin steps was hokey hogwash, but that wasn’t aimed at me and I think it was probably pretty effective. He garnered the endorsements of the AFL-CIO and Mineworkers unions. ERT beat him about 5:3, and so for I don’t know how effective the unions were in turning out their people. I do think that these endorsements damaged the unions, the AFL – CIO more than the Mineworkers. I’m wondering if this showing will encourage Rick Thompson to run again in the primary in May 2012.

Secretary of State Natalie Tennant ran a decent third, which is about where I expected her. She has won a statewide election but I don’t think her governor’s campaign ever really connected or ever develop a coherent theme. Perhaps the confusion and dithering from her about the special election after Senator Byrd died had something to do with that.

I’m surprised how poorly State Treasurer. John Purdue placed. Here let me note that campaigning skill and governing skill don’t have a real close relationship. Big John is my friend. He has done a good job as treasurer and has a strong record in government. He started campaigning too late, but developed a message and spun up a good campaign. He developed the “Big John” brand, and a moderately memorable country-type “Big John” song, and was hitting the opponents effectively on economic issues. And then, about a month ago, his campaign flamed out, wandered away from the brand, wandered from the message and finally went ineffectively negative against ERT. It was really a pitiful failure of campaign staff. More in a minute.

As I predicted some weeks back, State Senate acting president Jeff Kessler never got off the ground.

Characterizing one feature of the last 10 days the Democratic campaign is an exercise in restraint. A loosely formed group, “Mountaineers to Restore the American Dream” mounted a city to city caravan-campaign on the theme “Earl Ray is a SOB.” Okay, the real theme was something like “Anybody But Earl Ray,” but my title for it more accurately describes their message. How to describe this campaign? Ill-advised? Yeah, that works. Ineffective? I expect so. Nitwit! Yes, that’s the word I’m looking for, nitwit!

The group had a nifty theme song, “Goodbye Earl” which, as some of you may know, is the same title as a song from about 10 years ago by the Dixie Chicks. Well, they used the same tune, same sorts of voices and damn near the same lyrics. They claim this was “fair use” under the copyright law because it was a parody. I disagree because it was a quasi-commercial use. In any event, ERT did not rise to the bait on the copyright issue. Their song gratuitously linked the acting governor in a political conspiracy with Sen. Manchin, currently the most popular political figure in the state. No doubt, the MRAD people believed that this was true and ideologically pure, but it was so stunningly nitwit-ish that it blows right through pathos directly to bathos. Of the people who might have been receptive to a purely negative approach, how many were Manchin supporters who turned it off as soon as they heard the attack on their guy? Moreover, you can turn out a good crowd to curse Osama bin Laden. Going negative against anybody else is much more effectively done quietly. The ball to keep the eye on is what people will do in the voting booth. So a negative campaign is directed at the hearer’s votes and what they will tell their intimates and friends BEFORE the election. Not many people are willing to turn out on the street and shout about what a son of a bitch this or that candidate may be. Because a negative campaign, to be effective, is not an audience participation model, it needs to be long and steady.

The Republicans:

My prediction that Betty Ireland would not have any trouble in the primary was the most inaccurate election prediction I have made in 39 years of doing that. Part of the reason is I’m so out of touch with TV and radio media these days, but if I’m going to be predicting, I need to get the hell back in touch with them.

Businessman Bill Maloney rode the illogical yet persuasive “Fight Obama” horse and swore ideological conservative purity. Betty Ireland ran a straightforward and positive campaign with enough bones thrown to the party hard-core that I thought she would keep them in line.

Republicans are a minority party in West Virginia. Candidate Maloney will not have a problem holding nearly all votes of the Republicans who turn out in October. Here’s a secret: It has long been conventional wisdom that the Democrats rely on old-time, loyal straight ticket voters. But the Republicans are much more reliable straight ticket voters than Democrats in West Virginia. The Republicans do not often make the one straight-ticket-vote mark but rather go through race by race and mark each Republican, which has the same effect. Betty Ireland has previously attracted the support of some “soft” Democrats. It will be interesting to see if candidate Maloney modifies his message in any way to try to hit the same people. Even if he does, he has the proverbial tough row to hoe. However, he showed a willingness to go to the knife against Betty Ireland, and he and his staff will be cleaning and sharpening all the knives by Sunday morning.

Okay, how do I figure every voter got 10 votes? The population of West Virginia is 1,860,000. There are 1,180,000 registered voters in West Virginia. 15.4 percent of them, 182,000, actually voted. Registered voters to real voters: 6:1. Citizens to real voters: 10:1. Another way to look at it is that 4.2 % percent of the registered voters nominated the Democratic candidate (2.6 % of the population) and 2.3 % of the registered voters nominated Republican candidate (1.4 % of the population).

Isn’t getting something like 10 votes a reason to vote on October 4th?

R

Holy Moses, Preserve Me from the National Day of Prayer.

2011-05-10T20:25:00.001-04:00

Over the past months, there have been a few posters spread around the Marion County Courthouse advertising the celebration of the “National Day of Prayer” for 5 May 2011. Let me say at the outset that I consider this a good idea. We do not do this life thing on our own, and it is only wise to invoke the blessing of Deity regarding all of our serious endeavors.

And so, I trotted downtown early to check this out. It took place on the front balcony of the courthouse where politicians and dignitaries (including at least two of the Senators Kennedy) have spoken over the last 50 years or so. The sponsors had a printed program which promised a lengthy session, and so I parked across the street as I was not up for the prolonged standing this was going to require.

From the title, you might imagine (correctly) that I have some modestly critical things to say about this prayer celebration. But let me begin on a positive note or three. The idea of going to the Lord in prayer is thoroughly sound. Do you disagree? Fine, the First Amendment is quite sound, too. No problem. And there were some heartfelt and thought-provoking prayers offered up. Friend and brother from the Fellowship Barry gave a clear and simple request for blessing upon our public servants, those who live the “greater love hath no man…” life. The Sheriff made an equally stirring prayer to God for the safety of our law enforcement officers. (Parenthetically, the conventional wisdom is that the sheriff is politically vulnerable in the next election. I don’t really buy that. A West Virginia Sheriff has both law enforcement duties and is the chief tax collector of the County, but the voters don’t care about the tax collection thing. They look for the law officer image, and Sheriff Carpenter is fit, squared away, and fits that image precisely.) And I was glad to see Pastor Ken Wright, although I confess I started with the expectation that he would be a kind, loving servant of Christ, for he was the pastor at Fairmont General Hospital the afternoon my mother died and I will always remember his a kindness and calm demeanor. Pastor Wright called upon those present to treat all people of whatever station in life equally and even reminded himself that it times he failed in that. That, friends, is a man of God. He also offered a prayer of salvation which rather reminds me of some of the work of noted atheist entertainer Penn Gillette. And, of course, and my friend Pastor James Saunders focused on young people, whose growth and development are his passion.

Okay, that’s the good stuff.

I have to tell you, there was also some pretty weird stuff going on. When I first tuned in, someone was in the middle of a prayer asking that God remove various justices from the United States Supreme Court and West Virginia Supreme Court. That does seem to be rather a specific request and just a bit cheeky thing to be concluding that God must do. That pastor was followed by a representative of our acting governor, and that representative gave one of the dead bang tackiest presentations one could imagine. He mentioned the name of our acting governor (who is a candidate in the primary election this Saturday, 14 May) at least 10 times. He called upon God to fill our acting governor with strength as he goes about his great responsibilities. He asked God to fill our acting governor [name inserted] with grace and to bless him that his love of his people will be sincere, and that he will be never lacking in zeal. God gave me a minor blessing when a couple of coal trucks coming up the street to give me a break from this silly, syrupy slop. But after they passed, the speaker noted that with leadership comes opportunity and exhorted all present to pray for the acting governor, and his family, and specifically to “protect him from the evil one.” Come on, guys, he’s in politics, so that’s a pretty extreme request even to make of the Lord. And finally, on behalf of [name inserted], God was earnestly thanked for [name inserted]. Frankly, I cannot blame the acting governor for this, because I cannot imagine any successful politician sanctioning that performance, let alone planning it in advance.

Other pastors had rather interesting presentation styles. One asked “how dare they…” do various things she deemed offensive to God. Some of those offensive things are commonly done by humanists, atheists, Muslims, liberal Christians, and moderate Christians, just to name a few. Also, I have heard that God knows the following the sparrow, but this particular pastor exhorted him at such volume that I’m thinking a few sparrows got lost in the shuffle. Another pastor directed God to take notice of certain moral issues “so dear to your heart.” Again, I hesitate to give God marching orders. This pastor touched on a husband’s responsibility of leadership (works for me, I guess, but I guess to be safe I better ask) and the wife’s role in making a home a mighty place. He lumped together various impurities of the lustful variety including fornication, child molestation, cohabitation and pornography, but did not try to rank them. At least, I don’t think so. Maybe he meant that they all are of equal rank, but ‘round the West Virginia penitentiary, you may be guaranteed that fornicators and child molesters have rather different experiences. That’s fine with me, by the way.

We were treated to more screaming and haranguing of the specific militant variety (that the people of God should be wearing battle gear, possibly meant metaphorically) and I kept reminding myself I needed to be listening to this without judgment or at least to withhold judgment. That particular pastor declared that America will fulfill God’s plan.

Say what?

There was the usual “culture of death” abortion prayer which is, of course, pretty much a hot button thing among many churches.

There was a specific prayer for the upcoming election by a lady who exhorted God to elect “a man with a fathering heart.” There are two women running, one of whom has a decent shot, and I doubt if this pastor was excluding them intentionally. She did exhort everyone to vote for righteousness’ sake and to vote God’s will, and specifically ask God to eliminate gambling and strip clubs. (As is the case with lots of sin, diseconomics and disapprobation are more likely to lead to their discontinuation.) Oh, she mentioned that we were praying to the Christian God but modified it to include the Judeo Christian God. Oopsie, so much for you “spiritual but not religious” people out there. We were reminded later about our duty to protect the (political) state of Israel from all the enemies around them who “want to wipe them off the face of the earth.” (Nobody mentioned that Israel has South African nuclear warheads and so far as we know, the Arabs don’t.) God was directed to restore to the Jews what had been stolen from them and under the circumstances it would have been inconsistent to point out that the Palestinians disagree with that perspective. So, for that matter, to the Delaware and Shawnee formerly roamed these hills. Oh, don’t the Israelis still hold the Golan Heights? How long were they Syrian?

I remember a discussion with beloved Pastor Josh when I was a bit confused over some theological things. He taught me at that time that one very powerful prayer is to ask the Lord “Please teach me how to pray.” There was my problem with this whole National Day of Prayer celebration in Marion County. It was so much anti-. It was anti-discussion, anti-reasoning, anti-arguing, anti-persuasion, anti-listening, anti-loving and anti-lots of doctrines sound in red in your red letter editions to the Bible. So many of the pastors were not praying for things much as commanding this and that in God’s name and giving God his to-do list.

I am way too dumb to spout theology. “Lord, please teach me to pray,” is usually about the best I can do.

And yes, I certainly do recognize that a good bit of what I say here is squarely contrary to my opinions recently expressed about the late and unlamented Osama.

Lord, please teach me to pray.

R

Night, Night, Osama, It’s Been Good to Know Ya

2011-05-02T20:53:00.001-04:00

The passing of the late and thoroughly unlamented Osama bin Laden presents some really interesting philosophical and moral issues, particularly for someone who purports to think rationally. As I put some thoughts together, I’m thinking that if a discussion of Dead Osama does not defy rational discussion, it certainly gives it a workout. I’ll try anyway.

My first impression is that I do regret that only one American got to shoot the son of a bitch, and it wasn’t me. As I’ve talked to a number of folks today, that seems to be a fairly common opinion.

So what does that mean? Is that mere macho bullshit? Silly posturing? After all, I think I would remember if I’ve ever shot anybody, and I can’t bring any such occasion to mind. So perhaps it’s all a lot of hot air. Perhaps.

But it still sincere. God bless those who live simple lives and happy lives and uncomplicated lives, spared from the stench of pure evil. Even if you are fortunate enough to lead such a life (and I do sincerely mean that it’s fortunate), it’s still a fact that there is genuine evil in the world. It is not an unacceptable leap of logic for me then to conclude that there are some people, some few people, who simply need to be removed from this corporeal existence. (There’s a post on capital punishment in the making – looking ahead, I generally oppose it on thoroughly practical grounds.)

And so, my opinion about the preferred fate of a few evildoers and particularly about Dead Osama is inconsistent with my concept of justice, at least as it involves more garden-variety violence. Moreover, my opinions are not simply inconsistent, but dead bang contrary to the very clear teachings of my Christian faith. This seems to be a substantial inconsistency, and not merely Emerson’s “foolish inconsistency.”

So far as I’m concerned, Osama was an evil asshole when he was alive. Dead Osama is now a dead evil asshole.

It is difficult to set aside, or even acknowledge, intense emotional indexes attached to causes or people, particularly those involving negative emotions and more particularly those involving out and out hatred. Hatred, we are taught, is a terrible thing. Isn’t it? Moreover, where opinions are so fixed, when we attempt to have any rational give-and-take discussion, how quickly does it descend to “Screw you, Jack, you’re wrong, I’m right!”? I have just read The Eichmann Trial by Deborah Lipstadt. [A book review post follows before long]. The trial of Adolf Eichmann was nearly 50 years ago. This is the first extensive study of the trial in several years. And yet, this author becomes mired in emotional philosophy when discussing purely legal if highly controversial aspects of the case – the kidnapping/rendition of Eichmann from Argentina to Israel; the jurisdiction of the court of a country which did not exist when the criminal acts were committed; and significant issues with the conduct of trial such as who was on trial, the individual Eichmann or Eichmann as a representative of the system which prosecuted the Holocaust. Add to the intensity of the pain that these were events based fundamentally on religion, and you have a recipe for a real short and real nasty discussion.

The terrorist attacks of 2001 and the activities of Dead Osama and Company invoke religion. Is that fair? Well, isn’t Islam a nasty and evil religion? We can find within the Koran various suras (translated into English, of course) which support violence to infidels (that’s us) –and to which we have reacted with highly symbolic (if somewhat idiotic) symbolism such as burning Korans and so forth. On the other hand, isn’t Islam a religion of peace, roughly on a par with Christianity, Hinduism, and so forth? When Muslims speak of Mohammed or even Jesus, one of the correct responses is “Peace be unto Him.” That sounds pretty tame to me.

Besides, all things being equal, if the forces engaged against terrorists were to begin calling themselves the “Military Order of Christ” and using the fairly distinctive “Crusader Cross,” would they not be self identifying as Christian crusaders? (I know that’s unconstitutional as to American forces. This is a thought exercise. Work with me here.) In such a case, no organized Christian denomination would have to support this “crusade” for it to be perceived as what those darn Christians are doing. Just so, Osama & buds identified themselves as Muslim fighters fighting a Muslim war. Be it fair or unfair, their actions splash all Muslims. Not unsurprisingly, it’s always the biggest mouths which get the attention.

One lesson we might learn from this is that the United States and other powers arrayed against terrorism need to focus on terrorist acts, not the terrorist’s faith, and on our actions as promoting national interests and not a religious agenda.

Another question is the validity and usefulness of revenge generally. What we Christians call the Old Testament talks about “eye for an eye” justice. Some say that if everyone supports an eye for an eye, sooner or later, the world will be blind. Maybe that’s a logical extension, or maybe that’s a reductio ad absurdum, but to some extent it’s true.

Globally or individually, when (if ever) is revenge an appropriate motive for action? And if revenge is not appropriate as a motive, is it appropriate to do the same thing you would have had you been seeking revenge and justice justify it on practical grounds, or is that cheating?

In his own videotapes, Dead Osama states that he planned the 2001 New York/Washington terrorist attacks. He also said he was surprised at the degree of their success (success being defined by his goals at the time.) (Please, I do not want to hear from any “thermite conspiracy theorists” – if you’re one of those, go back and take a physics class.) And so, under “natural law,” and under human law generally accepted since before the mind of man runneth not to the contrary, Dead Osama committed thousands of murders – intentional, unjustified, unexcused killings of fellow human beings. Throughout most of human history, the just penalty for that has been seen as the death penalty. Is that a just penalty in this case? A necessary penalty? A dangerous penalty? In the practical world of physical conflict or even politics, if you cannot convert your enemy to a friend or ally, you need to crush them to the extent that they are never a danger to you again. That lesson has been (sort of) learned in several wars, and that is entirely a practical lesson. But to fulfill that practical need, those prosecuting the war seem to find that the very human desire for revenge is powerful fuel to promote those results. This human desire for revenge impels people to extreme sacrifice and monumental effort. Might this white heat be used cynically by those who want a result but who were not driven by that same heat? Pull the other one, what else is new? But the place of vengeance for those who really feel it and believe in it remains a bothersome question. As to Dead Osama, his life was ended violently and yet quickly. We can find various web offerings in questionable taste suggesting innovative and very lengthy methods by which his life might have been ended, and I am sure I could find a good bit of support for any of those methods. Was a bullet good enough vengeance? Was just dying good enough? It’s not like that was some unique result for him, that’s really the human condition. On the other hand, do those with the revenge motive in their hearts gain or find peace or fulfillment or anything positive from the death of now-Dead Osama?

The truth is, we do. It defies reason and responsible teaching, but we do anyway. I claim to be a fairly rational guy, and yet I cannot see a way that this feeling could be mellowed out of me in this particular case.

More problematic is the instance where vengeance is visited disproportionately to the original harm. When this is done, the aggrieved party still feels that he or she is wholly justified. And yet where the harm for which vengeance is taken – say, an insult – is not really dangerous, we have the clash of a (hopefully) rational society with a party who is in their own mind genuinely aggrieved. Of course, in most of those instances, the revenge acts are sanctioned by the criminal law. (In the sense that sanctions are imposed for doing the acts.)

I just remembered – one of the cable channels was showing the Charles Bronson movies, Death Wish I through V last week. The theme of those is the aggrieved and righteous vigilante. Perhaps those are stuck in the back of my mind as I’m ruminating tonight.

Certainly, military and counterterrorist planners are considering the reprisals which are planned by Dead Osama’s compatriots in revenge for last night’s raid. Certainly, we have a whole lot of pissed off terrorists out there. I have also heard suggestions that terrorist networks held out threats to protect Osama, but I don’t find that terribly persuasive given the willingness of terrorists to proceed with darn near anything. Certainly, there will be reprisals attempted, and we have to accept that some of them might be successful. The United States counterterrorist forces have done an astounding job protecting the homeland. It would be nice to think that perfection is achievable, but it’s pretty dumb to count on that.

My own tentative conclusion is that Dead Osama at the bottom of the ocean is a good thing, and I’m glad that justice made a house call.

We should remember to keep our brains engage. We should remember to avoid such anger, such bloodlust that the Eagle’s talons rip randomly rather than strike with cold precision.

It is a hard world. I have no idea how to fix that.

You’ve got to prime the pump.
You must have faith and believe.
You have to give of yourself
Before you’re worthy to receive.

R

Snippets of Really Important Stuff

2011-04-28T21:28:00.002-04:00

The Royal Wedding

Several thousand of the Fellowship across the sea have worked for weeks and are working all night to ensure peace, security and safety for that idiotic extravaganza. They are in our thoughts tonight.

This Damned Election

The State Journal today quotes some academics who predict an ultra-low turn out in the governor’s election of 14 May 2011 due to something they are calling “voter fatigue.”

It’s fine to sit back on one’s ass and analyze how bad things are. But it’s better to suggest some improvements. THIS ELECTION IS IMPORTANT. If “We the People” let down, some nebulous “they” win, and we’re not in charge any more. And there are more loyal Mountaineers than there are dishonest bastards. There's more of us than there are of them.

Wireless

Seldom do I hit any wireless access other than my own servers. Downtown the other day, I was working in the café and the window of available networks came up. (No, I don’t know why. My HAL9000 laptop does lots of things for reasons unbeknownst to me.) One wireless network was cleverly named: “geturownfuckinginternet”

Clear communication, I do so love it.

Book Rec.

I’ve run across a short and inspiring little book by historical novelist Steven Pressfield: Do The Work. It’s a simple tome on burning through the crap of life that holds you back. On Amazon, it's cheap in hardcover and currently free for Kindle.

Faster Food, Simpler Life

Today as I was waiting on a hearing, I stayed in the café working. When I’m in a hurry, I will stop at McDonalds for their breakfast fare, to the tune of 7 bucks or so. Today, I ordered breakfast from Jeri, the proprietor, for $4. Cheaper, healthier (lots less grease), and I feel like a dumbass for stopping at McDonalds - ever.

[Note to Roger from Bridget the Dog: You ARE a dumbass, but I’m not going to bury you in the backyard. Yet.]

Dragon Naturally Speaking

I accidentally ran across an excellent feature of this most useful voice recognition-dictation program. You can spell stuff phonetically (alpha-bravo-charlie-delta, etc.)

Funeral

The funeral of Ron Dilly, who attended our church, was held today. I accord him what I consider high praise: He was a man’s man.

Watch Crystals

I’m death on watches. Possibly it’s secondary to clumsiness but I prefer that it’s a product of getting my hands dirty. In any event, I’ve found that the material used to protect the screens of ebook readers, PDA’s, etc., makes a good protector for a watch crystal.

A Grumpy Bull-Moose

Yes, I am, especially tonight. I can live with that.

R

Easter Meditations

2011-04-23T23:55:00.003-04:00

Good Friday Meditation
2011

Note: At Central Christian Church, we do "meditations" on the 7 last statements of Christ on the Cross. I did one this year. This is the most intensely personal stuff I post.

“Father, Into your hands I commit my spirit.”

That’s really the whole point. If you do the top 10 list of the questions of human life, or especially the fears of humanity, that’s number one.

Now what, God? Am I OK? Can I commit my spirit into your hands? Our hearts this night are so saturated with a 2,000 year old sorrow which is still here and now.

Our love for this man Jesus is a deeply personal thing. Through this man, we encounter an ultimate, painful passageway and we are afraid to look. No, what I really mean to say is that I’m afraid to look.

Into your hands, God, can I commit my spirit?

That’s reason this building is here, these bricks and mortar. If we didn’t have to worry about that one, wouldn’t this be a great place for townhomes or a dentist’s office or even a big open field where ageless children would play in an endless summer and never skin their knees?

We are sad tonight. We are sad for this man, the Son of God, whom we love, who experienced agonies for which we literally don’t have words, and then who walked willingly right through the passageway, across the doorstep of Death, committing his essence to his Father, to our Father.

I think tonight about the very end of a rock opera written in my youth, Jesus Christ Superstar. At the very end, the climax, there is a choir of discordant voices and every instrument is screeching and the tenor who plays Jesus cries out “Father! Into your hands I commit my spirit!” And at the instant that last syllable is spoken, sounds simply cease in the theater. There’s a sudden, an instantaneous flood of quiet. After a minute of this most profound nothing, a few strings start very softly and very slowly playing the melody from The Garden of Gethsemane.

God thy will is hard
But you hold every card
I will drink your cup of poison
Nail me to your cross and break me
Bleed me beat me kill me take me now -
Before I change my mind

And everyone leaves silently. The rustle of our now ridiculous going-to-the-theater clothing is all that’s left. Maybe we feel a little stupid being humbled by actors, but there you have it, we are.

