Quote of the Day
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
George Eliot
Monthly Blog Update
I thought with a short month, plus one day last month where I got one of the highest pageview counts ever, it would be difficult to maintain my string improving pageview totals, but this month tied my highest over the past 14 months. (Today I had a lower count than usual (Google maintenance affecting reporting statistics?) plus the month I tied had 2 more days.) I thank readers for their continued interest in what I regard as a distinctive political blog.
Davy Jones, Lead Singer of the Monkees: RIP
The late John Stewart, once a member of the folk group the Kingston Trio, released one of my favorite all-time albums in the late 1970's ("Bombs Away Dream Babies"); I knew about his monster hit "Gold" with backing vocals from Stevie Nicks, but I'll never forget hearing "Midnight Wind" (one of my favorite songs, period) for the first time on my plane trip to Van Nuys, CA, the computing services company home headquarters for the Houston branch I worked for.
(Southern California really did fit the stereotype: Venice Beach, roller skates, etc; one of the executives' wives I met in passing was a young blonde bombshell whom really did say things like "mellow, man". In a past post, I mentioned that a different pretty blonde from headquarters I had befriended was really sad. When I asked why, she told me that because of travel, she was going to miss her car's birthday. She then brightened up and smiled up at me, saying she had found her car just the right birthday card; it was on the way and would get there on time. [I swear to God this really happened.] Anyway, during my Los Angeles stay, I didn't have a rental car and needed a ride; the young woman invited me to go with her in her car--and the first thing she did after I settled into the passenger seat was to point out a birthday card hanging via a lanyard from the dashboard mirror. Isn't life wonderful? I need to marry a woman whom mails her car birthday cards... By the way, it was really cool to drive on Ventura Highway with the America song playing in the background... )
The Monkees were a delightful takeoff on the early Beatles and their trendy movies. (I personally prefer the innocent love songs of the early Beatles.) Everyone knows the basic Monkee hits, but only one of them got me in trouble at work. Anne Murray in 1980 did a remake of John Stewart's "Daydream Believer", the Monkees' third #1 original hit; I wasn't even consciously aware I was (not that loudly) singing along with the song playing in the office, but my manager at the time was sufficiently annoyed. No doubt he thought somebody in the office had switched to the crappy singer channel and wanted to change it back... (have you ever met people whom sometimes are so into what they're doing that even the slightest interruption can startle them?)
I'm not sure when I last saw or heard Davy Jones; it may have been on one of those wonderful Dennis Miller Show podcasts when Dennis interviews these singers from the 60's like Peter Noone (remember Herman's Hermits?) where they give all these fascinating anecdotes about what was going behind the scenes and other pop stars they knew personally. I remember as a kid loving the series and the songs; my thoughts and prayers are with his surviving family members.
You once thought of me as a white knight on his steed
Now you know how happy I can be
Oh and our good time starts and end without dollar one to spend
But how much, baby, do we really need?
Cheer up sleepy Jean
Oh, what can it mean
To a daydream believer
And a homecoming queen
There's something endearing about hearing singers in their sixties reprising these golden chestnuts.
The Government Is Out To Get You (Maybe):
The "White Glove" Treatment
We know the stories: Al Capone was convicted--on tax evasion; Martha Stewart was convicted, not of insider trading, but of obstruction of justice and lying to investigators; in his first trial, Rod Blagojevich was convicted on only one count: lying to the FBI. Sometimes you get the feeling they throw every charge they can at a defendant in the hope something will stick. In fact, it seems odd when the defendant seems to walk away from a notorious case without even a minor charge conviction--take the biggest trials over the past 17 years: OJ Simpson and Casey Anthony. From what I understood of the cases presented and evidence, I agreed with the not guilty verdicts. (But I have to tell you--a suicidal OJ Simpson trying to flee police and a young mother whom delays reporting the disappearance of her daughter and goes out partying like she's making up for lost time are damning circumstantial facts. I'm sure there are sophistic psychologists whom can explain the reactions away.)
The tax laws are so convoluted not only do you sometimes get conflicting interpretations of tax law from the IRS and the Treasury Department Secretary has trouble doing his own taxes, but there are thousands of professionals whom make their living at it (it is part of what my CPA baby sister does for a living). We have thousands of politicians whom apparently think unless they keep feeding the bureaucracy and being Big Nannies and Busybodies, they aren't doing their jobs... I mean, I don't even know how sexual acts (e.g., sodomy) even come up for discussion (unless people are insisting on doing it in the public square...)
But we know the one sure thing: that if and when we violate any of tens of thousands of laws we don't know about--which violates the very essence of the rule of law--the elitist suits will say ignorance of the law is no excuse... I just want to stress in this regard (and I acknowledge here that I'm not a trained lawyer (thank God!), but I want to stress a couple of salient characteristics discussed by the World Justice Project and philosophers such as Joseph Raz: "the laws are clear, publicized, stable, fair, and protect fundamental rights, including the security of persons and property"; "the discretion of law enforcement and crime prevention agencies should not be allowed to pervert the law".