A rock opera – that’s a place we find Truth? Why not? Jesus was talking to his Father. And was he talking to us? I’m sure not the authority. I hesitate to interpret anything. Every bearded nitwit since Job’s friends has spoken the Truth of God. They have, it says so right there on the label.

Lord ,I want to know the Truth. No, Lord, I NEED to know YOUR truth, straight from you, straight from your son. I know it’s inconvenient. I know it’s pretty selfish to expect Truth from someone right when they are dying, but I need to know.

I tried to avoid all this. I didn’t want your Truth, God, I didn’t need your truth, I could have lived without your truth, and I really preferred not to think about your truth in the bloom of this corporeal life, before my hair turned grey and my joints hurt. But you didn’t let me alone. You threw these ... people ... at me. My wife, my mother, my brother Billy Reid, that pesky Norton, and this effervescent guy Josh, and then you brought me to the people in this place. They treated me with love and accepted me and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s like the problem the Indians had at Plymouth Rock, the immigration laws just aren’t strong enough here.

And you repeated the words of your Son until I listened.

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” Of course it’s a message. I’m so stupid ever to have doubted that. Lord, you prove to me every night as I sit quietly. I listen to my breathing when I’ve exhaled and I’m not ready to breath in again. And I listen to my heart. As it slows there are little slices of time between beats. And between breaths and heartbeats, I find the quietest time of all. And then there’s this spark, I don’t know where it comes from, you I guess, and I breathe and my heart takes a beat and I’ve passed through a doorway. My spirit has always been committed SOMEWHERE. You kept telling me it was You. I just didn’t listen.

Jesus also said, “Let not your heart be troubled.” In that, and in these last words, “Into YOUR hands, I COMMIT MY SPIRIT,” I think I hear Your message:

“Relax, this is really not such a big deal. Of COURSE I’m committing my spirit, my essence, all that exists of me, to my Father in Heaven. You will too, Roger. I’ve told you: I’ll be back, and I’ll take you there myself.”

Problem for the Morning

I picture tonight some centurion hitting the sack thinking, wow, what a weekend, these nutsy Jews! At least tomorrow, it'll be back to normal. And I picture someone waking him early in the morning: Boss? Boss!? We have a problem . . .

R

Snippets

2011-04-19T19:33:00.001-04:00

Parking Incompetency

Ford Motor Company is aggressively advertising models with its computer-assisted automated parallel parking system. Pull up somewhere in the vicinity of a parking space, and the computer finds it, measures it, and neatly tucks your car into the space.

Years ago, we were speccing out a rescue truck which was going to run about 15 tons fully loaded. An early question arose as to whether the chasis would be specced with a manual transmission or automatic transmission. It was a short discussion. The unanimous feeling was that if someone does not know how to drive a manual transmission, they should not be driving a big, heavy emergency vehicle anyway.

In that spirit, people who cannot parallel park need to turn in their drivers licenses. To slightly paraphrase dirty Harry, “People should know their limitations.”

Immersion

Yes, I know I can be a bit of an enfant terrible now and then. I do try to hold down those unfortunate predilections ‘round the holy precincts of the church. Meaning that slathering sarcasm, babbling barbs and asinine asides are done internally, rather life a first-person narrator relates his/her own thoughts. (John Mortimer in his Rumpole stories did that so marvelously.) My internal observer got a workout last week when a fellow asserted that baptism specifically by immersion was an absolute prerequisite to salvation of the soul and so forth and that lacking this necessary experience, no matter what other experiences, beliefs or relative merits an individual might have, he/she was, at the very least, Darned to Heck.

By the way, our denomination is not nearly so doctrinaire. It’s a fairly large tent including lots of variations of Christian belief.

My whimsical thoughts, later expressed in private, are that if the Bible mandates baptism by full immersion, it certainly does not support the use of baptismal fonts with filtered and chemically cleaned water from the municipal waterworks. Rivers, that’s the way it was done in biblical times! And so, I’m thinking that we should all adjourn down to the West Fork of the Monongahela, whatever the weather, to observe this most ancient of Christian traditions. And then, the pastor informed me that some of the genuine early Christians also used pits dug out in caves as baptismal fonts. I suppose that’s okay too. I need to go looking for caves.

Robert E. Lee Apocrypha

The following comes from Robert E. Lee: A Biography (1995), by Emory Thomas. Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Lee attended a church service in Richmond. The invitation to come forward to the rail for communion was given.

"A tall-well dressed, black man stood and strode to the rail. There followed a pregnant pause. According to one witness, "Its effects upon the communicants was startling, and for several moments they retained their seats in solemn silence and did not move, being deeply chagrined at this attempt to inaugurate the 'new regime' to offend and humiliate them...". Then another person rose from the pew and walked down the aisle to the chancel rail. He knelt near the black man and so redeemed the circumstance. This grace- bringer, of course was Lee. Soon after he knelt, the rest of the congregation followed his example and shuffled in turn to the rail...Lee's actions were far more eloquent than anything he spoke or wrote." (Thomas, p. 372.)

The Do-Rag Rag

One of the reasons that I do so love the law is that it adequately adapts to the changes in society even in culturally blurring in times such as these. As an example, I offer information regarding a modification of standard practice before the Circuit Court of Marion County. For as long as I remember, one must remove ones hat in Court. As of this week, the “do rag” will now be considered a “hat”, meaning that it is an article of clothing that must be removed when the wearer is in the court room. I must confess, I got considerable enjoyment from questioning the presiding judge closely so that the supporters of my unfortunate client would be sure to comply fully with the letter and spirit of the new rule.

All in the name of a bit of harmless fun round of the Marion County palais d’ justice.

Pippa passes.

R

Handicapping the Governor's Election

2011-03-31T11:21:00.006-04:00

Handicapping the Governor’s Election

The welcome visitors to No. 3 from beyond the borders of Mother West Virginia may find this even more deathly go than the standard fare here. And yet, all politics is local and this year we have an exasperating off-year political extravaganza.

Recall that our beloved Sen. Byrd died in June 2010. In the special election for that seat, Gov. Manchin moved to Washington, Senate President Earl Ray Tomblin became acting governor, and the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals ordered that a special election take place for the governor’s position in 2011, even though the regular four year term will be on the 2010 ballot.

The primary winners of this katzenjammer so far:

* Political consultants

* Anybody who sells political advertising

* The West Virginia Republican Party, because as a minority party, any time they can get something in play, the worst can happen is that it doesn’t hurt them.

It’s perilous (and scurrilous?) to identify the “losers” so far, so I will refrain.

The unseen danger to the body politic is that the rush to create “excitement” about this or that candidate must become so shrill to get any attention at all that we are burning out the give-a-shit circuits of all but the hardiest citizens. This is a real danger. If people become so fed up with the political process that it takes Dancing Bears giving away ice cream cones to make an impression, elections will have zero to do with governance.

One of my very favorite avocations is handicapping political races. In doing so, I often annoy people because some of my predictions and observations do not favor their candidate. They see this as some sort of intentional negative juju. In fact, while the actions of individuals is hard to predict, trends and actions of masses of individuals (like voters) are subject prognostication even though there are a lot of variables. If you confuse what you want to happen with what the evidence suggests will happen, you aren't very useful in politics. (Nor anything else, for that matter.)

Each election, I post my “predictions” ballot in some semi-public place, and I have a fairly decent record of accuracy. It’s not time to post my final predictions ballot yet. But I’m ready to do some preliminary handicapping.

The primary election:

Republican Party:

There are eight candidates in the primary. Betty Ireland will run the table. The other candidates are Clark Barnes, Mitch Carmichael, Ralph William Clark, Cliff Ellis, Larry Faircloth, Bill Maloney and Mark Sorsaia. This is not to say that the others are particularly unqualified or weak. Mr. Faircloth is from the Eastern Panhandle, and the eventual November winner has to do well in the Panhandle. (The Eastern Panhandle has been largely ignored by Charleston for decades. Its population has grown so much, politicos cannot ignore it any more.) Mr. Maloney is a “fresh face” with a really strong financial base, but it’ll be too late to organize a win. The others largely have a regional following.

As an organization, Republicans have done poorly in West Virginia, although there is a history of some “bright stars” breaking out of the pack. Ms. Ireland and Rep. Shelley Moore Capito are the current Republican “stars” in West Virginia. The only problem I see for Ms. Ireland in the primary is manageable – the louder parts of the Republican base want to focus on torchlight parades against Obama and irrelevant crap like that. It’s probably a bother to keep those folks amused. But since Ireland is the only game in town, they’ll fall in line, at least for a while.

The Democratic Party:

Uh oh, we have the “cup runneth over” problem. There are six candidates. One of them, Arne Moltis, is a nonstarter. The others, in no particular order, have some measure of viability. The knives are coming out in the primary. Can you spell “fratricide”? The key to the general election in October (not November) is how much damage the party does to itself the primary process.

The candidates:

Jeff Kessler - Sen. Kessler led a successful minor putsch in the State Senate this year. He remains mostly a regional candidate (Northern Panhandle) and I’ll be surprised if he catches fire.

John Perdue - Mr. Purdue is currently the state treasurer. He is smart, highly qualified and very experienced. He has very little charisma and generally is not a good politician, which is emblematic of an unfortunate weakness in the entire political process. It will be hard for him to communicate his experience, because he’s not been a self-promoter in the past. It’s hard to communicate competence in 30 second ads. Also, Mr. Perdue speaks with a very thick accent which is somewhat off-putting.

Natalie Tennant - She is the current Secretary of State. It is a reality that gender is still very relevant and being the only woman Democrat candidate will help her. To the extent anybody was watching, she wounded herself in the dithering around over the Senate special election. However, I don’t think very many people were watching. Since she has won a high-profile statewide race (by burying a labor-backed candidate), she will run strongly.

Rick Thompson - I went to law school with Speaker Thompson. He’s a decent fellow. Importantly for me, my good friend House Judiciary Chair Tim Miley is strongly supporting Speaker Thompson. Mr. Thompson has a decent war chest (still not enough to go through October) and one of his biggest campaign assets is his wife, Beth Thompson. She’s one of the most effective campaigners I’ve ever seen. Mr. Thompson has the labor endorsement, which is risky for labor but that’s not his problem. However, if he pushes one of the favorite labor positions (collective bargaining for public employees), he will alienate himself right out of contention. It is early advertising, Speaker Thompson has been channeling Abe Lincoln by sitting on the steps of a log cabin strumming a guitar and singing. Well, I’m not his target audience so my opinion that this is appallingly hokey probably doesn’t count for much.

Earl Ray Tomblin - Gov.Tomblin is an old-time political boss from Logan County. That’s not a pejorative – I have friends in Logan County and I like the idea of politics without lots of pretty decals on it. Mr. Tomblin stepped in the day that Governor Manchin left town and took charge of the place. At the time, I admired his chutzpah, and it showed audacious unashamed personal leadership. I think he went overboard as the weeks went on, particularly by changing the names on the welcome signs at the borders, posting official photographs and so forth. Anecdotally, I’m hearing some “incumbent credits,” because of her comments like “Well, the guy there now is doing a pretty good job.” Mr. T has by far the strongest set of advisors and staff around him. The smartest candidate (whoever that is) will run a positive campaign and let the others attack Gov. Tomblin. But he won't go down easily and if he clears the primary, paybacks will be hell.

The real challenge for Democratic Party leaders will be to survive this primary intact to then face a very strong race with one or the Republican Party stars.

Radio Ads

Once again, we have reserved the radio ad spaces for some local stations on election night. I personally write those and I personally record those. How to capture a little bit of the frustration of this whole process is going to be a challenge in short ad, particularly since I insist on making it something positive. I’ll make a stab at posting the audio when it’s done.

It’ll be a long, hot summer.

Pippa passes.

Oh, What Some Lawyers Do; And Other Tales

2011-03-24T16:49:00.007-04:00

Not so long ago, I read a book titled An Honest Calling, about the law practice of Abraham Lincoln. And that's what the practice of law is, a calling, and an honest calling.

In an organized society, lawyers play a central role. They are John Adams who was paid only 18 guineas for more than two weeks of near-continuous work defending British soldiers accused of the Boston massacre, one of the most inflammatory and unpopular defenses ever raised. They are Andrew Hamilton who, in 1735, kept Peter Zenger out of a dungeon-like prison for seditious libel by sassing the King's hand-picked Judge and daring to ask a jury to find someone innocent because it was the right thing to do even if the Government wanted him gone. They are Abraham Lincoln who, in his practice, did such important cases as those which resolved the right-of-way disputes between the river freighters and the railroads with their bridges. Lawyers wrote the Constitution. Lawyers stand in the way of the government or the mob (frequently the same people) attacking the individual. Seldom is the law a pathway to great wealth, and anyone who goes into it expecting the contrary is likely to be disappointed.

I’m getting damn sick and tired of the blame, the slams, the disdain, the lies, and the intentional distortions, driven by those who have a reason to fear just treatment and often driven by hidden economic power.

But, oh, what some lawyers do…

Monday’s edition of the Times-West Virginian contained a full page ad placed by a law firm which has offices in several states, but not in West Virginia. The banner at the top of the page read “IMPORTANT NOTICE” and continued, “If you or your loved one was is a resident of one of these [nursing home] facilities, they have been cited for multiple deficiencies including:”

[Note: I mention only in passing that the opening neither makes logical sense nor is grammatical. Whether facilities are cited is not dependent on whether your loved one is a resident there. “They” presumably refers to the facilities rather than your loved one, but I could be wrong.]

The full-page ad then lists numerous “deficiencies” existing in two (related) nursing homes which are located right up the road from No. 3.

The nursing home industry is fairly heavily regulated. The great majority of nursing home fees are paid by Medicare and Medicaid. To qualify for Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement, facilities have to abide by a hefty set of rules and are subject to frequent inspection. Inspections are exceedingly thorough. If there is a dirty spoon in the kitchen, you get gigged for it. If the nursing notes do not clearly document all aspects of care, you get gigged for it. (Whoops, there I go committing the same grammatical error as the law firm. “You” don’t get gigged for it, the facility does.) Of course, there are different levels of violations. Fatal medication errors, blocked fire exits, scalding bathing water, dropping patients and so forth are failing grades. Inspection results are reported very generally on the Medicare website. You cannot tell from looking at them if there was a dirty spoon for the whole kitchen was one big petri dish.

Back to the ad – beneath each facility’s name is a list. Every entry begins with “FAILURE:” Among the “failures,” we find a host of things, including:

FAILURE To provide care in a way that keeps or builds each resident’s dignity and self-respect.

FAILURE To follow all laws and professional standards.

FAILURE To at least one a month have a licensed pharmacist check the drugs that each resident takes. [I’m not sure who splits infinitives, the government or the law firm.]

FAILURE To provide proof that all residents’ personal money which is deposited with the nursing home is secure.

FAILURE To have a program to keep infection from spreading.

FAILURE To tell the resident, doctor and a family member if: the resident is injured, there is a major change in the resident’s physical/mental health, there is a need to alter treatment.

FAILURE To hire only people who have no history of abusing, neglecting or mistreating residents; or report and investigate any acts or reports of abuse, neglect or mistreatment of residents.

FAILURE To make sure that the nursing home area is free of dangers that cause accidents.

And so forth.

The banner at the bottom of the ad warns:

"POOR CARE CAN LEAD TO BEDSORES, BROKEN BONES… EVEN DEATH."

And then, of course, the aggrieved reader is invited to call the law firm’s toll-free number for a free evaluation.

At the outset, let me say that I’m not in competition with these lawyers. I’ve never done a nursing home liability case (see below), never expect to and, for that matter, never want to.

Since lawyers don’t know a whole lot about advertising, sometimes it is merely tasteless or silly. (“Don’t take a knife to a gunfight.” “Ever try arguing with a woman?”) As a whole, the idea is thoroughly legitimate and proper. “These are the kinds of cases I do, I’ve done a lot of them, I’m good at it, and I’d like to talk to you about yours.” In other words, I want a share of the market of the cases out there where people need lawyers. Perhaps it is unfortunate that people need lawyers. But they do.

But some lawyer advertising goes farther – it creates cases. I cringe whenever I see ads that start out with "Did your loved one take Tri-Mumble-Chloride tablets and get warts? If so, YOU may be entitled to money!" Surely, some legitimate cases will be discovered, along with a whole lot of dogs. This was also the case early in the asbestos cases. Now, however, those are mostly restricted to patients with mesothelioma which is a cancer almost exclusively caused by asbestos exposure. How many bogus cases are created, though?

Nursing homes are good targets for this kind of advertising. Potential plaintiffs are very sick people. Nursing home residents are, with very few exceptions, guaranteed “a poor outcome.” The Bible refers to this as an allotment of one’s threescore and ten, but in nursing home context that is quite grim. “Dignity” is not happening in a nursing home and anyone who pretends otherwise may have other fantasies. Nursing homes have patients always with diminished physical capacities and usually diminished mental capacities and working with the patients is quite challenging. And then there’s the family dynamic. The family was introduced to Mr. Reality who told them that they cannot care for Grandma in a home setting. Most families are feeling really guilty about that. Then they realize it’s a load off their shoulders, and so they feel guilty about being relieved. Some families worry about the expense of the nursing home and the effect on inheritance. So there you have guilt because nothing is too good for Grandma, and so forth. And then when there is the inevitable “poor outcome,” how attractive it is to have a “they” who did in Grandma, which gets God and Life and the family off the hook.

When you have a fragile population, the opportunities for negligence which actually causes injury are many. Medication errors, scalds and falls happen in nursing homes and one that causes damages calls upon our system of justice to have the negligent party repair the damages insofar as they can be repaired with money. Usually this is done through insurance. In nursing home cases, insurance companies have the very ticklish issue of how to offer the argument that damages for a younger person may entitle that person to a larger verdict than damages for an injury to an older person who was already severely ill and facing a limited lifespan. Cold? You bet. That’s why most lawyers shy away from those arguments.

For that matter, in one of the nursing homes subject of this week’s ad (when it was operated by some other company and something like 25 years ago) there was an incident of negligence which caused the death of a patient. Somehow a patient got smoking materials and caught his or her (I forget which) bed on fire. We were cruising nearby, so beat the fire department to the scene, evacuated the burn patient and evacuated the wing where the fire had taken place. The victim’s family filed a lawsuit and while I lost track of that, I’m sure that there was a settlement or verdict. And justifiably so.

That was a no-brainer. But what about cases related to the conditions in this inflammatory ad? For these facilities’ failures, we’re in the dark. For instance:

FAILURE To follow all laws and professional standards. Which ones? The murder statutes? Littering?
FAILURE To at least one a month have a licensed pharmacist check the drugs that each resident takes. [I’m not sure who splits infinitives, the government or the law firm.] Did someone go 32 days without a check? Was someone forgotten? Was there a serious med error?
FAILURE To provide proof that all residents’ personal money which is deposited with the nursing home is secure. Damfino how that will break bones, but they should keep track.
FAILURE To have a program to keep infection from spreading. Does that mean they didn’t write everything down or that staph was rampant?
FAILURE To tell the resident, doctor and a family member if: the resident is injured, there is a major change in the resident’s physical/mental health, there is a need to alter treatment. What actually happened? What was the omission?
FAILURE To hire only people who have no history of abusing, neglecting or mistreating residents; or report and investigate any acts or reports of abuse, neglect or mistreatment of residents. Oopsie, this is a big one - Did they hire someone and muff the background check? Or fail to document an investigation? Sometimes there is real harm. Mental deterioration often includes fear and misperception of harm. Which?
FAILURE To make sure that the nursing home area is free of dangers that cause accidents. Did they fail to document something? Were there banana peels laying around?

We Just Don’t Know. Where there is smoke, there is smoke and it’s hard to see.

Who wins? Some patients are actually harmed and to the extent that they can be compensated or appreciate the compensation, they can win in a nursing home suit. Families of patients likewise can benefit as to actual losses. The monetary losses probably will not be large – most patients in nursing homes will not return to the status of “breadwinners” for a family. (On another day, we will discuss the justice of money for non-economic damages, particularly for those who did not sustain injury.) Counsel for the injured people certainly gain, usually on the order of 1/3 to 40% of the recovery. The particular law firm which placed the ad boasts it has achieved nearly $1/2 billion of verdicts and settlements. The defense lawyers benefit significantly, although very strict controls placed on them by insurance companies are driving some of the best of them to the plaintiff side. And, finally, the insurance companies themselves always can use a few scarecrows to justify premiums. Notably, in places where there has been “tort reform,” there is been little or no rollback of insurance premiums.

Who loses? Well, who pays? Who always pays? What creates value from which payment is made? Right, value is created by people doing work. We have decided on a system of risk distribution so that we all pay a little so that injured people will receive just compensation. At some point it crosses the line from just compensation to rampant wealth redistribution, and every step of the redistribution exacts its own little tax on the process. That is only feebly related to the concept of justice which has grown up “around the council fire” as our civilization has matured.

And we lose respect for the system of justice. We acquire some jaded disdain for orderly compensation to injured people, and so other genuinely injured people suffer from hostile and thick minded juries and mean-spirited judges who deny them even a modest just compensation.
This law firm is done nothing wrong in its advertising. This is the First Amendment at work.

I’m still glad I’m a lawyer. I’m still glad pickup the hammer and tongs and played on behalf of people who need me.

But, oh, what some lawyers do.

Nukes?

Continuing with the newspaper, today's “person on the street” column asked about the future of nuclear energy after the Japan reactor emergencies. West Virginia is, of course, a major coal producing area. The answers all called for using coal and all but one called for “clean coal technology.”

There is a problem with that. "Clean coal" does not exist in a commercially viable form for power generation. As matter is changed to energy or matter changed to different matter, there is a transfer of energy involved. To change coal into something which burns cleanly requires energy put into the conversion process which will not then be available for the end-use, power generation. That conversion is also expensive. So you take a lump of coal with a certain chemical energy within it, and spend money to reduce the available energy to make it burn more cleanly, meaning it will burn and release fewer particulates and lower amounts of harmful chemicals. But the amount of carbon liberated (which eventually will be taken up as carbon dioxide) remains the same.

This is just one brick in a very complicated wall. There are no simple answers to energy.

Pippa passes.

Those Pesky Juries - The South-of-the-Border Solution; Singing “Stormy Weather”

2011-03-09T12:11:00.002-05:00

Who Needs Juries?

We are reminded ad nauseum by “law and order” aficionados and some insurance/business defense advocates that the jury system is not delivering justice in America.

The Washington Post on Wednesday, March 7, talked about the handy Mexican solution and how well it works.

One Antonio Zuniga was tried and convicted of murder. In a very rare move in the Mexican justice system, that conviction was overturned and Sr. Zuniga was granted a second trial. Fortunately for the anti-crime forces, he was convicted again.

The evidence against Sr. Zuniga was as follows:

One purported eyewitness who identified Sr. Zuniga as the shooter, and who later recanted and said it was a hit by three gang members (not Zuniga) over a drug debt.

Sr. Zuniga’s lawyer presented some evidence in his behalf:

12 alibi witnesses who saw him at work someplace else while the victim was getting shot.

The fact that Zuniga had never met the victim and had no connection to the victim.

The fact that the gunshot residue tests performed on Zuniga’s hands was negative taken soon after the shooting were negative. (When you fire a pistol, there will be some residue of the propellant deposited on your hands and clothing.)

North of the border, we have this inconvenient doctrine of the Presumption of Innocence, the so-called “Golden Thread” which has characterized our justice system from its earliest roots in England. And we do one other important, yet inconvenient, thing: We call in juries of citizens to make the decision about guilt or innocence.

South of the border, the Mexican government does not impose upon citizens by asking them to serve on juries. Guilty/not guilty decisions are made by judges alone. Moreover, judges do so with paper and the arguments of lawyers. They see no need to meet and listen to all the witnesses. Nor do any of the participants need to “play fair.” The prosecutor in Zuniga’s case was quoted that her job was to prosecute, not to judge. So, we conclude, she doesn’t evaluate guilt or innocence.

What is made this second trial hit the Post is that the second trial was filmed and has been made into a movie, Presumed Guilty. A judge in Mexico has banned the screening of this film, ostensibly because one of the participants did not give consent to filming. But remember: Make something unavailable, and you make it desirable: pirated copies of the film are floating briskly all over the country.

Juries don’t always get it right. Honestly, I’ve had juries in cases rule so well in favor of my client I wondered if they were listening to the same case. And I’ve had a few juries rule so badly that it was absolutely sickening. In the same cases, the parties on the other side had opposite views to mine. But in those cases, the decisions were not made by government officials, they were made by citizens. To be sure, a bad judge can influence a jury to make a bad decision, but all in all you get more common sense justice from your fellow citizens.

It is in no way disrespectful to say that any system of justice has flaws. We hear from time to time about a prisoner who is released from an American prison after DNA evidence proves conclusively that he is factually innocent. To have any system of justice at all, we have to recognize that there will be errors. Recognizing that and being the guy who serves prison time knowing that he is innocent come from rather different perspectives. When someone is arrested, he or she is absolutely powerless against the government. He will be restrained with handcuffs. She will be put into a jail. They will eat when they are told to do so, sleep when they are told to do so and will live in cells and “ranges.” They will appear before judges who have a great deal of discretion. It is not at all unusual that a judge may impose a sentence of anything from probation up to 10 years in prison and, as a practical matter, no appellate court will touch that sentence. That is why we have juries. That is why we have the presumption of innocence. That is why the state or government has to prove the case and prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. These protections are not intended to get guilty people off. They are intended to keep innocent people out of prison. To do that, these rights have to be extended to everyone. If you think of examples where something outrageous is been done in a criminal case, you may very well be right. There are instances where criminal procedure can be significantly improved. But so long as we remain Americans, we have to be true to our Constitutional principles: the presumption of innocence, the burden of proof on the government, a high standard of proof, a public trial, the assistance of counsel, and most importantly of all a jury of citizens to oversee the process.

You want courts to strictly construe the Constitution? They have to provide those things, or it ain’t the Constitution.

And so, the next time you decide to vacation in sunny Mexico, know that you can be arrested by the Cheshire Cat, prosecuted by the Mad Hatter, and sent to prison by the Queen of Hearts.

Note: Copyright law is a little relaxed regarding titles. Presumed Guilty is also the title of at least 15 books and one other movie which have been published or released in the last 30 years. Using the same title does not necessarily constitute a copyright infringement.

Stormy Weather

A line of late winter/early spring thunderstorms passed through Mother West Virginia couple of weeks ago. We were sitting, as is our wont, solving the day’s problems and preparing to meet the day’s challenges when we heard on the tinny radio in the café the signal of the Emergency Broadcast System.

I had never heard the Emergency Broadcast System used for mere weather. I remember in the 1960s, there was a lot of attention paid to and an awareness of civil defense. In a time when the United States and the Soviet Union were each building bigger and better ICBMs, the sudden “we interrupt this program…” always brought at least a shadow of dread and a catch in the chest.

The decision to activate the Emergency Broadcast System or, for that matter, to declare a state of emergency is not an easy one to make.

I remember my Emergency Broadcast System codes. I wonder if they still work? I don’t think I’ll experiment. I also remember that in 1975 we accidentally set off the civil defense system in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, due to some atmospheric phenomenon that sent an FM radio signal a whole lot farther than it was intended to go. The folks in Mississippi were not amused.

Pippa passes.

Observer

2011-03-06T21:01:00.001-05:00

Observer

Another three weeks has gone by. This is a blog, not “Dear Diary,” and yet I find myself this evening writing about writing, at least a bit. I like to say something worthwhile or which will in the very least start a conversation, but I can only sneak in the back door tonight.

I remember when I first came to the bar I practiced in a small office building right beside the courthouse. Fairmont is a small town. I have no idea if it’s a typical small American town because I haven’t spent a whole lot of time in other small American towns. I may be the most poorly traveled lawyer you know. Then, as now, a good many people gathered around the courthouse apparently just loafing. (I spent two weeks one afternoon in the courthouse in Hazard, Kentucky, and it was so similar that it was positively spooky.) Our newspaper then, as now, did a lot of “human interest” stories and ran one on one of the more visible loafers. This was an old guy, kind of scrawny, with a long white beard. Whoever wrote the story was ready to paint him as both a derelict and a victim of industrial man’s inhumanity to man and all that sort of him thing. (I suspect that was a young reporter channeling Woodward and Bernstein, but I’m not certain about that.) As it turned out, the guy had an interesting story. He had always made his way in the world, and never made much money, but prided himself on having been a good friend to everyone. When he was asked about what he did these days, he replied that he was “an observer of the scene.” That turned out to be the headline writen for his picture on the front page, “Observer of the Scene. We need observers of the scene. Of course, they aren’t terribly productive. But, when you get right down to it, not a lot of people are all that useful in the material sense. There is an issue in Congress now about funding National Public Radio because it “should be self-sustaining.” In other words, it should be productive. Although how radio is actually going to be productive is beyond me. Dance, there is something that makes no sense to me. Why would we think of spending money on that? Well, who am I to say? It’s not productive in the material sense, but some people value it. And somebody has to be watching all of this, somebody has to be chronicling it. If the tree falls in the forest, we need somebody there to hear it.

Sometimes the best we can do is be an observer of the scene I suppose.

All Folly Down

Politics, I do so love politics. Owing to my beloved and respected “second father,” I have been doing graduate work in politics for going on 30 years. I’ve worked in several campaigns and written (or ghost written) lots of pamphlets and newspaper ads and radio ads and so forth. I love to run the “decision trees,” those multidimensional flowcharts where you find the various effects of various decisions and where, like chess, to be successful you need to be playing about six moves ahead.

This winter, I engaged in a pedal to the firewall political free-for-all and graduate study in practical politics. This occurred when I became one of nine people vying for appointment to the Circuit Court bench in Marion County. I have yet to write or talk much about this directly. Well, now my part of this is concluded even though the new judge has not yet been appointed. (I’m out of the running.) At the outset, let me say that the other eight people are all good lawyers and good friends. When you “fall short,” there is always that little tiny temptation in the back of your mind to bitch at the referee for making a bad call. Bullshit. Hello, Mr. Reality: Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes that ol’ bear gets you. It’s as simple as that.

But I have paid attention, and I do know a whole hell of a lot more about judicial selection than I did, and I’ve thought a great deal more about the qualities of our judiciary. I’ll right on the details of that at length later. Depending on what the West Virginia Legislature does with the proposed Intermediate Court of Appeals this session, I may have an article for publication on that anon. But I want to comment this evening on the relationship of the public with judicial selection.

Zero. Zilch. Nada. Judges are among the most powerful people in government. The Supreme Court of the United States has changed the landscape of political campaigns by now permitting corporations to make direct political contributions. It only took five justices who never saw a ballot box to do that. On the local level, the power of a judge is much more immediate. When we think of what a judge does, usually it is a criminal sentencing that comes to mind. And so you or your friend or the person who hurt you or the person you never met before are dependent upon the wise decision or random whim of a human being. We are wholly dependent upon the good sense and good faith of that person. Internally, the judicial branch of government has the weakest checks and balances of the three branches. And yet people either ignore their judges are or are directed in their opinions those having money driven agendas.

No, I don’t have some grand scheme to bring the Millennium to the courthouses. Know that those people are there and that you probably don’t have a clue who they are or how they got there.

Clickety

I’m getting used to the idea that computers are inherently modular. Stuff breaks on them all the time, and if your system works for one week continuously, it’s a trick, and the computer gods are lolling you into a false sense of peace. My trusty laptop crapped out and a good friend rebuilt it. And then, owing to Mr. Gravity (I fell on it), the LCD screen went tango uniform, so now it is the guts of the home office computer with a monitor attached. It now lays beneath the Gadsden flag, where the snake gazes hopefully but with eternal disappointment that he will see a bit of wisdom flow from the fingers of this wretched scribe sooner or later.

Let’s see, and then the keyboard at No. 3 crapped out, and partner JC gave me one of those “clackety” kinds of keyboards, the ones you can hear across the room and hear someone typing on when you’re talking to them on the phone. Actually I kind of like that – it’s a little feedback that I’m actually working. Wow, it doesn’t take a whole lot to amuse me, does it?

Fred’s Ring Redux

Brother Albert price died a couple weeks ago. Bro. Price was a member of Hermon Lodge No. 6 in Clarksburg.

There’s probably been a couple of years since I’ve written about Fred’s ring. When my good friend Fred Griffith died, his widow gave me his Masonic ring. The intrinsic worth of its metal is negligible – it's made from stainless steel. Brother Price is the one who made Fred’s ring. As I understand it, he made a lot of them for the brethren around here by taking stainless steel tubing used in the aircraft industry, shaping it and stamping it with distinctive tooling.

Sometimes our works do live on, at least for a bit.

Journey

This week includes Ash Wednesday. It is the start of another Lenten journey. That is important to me.

R

The Governor’s Special Election: Laughing up the Sleeves; The NRA Misses the Broad Side of the Barn; And other tales

2011-02-11T22:20:00.009-05:00

Government by Dairy Queen; The Special Election

I’ll have an ice cream cone – seven scoops, lemon, chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, coffee, pistachio and almond ripple. Covered with fudge. With sprinkles. Okay on second thought, I’ll take nine of them. No, no bag. Oh, no, I’m alone. I’ll just eat them here.

Elections are like ice cream cones. They are really good things. Delectable. Democracy in action. And consume too many of them in a short period of time, and you’re going to puke. And puke. And then puke some more, and not be very enthusiastic about them for a long time to come.

Welcome to the politics of West Virginia. We’re gearing up for the special governor’s election. The primary will be held on May 14. Then we will have a general election on October 4. Oops, then it will be 2012. Voters will go to the polls for the West Virginia primary in May. And, finally, and I’m not sure it if it will be climax or merely dénouement, but we'll finish off with the November 2012 General Election. And so, in a timespan of 18 months, West Virginians will abuse themselves with four contested, barn burning, hammer and tongs, knife in the kidney, slander and libel fest elections. I can hardly wait.

Oh, this follows the special senatorial primary election in August, 2010, plus the senatorial lovefest general election in November 2010

The cause of all of this was the death of Sen. Robert C Byrd in late June 2010. Sen. Byrd was the almost totally beloved and absolutely untouchable Dean of West Virginia politics. In a gesture to populism, the Governor and Legislature ordered a special election in 2010 for the open Senate seat even though that election was not necessary. Two years, they reasoned, was too long for an appointed senator not elected by the people. In any event, Gov. Manchin won that election which then created a vacancy in the governor’s mansion. Under the West Virginia Constitution, Senate President Earl Ray Tomblin became acting governor. That, by the way, set up a power struggle in the Senate. They’re still cleaning the walls from the pie fight.

Let me take a detour from fact and political reality here: every politician says that he or she wants Biblical glory for Mother West Virginia, let the chips fall where they may. I am reminded of very sage advice I received years ago from my seniors – don’t appeal to someone’s better nature, they may not have one. Instead, appeal to their self-interest. Everybody wants to win. Quite a number of people have the taste of the governor’s chair will in their mouths, and they will stop at damn-all-nothing to slake that thirst. And if the people benefit? Well, that's OK too.

One of the players seeking election is Senate and Acting Governor Tomblin. The other players do not want to wait, primarily because that would permit Gov. Tomblin to amass two years of incumbency points.

I consider the necessity for three back-to-back years of elections to be a chicken bone in the throat of Mother West Virginia. But here is where our dedication to a government of law has to withstand a test. The necessity of a special election this year was confirmed by the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. I didn’t like the result, but in reading the decision, they were exactly correct that the Constitution requires it. Last year, the whole special senatorial election was pushed as a trendy damn-history event. The 2011 election has to be held to satisfy the Constitution and to avoid it we would have to trash legal procedure. (One Supreme Court justice recused herself from the election things because she’s going to be on the ballot in 2012. Circuit Court Judge Larry Miller filled in. He’s a good friend and a totally upright guy. The fact that he signed off on the Supreme Court decision lends a particular credibility to me.)

So what do we have? On the Democratic side we have chaos in fratricide. On the Republican side, they are simply laughing their asses off. You see, Republicans in West Virginia have a fundamental problem – the great majority of the time, they lose elections. Therefore, any chaos will at worst leave them no worse off than they already are. Moreover, a 2011 primary process coincides with a convenient appeal to populism. Conveniently, it also aids Democratic Party fratricide and will require Democratic candidates to blow most of their resources on the primary. In my judgment, it would have been wiser and better to have used a conventional system which, up until last week, was what the law provided for. Of course, that would’ve affected the result of who the nominee was, mainly by leaving big money out of the process. I have a little problem tying big money to the public will, but maybe that’s just me. (Just like singing that phrase “world without end” in the Gloria Patria, this whole idea of a “public will” induces a chuckle every time I say it.)

As you might expect, everyone getting into the governor’s race sees himself or herself riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. One candidate announced “A new day in West Virginia!” I’m reminded of the comment made by Brother WC Fields that we don’t need a new deal, because we're going to get old double shuffle anyway.

I am not ready to handicap the election. Every election for 30 years, I've prepared a sample ballot about a week prior to the election and posted it in the back of the circuit clerk’s office with my predictions. I think I would have to write this one on Kevlar this year. So far, the Democrats have five reasonably heavy candidates in the race. State Treasurer John Purdue is smart and accomplished, but suffers from genuinely lousy PR. Speaker of the House Rick Thompson is primarily known in southern West Virginia and would have to hurry up to get a statewide reach. One of his strongest assets is his wife, who travels around with him and who is a GREAT campaigner. Gov. Tomblin is going to get some incumbent points and also points for having jumped in and taken charge. He, too, is known primarily in southern West Virginia and the disgraceful fight in the Senate likely has hurt him. Senator Jeff Kessler announced today. He led the revolution in the Senate which is the first thing that has given him any genuine statewide exposure and which carries some of its own negatives. Finally, there is Natalie Tennant, Secretary of State. While that may be a fairly unimportant job scheme of things, she has run and won a statewide election. Last week, she shot herself in the foot by having a bunch of posters printed at public expense on election issues featuring her photograph. A. James Manchin could get away with that kind of thing, but he’s gone now.

Republicans have a strong candidate in Betty Ireland, the former Secretary of State. She has stayed reasonably prominent since she left office and is already running hard. I have no doubt that she will get some pushback from others in Republican Party because she is just not doctrinaire enough. (That is not say that the Democratic Party does not have a crazy wing. However, the sane wing keeps winning elections, so the crazies stay at the back of the room.) I don’t see Ireland doing goofy things like invoking lasers in the sky, so she will benefit by the Democratic infighting. The question, of course, is how much will she benefit.

Permit me to remind you of something Will Rogers said: I’m not a member of a organized political party. I’m a Democrat.

Note: I finished Greg Icenhower’s biography of A. James Manchin yesterday. A James acted like a goofball, but he believed everything he said and he genuinely loved Mother West Virginia. In 1974, I was down at the Legislature on an internship through West Virginia University. We had an evening session setup by Doc Whisker with A. James. In the room were about 20 intense college students at the end of a hard week but still looking forward to hitting the bar at the Daniel Brown Hotel that night. A. James talked to us for a couple of hours and absolutely captivated us with stories of doing what he felt was the right thing for people. When he was head of the Farmers Home Administration West Virginia (a political plum for helping the Kennedy's in 1960), he attempted to fund a football field in Wetzel County. It was turned down in Washington because they had a rule against funding what were primarily spectator sports facilities. Undeterred, A. James proceeded to fund and approve an outdoor volleyball court 80 yards x 120 yards.

Unrelated note: I read a brief biographical sketch of Lewis Wetzel this evening. He was a well-known Indian fighter on the frontier when the frontier was here in West Virginia. Manifest Destiny aside, the local warfare was intense and Wetzel was a positively accomplished practitioner. He developed the usual skill of being able to reload a flintlock rifle while at a dead run.

The NRA Misses the Broad Side of the Barn

Jeez, and Bro. Dave says I'm a bad shot. I got an e-mail this afternoon from the NRA. Let me say at the outset that I’m a member of the NRA. I argued the gun statute case before the West Virginia Supreme Court for the NRA after the enactment of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Amendment to the state constitution. I support gun rights. I like guns.

Today’s e-mail proudly announced that the NRA is backing two new bills introduced at the West Virginia Legislature. The first is stupid and the second is both stupid and unconstitutional.

“House Bill 3084 would clarify the training requirements for concealed carry applicants, such as the misunderstanding about the existence of a live fire requirement.”

In West Virginia, one must have a permit to carry a concealed firearm. (To openly carry a firearm is lawful so long as one does not brandish it. In other words, if you carry a handgun, leave it in the holster. That's still stupid, though.) The existing statute requires that you have to be a graduate of a recognized training course in order to qualify for the permit. People with law enforcement training or military training have had those courses automatically. NRA courses are specifically approved within the statute. What is, apparently, unclear to some is whether the courses need to include “live fire,” that is, going to a range and actually firing a weapon.

This bill clarifies what nobody in their right mind already knew, that there need be no requirement of “live fire” to obtain a pistol license.

Nor should there be a requirement of working on patients to get a surgeon’s license. Or ever starting an IV to get a paramedic’s license. Or actually donning turnout gear to obtain a firefighter certificate.

Maybe the thinking behind this bill is some “slippery slope” thing that is driving maniacal resistance, for example, to questioning 30 round pistol magazines. (Of that, a discussion on another day.) But, Lord Jesus, please don’t tell me that we will have ignoramuses who have never felt recoil or heard anything go “bang” carrying firearms.

Incidentally, initial life fire is nowhere near enough. If you’re going to do anything dangerous, you need to maintain your skills.

“The second, House Bill 3085, would prohibit physicians from making unrelated
inquiries into a patient’s status of firearm ownership.”

You really have to read some of the language of this one to get the full belly laugh. It would permit the Board of Medicine to suspend or revoke a doctor’s license to practice for any ONE or more of the following 9 causes: (The first 8 are already in the law.):

(1) Conviction of a felony . . . ;
(2) Conviction of a misdemeanor involving moral turpitude;
(3) Violation of any provision of [the licensing law];
(4) Fraud, misrepresentation or deceit in procuring or attempting to procure
admission to practice;
(5) Gross malpractice;
(6) Advertising by means of knowingly false or deceptive statements;
(7) Advertising, practicing or attempting to practice under a name other than one's own;
(8) Habitual drunkenness or habitual addiction to the use of morphine, cocaine or
other habit-forming drugs;
(9) Making an oral or written inquiry of a patient concerning the possession, ownership, or storage of firearms, where the inquiry has no relationship to the practice of osteopathic medicine or the medical condition of the patient and is for the purpose of gathering statistics or to justify patient counseling unless the inquiry is the subject of a request or related to a medical complaint made by the patient.

The statute has the distinction of being insulting and unconstitutional.

Some months ago, I answered some sort of written questionnaire prepared by some national company as a part of some medical care. It had three or four questions about the ownership and use of firearms. Do I think that my doctor needs to know that? No, not really. It would be a little tacky to go tooled up into the doctor’s office, especially if one were going for an examination required disrobing. (I remember some funny scenes from the Police Academy movies where the gung ho character Tackleberry would occasionally relieve himself of his many firearms and stack them up.) But I do not need the Legislature or my mommy to tell the doctor what to ask me, or to tell me how to answer him or her. I’m a big boy. I have a choice to answer “Yes,” “You bet your ass!,” or “Sorry, Doc, that’s really none of your business.” See? I didn’t need the Legislature to protect me, I did it all by myself!

I really hope I don’t need to expound much on constitutionality. This is America. We have free speech. We can say things and ask questions with very few limitations. Those who would "protect" us from speech are insulting us. Oh, and they are also very much into Selective Socialism.

By the way, sometimes I'm asked "Should I get a gun?" And my answer is, How the hell should I know. I'm not YOUR mother.

Pippa passes.

R

Prime the Pump

2011-02-06T16:28:00.007-05:00

Prime the Pump

Billy Edd Wheeler is a West Virginia songwriter/playwright & artist. One of his country/folk favorites is called "Desert Pete," and is the story of a thirsty man running across a water pump out in the desert. The last person there, Desert Pete, left a bottle of water, just enough to prime the pump. The thirsty man's challenge is to trust that using that water to prime the pump will make the pump work and give him all of the cold & sweet water that he needs.

The chorus of the song goes:

You've got to prime the pump.
You must have faith and believe.
You've got to give of yourself 'fore you're worthy to receive.
Drink all the water you can hold.
Wash your face cool your feet.
Leave the bottle full for others.
Thank you kindly, Desert Pete.

I haven’t posted in 6+ weeks. I’m moderately surprised that Friend Jan hasn’t hassled me for my laziness. In reality, I just haven't primed the pump.

The “winter of my discontent” has been wrapped up in a tea bag and dipped into the hot water of politics. Mind you, I love politics, but this heat was scalding because it was me wrangling for an office. Our long-serving Circuit Judge, Fred Fox, retired. He is the longest serving judge or justice in the history of West Virginia, and his retirement still came as a shock. It did set off a frenzy of maneuvering amongst the Bar to find a replacement to be appointed until the 2012 election, and your wretched scribe was in the battle. The Judicial Vacancy Advisory Commission met last week, made a short list, and made the wise decision that a black robe would be just too strange looking on this poor stiff.

I will confess that my legendary good humor was strained for an hour or two after I got The Word on Tuesday. And then, Wednesday morning, I was having coffee as usual with Bro. Dave at the Classics Café and we were again solving all of the World’s Problems. Jeri, the owner, came up and exclaimed “Hey, look!,” and pointed at the Courthouse right across the street.

The photo above is what she, and then we, saw: A double rainbow over the Marion County Palais du Justice. Dave and I burst out laughing. Coincidence? Refraction of light, nothing more? Or was it a timely reminder that all of our little machinations don’t amount to a Hill of Beans in the scheme of things?

Good humor restored. "You've got to prime the pump. You must have faith and believe. You've got to give of yourself 'fore you're worthy to receive.

You Are Your Own Security

When I go to our newspaper’s site in the mornings, I’m greeted with an online video ad, usually something local. This morning, though, it was a feel-good, professional ad for Smith & Wesson Security Services. I have a positive feeling for Smith & Wesson, but I didn't know that they did home alarm systems. The video was of a happy little family group on the couch, but the male announcer told me what a close call they had just had. An intruder had just tried to break in! “But thankfully, the Peterson's were never in any danger. The Peterson’s Smith & Wesson Security System sounded the alarm and scared him off.”

Bull. Shit.

Mind you, I believe in electronic security and perimeter security. There are all sorts of good reasons. Most criminals are stupid, greedy and lazy. If they meet strong resistance gaining entrance, most will leave. If they believe that the police are coming, most will leave. Moreover, other electronic services and devices, such as smoke alarms and the personal distress devices for older people, work very well and save lives.