I usually don't use this blog to complain about law enforcement; in fact, I've usually gone out of my way to accommodate authorities. But let me give one example (even though it ended relatively well). I mentioned in past posts that I worked on a project in a suburban Milwaukee county starting in July 2001. I was still living in California, but the Wisconsin project company, located in the southwest Chicago suburbs, insisted I needed to relocate, which they would pay for, versus pay expenses (the relocation would pay itself off by not paying travel expenses). They agreed to pay expenses through the end of July. I issued notice to my apartment, arranged to have my car picked up in California and delivered in Wisconsin, and had arrangements for movers the last Monday of the month.
Two days before I was scheduled to fly back to California a final time, the company's VP showed up on site and with no advance warning, told me he wanted a new ERP upgrade test database up over the coming week; it was not a contractual requirement, but he wanted to show up at a client management meeting the next week saying he had a new upgrade database up. With 3 days back home packing up and moving, this was not physically possible (there are technical issues that crop up the first time you do a test upgrade involving everything from software issues to existing data issues. And (working as a subcontractor for another vendor in California) we allocated a full week of DBA's scheduled around the clock to do a simpler (within version) upgrade for a rehearsed go-live upgrade when I worked at a Los Angeles client the prior year. The bottom line is, I would not only have to cancel my trip back home and postpone my plans to move (and my apartment had already been leased out) but work around the clock to meet an arbitrary deadline. I got nowhere with the VP, the junior partner to the company president. I got nowhere with the company president. So I then had to spend hours pleading with my California landlord and rescheduling everything a week or two later.
The last item I had to deal with was extending my Best Western reservation over the weekend. I then discover that the county had a fair scheduled over that weekend, and the Best Western was fully booked. Now I'm stuck Friday trying to find another hotel room. I finally managed to squeeze in a reservation at a Motel 6 or a Travelodge through a travel service. What I didn't notice was that my reservation said in small print that confirmation was unofficial and subject to cancellation by the vendor. Working on the upgrade, I never checked my personal email during the day when a cancellation notice arrived mid-afternoon. I finally left the courthouse about 10:30PM --I had been onsite, except for a lunch break, for 15 straight hours, and I was exhausted, not even having dinner yet. I go to check in at the hotel, figuring to eat afterwards. That's when I find out I don't have a reservation. The hotel clerk was not very helpful about suggesting an alternate hotel (after all, "it's not [his] problem").
If anything, I left the hotel even more exhausted after the argument. I decide that I'm going to head I-94E towards Chicago--surely I can find a hotel in a county not hosting a state or county fair. For whatever reason, there was a long left turn lane with a physical barrier away from the main lanes--I can't cross the barriers so I have to cross over/under I-94, obviously looking for the first street where I can turn around, head back to I-94.
That's where I got in trouble. I didn't realize probably because of dim lighting that I was in a left-turn, no U-turn lane. And this intersection was 2 blocks away from the police station. And there was a police car sitting at the intersection at the time of my turn. There was absolutely no traffic in the other direction (that I was looking to move into).
So anyway I'm heading onto the access road to I-94E when I saw a police car with flashing lights behind me. I'm figuring that he is on some emergency call so I pull over--and then I notice that he's following my rental to a stop. I have absolutely no idea in the world why I've been pulled over, but I could tell from his initial questions that he didn't think I had stopped early enough. I knew he probably knew I was driving a rental and hence didn't know the local driving area. He insisted that I "knew" it was a no U-turn lane, and I was sorely tempted to argue the point that the U-turn violation was a ridiculous technicality in any event given the lack of oncoming traffic, but I bit my tongue and pleaded to be issued a warning. He finally agreed to give a warning but not before telling me if I get so much as a jaywalking ticket in the county over the next 3 months, he would personally see to it that my ass would be sitting in jail. [Totally unnecessary.] I spent the next several miles driving slower than a granny, on the lookout for any ticket-pushing cop along the way. I finally found a Holiday Inn Express around Kenosha.
Of course, I didn't get another ticket. And when I checked back into the Best Western the following Sunday night, the hotel manager told me that the checkout clerk hadn't talked to him, but because I had done so much business with them, they would have been able to accommodate me; they didn't know how to get in touch with me to let me know. EXPLETIVE DELETED.
Among other things, laws must be reasonable within context. I'll give a simple example. I once drove from El Paso to the Dallas area (at the time I had two siblings whom lived in the general area). I was exhausted when I reached the west Ft. Worth area. I'm doing the speed limit--55 mph or so--when all of a sudden these cars on both sides are literally shooting by me, like I'm a granny driving in a hospital zone. (There are lots of places in Texas except for speed traps like Selma where you might not see a police or sheriff's car for miles; I quickly realized by following the traffic laws, I was probably creating a driving hazard and moved to the rightmost lane. The point I'm trying to make here is that when people don't follow the laws anyway, it becomes arbitrary to pick any one violation, which violates the principle of equal protection. The obvious remedy is to junk the unnecessary law.
Prolific lawmaking is intrinsically unjust. We should demand that each lawmaker make a commitment to a Pareto principle like reducing 80% of laws (especially dubious rules and regulations that make government less efficient) in favor of the most critical 20%
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Paul McCartney & Wings, "Listen to What the Man Says"