But, but, but - to say that “The Peterson's were never in any danger” is magnificently stupid.

Most criminals are lazy morons. If they were not, they would make the connection that crime doesn’t work to make their lives better long-term. But not all of them. What the public does not recognize is that evil people do not reside just on the movie screen or in books. And just as dangerous as the evil people are the amoral people and the sociopaths, those who do not make the connection that it is wrong to harm others. Unrealistic? Excessive? Nope, consider it a tip from Mr. Reality.

God bless our police officers. They do a hard and dangerous job for not enough money. However, primarily they are a reactive force. When something bad happens, they react to it. They deter crime because most criminals fear that they will be caught and punished after the crime is committed.

And so, to sell us “complete security,” the alarm companies are peddling the bilge water that “The Peterson's were never in any danger.” Loud noises and the threat that the police will arrive in a few minutes will not deter the sociopath. They may merely hurry him up and make his attack all the more violent.

This is not a “get-your-gun” polemic. The decision to take up a weapon is an extremely serious one. It should only be made after a commitment to respect the extreme responsibility attendant to that decision. It should only be made after a commitment to learn to use weapons responsibly and safely. But do not console yourself that you are relieved of the duty to protect yourself and your family because the thought of police coming in 3 to 5 minutes will chase away every criminal. We citizens are at our most vulnerable when we become too complacent or too lazy or too afraid to consider our own safety.

Mumbles from Mumbai

As I’m working, often I keep “Internet radio” playing in the background. There are not many advertisements which, curiously, emphasizes those which there are.

This morning, I heard a well-done ad. Did you know that you can get the help of a “personal assistant” for only $6.98 per hour? Personal assistants are the folks who trudge through the minutia of life so that we can think Higher Thoughts and do Greater Deeds unimpeded by Ordinary Things and, coincidently, stay out of touch with humanity. Miley has a personal assistant. So does J. Lo and Brad and Oprah and The Donald, so why can’t we, and on the cheap at that?

Well, my question was, how can they provide this service for less than the federal minimum wage? Dummy me. I looked at the website. I bet you already know how they do it. They describe themselves as “a full service offshore outsourcing solution provider” located in the US with the “operated delivery center located at Mumbai, India.”

In other words, Americans (maybe) formed a company to service greedy and lazy Americans using Third World labor.

Before any of us get all pious, let us remember why this outfit has a call center in India. We put it there. We’re the ones who demand plastic junk which can be made cheaply in Asia and then sent by containership to North America at a lesser cost than it could be manufactured on this continent. We are the ones who are unwilling to pay American wages for work that we consider beneath ourselves. We are the ones who look at products which fill our mouths with the saliva of irrational desire and tell ourselves, “oh, just this once, it’s okay to buy something that’s not American.” And in doing so, wink wink, it’s OK to have some illegal immigrants just this once to harvest the crops so we can eat cheap at Applebee’s and, wink wink, we’ll pretend that proud American brand names (Buck, Springfield, Timber Rattler, or, hell, Ford, GM & Chrysler) are still All-American. Are your winking muscles getting tired yet?

Government regulation is not the answer, even if it were possible to get a square deal there. (It is to chortle - some of the best investments in America are made in its politicians. And the funny part is, it’s legal. Wink, wink.) We the People have a right to spend our dollars as we choose.

Where do we choose? Here is a test of us as a people. Not whether we have a government strong enough to coerce us to long-term economic health if ever it were inclined to try, but whether we have the people who are intelligent enough and of sufficient moral strength to do so. I say these things not from some position of moral superiority - - I have my own excess of Chinese, etc., shit. It has to end. Or not. Our choice.

What’s it going to be? Mumbai or Fairmont? Shanghai or St. Louis? Indonesia or Indiana?

Note: There are places to learn about american products, such as
Buyamerican.com and buyamericanmart.com, among others.

My Secret

I don't care about the Super Bowl. Mum's the word.

Pippa passes.

R

A Word to the Fellowship; And Lesser Rambling

2010-12-15T12:43:00.004-05:00

Personal to the Fellowship

EMS1.com reports that it has been a very hard week. We lost our brother Dave Grundle, age 50, an EMT in Indiana, and an ambulance accident. Our sister Vanessa Carrillo, age 19, was critically injured in another ambulance accident on I-25 in New Mexico. Brethren, the job is as dangerous as ever it has been. Be careful out there and remember those who have fallen.

An Addendum Wherein My Ignorance is Laid Bare

My brother Born has informed me that a very short portion of the Shenandoah River does indeed run through Jefferson County, West Virginia, and that with respect to the geographical observation made about John Denver’s Almost Heaven, West Virginia, I am wrong, wrong, wrong. Born wanted to inform me lest I show my ignorance. That particular ship has long since sailed, of course.

Perhaps John Denver just could not work “Monongahela” into the rhyme scheme.
This reminds me of a curious argument that Born and I had after he ruled in a case years ago concerning whether the Mason-Dixon line extends all the way to the Ohio River or terminates at the eastern boundary of the northern panhandle of West Virginia. Yes, I know that’s a pretty esoteric subject. It’s just what we do.

A Gender Observation From the 1930s

Among my eclectic collections are books about the history of Fairmont, Marion County, and this region generally. Recently, I acquired from an eBay seller a compendium of some old sources including biographical sketches of various prominent Marion Countians of the 1930s. Among the descriptions was the following:

“Miss L. Dale Westfall - Although women in America no longer suffer from sex discrimination to any great extent in relation to their activities in the professions or in general business, the time is not so far back in our history when many and agitated discourses in the public press and elsewhere were those concerning the inferiority of female brain tissue. No doubt some of those could be resurrected from dusty shelves, but it is safe to say they will never be by the present generation of intelligent citizenship of Fairmont, West Virginia. ... Family life had been one of ample means and Miss Westfall, early showing unusual talent, had been encouraged to cherish the hope of a college career, but was orphaned at an early age, and shortly afterwards faced with the disastrous knowledge that the funds had been lost through unfortunate investments, she began to show some of those sturdy traits of character that have helped to place her far front in the business world.… Not only in association with others, where her business vision and sound judgment have contributed no largely to firm success, has Ms. Westfall earned the distinction which is hers, being termed one of the leading businesswomen in the state, but alone and individually her investments have been made with such business sagacity that the returns give her a most satisfactory income.”

I don’t know who wrote this, but I imagine that the conclusions about how open and easy local society was to gender differences in the 1930s are not all that believable to the modern ear. Perhaps it is commendable that this writer was giving it a shot 80 years ago. Perhaps not, I can picture a reaction that the writer was quite dense.

I’m working on an essay about the concept of “brotherhood” in the old sense as it should and does extend across gender lines, and I thought this passage from the 1930s was interesting.

Tidbits of a Curmudgeonly Manifesto

I don’t know how I got started on this, but I just started writing down little hobbyhorses the other evening:

Coke® or Pepsi®? Who cares? They are cola. They taste the same. Those who get all snooty about one or the other are wallowing in bargain basement elitism. We are not talking about the difference between single malt scotch and the five-dollar-a-bottle blended scotch. We’re talking about Coke®. And that includes Pepsi®. Grab a Kleenex® and have a good cry.

I make reference to God frequently and sincerely. Some people do and some people don’t. That’s the First Amendment in action. If you disapprove of my faith, I can live with that.

I do not fly or otherwise display the Confederate battle flag (the “stars and bars”) because I think it’s tacky and offensive to black folks. However, I no longer take offense automatically at those who do. Display of any flag is constitutionally protected and symbolic speech. To some, the stars and bars reflect general disaffection or regional pride. I do not suspect that those waving the stars and bars are organizing themselves into gray clad regiments which are preparing to invade Pennsylvania by way of the Emmitsburg Road.

The Gadsden flag (“don’t tread on me”) was used at the time of the American Revolution. It is a legitimate American symbol and is very easy to interpret. I do not care how many whack jobs have hijacked it as an emblem of their own agenda. To me, it symbolizes the American spirit, and I will continue to fly it.

Oh, my God. The electricity is off. Heavenly days. This means that you will have to live in the same manner people did for tens of thousands of years until sometime in the last century.

The church down the street with its loud speakers blaring hymns every day at 7 AM, noon and 7 PM is every bit as annoying as would be a mosque with the muezzin in a minaret yelling out a call to prayer five times a day. Sharing your beliefs does not give you a right to be pushy or thoughtless.

Yes, I always carry a knife in my pocket. It is not an affectation, it is a tool.

In my opinion, the person cleaning the bedpan in the hospital has more dignity than the highest-paid administrator there.

Please remember that this is but one sellers stall in the marketplace of ideas. I encourage comment, I cherish thoughtful dissent.

Pippa passes.
R

Appealing Sturm und Drang

2010-11-28T16:34:00.004-05:00

An Intermediate Court of Appeals?

A chief goal of some business interests in West Virginia in the upcoming session of the Legislature is to establish an intermediate Court of Appeals.

When I talk about the legal structure of Mother West Virginia, I always picture myself talking to Mum in the UK and Flick Down Under, so I’ll refrain from rushing ahead. People go to court to resolve disputes and everywhere in the civilized world there is some sort of court of general jurisdiction, a court for citizens to obtain justice. Wherever the English Common-Law model of justice is followed, that court of general jurisdiction is where juries will sit. In West Virginia, the court of general jurisdiction is called the circuit court and a circuit usually consists of one or more counties. Circuit Judges are elected in partisan elections.

You have to have a safeguard against error, passion and prejudice. If you have any system and declare that what you have is perfect, you’re wrong. And so, in the Common-Law jurisdictions, there are courts of appeal. Someone who is dissatisfied with what a trial court does can appeal the case and ask a “higher” court to review what the trial court did and correct mistakes. Generally, the limitation is that the lower court decision is given great deference in its factual determinations because that’s where the live witnesses were heard. Here in West Virginia, there is a single appellate court, the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia. And so, the loser at Circuit Court has one chance to correct mistakes. In nearly every other state, there is at least one intermediate court between the trial court and the Supreme Court of the state.

One thing which powers the desire in West Virginia for the Intermediate Court of Appeals is the perception that jury verdicts are too high. (That’s an oversimplification, of course.) Another motivation is that appeals in West Virginia are not a matter of right, that is, the Supreme Court doesn’t have to hear the appeal. (See below the recent changes to the rules.), And so, there is the very real fear that someone will eat an unjust verdict and then have no way to know that someone will at least listen to their claim that it is unfair.

The Supreme Court of Appeals has responded to the concern by altering the Rules of Appellate Procedure. Formerly, if you filed a petition for appeal, the court could deny it with a two sentence order. Under the new rules, the Court will issue a “memorandum opinion,” that is, a short opinion which says why they are rejecting an appeal. The Court said before that they did carefully read every petition for appeal but, like so much of what happens in any courthouse, that was behind closed doors. The Court reasons, I presume, that the memorandum opinion will prove that every case has been given individual attention by the justices.

The problem here is that we have five Supreme Court justices (also selected by partisan election) and they have exactly 168 hours in every week to pursue their vocation, to care for their families, and for refreshment and sleep. The justices themselves cannot review every appeal much more thoroughly than they already are doing. They are ably assisted by very smart lawyer-law clerks, some the “superstars” of their law school classes, but those aren’t the people who were elected to rule on cases.

The “formula” answer for a lawyer who does not represent big business interests or insurance companies is that we do not need an intermediate appeal court because we can trust our circuit judges and juries.

Right, like I’ll follow a formula. Here again – you think you have a perfect system? If so, you probably have other hallucinations. Just because business interests, who are the loudest at the moment, want such a court, should other interests oppose their position? That’s pretty sloppy thinking. I cannot help but conclude that a just result justly arrived at is safe on appeal.

That being said, please remember that not a lot of people want justice in the abstract. That’s the sad secret of our justice system. People want to win. People want to find advantage for themselves. In our system of partisan elections and indeed in systems of nonpartisan elections, the heavy money does not closely track law school transcripts or superior intellect. How will a prospective judge vote in cases in which I’m interested? That’s the question. So it’s not so much the concept of an intermediate appellate court or a discussion of whether it’s needed or at least whether it would be quite useful. The Devil is in the details.

The real questions are who will the judges be (which means how will they be selected), how strict will the legal standards of appeal be, in other words, how much deference will be given to the actions of the trial court, and how transparent will the process the? I don’t hear much discussion in the last two questions, perhaps because they represent fairly settled law. A trial court should be granted a lot of discretion on determinations of fact. And if we say that an Intermediate Court is a good idea because people haven’t been adequately heard, then we should expect a genuine, reasoned written opinion in every case. Question number one is where the rubber meets the road. I will not reprise the endless discussion about partisan election versus nonpartisan election versus appointment versus retention elections versus mixed schemes ad nauseum. My own tin can version of statistical analysis, thinking about the judges I’ve known over the years, tells me that the Bell Curve follows any selection method. Two of the genuinely finest judges before whom I practiced died over the past week – United States District Judge Robert Maxwell and state Circuit Judge Les Fury. Judge Maxwell was appointed; Judge Fury elected.

A final consideration is that appeals be promptly resolved, for the great majority of appeals are not about million-dollar judgments. They are about child custody and alimony, boundary line disputes, people waiting in jail or waiting to find out if they have to go to jail, or other questions vital to just a few common citizens. We need to consider their rights, too.

Yes, I know this part of the post is dreadfully dull. It’s funny – looking rationally at important public issues should be dull in a lot of instances. Does the Sesame Street generation have the patience to govern America?

Minor Observations –

Ho, ho, ho, asking the obvious -

The State Journal, a statewide newspaper in West Virginia which focuses on business issues, ran an editorial on the question of whether the confusion and competing interests concerning a special election for governor in 2011 will prevent the Legislature from dealing with more substantive issues. The title of the editorial was “Will Politics Trump Good Government?”

The obviousness of the answer is pitiful, just pitiful, to quote noted philosopher Jed Clampett.

Gun Show

There is an ad today’s Times-West Virginian for the gun show which comes the Fairmont two or three times a year. Sometime in the future, I’ll make a stab at describing the experience and spirit of the gun show. The ad in today’s paper includes the line:

Get Your Guns While You Still Can!

I understand that creating a fear of lack is a marketing technique. But, to my Second Amendment, compatriots: Listen. Are you listening? Over the short term, there will be no shortage of firearms. Before the midterms, gun rights were pretty secure in Congress. You think maybe the midterms hurt? With the Heller/McDonald decisions, constitutional law is on the side of a liberal interpretation of the Second Amendment. So, relax.

The Catch of the Breath, “Liberal” Defined

No, no, no, when I talk about a liberal interpretation of the Second Amendment, I’m Nancy Pelosi and I'm not talking about an interpretation that restricts firearms to members of an organized militia who may only carry muzzle-loading flintlocks. Those who read that into what I wrote are succumbing to the propaganda paranoia coming from media zealots who are more interested in book sales and Nielsen ratings than in advancing rational and helpful political and social thought. “Liberal” and “conservative” are names placed on two dinky little pigeonholes nailed together by someone other than We the People and into which interests other than We want to cram every conceivable political or economic thought. How can we pretend to be a Land of the Free if we blithely let someone else hand us a list of our own “approved” beliefs? The “liberal” to which I refer includes the definitions:

favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible;
favoring or permitting freedom of action, esp. with respect to matters of
personal belief or expression; of or pertaining to representational forms of
government rather than aristocracies and monarchies; not strict or rigorous;
free; not literal: a liberal interpretation of a rule.

A restrictive non-liberal reading of the Second Amendment would activate the militia clause in a manner which the United States Supreme Court (in McDonald) decided was not intended by the founders.

Once words start scaring us, we are no better off than Pavlov’s dogs.

Almost Heaven

I really love the John Denver song, Almost Heaven, West Virginia. He makes reference to the Blue Ridge mountains which are more commonly identified with the Commonwealth of Virginia but which lie partially in West Virginia. [A little bit of nickel knowledge: the “blue” in Blue Ridge refers to the color imparted in the atmosphere by natural chemicals from trees.] On the other hand, when Denver makes reference to the “Shenandoah River,” I always cringe a little bit. The edge of the Shenandoah watershed defines a part of the border between Virginia and West Virginia, with all of the Shenandoah lying on the Virginia side. I thought we settled this one in the Civil War. Okay, I still like the song.

Good Example by the President

Pres. Obama is going around sporting a fat lip with stitches in it from injury while playing basketball. What an excellent example for young people. These are the bumps and bangs of real-life, not the puny intakes of breath from the Xbox NBA basketball game. For that matter, all of the presidents going back to Theodore Roosevelt (with perhaps two or three exceptions) have been quite active people. There's a lesson there.

A Wise Hobbyhorse?

Why in the world would anyone ever refer to himself or herself as “wise”? That is cockiness incarnate. I have been treated to professional advertising lately, most of it by lawyers, where the advertisers lay claim to the sobriquet “wise” and award themselves with the mantle of “wisdom.”

Even when “I am the greatest!,” I run into the fray looking like a blowhard and I also run the risk of meeting Joe Frazier and getting knocked on my ass.

The simple fact is that neither I nor anybody I know is anywhere near smart enough to refer to themselves as “wise.” This is a determination to be made only by others, and only invariably after a long and consistent history of intelligence, moderation and moral rectitude.

Maybe wisdom this a good goal to shoot for. But unlike a merit badge, there is no guaranteed path and you are not in control.

Pippa passes.

R

Darwin & Daffodils

2010-11-19T09:12:00.004-05:00

A Quick Lesson in Leadership

The notion of "social Darwinism" is quite overused, just as our several other scientific principles when folks try to hammer them into social systems. Nevertheless, I see some parallel between extended Darwinian kinds of concepts and leadership.

One such concept to which I heartily adhere is that leadership is not grasped, declared, proclaimed or bragged about, it is simply exercised. In other words, the person who yells out “I’m the leader!,” has already relinquished any control. The leader who will be followed, in my experience, is the one who simply gets out and leads knowing that his or her lead will be followed. This week has furnished West Virginia with an excellent example of this principle in action..

Those of you in the flat lands may be unaware of the triflingly unusual situation in the executive branch in the government of West Virginia. Our two-term governor elected in 2004 and 2008, Joe Manchin, was just elected to serve out Sen. Byrd’s unexpired term in the United States Senate. (Incidentally, I consider this a very good choice for West Virginia and for the nation. For instance, with the arrival of now-Senator Manchin, the ill-considered concept of “cap and trade” is dead on arrival in Washington.) Sen. Manchin's selection left a vacancy in the governor’s chair. The West Virginia Constitution provides that in the event of such a vacancy, the president of the Senate shall act as governor. The statute is not a model of clarity on this point nor is the rather fuzzy statute which recently designated the president of the Senate as the lieutenant governor. Likely, someone will bring some sort of petition to the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia to clarify the situation and determine, among other things, whether there shall be some sort of special election for governor in 2011, right before the general election for governor in 2012, and whether the president of the Senate will be serving as governor, acting governor or shall act as governor (See? The nuances are somewhat complicated.) in the meantime.

But into the thick of this bothersome uncertainty has stepped Senate President Earl Ray Tomblin. As soon as Sen. Manchin moved out, Mr. Tomblin moved into the governor’s office and just started doing the job. He has brought in his own staff, made some changes in administration leadership positions and has wasted no time in putting his stamp on the governor’s office. I don’t know Gov. Tomblin, and have never met the man. But I do think that this is a darn fine lesson in leadership. If you wait for your critics to give you permission, you'll never even get started.

2011 is going to be an interesting year in these mountains.

Anonymity & Timidity

The Good Lord Himself (OK, Herself?) personally knows my many weaknesses. Absent from them,I am happy to say, is faint-heartedness of principle.

Today’s Charleston Gazette reports a lawyer disciplinary case of some note and controversy. Some nasty comments to the story are from lawyers writing under pseudonyms. (One styles him/herself the “great american,” lowercase theirs. Holy Cow, chutzpah on the hoof.) Writing criticism anonymously, I believe, demonstrates a certain kind of weakness of character.

If someone reads something I write and thinks that the writer is a stupid, arrogant SOB, they will damn sure know that Roger Curry is the stupid, arrogant SOB that they are thinking about.

Dumb, De-dumb, Dumb

One of the myriad weaknesses I must cop to is the occasional intransigent shortsightedness.

Some few years ago, a “Gateway Connector” highway was begun through a moderately rundown area of East Fairmont in order to provide a more direct connection with Interstate 79. It has long been my unshrouded opinion that this was the Road to Nowhere and a bloody awful waste of money.

Okay. They’ve opened part of it, and I drove up the Connector yesterday. I was wrong. Just plain, flat wrong. This darn road is such a benefit in opening the downtown area to outside access that I have to say it was worth the money. I still think with regret about some of the older people displaced from homes which they continued to carefully tend in a steadily deteriorating area. On the other hand, some of the structures razed were blatant slums when I was last in them 25 years ago and had not had a hammer or paintbrush cross their thresholds from then until the time they were bulldozed to make room for the road, so good riddance to them.

Someone please write this down and remind me the next time I appear to be just absolutely dead bang certain about something.

Asses Watching Other Asses

America has a tradition of free speech and town meetings and so-called ordinary people standing up on their hind legs and saying extraordinary things. These were the pamphleteers of the colonial and Revolutionary eras; these the acid writers of the 19th century; these even the new thinkers published by small houses in the 1950s. And these traditions were given such a quantum boost by this universal soapbox and printing press right before your eyes.

Not only has the written word flourished through the blogosphere, radio-like opinion has now started to take off (e.g., blogtalkradio.com) and of course there is the Everyman medium, YouTube and similar entrants into the Visual Marketplace of Ideas.

And where goes humankind goes Gresham’s Law. There are now, and I kid you not, videos on YouTube showing video games imitating real-life which gamers have played and want to display – So we have an opportunity to sit on our asses and watch the effects of other people sitting on their asses while pretending to participate in Reality.

Ben Franklin? Thomas Paine? Are you there? Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Dodgeball and Daffodils

The director of the West Virginia's “Office of Education Performance Audits” is a bold crusader against . . . dodgeball. When he visits a school, he examines even the lesson plans of physical education teachers to ferret out apostasy. The summer, he was quoted in the Charleston Daily Mail:

"Dodgeball ... is not part of the West Virginia 21st Century physical education content standards and objectives. This practice had the potential to cause physical and emotional harm to students and was not of an educational nature."

Mind you, when the teams lined up at dear old Parkersburg high school to play dodgeball, I had trouble getting out of my own way. It was not an unheard-of circumstance that my handsome visage had the reverse imprint of “Wilson” planted somewhere. But give me a break – it’s dodgeball. I tell children with whom I interact that the occasional bangs and bruises are parts of growing up and indeed some of the good parts, because they show that you’re really living. Tell me, is that a terribly passé attitude? When I got creamed with a dodgeball, it may have hurt my little feelings but it also pissed me off. Somehow this seems moderately educational to me.

What’s next? Shall we change the name of school sports teams to those of harmless herbivores, pastels, flora and other vanilla things? Will the Fairmont Daffodils edge out the Charleston Chipmunks in a gentle game of tiddly-winks or croquet? And will the winner then have to apologize? After all – we don’t want to upset anyone.

So is sitting on one's ass watching other people sit on their asses and play video games such a great surprise right now?

Perking Up

It will be a nice fall day in West Virginia for a walk in the woods Saturday.

Pippa passes.

R

Titanium, Germanium and Francis Scott Key

2010-11-04T20:22:00.003-04:00

All that Glitters is Not Titanium

Earlier this week, I was in the Fairmont General Hospital HealthPlex where there is a large wellness center/gym/work out area, urgent care center, doctors offices and so forth. FGH is a non-profit hospital and occasionally runs capital contribution campaigns. The HealthPlex was built three or four years ago, partly with sizeable donations, and there are the usual plaques to commemorate the donors and the levels of giving. On the wall by the elevators are four large plaques for the five levels. The first four are fairly humdrum, and follow the per ounce monetary value of metals: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. But they had five levels and had to name another metal. Plutonium and Americium are more valuable than Platinum, but I understand why they might avoid those. So, the highest giving level is denoted “Titanium.” That seems strange.

Mind you, I consider titanium a superior metal. The spreader arms of the first model of the Hurst Rescue Tool (“The Jaws of Life”) were fabricated of forged titanium. They were about 2 feet long had to be able to exert over 20,000 pounds of force at the tips without deforming or breaking. Titanium is used in some aircraft construction. Also, titanium is being used these days to make some very nice looking and relatively inexpensive jewelry. Perhaps this is not something random and the FGH Foundation has hit upon the idea of ranking metals not solely by their monetary value but by by their metallurgical properties and their usefulness to mankind. Based upon that, I have made a careful study of the periodical table of elements [don’t hassle me, I know that bronze is an alloy] and I suggest the following11 levels of giving, Olympic medals, and so forth, based on usefulness to mankind and my personal yet impeccable opinions:

1 - Iron
2 - Copper
3 - Aluminum
4 - Lead
5 - Zinc
6 - Mercury
7 - Tungsten
8 - Germanium
9 - Titanium
10 - Magnesium
11 - Chromium

If I had to choose number 12, it would be bronze. Silver and gold just don’t make the list. I extend apologies to Oliver Goldsmith and Paul Revere.

Note: I recognize that it would be a real bear of a job to fashion a medal out of mercury. Not my problem, I’m just the creative brains of the outfit.

Dumb Question for Wednesday

“How did the election go for you?”

Who cares? The election is OVER. What counts now is what the people we elected DO and what WE do as citizens from this day forward.

Francis Scott Key - Read the Next Stanza

The old boy knew that he wasn’t waxing lyrical about a people who were already perfect:

“God mend thine every flaw.
Confirm thy soul in self control,
Thy liberty in law.”

Pippa passes.

R

Un-campaign Notes

2010-10-31T20:08:00.007-04:00

There is still smoke curling off the keyboard from political writing which has gone hither and yon in recent weeks. I cut a public service announcement on behalf of the firm on Friday which will run election night on the theme “Don’t go to sleep, we're citizens 24/7.” For tonight, I offer nonpolitical things, and this terminal of my HAL-9000 computer system will be wondering who is inputting this information.

Singing

Beloved friend Parson Jim Norton at a cold and was not singing in the choir this morning, so he sat by me. I have a cold, too, which drops my voice about half an octave. As we were singing a hymn this morning, it struck me that was the first time I had stood and sung along with a good bass voice since I did so with my dad many years ago.

Lawyer books

I haven’t written book reviews in a blue moon and this doesn’t count as a review – more like a random comment or two. John Grisham’s newest book, The Confession, was published last Tuesday. A couple of years ago, I had sworn off Grisham because improbable plot twists late in his novels made them less enjoyable for me. I downloaded this one anyway, and it’s a good one. He uses the most believable scenarios since his very first novel, and The Confession centers around that very rarest bugaboo which does (as well it should) scare the hell out of every participant in a death penalty case, that we wrongly convict and execute a factually innocent person. Grisham hardly needs my imprimatur, but he has it anyway.

And then I read The Reversal by Michael Connelley, also recently published. Connelley is a journalist who has two long-running characters who occasionally intersect, one of whom is a lawyer in the traditional lawyer-novel sense. The plot starts with a 20-year-old murder conviction being reversed and a defense lawyer being hired as a special prosecutor. The glaring error in this one is the discussion (unnecessary to the plot) of whether to seek the death penalty of someone previously sentenced to the penitentiary for the same crime. You just can’t do that, because that would “chill” the right to appeal a verdict which was improperly obtained. It's still a fine read.

The Sounds of Silence

In the coming weeks, I have to collect all of my “letters to the editor, op-ed submissions, and similar writings.” Of the purpose behind this, more later. Others will be asked to do the same.

I must say, I’m looking on this with wry amusement. Most of my friends probably have a real good idea of where to put their hands on their public writings and, while their personal correspondence may be voluminous, the blatherings they may have posted where Angels Fear to Tread are few. There are of course, some exceptions, many of whom have blogs which are linked to the right of this page.

To me, finding these writings is not Mission Impossible, but it will certainly be Mission Darned Difficult. I don’t do many letters to the editor, for I can seldom keep my writings short enough. I do submit op-ed commentaries and opinion-laden articles, mostly to statewide publications or to the local newspaper and publish what used to be the “canons” from the blog as book reviews spread here and there. (I also wonder how far back I have to go - My first letter to the editor was as a senior in high school; first magazine, US News, as a college student; the ABA Journal as a young Turk; a couple of USA Today letters over the years - how far?)

But, my heavens! (Prior to being so sensitive that anyone would be reading what I said, it would have been “Holy Shit, Batman!”) I have opinions! I’ve expressed them! People may not agree with me! People may not like me!

Well, that is the flipside of the First Amendment. When you make public commentary, you’re making a choice to participate in the marketplace of ideas. People are welcome to be consumers-only in that marketplace. The responsibility of vendors in the marketplace is significant from where I stand. And the greatest fear is this: if you are honest in your writing, people know who you are. And you’re just going to have to take the chance that some people will not like you. In fact, it’s not a chance, it is a fact – for every person who engages in productive and respectful discourse, there is another who throws the anonymous rocks of personal destruction. Moreover, people who read you over time will see you grow or diminish as you refine your ideas, abandon the bad ones or seize on what "sells."

I intended this mini-essay to be lighter than it has turned out. But I confess that my heart is still pretty light. I look back over things I’ve written in years past and occasionally I will say, “Boy, that one’s a little bit dense,” or even “What the hell was I thinking?!?” That I’m still content to write what I think and feel so far as it is proper to be written and I am at peace with always having done so. I certainly think - I certainly hope - that it has always been done with honesty and respect, even if it has been occasionally stupid.

Speaking of Intelligent Commentary

My Old Friend The Reasonable Curmudgeon has posted the most provocative, delightful and, well, reasonable essay on his blog (link to the right.)

http://thereasonablecurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2010/10/i-just-dont-get-it.html

Not Going Far To Look for America

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and
aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all gone to look for America
All gone to look for America
All gone to look for America

In some folk/folk-rock of the 60s and early 70s, you find good poetry. The next few paragraphs have been sitting on the hard drive for a couple of weeks. A tweak here and here, and here they are:

I found America tonight.

One of the old Disney movies with Fred MacMurray talked about the concept of “serendipity,” where you ran on to something wonderful you weren't looking for, and even had this catchy little song, “seren-dipa-dipa-dipity.”

We’re on one of the long hauls of this never ending political marathon and every smile in front of the camera claims to represent America. No, I’m wrong – not “represent” America, they claim to be America. I’m in the middle of the marathon, writing and calling everyone I know for my friends and for the causes in which I believe so deeply. But I was reminded tonight that politics is not America. The political system may support America, it may provide some guidance for America, but it is not America.

This evening we went to the church for a fundraiser called the “Furnace Dinner.” The purpose was to generate some funds for church property maintenance, part of which is going to be a lot of HVAC work. If you see one little church dinner, you’ve seen them all, haven’t you?

And so, once again I prove conclusively that a few bulbs in Roger’s chandelier burn out and need replaced and refreshed now and then. There, at the Furnace Dinner, was the real America. America is found in the Fellowship of honest people. You find America when families come together, where moms and dads are with their kids, or the young and active help the aged, or anywhere that goodwill prevails. It doesn’t have to be a church – the softball field, a family reunion, a chance meeting of strangers who become friends at the state park, a concert, or even a person of goodwill sitting alone and transcending his or her troubles, there is America. As for me, I found America tonight in a simple dinner cooked by pretty good cooks and served by a Boy Scout troop. I found America tonight in high school students singing solos and a large professional-quality-yet-unpaid choir performing. America was there tonight in kind words everyone said. And easy hugs.

In short, my dear friends, America is in the people. It is not solely a church or in particular organization or a political party or ad hoc movement, America is not in stickers on automobile windows, it’s everywhere among the people.

I’m glad I didn’t stay home tonight.

A Dangerous Addiction

I posture myself is a bastion against the profligate use of electronics for simple things people should be doing with their minds. And here I confess, I have slipped. I filled up the Chrysler on Friday and mentally calculated the mileage at about 21.6 mph. What was I thinking? Where was my confidence? I pulled out the … sigh … my cell phone. It has a calculator function. It calculated to 20.85. I have no excuse. Scotty, beam me up. Now. Please.

Pippa passes.

R

Political Bigotry: Juan Williams, NPR and Arrogant Hypocrites; Or, Mama, Where’s My Constitution?

2010-10-23T11:03:00.002-04:00

Let’s set the scene, the players and the issue.

The scene: “The O’Reilly Factor,” a “fair and balanced” yet shrill, unpleasant, lowest-common-denominator “news commentary” program on Fox News. The players: Bill O’Reilly, the spiritual creator of the foregoing; Juan Williams, an intelligent and articulate analyst/,commentator for National Public Radio, an organization which prides itself on neutrality and which is criticized for as much liberal bias as O’Reilly is for conservative bias, and which is supported largely by public funding, including tax dollars.. [See Notes on Labels below.] The issue: The private perception by citizens of Muslims.

Williams made the following brief observation:

"Look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous." It hardly needs recitation that Muslims on airplanes committed a heinous terrorist attack on American soil and that government response to that attack has led to drastic changes in American society.

The response by NPR:

William’s “remarks on 'The O'Reilly Factor' this past Monday were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and goodundermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR." NPR fired Juan Williams.

In these writings, I have long chafed at that whining concept of “political correctness.” Everyone on the right [See again Note on Labels below] whose beliefs are questioned in the least cries “I’m a victim!,” and pretends that he or she is being led off to the nearest concentration camp. I have rejected and still reject the entire politically correct/incorrect tear-jerk-athon.

The people paid with our money at NPR have transcended mere political correctness. They have blithely and even proudly adopted (or admitted) political bigotry as their modus operandi.

Prejudice is everywhere. Everyone is prejudiced for or against something, many things as a matter of fact. Prejudice simply means “prejudgment.” In some places (e.g., courts), prejudice is positively a bad thing. In other places, prejudice is a condition which exists and simply has to be dealt with. Bigotry is another matter. Like ignorance, prejudice can be fixed with information and thought. Bigotry is a fixed opinion, armored against fact, reason, kindness, respect, or adherence to the rules and values of an organized society. Like stupid, it cannot be fixed. The NPR management mavens have proven themselves to be bigots.

That the canning of Williams is contrary to constitutional principles is, I hope, clear. He was exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. It would take one really stupid SOB to deny that. What he was saying was truthful. Now follow along here: Williams was not saying that Muslims are dangerous or unpleasant or whatever. He said that when he sees people in an airport who are Muslims, he gets worried and nervous. He is saying how he feels. Not only is that the truth, he is the only person who can possibly know that truth. Does National Public Radio wish to ban him from holding beliefs? (Recall, if you will, the delightful concept of “thought crime” from George Orwell’s novel, 1984.) Surely NPR does not want its analysts to lie about what they think – do they? No, likely they just want people who are supposed to be thoughtful analysts allies to shut up and sing the company song. How, I wonder, is this different from singing any other company song? Other than some insignificant differences in dress and deportment, NPR and Rupert Murdoch simply are the Tweedledee and Tweedledum merchandisers of manufactured opinion.

Williams expressed an honest belief. It is a legitimate issue and discussion whether that is a reasonable belief. Should someone be worried and nervous when he or she sees Muslims in an airport? A few Muslims have crashed airplanes into buildings “in the name of Islam.” Enough others have formed at least small armies to conduct localized wars for the same purpose. Some (undetermined) proportion of Muslims hold violent beliefs. What is the objective danger level created by a Muslim in an airport as compared to another individual in an airport? What about the subjective beliefs? On my own streets, if I see a civilian carrying a firearm openly, my thought is that’s probably not a good idea, but I’m not worried or afraid. If I see a civilian attempting to carry a firearm concealed but not being quite successful at concealment, I think that he or she is unduly careless, but I’m still not worried or afraid. Other people in other places would be worried and afraid and if I were to deny them the right to express the fact that they honestly and personally experience those feelings, I would myself be a bigot no matter how strongly I believed that their feelings were “wrong.”

We can make no social progress without honest expression and honest discussion. Williams is worried and afraid when he sees a Muslim. Do not tell him, “You are wrong, get over it.” If you tell him that, you are the bigot. If I tell you that I will never change my mind, I am the bigot. Until we talk, unless we talk, unless we as a society and as individuals open up and expose our honest beliefs and honestly consider whether they have a rational foundation, how can we as a nation or as a culture move forward? Williams said that he is worried and nervous. Some years ago, Jesse Jackson said the same thing about black men he ran into on dark streets. No one accused him of joining the Klan or adopting Nathan Bedford Forrest as his role model. He was being honest, in order to start a discussion which might lead to improvement. Had Juan Williams said, “Let’s nuke Qum,” that would have the kind of incendiary effect worthy of his being separated from a responsible news organization.

As it is, NPR has done for the Constitution what Al Qaeda did to the World Trade Center.

Note on labels: Liberal, conservative, right, left, progressive, and so forth are synonyms for irrelevant, misleading, feces, and excrement. They were originally applied to economic schools of thought which have long since vanished into static and are applied instead into shifting sands of convenient and often internally inconsistent sets of beliefs adopted by people who are too dumb, too lazy or too cowardly to consider important public issues, think about them, and expressed principled opinions.

R

Hicks in Philly and Other Wisps of the Vapours

2010-10-11T10:37:00.005-04:00

Navigation
On this Monday holiday, a certain Italian navigator in service of the Spanish monarchy comes to mind. He was convinced that he had reached his intended destination, and that he did show just in time before his crew mutinied. Sadly, he was wrong by approximately 8000 miles.

Happy Columbus Day.

Hicks in Philly

{Editor's note: There is a brouhaha in the mountains where the National Republican Senatorial Committee put out a casting call for a TV ad to be shot in Philadelphia. The casting call specified that they were seeking for a "hicky" kind of look, with seedy clothing and beat up John Deere and trucker ball caps. The following letter from a West Virginia emigre to his aunt back on in Alexander's Ferry has been obtained and is published as a public service. Beloved Bro. Dave Born did note this morning that at least in the Fairmont newspaper, it was printed on page 3 while the guy with the prize organic cabbages was featured on page 1.}

Dear Aunt Madge:

Thank you very much for your letter and the $100 check. I’m sorry it took me so long to write this. I know I was taught better manners, but I’ve been really busy.

I have to tell you about a casting call I went to for a commercial about West Virginia! When I moved away from Alexander’s Ferry, I told Mom and Dad and the whole family that I wasn’t going to get stuck working down in a coal mine or driving a truck. That’s why I came up to Philadelphia, to get a good clean job acting, so I would make lots of money the easy way. Well, I’m not living the good life yet, but I’m getting closer.

I went to a casting call a couple of weeks ago for really important political commercial. It was for some Senate campaign thing, and they wanted to trash the Governor. I know what he’s done for us but I’m behind on the rent, so I went anyway. When they cast actors for a commercial, they tell you the kind of person they’re looking for, the kind of clothes to bring to the audition and how to act. Well, get this: They were looking for guys to portray ordinary West Virginians! Can you beat that? I figured, lucky me, here I am and I have the inside track.

Pretty quickly, it got weird. They didn’t exactly describe the people I’m used to back home. The casting call said: “We are going for a ‘hicky’ blue collar look. These characters are from West Virginia, so think coal miner/truck driver looks.” Well, since those sorts of jobs put food on the table and clothes on my back when Dad was doing them, I figured I could bluff my way through it.

The whole costume thing was also really odd. They wanted all the actors bring hats, but they were looking for only certain kind of hats. You’re not going to believe this, but the main thing they wanted was to see hats that were old and dirty. Can you picture what Grandma would have said if somebody had walked in her house wearing an old dirty hat? Boy, I would not want to have been there for that. This director also wanted hats that said particular things. They specifically mentioned John Deere hats, old and dirty, like I said. That one stumped me. A John Deere hat is just what George Clooney wore in that movie we saw at the Marquee Cinema, “A Perfect Storm,” and even out on a fishing boat in the middle the Atlantic Ocean, his hat was new and clean.

Oh, they also said a trucker hat would be okay, but only an old one. The problem is, all my ball caps are like Uncle Matt’s and Dad’s and nearly everybody else’s back home - they have American flags, NRA seals or things like that on them. (Oh, I took my NRA Life Member hat and the director just had kittens - it turns out the NRA has endorsed Joe Manchin and not the other guy.)

They also wanted people wearing jeans and work boots and so forth and it was plain to me that the fellows that showed up were as comfortable wearing that stuff as a pimp would be wearing a choir robe. These guys were all out-of-work “Off-Broadway” actors from New York City. This one fellow had his name on his big wardrobe bag – “Louis Vuitton” – he must be French. He was awfully stuck on himself and when he started talking “like a West Virginian” I could hardly figure out what he was saying.

One of the fellows said he had to go way out of town to Tractor Supply to get a pair of working man’s pants and he was all hot and bothered by that. I don’t understand that, either. I’m thinking the food in the diner where the commercial was filmed probably came off the farm, and the farm workers probably came in needing to wash up every night. So what’s the big deal? Moreover, everything in that diner down the bricks and the plumbing was hauled there to Philadelphia on a truck. I didn’t understand that one, either. I remember driving a moving van part time to pay for school at WVU. I guess I just never learn to be ashamed of work like I should have. But, Aunt Madge, some of the best people I’ve ever known have been coal miners and truck drivers. This really bothers me.

Oh, I didn’t get the job. The director said “The rubes won’t believe you.” I remember Grandpa talking about “rubes,” but I haven’t heard it since I was a kid. Maybe this director is from somewhere really backward, I don’t know. Anyway, he said I just wasn’t “hicky” enough to be a real West Virginian.

I’m really glad to hear the cousin Ralph got a job at the Toyota engine plant. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a computer lathe, let alone how to work one. And is Katie really studying biometrics at Marshall? I hear that’s a hot field and graduates make good money. Tell Jim I’m proud he was promoted fire boss at the mine. To be the one in charge of safety for a full shift of miners is a heavy responsibility.

Don’t be offended, but I am returning the check you sent me. I’m thinking I will be “hicky” enough for the next commercial and if I get that job, I’ll be able to pay my rent for the month. I really wish I could afford own a house like most everybody does back home.

Your loving nephew,
William

The Silent Auction That "They" Will Regret

On Saturday the 16th, Central Christian Church is hosting the "Furnace Dinner," to benefit the building maintenance fund. Part of the festivities will be a silent auction. One item being auctioned is a sermon title - Pick your scripture, pick your title, and Pastor Josh will preach a sermon on it.

I will be bidding aggressively. The sermon topic I select will include hot dogs, Trotsky, mathematics and the word "Timbuctu." More later.

Pippa passes.

R

Unorganized Reflections

2010-10-07T13:11:00.002-04:00

It would be rather cheeky of me to claim that I’m ever meticulously organized here. Pardon me, but this week I don’t think I’ll even make a stab at it.

There is no way that I will attempt to synthesize the experience of the long illness and then sudden death last Friday of my mother and make something literary out of it. I cannot exactly claim to be a mere “observer the scene,” but neither can I write a retrospective which makes any particular point.

Funerals – Can a funeral will be “beautiful”? Certainly, quite a number of the persons attending this one referred to it as such. Maybe it’s something like the idea of Sebastian Junger’s Perfect Storm, where the event is terribly unfortunate but it just comes together in some kind of beautiful if macabre fashion. Pastor Josh Patty conducted a service of comfort, faith, and even optimism. He described my mom and her feisty attitude accurately enough to evoke a good bit of laughter. Josh visited the house early Friday afternoon and spent an hour with Grandmother a couple of hours before she had a sudden heart attack or some similar large & fatal event.

Of late, music is been playing an even more important part in the life of our Church. The funeral was a little bit music-heavy. Of course (to me, of course, because it was a Curry funeral) the opening hymn was “How Great Thou Art.” That dates back to the childhood of my paternal grandfather who absolutely loved that hymn and insisted it be played prominently at his funeral about 45 years ago. At my suggestion, Grandmother’s funeral included “It Is Well With My Soul.” I remember that one from only a few months ago at the funeral of a friend, and brother David and I were talking about it a good bit after that funeral. It has a rather interesting history. My partner, who was sitting with David, commented that he was in full voice in the singing.

Our cousin’s husband, Chris, volunteered to act as a pallbearer. Chris was always really good to my mom, as was his wife Nancy. Nancy’s mom is my dad’s sister who still lives nearby, and we all generally spend the holidays together. I know that mom’s death was particularly hard on my aunt. Grandmother’s eldest great-grandson, from California, was another pallbearer, as were two husbands and one boyfriend of three of the granddaughters. I’d never met the boyfriend before – very nice fellow, and when I thanked him for serving as a pallbearer, he commented on what an honor was. In any event, the family was all back to Harmony Grove Church for another Curry burial.

When God punches your ticket, you’re staying on the train. That being said, Grandmother received optimal medical care from when the event occurred. The paramedics and fire department had good response times and showed good judgment in doing immediate transport rather than an extensive treatment at the house (in my active duty days known as a “swoop and scoop.”) The ER staff at Fairmont General was properly aggressive and professional and, when it was clear what the outcome was going to be, they showed a great deal of kindness. Someone called the volunteer pastor on duty, who came back and spent time with us immediately after Grandmother died.

My Masonic brothers the Fords did the funeral arrangements in their usual kind and efficient fashion. That brings to mind jokes my dad would always make with the elder Ford, Bud. When they ran into one another, no matter who was around, they would begin discussing dad’s funeral arrangements in elaborate ways. “What can you do in the way of a Viking funeral?,” my dad would ask. Bud would reply that he’d have to use Tygart Lake because of the Monongahela River just isn’t deep enough. And then they would discuss whose john boat they were going to steal to burn up, whether there should be a colorful wig and clown makeup involved in the body preparation, and so forth. (This is, by the way, my kind of humor. The blacker and less appropriate, the better. I’m not sure if this is a regional thing or merely something typical of odd people throughout the nation.)

No sweeping philosophical declarations today. Hmm. The VR software translated that as “duck rations.” OK, no duck rations, either. There’s too much cutesy philosophy out there.

That’s it for now. Carry on. There's nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.

Pippa passes.

R

A Homegoing: Opal Gates Curry, 1923 - 2010

2010-10-02T13:15:00.001-04:00

Opal Corrine Gates Curry, 87, of Peacock Lane, was reunited with her beloved husband, Carroll H. Curry, in the House of the Lord on 1 October 2010, after a long illness.

Opal was born on 16 July 1923 to Okey R. Gates and Vaughn Daisy Elliott Gates in her grandmother’s home in Central, WV, a small town between Parkersburg and Williamstown. On the night she was born, the doctor got stuck in the mud trying to get through so she was delivered by her grandmother at home. She later moved to Fairmont and graduated from East Fairmont High School.

While attending church near her home, she met her husband, the late Carroll H. Curry. They were married on 12 December 1942 and were together for 56 years, until his death on 1 May 1999.

Opal worked at the Westinghouse Lamp Plant from 1941 to 1942. She spent the rest of her life raising her family and contributing to the community. She and her husband lived in several towns in North Central West Virginia while he was employed by Monongahela Power Co. She was a member of Central Christian Church for 25 years. She was a 50 year member of the Mt. Vernon Garden Club, and was a member of the Woman’s Club of Fairmont and the Red Hats. Her hobbies included sewing kids’ costumes and dolls, making dollhouses and crafts, and decorating her home.

Opal is survived by three sons: Dennis H. Curry of Spencer; Rev. Joel B. Curry and Dr. Shara B. Curry of Glenville; and Roger D. Curry and Janet Edwards Curry of Fairmont; and six grandchildren, Hillarey Carder (and husband Dan Carder) of Preston County, Ashley Gillespie (and husband Scott Gillespie) of Morgantown, Erin VanGilder (and husband Brent VanGilder) of Fairmont, Andrea Curry of Red Bluff, California, Alicia Curry Miller (and husband Matt Miller) of Danville, Virginia, and Tim Curry of Fairmont. Opal had eleven great-grandchildren. She is also survived by her faithful cat, Snow; and by many great friends, including Leona DeLong and Butch Moore.

Friends may call at the R.C. Jones Chapel, Ford Funeral Home, 1410 Country Club Road, Sunday from 2-6 p.m., and at Central Christian Church, 1640 Big Tree Drive in Fairmont on Monday from 10-11 a.m.

Funeral services will be held at Central Christian Church at 11 a.m. on Sunday with Rev. Joshua J. Patty presiding. Interment will follow at Harmony Grove Baptist Church Cemetery on Rt. 250 in Taylor County.

Perhaps I'll write more on this later.

R

Words from a non-Monogrammed Guy

2010-09-29T11:06:00.005-04:00

Old Gentleman

Tom Brokaw called them "the greatest generation," and that term has now been bandied about for years, pro and con.

I met a gentleman in the course of business last week. He was drafted at age 20 into the U.S. Army and was made an infantry officer. He made the landing in North Africa in Operation Torch in 1942, on Sicily in Operation Husky in 1943, and on Normandy in Operation Overlord in 1944. He ended the war at a river opposite the Soviet Army. He matter-of-factly described the 3000 bomber raid on the French hedgerow country where Allied bombers hit his unit’s position by mistake, and then mentioned in passing that when he was discharged he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. The DSC is next to the Medal of Honor, and criteria is that one has acted with "extraordinary heroism in combat." About half of these medals were awarded posthumously.

No more comment, this gentleman’s life speaks for itself.

Of course we have heroes today. But we don't know who they are. Hint: Not Bret Michaels, not Dog the Bounty Hunter, and not Al Sharpton.

Rednecks

One of my current reads is The Redneck Manifesto, by Jim Goad. He begins with a stout declaration of principles of Southern and rural people who are derided routinely in contemporary media as hicks, hillbillies, rednecks, and so forth. (Later, Goad briefly blows through a Psalm to workers, great stuff, and about two-thirds of the way through the book (where I am now) begins an odd neo-socialist rant.

Be that as it may, the lesson here is that you don’t have to like an entire book to learn something from it and to take away something valuable. As Goad talks about the way that so-called "hillbillies" live their lives, he distills that to a declaration of innocence and a slam at their detractors:

"They never learned to be
ashamed of what they were."

There it is in a nutshell, friends. To those of us who own nothing monogrammed, work on our own cars, enjoy fiddle music, read the Bible and the Washington Post, and take our baseball caps off and put our hands over our hearts when the flag passes, why ever should we learn to be ashamed?

Repeat Lesson on Seat Belts

I’ve said it before: The routine, habitual no-exception use of seatbelts improves your odds of surviving a collision without serious injury - a lot.

What puts me in mind of this is that Tim rolled his grandmother’s Audi on the Interstate last week. Someone cut him off and dropped the hooks and in avoiding plowing them, Tim used the median and flipped the Audi. (I’ve been wondering if the other driver, who vanished by the way, was trying to cause an insurance scam accident in a very stupid way.)

Yes, no doubt you have a friend of a friend "who would have been killed if I had been wearing a darn seat belt!" There are even some very few kinds of accidents where seat belts may add to the risk of injury. (A "T-bone" into the driver’s door often is cited as an example. True though that may be, if it’s that hard a bang, the driver will be injured to some extent anyway.) But anyone who says that seat belts don’t improve your chances of avoiding death or serious injury is simply wrong.

By statute, damages in a civil suit are reduced only very slightly for an injured plaintiff who didn’t wear an available seatbelt. I can argue this one either way. That doesn’t change a defendant’s negligence, but someone who is more severely injured because they didn’t buckle up can hardly claim ignorance, can they? And as for not securing children? My worst memory of the EMS years was a fatality where parents didn't secure a one year old.

Pippa passes.

R

Genuine Pleasure in Reconnecting With an Old Friend or How The Laffer Curve is My New Marvel; And Other Scribbles

2010-09-15T16:36:00.008-04:00

The Reasonable Curmudgeon

I ran across the blog of an old friend the other day: http://www.thereasonablecurmudgeon.blogspot.com/

This "Reasonable Curmudgeon" is a widely educated guy with all sorts of life experiences, and he's also a hell of a writer. Please note his 20 July 2010 discussion of the Laffer Curve.

It is indeed a pleasure to reconnect with The Reasonable Curmudgeon. He, too, has taken the body punches of life, which enables him to say things with experience and authority. Who are you going to listen to about the storms which are sure to come into your life? Someone who has never gone out in the rain?

And so, I happily add The Reasonable Curmudgeon’s blog to the links on the right for your frequent reading pleasure.

Perhaps on an effort another day I’ll chat about the Laffer curve.

Note: Yes, I know that the titles to my posts are a tad complicated, a touch obscure, and just a teensy-weensy bit enigmatic. I like double titles, having first come to appreciate them in the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons. I like Rocky & Bullwinkle. They make considerably more sense than anyone in the marble whorehouse on Jenkins Hill. Ever since a discussion years and years ago with George Byers, a wonderful guy who still teaches English at Fairmont State, I’ve always had lots of harmless fun with titles. (George’s comment to me at the time, and I was about 19, was "Dummy, the title IS part of the composition!" I think we were talking about Charles Lamb at the time.)

Iron Stairs, Glass Floors and Fifty Years

think I’ve talked before about the public library in Parkersburg West Virginia, the town I lived in when I was growing up. This was the "Carnegie Library," part of the legacy to America of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.

I can’t tell you when it was built, but I do know that it was an old building. The first floor ceilings were high and ornate moulded plaster. When I walked in, there was an enormous reading room on the right, behind doors which were never closed. All manner of periodicals including the latest out-of-town papers were organized and neatly laid out and there were always several people (including a good many older people) there in the reading room.

The stacks, though - that’s where the magic was. The library had four floors of stacks in the back. They were connected by spiral staircases, all narrow and wrought iron. The floors were iron frames and the flooring consisted of large glass blocks so that on the top floor, you could see wavy images of dark oak bookshelves immediately below you and ever more blurry things two more floors below that. You were dancing in the air, you were a part of the computer before the computer was really a part of our lives or anybody ever thought of the Tron movie. You moved about and picked through bits of memory and could take bits and absorb absorb them and share them and savor them, and remember these experiences now well on to 50 years later.

The time came when the library moved to different quarters, so the building was empty. At that point, a retired engineer, Joe Sakach, opened "Trans-Allegheny books," a huge and delightful bookstore in the old library. They did a good mail-order business but as Waldenbooks and Cole’s and Barnes & Noble and Amazon and Walmart and Oprah made first buying books and then picking out books cheaper and easier for the microwave generation, Trans-Allegheny slowed along with the other independents. Mr. Sakach died, and the executors have been trying to find someone to reanimate the bookstore, with no takers.

I almost said that I have never complained about progress, but that would be a bold faced lie. I have bitched, moaned and complained about progress every 10 minutes approximately since birth. And yet progress comes and I certainly use new technology even if I am clumsy and grumpy about doing so. You might note that the publication of these scribblings is electronic rather than from a mechanical press and distributed in halfpenny editions. But the sights and smells in the world of that library are still a part of me.

"Litter cleanup ahead"

On one of our two-lane roads last weekend, I was buzzing along just "blowing the stink off." (That’s the phrase my grandfather used for taking a nice fast ride with the windows open to enjoy the day in the sun and the breeze and the speed and the feel of the road.) I came across one of those temporary orange diamond warning signs with the legend "Litter cleanup ahead." No problem, you just back off and wave to your friends and neighbors as you ease by them while they are picking the detritus from the lap of Mother West Virginia.

And for every item that these friends grasp and put in a plastic sack, there is a thoughtless piggish bastard who put it there. There is someone who is too lazy and too stupid and to irresponsible to pick up after themselves. I even wonder if these folks are potty trained.

Performance Art

I have only a passing familiarity with American sign language (ASL). Mostly, that is through having deaf clients for whom we have used interpreters. At the clients of left, I’ve talked with the interpreters about the nature of ASL, its relationship to Indian trade language (tenuous), its syntax (unique, and not a word for word English translation) and so forth.

The only fellow I see who is fluent in ASL is Parson Jim Norton, whose parents were deaf and who grew up using ASL as one of his first languages. At times, 'round Central Christian Church, Jim will arise before a hymn or some poeticI him or some poetic passage of Scripture and interpret it in ASL. He did so couple of Sundays ago and I was struck not so much with the capacity of ASL to communicate ideas as with its order and fluidity as performance art. Perhaps it is dance with the arms. I confess that I have never understood or appreciated dance as an art form (even though dancers obviously are exceedingly athletic). Watching Jim opened a window for me a little wider, and reminded me that I have way more to learn than I already know.

Thought for the day:

If you do not like the books I read, don’t read them.

Additional thought for the day:

. . . and I'm not interested in your opinion about those books.

Pippa passes, as always.

R

Beyond the Schmaltz of 9/11

2010-09-09T13:52:00.014-04:00

Schmaltz

Saturday is the ninth anniversary of that fateful day where we all remember where we were and the deep anguish we felt as the world changed, blah, blah, blah.

It is amazing – such a seminal event in American history yet it has been so overhyped and over-whined that it has become almost tiresome to hear about, particularly where “the victims of 9/11" are invoked for causes or political interests which have little or nothing to do with terrorism or where others are trying to buy into a little bit of the “victim” action for themselves.

A particularly egregious example of the latter are those star-crossed “birthday victims.” [Note: I use really-improbably-but-marginally-believable stories for sarcasm, but this one is totally on the level.] Some folks whose birthday falls on 11 September are identifying themselves as additional victims because “their day” was co-opted rudely by Atta & Company. To this crowd, some of the most wretched victims of all are those soon-to-be nine-year-olds who were born on 11 September 2001, identified as such by their parents, who are sure to pass along this loathsome sorrow to these children as soon as they can really savor their ill fortune.

Enough. People who were school-age or above in 1941 remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard about Pearl Harbor. The same will apply to the WTC etc. for us. We each have a story and our private thoughts. Some of those stories are quite powerful, within ourselves, owing to our backgrounds and beliefs. I have a strong reaction to the Two Towers and all of that. Please pardon me if I don’t slather it all over the screen for you. Somehow my own reaction to what I saw on television doesn’t seem to be very startling in the broad scheme of things.

And to others similarly situated: You have your First Amendment right to bathe in your angst, blah, blah, blah. But you are boring. Very boring. Until somebody came up with something truly idiotic like “they stole my birthday,” I hadn’t heard anything new about the 2001 attacks since 2002. A particular note to those of you who believe that (1) the United States government knew the attacks were coming in advance, (2) somebody packed the WTC with exotic theoretical explosives, (3) the passenger jets shot missiles into the towers right before they plowed into them (carrying more explosives by four orders of magnitude in their fuel tanks than any missile could hold), or (4) Saddam or Satan was behind it all, listen to me: You are mentally ill. Please do not take a job as a teacher. Please do not procreate. Let's cover both the nature & nurture bases here.

The question remains what to do about the coming of 11 September every year.

There are various schools of thought which generally fall into a couple of categories. One is that it be a day of remembrance which morphs into a day of vengeance, primarily against anything Muslim, grassless or sandy. The other is that this Holy Day be elevated to some higher plane which gives lip service to anything patriotic, but promotes the One Big Happy Family of Humankind with Those Darn Ornery Terrorist Kids. The former is characterized by exhortations in the press and on Facebook to be sure to fly your flag this Saturday lest you prove yourself un-American. (Oh, and there’s tha big deal about a preacher in Florida who’s going to have a Koran barbecue.) The latter is characterized by suggestions such as that of President Obama that we have services of interfaith understanding and that we make this a national day of service, period. Once again, reason is trumped by caricature.

Taking time for remembrance in isolation doesn’t seem to be of great value, although I know lots of people disagree with me there. Remembrance, I believe, should be for the living, to fulfill our own sense of obligation and honor and to provide inspiration and instruction for our future behavior. If we become so emotional or so irrational that we can make no sense of what we’re supposed to be remembering, there is little use in the remembrance. Similarly, service with “an attitude of gratitude” for what we have is an important part of our society. We lament, I lament for that matter that self-interest fuels human activity more than it ever has. However, without that spirit of cheerful service, life would be pretty poor in this world. And I can add little to the “brotherhood of humanity” idea other than to say that simply turning the other cheek from genuine harm is pretty stupid.

By the way, if the preacher wants to burn the Koran, that’s pretty boring too. Some symbolic speech is stupid speech, but the Constitution does not limit rights to people who refrain from stupid things. My thought is that the Reverend Salamander is a putz and should be ignored. Were he burning a Bible, I’d say the same thing, even though I’m a Christian. The printed material is not the person of Deity. On the other hand, I get really ripped when someone disrespects the flag. I know this is inconsistent. Read your Emerson and welcome to my life.

Come Saturday, I will remember and I will (I hope) continue to be of cheerful service. For myself, I will particularly remember the emergency services people who ran toward the danger rather than away from it. I will remember two people, both volunteer EMT’s from Long Island, one a lawyer and one a messenger and Boy Scout leader, who were working in Manhattan that day. They went to the scene, grabbed trauma packs off fire engines and went into the towers. Greater love . . .

The rest of it is just noise.

Perhaps I will ritualistically burn a few of my Archie comic books just to get into the spirit of things. No doubt the Jughead Crew will throw a fatwa on me.

The Other Hazard

This morning's Dominion-Post (the Morgantown, West Virginia, newspaper) ran an Associated Press story on the front page with the headline “Doctors See Eye Hazard in Laser Pointers.” Wait a minute, I smell a small contest! A fine book from the Three Parsec Bookshelf® to the first person who can identify the other hazard of using a laser pointer. Brother Maccheu is ineligible, as we got a real hoot about this at coffee this morning.

A Thought for the Day:

When you ask for my advice, listen for at least 60 seconds before you tell me I’m wrong. After all, you’re the one who asked.

Pippa passes.

Sparks and Parks

2010-09-02T21:21:00.004-04:00

US as the Spark

“Person in the street” things never impressed me a whole lot when they were about politics, economics, public policy and so forth. One or two sentences seldom tell you much. Or so I thought.

Today’s Fairmont Times-West Virginian newspaper had its usual kinda fun “Word on the Street” column, with pictures of local folks responding to a question. The question of the day was “What could spark the U.S. economy?” Three of the five people who answered suggested that a federal program would help out, and two of them specifically mentioned the “Cash for Clunkers” plan where the Government paid people to trade in old cars. (Car dealers took a cut of that, of course.)

Mind you, I do not criticize these folks. They react to common wisdom which is drilled into us by three branches of government, by the press and (when they are being candid) by the Fifth Estate (the corporate community). When in need, go to the Government, they will provide. Blessed art they.

The fallacy here is that Government creates nothing. Government regulates. Government adminsters programs for private business to build infrastructure. Government provides protective services which we developed a habit for to go about our productive activities in peace. The Government mines no coal, digs no metal ore, builds no vehicles, grows no food, and harvests no timber. The Government sings no songs and writes no books which have the slightest intellectual or literary value. (Have you ever read the Tax Code?) Government is useful in many ways. Some modern self-styled conservatives are really semi-anarchists (unless one starts picking on programs that pay them), but Government is conceived by Humankind as a benevolent invention to make society better.

It still produces nothing. Government income comes from people through taxes. (Oh, yes, corporations pay taxes. The corporate charter gets up every morning . . . no, people do. And then people do the work and buy the products and services.) “Cash for Clunkers” bucks did not originate with “the Government.” They originated with the woman at a drafting table and the man on the tractor, both doing productive work for pay. The dollars just took an expensive detour through the Government.

This is not an Obama thing, a Democrat thing, a Republican thing, a Newt thing. This is an American thing, a Reality thing. The only thing that will spark the economy is us.

A Dull Fire

Last Sunday’s Dominion Post, the Morgantown (West Virginia) newspaper, had a decent story and a couple of fair photos about a structure fire which broke out very early Saturday morning. It was front page, below the fold, with only middling size headlines. The ho-hum-ness of it all really says some some remarkable things.

For my non-Mountaineer friends, a short word on the terrain in West Virginia: If you live on the plains, it is quite mountainous, and our plethora of two-lane roads make for quite challenging (to me, fun) driving. If you live in the Rockies, these mountains are more moderate and (from their shape) geologically much, much older than yours. In any event, all towns, roads and streets have to deal with steep terrain. I live on a street, for example, which follows a ridge line. In Morgantown, there is a long commercial road near the airport called “The Mileground,” which likewise follows the top of a long, broad ridge. On the Mileground, you find a number of car dealers, restaurants, retail outlets and the like.

Very early Saturday morning, a fire broke out in some apartments which were attached to a NAPA auto parts store. The fire spread very quickly. So, at 2:30 AM, the first fire departments were called and as they discovered a vigorous fire, they called for the second and third alarms. All in all, more than 100 volunteer firefighters from 14 fire companies in four different counties rolled out of bed, drove to their stations, and hurried to this fire. Since it was a blaze at an auto parts store, they had to deal with a lot of flammable liquids and a lot of flammable pressurized gases, including such simple things as cans of spray paint. (There is a reason that the label on a spray can tells you not to throw the cany into a fire. The thing will explode. The firefighters talked about little explosions cooking off for hours.) It took these guys about seven hours to put the fire out and do the overhaul necessary to make sure it stayed out.

What strikes me is that citizens take it for granted that there are people in their communities who are willing to do this work. That being said, not everybody can do the work. Firefighting requires strength, stamina (and as I tell my son, a maladaptive psychological state). I could no longer do field work in emergency services of any sort if all our lives depend on it, because I’m just not conditioned. What I would suggest is twofold: One, that we thank the people who do this sort of work. On a holiday, send a meal to the local firehouse or rescue company or police station. If you see people working a long call in August (their protective clothing is really hot), drop them off the case of bottled water. Just thank them for being there on the job. Volunteers get paid nothing. Career people are not getting paid enough.

Two, reflect on our own contribution to your community, to our fellow humans. Perhaps we cannot carry a 200 pound person out of a burning building. What can we do? What DO you do? Driving? Phone calling? Doing the books for a Fire Department? Selling at a bake sale? Talking to youth? Reading to old folks? There is something. If they can do what they do, we can do things, too.

Finally, it strikes me that no one was injured on The Mileground fire. This was a dangerous fire, it took guts to be there, and it took smart chief officers to fight it safely and effectively. Moreover, lots and lots of emergency service people always, always wear their St. Florian or Saint Michael medals, even after they retired. This isn’t because the medals have some sort of magic power, it’s an affirmation that they know in Whom to put their trust.

Sniper

The Discovery Channel office in Silver Spring, Maryland (a DC suburb) was the scene of an armed hostage-taker yesterday. When the criminal pointed a gun at a hostage, a police sniper shot and killed him.

Out in Goofyville, the comments are rolling about the bloodthirsty police:

Let us just give police [the] simple right to kill whoever they feel deserves to killed.

They just let him bleed to death. It should be considered as murder and [a]premeditated one.

There are no winners here (except perhaps the cops, who love it when they get a chance to shoot people).

OK, that’s enough examples.

Shooting a criminal is a gut-wrenching thing for a police officer. This officer is worthy of praise and prayer this day. The criminal took up a firearm with the intent of harming others. While he was armed, he volunteered for a lethal reaction.

By the way, why does the press call him a “Suspect”? He’s a criminal. OK, a dead criminal.

More of My Home Among the Hills

Yesterday, I was in Family Court in Taylor County, the traditional seat of the family. (The common Curry ancestor of the thousand odd Curry/Curreys scattered over West Virginia settled in Taylor County on Lost Creek in 1799.) I had the 9:00 o’clock hearing, which did not take long, and then the 1:00 o’clock hearing. It would’ve been a waste of time to drive back to Fairmont.

The people around me sometimes laugh a bit at the size of my briefcase and all the stuff I carry. But I always have work in my briefcase and whatever it takes to do the work. And so, right after the nine o’clock hearing was concluded, I adjourned to the picnic area at Tygart Lake State Park. Here, a picnic table and a laptop with a full battery provided all I needed to enjoy the late summer day. The leaves are still full, it is cooling off a bit, and the birds and animals, large and small, could be heard moving in the woods.

One’s pay may be more than money.

Quote for the Heck of It:

“I will not be wronged, I will not be insulted, I will not be laid a hand on. I do not do these things to others and I require the same of them.” John Wayne, the J. W. Books character in The Shootist, his last film.

Pippa passes.

Not as Good as Lincoln-Douglas; And Other Things

2010-08-27T21:14:00.011-04:00

Running for Senate

A newspaper ad has run over the past week in the Fairmont newspaper, the Times-West Virginian. It’s a political ad by one of the minor Republican candidates for the open Senate seat, Kenneth Culp, a CPA. (The subject of whether we should be having such a special election may be for another day.) This fellow has virtually no chance of winning. One advantage that kind of uphill fight is that the candidate can pretty much say anything they want and anything they believe, hope that their message “goes viral,” and they pull off a miracle. They don’t have to worry much about killing sacred cows or offending people. Sometimes, once in a blue moon, really, this tactic works. (The national example that comes to mind is Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota.)

Mr. Culp’s ad was OK by my standards. Here are some excerpts:

“I remember what it was like to work my way through college because my parents were poor. I know what it’s like to have to go to work every day to feed my family . . . to buy food, clothes, gasoline and make a mortgage payment . . . to have to buy used cars because I can’t afford a new one. . . . I remember what it was like to work 70 to 80 hours per week, 52 weeks a year to build a successful business. * * * I am the only candidate who has a comprehensive plan for getting our economy back on its feet. Once we have stopped Obama’s radical, socialist agenda we need to get back to a fairer income tax system that rewards success, not punishes it. * * * Don’t be fooled by all the slick ads running on TV. It’s going to take an outsider to fix these problems.” [Not that my grammar is great, but I didn't fix any of his, either.]

Oh, by OK, I do not mean that I agree with Culp’s politics or positions, just that he is stating them, which is unheard of. Mind you, this isn’t Lincoln-Douglas debate material, where the candidates spoke for 3 hours at a time, but it’s lots more than “Vote for Smith, the People’s Choice!”

Unfortunately for candidate Culp, the ad is terribly ineffective. (I also think some of it is a little zany and patently absurd, but those are political opinions rather than opinions about politics.) Candidate Culp mentioned his real opponents by name - a TERRIBLE idea. Culp acknowledges the good points of the two most prominent candidates in his race – so essentially he bought them a little bit of advertising space. “John Raese is a fine gentleman.” [Even some Republicans disagree with that one. John Raese is rich, handsome and wields power indiscriminately with an ax.] “I especially respect Mac [Warner] because of his 24 years of military service." Warner has a conservative/golden boy/military image which most politicians would sell their mothers into slavery for. His ideas are those of a dogmatic conservative “true believer,” which is always somewhat chilling. And finally, Culp fills about 12 column inches with 6 or 7 point type explaining at length his positions and beliefs. In a responsible nation with a responsible electorate, those lengthy explanations are precisely what responsible candidates need to be doing. Is it any surprise that this is so ineffective in America? Other than generally oppose Barrack Obama, I have no clue what any other Republican candidate plans to do.

Oh, the Democratic primary will be a runaway by Governor Manchin. His chief opposition is from Ken Hechler, a former history professor, Congressman and Secretary of State who is pleasant, pleasantly quirkly (drives around in a red Jeep) and 95 years old. To make a statement, Governor Manchin really needs to pull about 80% of the vote.

Addendum, Sunday, 29 August 2010:
1 - Governor Manchin took 70% of the vote, which is a touch worrisome.
2 - John Raese polled 71% in a 10 person field, but only one other strong candidate was running. Considering the money he dumped into ads, that's not a total shock.
3 - A press account this morning of "person on the street" opinion states: "Raese’s TV ads were enough to convince **********, a 69 year-old from Morgantown, to vote for him. Though he’s a millionaire businessman, he appears on camera in jeans and a denim shirt, his sleeves rolled up, talking about the jobs he’s created." He appears on camera. Can you believe it? This individual expressly voted because of how he appears on camera. St. Patrick with Rattlesnakes, welcome to the New America, Land of the Superficial Appearances.

But a Bigger Problem . . .

I reminded LaJ in the car tonight that “Tomorrow is the election.” Her reply: “What election?” In this season of haphazard and ad hoc decision making (which isn’t over - most likely, there will be the Governor’s chair to fill), it is hardly surprising that lots of intelligent people who do not have politics in their blood are wondering just what the hell is going on. Of course, this inures to the rich and well known.

Mi Casa Ain’t Su Restaurante

At least in the Mid-Atlantic area, Mexican restaurants seem to be named with random Spanish words which have been picked, probably, because Americans in this region know that they are Spanish words. Two Mexican restaurants in the Fairmont area (both excellent, by the way) are La Casa & Mi Pueblo - but I doubt that locals would name a restaurant “The House” or “My Village/Town.”

Note to Fairmonters: No Wings Olé is not a Mexican Restaurant. The closest it gets is that some crockery was probably made in Mexico before the wholesaler outsourced manufacturing to China.

General note on regional cuisine: I have a client, a very pleasant Hispanic gentleman from Arizona. He’s an American born & bred, but has relatives on both sides of the border and is fluent in both languages. While he longs for home, he has been seriously enamored of the cookery at the Bob Evans Restaurants, an Eastern chain that is a pure Midwestern country theme, the sort of place that serves breakfast all around the clock. (He also has a killer recipe for sopapillas.)

Time Magazine:

The current cover of Time shows a star & crescent in a stars & stripes theme with the legend “Is America Islamophobic?”
If you take the “phobic” part to mean general dislike, the answer is yes, and that’s OK with me.

Pippa passes.

R

This Wretched Scribe Afflicted with Acute Philosophical Atrophy

2010-08-23T21:44:00.007-04:00

Matriarch

LaG, the Matriarch of the Clan, continues to experience severe medical problems. Thus, the regularly-irregular publication schedule of this wretched scribe's blog has been irregularized even more than usual. She is receiving good care, Pastor Josh and friends from Central Christian Church are much in evidence, and Bro. Butch Moore continues to faithfully discharge his Obligation by his resolute attention to the physical plant needs in the Home on the Ridge. Thanks for the many expressions of concern and prayer is always appropriate.

Brad Pitt and the Oil Spill

Actor extraordinaire Brad Pitt has weighed in on the Gulf Oil Spill. Formerly an “opponent of capital punishment,” enquiring minds will be fascinated to know that he is willing to make an exception for “those who are responsible.”

OK, it is a grave error to say that celebrities shouldn’t comment on public issues unrelated to their fields (in this case, acting and picking up girls - I am not qualified to judge him on the former, and the publications displayed at the checkout line in the grocery store suggest that he's a whiz on the latter.) Actors are amongst those given leave to wax ineloquently on damn near anything by the First Amendment. Listen, the problem here isn’t that he speaks, it’s that we listen. Are we so spectacularly dumb that we value the opinion of a handsome yet random actor over that of anybody with a reasonably complete science education? And when anybody spouts an opinion which is self-evidently absurd, why do we publicize it?

The Gulf Oil Spill was indeed an indecent and monstrous blight. The causation is anything but simple and linear. Nobody understands the extent of the damage. [Right wing and corporate apologists opine that everything is A-OK, because we can’t see much oil now. Guys, meet Brad; Brad, meet the guys; You have a lot in common.] I’ve yet to see anyone mention as one basic cause our obscene reliance on oil, to the extent that 80% of Congress and 100% of the past 8 presidents are/have been willing to give every other demi-sheikh a blow job and to the extent that we drill wells 5000 feet deep in the ocean.

How did the causes align to permit this well to blow? We need to know. Brad Pitt cannot tell us. Neither can I. Neither can nearly anyone in Government. The best oil geologists and engineers work in industry. BP is losing double-digit billions on this road kill salad and I’m betting that they’d sort of like to avoid a repeat. Other companies likely are laughing up their sleeves, but want to make sure the attention doesn’t turn on them.

One other subject totally absent from the press coverage was the long hours and brilliance of the engineers who fixed the well. They were working with robots on a problem caused by excessive pressure in an environment where the ambient pressure was in the order of 150 atm.

Brad, old love, if I want advice on picking up girls, I’ve give you a jingle.

Craigslist Ad I’d Like to See

"Classy guy seeks woman of any age who enjoys long walks on the beach, gentle rain showers, sipping wine, going to concerts, and flower gardening, and who enjoys doing all of the above alone. I’ll be at home, take your time."

Safety, Monies and Mama

Son Tim attended in interesting fire call yesterday. A compact car hit the end of a guardrail on Rt. 250, impaled itself 30 feet into the guardrail (down the middle of the car) and caught fire. The angel who looks after children and fools was on duty and the occupants walked to the ambulance.

I drove past the spot today. The guardrail had a single layer curved piece protecting the end, and that did nothing to retard the progress of the car significantly. The curved piece is fairly cheap as safety devices go, and you get what you pay for. I’ve seen the aftermath of crashes into the large square “target” endcaps which crumple the corrugated steel of the guardrail to absorb impact, and those appear to work fairly well, but they have to be darn expensive.

Safety costs money. In the accident yesterday, we can assign some responsibility for the extent of the damage to the guardrail designer and installer. But isn’t there a whole lot of “pilot error” in running a car off the road and hitting a guard rail that hard? What is our responsibility as a society? How much safety should we buy with tax dollars? How much should we mandate by regulations? Does it matter how stupid the hypothetical people are we’re protecting? How about the probability of harm and probable extent of harm? Here again, we’re denied a simple linear analysis and burst squarely into economics and morality.

Carry Me Back to Old Brasilia

Last week, I received by mail from a well-known third-party vendor will who I will not name (but I will say that a large South American river is involved) a package containing, among other things a rather decent knife from a rather decent manufacturer. I purchased this as a gift for my brother. On the packaging is a 1:1 photograph of the knife. I’ve seen the packaging on the same model direct from the manufacturer, so I know that it is clean and has no stickers of any sort on it. However, this third-party vendor (wisely) plastered a bright yellow sticker on the box with the legend “Sharp Object Inside.” They also sell irons with stickers “Remove clothing before ironing,” (which is not as funny as it once was because I talked to someone who actually ironed something on themselves and got burned).

Maybe these stickers are bad for evolution.

Pippa passes.

R

Mike Fink and Other Less Interesting Folks

2010-07-28T20:52:00.010-04:00

Darn Mike Fink

Yesterday I was driving through Calhoun County, West Virginia. This is a beautiful place, although quite different than the homes of many readers. It is a county of two-lane highways. I grew up in such places, and I know both feeling of isolation and insulation and indeed comfort of “home” and “neighborhood” that a place like Calhoun County engenders.

My mission yesterday was as a marauding Philistine, to find land for uses inconsistent with the quiet nature of Calhoun County. As I drove up Route 16, I passed through the unincorporated community of Chloe and was reminded of the comment of Gertrude Stein that “there is no there there,” and then I arrived at the community of Minnora and found that there wasn’t even any there. And, of course, I jest, these are simply tiny communities where neighbors nest in comfort and security and where in the deep snows of winter, neighbors check on each other.

Well, the land lies beautifully along Route 16. America is such a beautiful and varied place, and I love so much of it. But my home is, indeed, among the hills. Here, finally, was a place to share with people who have been deprived of the quiet joy of living in Mother West Virginia.

And then: Darn the luck! I ran across a historical marker alongside the highway. In West Virginia, the Department of Culture and History erects permanent markers at historical sites. This particular one marked the “Grave of Mike Fink.” The pleasing vapor of my pleasant (and financially advantageous) visions blew away. You see, this Mike Fink (not that Mike Fink, the other Mike Fink) was a seminal figure in central West Virginia history. To countenance development within shouting distance of his grave? Heresy! Besides, dealing with the Department of Culture and History would be nightmarishly expensive and the flood of tourists would make any sort of regional development just another tawdry collection of souvenir stands. And so, the grave of Mike Fink as well as the unnamed Indian who killed him (photograph above) remains unsullied, as does the Valley of the Elk, which is only right.

I Got It Wrong

I have been reflecting on the strange case of Shirley Sherrod, the Department of Agriculture official who was fired by Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack after Andrew Breitbart published edited videotape of a recent speech she gave. In that speech, she described an incident 25 years ago where she first sandbagged a white farmer and then, after her own reflection, undid the damage and helped the farmer out. In my post of 22 July 2010, I roundly criticized her as having made a pretty stupid speech.

I’ve followed the news, I’ve considered the comments of Friend Rosa, and now I think I just got it wrong. Taken as a whole, Ms. Sherrod’s speech was a self revealing story of learning. I can hardly object to it having been hokey, inasmuch as I do so love hokey. I’ve also been reading Child of the Appalachian Coalfields, by Robert C. Byrd, and particularly his discussion of his membership when he was in his 20s in the Ku Klux Klan. Although it followed him all his life, in West Virginia he became the most popular public servant of all time and pretty well got a pass on the Klan thing.

And then I considered if what disturbed me was Ms. Sherrod’s reaction to the uproar in the firing as victim-like and whining, and I still think it was. On the other hand, to expect her to have remained calm after she was sandbagged was probably asking too much. I do know that my own reaction would not have been effective at all. A selected few may differ, but I lay claim to a reasonable degree of mellowness. When I screw up, I think I say yes, I’ve screwed up. But in this situation, of both Brietbart’s and the Secretary’s big white horses would have figured in my reaction. So, perhaps a response such as Ms. Sherrod’s was the only way to change the status quo, I don’t know.

In the world of the sound bite, we have to be careful, for we don’t see a lot of accurate representations of people’s beliefs.

My hand to God: A Lawyer Ad

There is an old custom in Mother West Virginia when one is relating something that is not very credible but which is nonetheless true. You raise your right hand when someone expresses doubt and say, “My hand to God . . .,” and that imbues what you have said with the strength of a solemn oath.

I was cruising craigslist.com this week, looking for a printer. I saw that one can advertise legal services. Who (and how) would one advertise legal services on craigslist? So I looked, and My Hand To God, I found this ad: (I’ve changed only the name)

### DIVORCE SPECIAL ###

Mortimer Snerd
Attorney-at-Law

Now accepting divorce clients for hundreds off normal fee.

Mention this ad and get a divorce for $1200. Call me today.
304 555-5555

SnerdLaw
123 Snerd Lane
Snerdville, WV. 26101

Stunning, just stunning. The ad is either misleading or really indicative of not a lot of attention being paid to a case. One cannot predict in advance how much time and effort a divorce will take. The $1200 may be OK for a “no-fault” divorce with no children and not much property. But if you add ANYTHING else, the lawyer will be working for free or not doing stuff that should be done. Is this some sort of “get ‘em in the door” thing? Beats me, and I’m not going to ask Mort. You don’t always get what you pay for, but if you don’t pay, the chances of getting go down a bunch. And “mention this ad”? Tacky, tacky, tacky.

Pippa passes.

R

Snookering, Ivory Handles and the Beloved Crown Vic

2010-07-22T21:42:00.003-04:00

Mommy, I’ve Been Snookered!

The NAACP is lamenting that that they were “snookered” by Fox News regarding the USDA supervisor from Georgia who was fired by the Agriculture Department. A conservative sewer stirrer edited a tape of a recent speech where the woman described sandbagging a white farmer 25 years ago in some sort of mortgage foreclosure by, among other things, sending him to an incompetent white lawyer, one of “his own kind.” Later in the same speech, she talked about how she had changed her mind and had given that farmer appropriate assistance. The NAACP has been ragging the rag-tag “Tea Party” about its supposed racism, so the honey dipper was crying “hypocrites!,” and the NAACP hit the bait hook, line and sinker.

Hello? What is the message here from the NAACP? When we make a cynical political judgment and take a public position in someone’s favor and against someone else without asking enough questions or getting enough information and it blows up on us, it’s not our fault, we have been misled? This doesn’t get Fox News (or CNN or ABC or the Christian Science Monitor or MSNBC or the Pedophile Online Journal) off the hook for slanting stories. But in the big leagues, sometimes the pitchers throw curveballs or even spitballs. Crying about it just isn’t a big league kind of response.

In any event, for a government agency regional supervisor to give that speech was memorably stupid and evokes a “What the hell were you thinking?” response. People confuse the First Amendment with a blank check. The First Amendment gives you the right to say almost anything. The exceptions are few: The timeworn example of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater; maliciously libeling someone with untrue allegations; and the like. The First Amendment does not mean you get a free pass when your speech conflicts with your job duties. The government will not pull a Peter Zenger on you and prosecute and the situations under which you may be sued successfully are few and far between. But there are still consequences. If a government official screws the pooch and creates havoc, there are consequences. If I cuss a judge, there are consequences. Sometimes, you’ll get fired. Sometimes, it’s simpler - people will just think that you’re an idiot.

So far, the fired USDA supervisor says that she is a victim and she does not acknowledge that she did something just a tad stupid. Oh, and as of today, she says that Pres. Obama needs to call her personally and apologize. Poor baby, maybe he can also give her a foot rub.

Not MY Mountains, But Good Mountains

God bless Juan Valdez. The guy bails me out of absolute torpor every morning without fail.

The Free Press

In the course of a couple of interesting cases before the Circuit Court of Gilmer County, West Virginia (County seat – Glenville), I’ve come in contact with a net-only news publication, the Gilmer Free Press ( www.GilmerFreePress.net ).

The Internet is the new printing press and everyone can be their own pamphleteer. The quality of the Free Press strikes me. (Before somebody gets all pissy on me, I’m talking about the layout, the quality of the writing, the timeliness, and other things that make for a successful news source. By that analysis, Pravda was a pretty damn good newspaper.) The Free Press has lots of the interesting stuff like national political opinion, horoscopes [stupid; silly; people still like them], an astronomy column and other things that some people find fascinating and some people find a great bloody boor. It is heaviest on local news, although it throws news and opinion into a blender rather obviously. When it comes to publishing letters and comments, the unknown editor must pray to the gods of New York Times vs. Sullivan every night, for absent the concept of actual malice in libeling public figures, the Free Press would be sued daily. (There would be a problem finding the defendant, because the Free Press is published anonymously.)

What fascinates me most of all is that someone is spending a lot of time gathering news, taking photographs, writing stories, retyping turgid information which comes to them in some non-electronic printed format, tracking down obits, and so forth. I can’t see how publishing the Free Press consumes less than one “full-time equivalent,” that is, the equivalent of one person working a full-time job. However, the Free Press is free on the Internet and doesn’t have any advertising. I haven’t figured out any identifiable economic interest which would justify this kind of effort. Now, Glenville has more axes to grind than your average lumberyard, so the motivation may be as simple as that, but I do find this thing a unique creature of the new age.

Mencken

I have “discovered” the writing of H. L. Mencken. I’ve always heard of him, and just read a few lines of his writing which were presented as examples of curmudgeonliness, but I’ve never sat down and read his work at any length. He was an essayist, keen social observer, biting humorous humorist and is one of the most delightful writers I’ve read in a long, long time.

The Crown Vic

Admit it – when you’re driving down the highway, you keep your eyes on the rearview mirror looking for the familiar silhouette of a Ford Crown Victoria sedan. That is the automobile purchased very commonly by police departments to use as cruisers. Ford Motor Company had a special “police package” (power, handling, electrical) for that purpose, and about half of the Crown Vic’s produced went to police departments. Ford has discontinued production of the Crown Vic, and the competition is on among manufacturers to furnish the preferred future cruiser. Ford is touting a Taurus-based model, Chevy a Caprice and Chrysler a rear-wheel-drive Charger.

As you may imagine, police vehicles get pretty hard service. When they get too many miles on the clock, most departments auction them off fairly cheaply. and that’s when we see the Crown Vic Wannabe Syndrome at work. Old cruisers are not hard to spot. Most of them will have a 2 inch rubber stopper in one or both rear fenders closing the hole where a big whip antenna was removed. Some still have a spotlight installed through the A-post beside the windshield. Most are painted either white or black, with rims to match. And, because they are Crown Vic’s, drivers are still wary of them, and the young guys (and invariably, guys) who purchase one for $800 know it. Look around for a former police car and look at the driver. Imagine a little movie screen on his forehead. Watch the movie: it’s Broderick Crawford in Highway Patrol. It’s Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. It’s Walter Mitty in whatever role, as the toughest, baddest ass in a neighborhood, with the music to Miami Vice playing the background.

It’s our fault, you know. We’re maintaining a society where it’s not OK just to be a person. You have to have your title, your badge, your merit badges, your uniform, your monogramed something, your metaphorical ivory handled revolvers (remember, pearl handles are for pimps) to have value. Titles before your name, letters after your name, the right chrome, the right emblems on your car, that’s what creates and validates you.

And so if a person can gain self-respect with an $800 car, more power to them.

The Matriarch

The family matriarch, LaG, continues to experience health problems, which is the priority of this wretched scribe. Publication schedule, therefore, is unpredictable.

Pippa passes.

R

Reflections on Weighing the Same as a Duck

2010-06-30T20:16:00.010-04:00

Ducks are Apprentice Eagles?

Did you know that the news networks refer to some of the talking heads who appear on issue-specific segments as “analysts”? OK, I can live with that. That means the folks who cook at McDonald’s are chefs; drug dealers, entrepreneurs; ducks, apprentice eagles; and Pee-wee Herman an example of manhood and moral rectitude.

Of particular interest (and distress) too me are the “legal analysts.” Oh, I suppose the possibility exists that they are qualified. Most are lawyers, so I presume they’ve been to law school, and some of them even teach at law schools. Naturally, they all fit the talking head formula (handsome, pretty or dignified; aggressive attitude; sneer; and a big mouth). There seems to be a lack of those who actually have made their bones in society and particularly in the nasty trenches where the justice system must go to referee the kind of raw sewage that society spills.

I may be too harsh here - the “analyst” format and particularly the “panel” format don’t seem to lend themselves to any kind of rational or thoughtful discussion. Rational discussion, you see, lives out beyond cute soundbites with which an audience already agrees. Cheerleaders are fun, and a hearty “go team!” can stir the blood, but it hardly constitutes intelligent discourse. The talking heads talk over one another in a contest for “Most Obnoxious” and certainly the “Loudest and Most Whining Voice.” And it’s the most obnoxious, whining comments that get the heartiest feedback from the “hosts.”

Two nights ago, I was treated to such a panel of highly qualified legal analysts discussing the Joran van der Sloot prosecution in Peru. This involves the twenty-something fellow who is considered a leading suspect in the disappearance and presumed murder of a female college student in Aruba a few years ago. Now, he has been arrested for murder in Lima, Peru, again of a young woman and the news has presented a somewhat colorful description of the evidence.

Parenthetically, how come I say “somewhat colorful” when the guy is clearly guilty? Because I’m not in Peru. I wasn’t at the murder scene. I have seen small snippets of video tape together with explanations which, if true, present a strong circumstantial case. I know nothing about any other available evidence, have heard nothing from or on behalf of the defendant, and am not cocky enough or stupid enough to make an accurate assessment of guilt or innocence by divination from 8000 miles away. Premature adjudication is a nasty habit in America. Van der Sloot is in custody. We have time to make an adequate analysis (or rather the Peruvians do) before making a judgment.

The talking heads were lamenting that Van der Sloot had been released from custody in Aruba and were wondering if a similar injustice would occur in Peru. Simply impossible, said one shrieking analyst! “There is no jury!” No one paid attention to this analyst. The analyst repeated, ever more shrilly, “There is no jury to fool!” The analyst kept repeating the same sentence, louder and louder, to extol the superior justice system of Peru where a learned judge decides the fate of a defendant rather trusting his or her fate to the ignorant jury which can be so easily misled by the clever lawyer. Oh, dripped the sarcasm, what a wonderful thing it would be if America were not saddled with these silly juries and if judges could simply declare the truth as the press knows it to be.

I’m sure that kind of sentiment played well with a big part of the audience. Indeed, I bet a lot of those folks were self-styled conservatives and a good many of them were self-styled liberals. These are people who would say, “let’s not have juries.” Indeed, we hear the same tune sung in civil cases all the time whenever a jury decides “the wrong way” according to someone with enough money to do a press release. “They were fooled,” by the trial lawyer or the insurance company lawyer or the advertisers or they didn’t understand the value of money or the the issues in the trial were too complex or they were swayed by sympathy or the experts were bought off or something or something or something. Never have I heard a loser in a jury trial say, “Damn, a jury of citizens ruled against me. I wonder if they’re right?”

Seldom does any real issue have a simple answer. Seldom does one cause explained an effect, let alone a whole society of effects. Never have I see one single “fix” solve a problem or set of problems. The notion that we should “get rid of juries” should shake honest people down to their roots. Certainly, frustration is at work here. Sometimes that frustration is justified; sometimes it’s not. We have decided that we want to be as certain as we reasonably can be before we convict someone of a criminal offense. We have decided that it’s not acceptable to risk putting factually innocent people in prison and we recognize that memory and evidence may be fallible at times. At least we had made those decisions as of the time our system of justice emerged.

And since? We have, perhaps, become accustomed to a short attention span, because we have come to expect instant results. An arrest? We need a conviction, right now. Quick punishment, quick, quick, quick, and if that means a few rat droppings fall into the sausage press of Justice, that’s the way things go. I also agree with a proposition put forth by my friend former Justice Richard Neely, that we as a people have become too lazy, too stupid and too scared to take care of ourselves. If that is the case, I have to wonder if we still qualify for self-government.

We venerate “The Founders.” To most, they cannot have done wrong, although there is an element of society who hold that they did nothing but wrong. All but a precious few unrestrained modernists know how to divine “original intent” even on subjects unknown and unknowable to The Founders. The Second Amendment? It applies to modern firearms, obviously. (Don’t hassle me on that example - I conclude that the Second Amendment does apply, but that you have to think about it first.) Search of an automobile by a police officer? Elementary, the Founders were right on top of that. From every conceivable political direction, The Founders are cited as the one, the only, the perfect authority. But only when it’s convenient.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and company enumerated several reasons for the colonies to declare independence from the British king. One of the dastardly acts for which the king was excoriated was “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.” Please note the T. in trial in the J. in jury - that’s in the original. And in that masterly plan, the Constitution of the United States, a copy of which our beloved Senator Byrd carried in his vest pocket all of his years in the Senate, the Constitutional convention preserved the right to trial by jury for all crimes. [See detour about civil cases below.] These were not new concepts. The jury was a right grudgingly granted by King John in Magna Carta and extended to all Englishmen throughout the development of the common law. The jury was the creature which saved Peter Zenger from prison for publishing a newspaper and saved some hapless British soldiers from a political hanging for the ill- named “Boston massacre.” A jury convicted Jack Ruby and Jeffrey Dahmer. A jury decided for Karen Silkwood that indissoluble plutonium doesn’t get into the urine by accident. Juries have been the ultimate control of the power of government over the individual. Without the jury, government “of the people, by the people and for the people” would be a jest.

The detour: Juries were not called upon in civil cases centuries ago. Some cases are appropriate for juries, generally those about whether one person or entity owes money to another. In the injury realm (where most of the controversy lies), the civil jury system was built by the prevalence of insurance policies. Most civil court actions, however, are what used to be called “actions in equity” where the litigants are seeking something other than money. There, it is a judge who must decide.

And some juries of runaway and award what many believe is too much money. (There are rousing articles on this, and perhaps I’ll do a me, too, one day. Or perhaps not, I’ve seen juries runaway where I wondered where in the hell they had found evidence of that much damage.) And a jury acquitted O.J. Simpson when the heaviest weight of the evidence was clearly against him. (I’ve written before that a judge who refused to take charge of the courtroom had a lot to do with that verdict.)

So what will it be? The people as a whole? Or the products of the law schools who have morphed into judges? Do not think that we would have a perfect system under judges alone, or even a better system than we have with the presence of juries. Certainly, we would have a more efficient system, for it takes little time for a single person who doesn’t have defend his or her beliefs before pronouncing them to rule. And I do not condemn judges as a system or as a group generally or even individually. Some of the finest and most honorable people I have known within the legal profession have been judges. My best friend, man and boy, was a judge. (In West Virginia, state judges are elected, and his refusal to act political led to him losing an election. To me, that’s not a bad trait for a judge.) But there is the rarity that no one likes to talk about, a judge who does not exercise self-restraint, a judge who makes snap decisions and then refuses to hear any evidence or opinion which tends to contradict those decisions. What then?

I’m no “legal analyst.” And while I’ll cop to knowing how Courts work, I don’t pretend to any higher knowledge of right and wrong. I’m content to let the people as a whole keep control of that.

Eagles: Get the Hell Out of My Duck Pond; Or Oddities of local practice

Large law firms, I understand, are supposed to be run like a large families, where everyone cooperates and works together for the good of the whole. Generally, they’re pretty good about protecting the confidentiality of the firm, so I seldom have any indication how big firms do pulling off the family thing. No matter.

I practice in Marion County. There are around 90 lawyers who actively practice in here in Marion County. A few are in local offices of the very large firms, but most are in much smaller offices. And yet, the pleasure of practice in Marion County is that the Bar as a whole does resemble a family-oriented big law firm. There is a cooperation which is the hallmark of practice here. There is a ongoing tradition of mentoring younger lawyers which passes on good, sound, effective practice even when what they’ve learned on the way to the bar is insufficient. That’s not even a criticism of the legal education system - - when I first came to the bar, I was ready to start learning how to be a lawyer, and thank God I came to Fairmont, but I wasn’t ready to be turned loose on real people with real bad problems. In Fairmont, I found older masters of the craft who were willing to teach me. There are still times that I’ll get on the phone to some other lawyer here just to make sure that I’m not on the totally wrong track about some legal issue. And one of the great pleasures of my practice is that, now and then, I’m the recipient of such calls. I don’t understand why, but I am.

Some years ago, the West Virginia Supreme Court of appeals adopted “Standards of Professional Conduct.” These standards explained dignified and polite practice. Some Courts added these standards to their local rules. The funny thing was, however, we all knew that we didn’t need those standards for the great majority of the local people, because the strongly ingrained culture here was one of polite, cooperative and professional practice. Oh, I realize that’s not the TV image. There, lawyers are supposed to be raging pricks who are successful only if they screw unto others and prevent the other side of a lawsuit from even presenting their side.

You're DUCKS, Dammit, Not Chickens, or We need a continuing education course on basic computer stuff.

In moving files around, I found that I didn’t know there was a difference between a CD and DVD, and I still don’t get this +R & -R stuff. Sounds like blood types to me. On the other hand, in talking with another lawyer a few weeks ago, I found she didn’t know that you could open multiple windows in an Internet browser. Yes, I know that is all pitiful. Don’t let your babies grow up to be electron-dumb lawyers.

Have You Received Your Personal Duck Blessing?

There was a blurb this morning in one of the many political e-mails I receive from all across the political spectrum. If someone tries to classify me by what mailing lists I’m on and what periodicals I receive, they’re going to have a difficult time figuring out who or what I am unless they posit that I’m a victim of Multiple Personality Disorder. Anyway, this was an e-mail with the tagline “Do you want to annoy an atheist?” The e-mail was plugging a book entitled The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible.

Where do I begin? First and foremost, why would I want to annoy an atheist? Other than being of the rather mild opinion that being annoyed is a bit unpleasant, rather like having the sniffles, and the further mild opinion that giving someone the sniffles isn’t nice, I really don’t care if an atheist is annoyed. Ditto a Methodist. Ditto a Buddhist. And the guy who charges me $2 to launder a dress shirt. And so forth.

I also wonder about the title of the book. How can a tome about the Bible be “political”? It can be high-minded and intellectual or totally silly, but “political” seems to be somewhere outside the foul lines. (Under the circumstances, I decline to refer to “left field” or “right field.”) And how can it be “incorrect.” I can understand a “politically incorrect” history. “In 1900, William Jennings Bryan was elected President of the United States.” OK, gotcha, politically incorrect. Of course, in the modern babble-lexicon, “politically incorrect” means that we are extra brave because we are victims because someone doesn’t like what we say. So if I brag that I’m about to say something “politically incorrect,” I’m really saying that I don’t have the self-confidence just to tell you what I think, I have to whine about it.

From the description of the book and e-mail, it’s clear that the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible takes a very literal interpretation of the Christian Bible. The author self- identifies that as a part of the conservative political weltanschauung. I don’t know what he does about the many Jews who are political conservatives nor even the rabid agnostic conservatives of my acquaintance. Well, that’s his problem. I rather idly imagine that the author would find my own lack of a detailed dogma inadequate for his needs, and that’s OK, he has the same First Amendment rights I do. He can disapprove of whoever thinks whatever as strongly as he likes.

In the 10th chapter of Joshua, we find:

12Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the
Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun,
stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. 13And the
sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves
upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood
still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.

The language and the image are pretty and striking. In the solar system created on the model revealed by Copernicus seems to imply that the Earth’s rotation stopped and then restarted. Given the laws of physics that we refer to as Newton’s laws, that seems like a rather profligate use of energy to make not much of a point. Not that God could not pull it off, it just doesn’t seem like a very logical act. I look for meaning there which doesn’t require tera-tera joules to accomplish. I’m not sure what that is, for as a Biblical scholar, I’m definitely in the remedial class. But how believing in that literal event is “politically incorrect” or “politically relevant” or even “politically who really cares” is a stretch.

The death struggles surrounding the creation are, to me, somewhat a tempest in a teapot. I am amused about that “Creation Museum” in Kentucky where they display models of dinosaurs wearing saddles. The simple fact is, here we are. The current expression of creation is a marvelously complex universe complete with self-aware, creative, regenerating life, and concepts of emotions which seem to have no direct connection to survival by natural selection. That’s pretty neat. I accept that this is all a gift from God. Others don’t. One of us is right. And does it matter? Oh, in the scheme of things, that’s the central issue of life, the one that invigorates us or scares the hell out of us. But the truth already exists. And so we go back to the idea of arguing with an atheist. Or any other person who holds a particular religious belief pattern deeply. Listen to some of those arguments – how often does anyone change their mind? At best, it becomes a hard-fought match in the UFC octagonal ring with lots of blood, no clear winner, and the crowd cheering their favorite and asking for more, more, more. I’ve seldom heard sober people sit down and calmly chitchat about their different views. In my own church, the “orthodoxy” is somewhat more flexible than in others. One simply makes a an open profession of faith which can be as simple as affirming that one believes that “Jesus is the Christ.” You want more dogma? No problem, join a different church. Or no church. Or I don’t care.

And so, armed with the information from The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible, what are faithful readers supposed to do to annoy atheists? Bore them to death? Do they expect to change their minds? Or in such arguments, will people of faith decide to change our minds? I’m reading The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith, by Peter Hitchens (brother of well-known atheist author Christopher Hitchens) (Zondervan, 2010), and he describes his own journey back to faith as being his journey and not one imposed on him from without.

Or to be politically incorrect, do the faithful need to kill them all and let God sort them out?

Well, there is plenty of objective evidence that we are doing poorly enough with both motivations and results that we should think about our own lives before we keep riding this particular tiger.

Kindness For My Web-Footed Friends:

A book from the Three Parsec Bookshelf® to the first reader who correctly identifies the scholarly reference denoted by the title of this post.

Pippa passes.

R

Senator Byrd

2010-06-28T08:59:00.002-04:00

Senator Byrd was in Congress my entire life. Writers are falling over one another in the flowery-prose competition today.

Simply put, Senator Byrd's death is a great loss to the United States and to West Virginia. It is also a great personal loss to a great many West Virginians.

He started with nothing. He never became money-rich in his service to the people.

At least he is now reunited with his beloved Erma.

Helen Thomas and the New Challenge: Can My God Beat Up Your God?

2010-06-11T21:38:00.005-04:00

(Portion of post title shamelessly stolen from Pastor Josh Patty)

Helen Thomas has reported the White House beat since Dwight Eisenhower was in office. She shows her age and, obviously, it’s about time for her to retire. On 27 May 2010, she appeared at the Jewish Heritage Celebration at the White House. Out on the sidewalk, Rabbi David Nesenoff of RabbiLive.Com stuck a camera in her face for an impromptu chat. The transcript follows:

Nesenoff: Any comments on Israel? We're asking everybody today--

Thomas: Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.

Nesenoff: Ooh. Any better comments? [Does "better" imply "gotcha"??]

Thomas: Remember, these people are occupied, and it's their land, not German and not Polish.

Nesenoff: So where should they go? What should they do?

Thomas: They should go home.

Nesenoff: Where is home?

Thomas: Poland. Germany.

Nesenoff: So you're saying the Jews should go back to Poland and Germany?

Thomas: And America, and everywhere else

The interview took less than one minute by the clock. And in that time, she and insulted the Jews in the State of Israel, proving that she is an anti-Semite, and an all round nasty and very undeserving human being. The kindest things which have been said about her are that she should retire immediately and the little nametag screwed on her chair in the White House press room should be removed. We cannot tolerate disrespect of Israel.

Israel, formally created in 1948, occupies its borders by virtue of conquest. In this case it was moving in and conducting what was partially a guerrilla war. (The British called some of it terrorism at the time, but that’s the nature of guerilla warfare.) The primary difference Israel acquired its territory most other nations doing so is that the Israelis did it more recently. In 1967 and again in 1973, neighboring (Muslim culture) states went to war against Israel and Israel opened a can of whoop-ass on them, making large territorial gains in the process. The Israeli war machine was then and is now fantastically funded and gloriously equipped by the United States, and it is unwavering American doctrine that Israel is our friend in the Middle East and is a strong counterweight to the Arab/Islamic terrorist states and thus some sort of guarantor of peace in the region. No kidding, that’s the doctrine.

Like nearly all "the answer is easy" responses, Thomas' response was simplistic nonsense. Sorry, Helen, you could have helped God make the damn place and it still would be simplistic nonsense. We are all inheritors of invaders of some sort. Usually, we call them "explorers" or "bold discoverors," although sometimes we adopt some weird self-loathing and assign non-existent motives to people long dead in order to suffer angst which somehow satisfies our need for drama. (Yes, the Europeans brought the smallpox virus. No, it wasn't intentional. Yes, there is a record of the British sending blankets from smallpox patients to Indians. Once. It was not genocide. It was we have more people and we are much better armed and ain't life a bitch, which is a theme that has been repeated rather often in human history.) I live where pre-Columbian Indians whose self-designation we don't know were dispossessed by others, principally Shawnee, who were in turn dispossessed by mostly English-descended poor people looking for land, who acquired legal title, through which I now claim. I'm not giving stuff back to the Shawnee. On the other hand, I haven't invaded Pennsylvania lately because that would be uncivilized.

The Israelis PR mask slipped some when the annexation of Palestinian occupied areas got into high gear. While it was occupation by force, it wasn’t much opposed because the Palestinians as a society are economically poor and militarily nil. All the Israelis needed were a few tanks, a few bulldozers, and a whole lot of fencing material. They forced Palestinians out of their homes in many instances with near zero notice, bulldozed the homes, and moved Israeli citizens into new housing on those sites. Some of the destroyed structures were at least a century old. Lacking an army, the Palestinians also already used guerrilla/terrorist tactics, mainly bombing, so Israel can always point to the cowardly bombers as justification for moving in.

Not a lot of people in the United States are bothered by this. Not only is Israel that counterweight, Americans have always disliked Muslims. They’re not the ones who killed our Lord (that was the Jews, but it was a long time ago and we ignore that) (don’t be an idiot, that was sarcasm) there is also some sort of Biblical interpretation that says we need a State of Israel in good shape to set up the end times for the second coming of Christ. Whatever the reason, we shovel Israel money like coal into the boiler of a steam engine and if they do something outrageous we smile, nod, and pull our forelocks. We ignore the fact that they have nuclear weapons secretly developed (although it’s a pretty open secret that they really want their neighbors to know), forgave them for an obviously deliberate attack on the USS Liberty by air and sea which killed 34 United States sailors and injured 174. We also tolerate the Israel lobby as customers in that prettiest whorehouse in America, the U.S. Capitol.) Not that that’s so unusual.

The pundits applaud Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland (an upscale upscale DC suburb) for withdrawing the invitation for Helen Thomas to speak at the senior class graduation. Of course, the school could do that exercising somebody’s First Amendment right, although it’s not clear how the decision was made. And that is one hell of a lesson for high school kids. Let’s take a highly respected journalist who knows more about American government than anyone most of those kids will ever meet and refuse to hear any of her words about anything because she has an opinion contrary to an American shibboleth. Great job letting kids model independent thinking, huh?

And in the meantime, while we fiddle around with censoring opinions, the Middle East remains that Ultimate Fighting Challenge Octagonal Ring where everybody plays “My God Can Beat Up Your God,” with the assistance of the latest in projectiles, explosives, noxious chemicals and fissionables. We don’t hear from people of goodwill in the Middle East, because the true believers will kill them. Ask Sadat. (Muslim true believers.) Ask Begin. ( Jewish true believers.)

(Note: I would particularly welcome the views of Preacher Joel, Pastor Josh and Parson Jim, all of whom are religious leaders & accomplished scholars and men of good will who I think disagree with me on this issue. Disagree. First Amendment. Marketplace of Ideas. Got it?)

Pippa passes.

R

Fillers

2010-06-08T21:11:00.002-04:00

It used to be that newspapers ran “fillers,” little one or two paragraph items to fill up what would otherwise be white space. I assume that the use of computers for composing the pages makes that unnecessary now, but I’m not sure. In any event, some filler-type material has been sticking in odd places on the hard drive here at No. 3:

I saw some video of a trendy nightclub full of beautiful people on the news. I wondered: Come sunrise, do any of those people DO anything useful that justifies the oxygen they breathe?

Once everyone is wearing the bright lime yellow shirts, will highway workers wear black to stand out and be noticed?

On Le Tube d’ Boob, there’s an ad for a “neckline slimmer,” a piece of exercise equipment which “targets the muscles of the neck and jaw to create a firmer, younger-looking you,” and so forth. The secret? The devise uses “resistance coil technology.” Translation? It has a spring in it.

Pointed observation: In the barber shop, it’s impolite to leave the toilet seat down.

“Some guys are born with the idea in his head that they can automatically drive fast, make women happy, and shoot a gun just based on his gender.” Not the greatest grammar, but true. (From Introduction to Firearms and Their Usage in Self Defense, by David Nash)

Seen on a sign at a Tea Party rally: No Socialized Anything!
I do understand that the Health Care “Reform” (see below) is castigated as “socialized medicine,” which invokes the old “communist” images. (Insofar as it restricts choice of providers, they’re right, although PPO’s and HMO’s have gone a long way down that road already.) Sorry to say, we are already heavily socialized. We have socialized highways. Socialized police and fire departments. Socialized municipal water systems. You get the drift.

And reform? I’ve been looking on WestLaw to find a quote from an opinion by my friend, former Justice Richard Neely, when he was on the West Virginia Supreme Court. I can’t find it, so I called Richard and he can’t remember where it was, either. (We did have a delightful chat - lots of people really disliked Richard because he always told the truth as he saw it. I always enjoyed raised-voice arguments with him.) The comment was about the Judical Reform Amendment and it was something to the effect that if the Legislature wanted to kill all women over 60, they’d call it the Grandmother Improvement Plan. (When can you recall ANY legislation which had ANY bad effect having a name which admitted the possibility of that effect?)

And in honor of my friend and brother Oce Smith, now returned to the inked presses of the traditional Fourth Estate, I bid you: Mizpah!

R

Politics, Honesty and Our Flag, and By God Stand Up When Our Flag Passes By

2010-05-26T16:49:00.005-04:00

The Dumbest Rumor, The Silliest Hope or the Blackest Deal

The nastiest and most insidious rumor is running around. Recall, if you will, Alan Mollohan, our incumbent Congressman, lost the primary election to State Sen. Mike Oliverio. Actually, Oliverio handed Mollohan his ass on a silver salver. He did so by a vicious negative campaign not done with the acme of skill, but since Mollohan had been taking it on the chin in the press for years and had not responded effectively, the attack campaign was more than enough.

And now, some strong Mollohan supporters appear to be putting together an independent run or write-in campaign for the general election.

Unless these people are smoking weed, this is I’m-having-a-baby-by-an-alien, Elvis-is-my-next-door-neighbor, the-CIA-shot-Lincoln thinking. Calling it moronic is an insult to all decent, law-abiding morons. These rumors must have the Republican candidate, David McKinney, laughing himself silly.

Let me tell you a little known political secret: Republicans are much more dependable straight ticket voters than are Democrats. Voting a straight ticket means that the voter simply marks the ballot once which enters a vote for everyone running on one party’s ticket. The difference betweem Democrat straight ticket voting and Republican straight ticket voting is that Republicans go through the entire ballot race by race and vote for each Republican separately so that they can pretend that they gave a great deal of thought to their choices. But either way you vote the straight ticket, the result is the same.

Not three Republicans in the district are going to cross party lines to vote for Alan Mollohan. Not five Republicans in the district are going to cross party lines to vote for Mike Oliverio. The only votes which Mollohan will take otherwise would go to Oliverio. Oliverio whipped Mollohan once, and the party loyalists will move to Oliverio. Oliverio showed that he has financial backing, and so the bloodbath will continue and Oliverio will wax Mollohan again, only this time the upshot is that Alan is campaigning for a McKinney victory. Brilliant. Just brilliant. It’s hard to say if this would be the result of idiocy, an unusual political deal or totally black under-the-table chicanery.

Here’s a clue: Sometimes Mr. Reality whispers in your ear. Sometimes he shouts. Sometimes he kicks your ass. That’s when it’s time to shut up, smile, and take one for the team.

Thank You For Being Honest??

About twice a week I blow through McDonald’s for a McCrap breakfast. This morning I went through and ordered a McBagel and McTea. I paid with exact change, which is one of my little quirks. I pulled to the window, and the window guy handed me a huge bag that must’ve weighed 6 or 8 pounds, and was full of a dozen or more wrapped sandwiches, etc. I told him that wasn’t my order and he told me sure it was, have a nice day, come again, and so forth. No, no, no, I told him, it’s not my order, give me the McBagel and McTea. Okay, no big deal, he finds my order and gives it to me. But then he says “Thank you for being honest.” What the hell?! We’re now at the point that you give somebody an extra little thank you if they are honest? We now assume that if someone has a fair shot to jam us, they’ll do it, and it’s a big favor if they don’t? So we owe them a BIG thanks? That’s warped, and while it may not be huge in and of itself, but it’s another bit of information for us to consider as we analyze where our culture is at.

Flag

I frequently appear in court in Grafton, the county seat of Taylor County. I have a particular affinity for Grafton. I really love the people down there because they are just my kind of people. Nobody gets real excited unless there’s something to get real excited about, everybody does their work, a handshake is a deal, everybody’s word is good, and there is a culture of respect in that courthouse which is missing in 80% of the courthouses in West Virginia. Also, my family's West Virginia history started in Taylor County in 1799.

I was driving down Route 250 toward Grafton the other day and actually driving a moderate speed and just enjoying a cool and sunny day & sucking down a cuppa joe. Right after I passed the tee-tiny community of McGee and was heading up the hill, I saw coming toward me in the other lane the Boothsville/Company 15 fire engine from the Harmony Grove substation. (Isn’t that a beautiful name for a little community, Harmony Grove? For some reason, that is considered the ancestral seat of the Curry/Currey family.) The driver was taking 250 at a moderate speed because in that part of the county, fire engines have pretty large water tanks and are unusually heavy. Well, you know me, I love the job and the people on the job. When the engine passed, I looked in my side mirror and saw an American flag flapping no kidding majestically in the breeze as it was attached to the end of the ladder. That is, I think, such a nice thing.

And then I think back to the school administrator in California who ordered – ordered! – high school students to remove T-shirts with American – American! – flags on them because it was Cinco de Mayo and they might offend students of Mexican extraction. Permit me once again to quote Pres. Theodore Roosevelt’s view on immigration, which I heartily endorse:

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts "native" before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.

The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else. [No, I did not change the gender thing. That’s the way he spoke. He was wise, not infallible. Learn from it.]

If we are going to guard the borders so that no one other than our clones can become citizens, let’s tear down that Statue of Liberty and melt the copper into pennies and wiring, because that stirring poetry inscribed at its base is so much empty crap:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Open the door. And let the new citizen-candidate become American. It’s a two way street.

And as always, Pippa passes.

R