I’m going to wade into a debate here that anyone with more common sense than I have would avoid like the plague.

Well, sort of.

[Read more →]

My “day job” (now there’s a laugh!) is that I’m a criminal defense attorney.  This morning while in court, I received a phone call from the family of one of my clients, who was supposed to be there with me in court.  He wasn’t coming.

Now I’ve represented this kid off and on for some time now.  I know that he does not like to be in custody.  Hates it.

All he had to do today was show up and likely as not that would have been the end of it.  No custody.

But he didn’t show up.

[Read more →]

As I read the news concerning the greatest oil disaster in the history of the United States (of the world?), I cannot help but wonder if British Petroleum has guaranteed the next major extinction.

No doubt some of you will write me off for that comment and move on, thinking what I have to say cannot possibly be relevant to your life, or to anyone’s real life, for that matter.  Obviously, I’m some kind of a nutcase.  After all, extinction is impossible; humanity is unstoppable.

But that — combined with the fact that extinctions are not at all rare — is exactly why this event may be the trigger for the next mass extinction.

[Read more →]

I was going to call this post, “California Dreamin’” because what finally broke through my “not writing on Unspun™” barrier has to do with California’s pension “crisis,” which is really just one more aspect of California’s generalized budgetary crisis.

But given what’s going on around the rest of the country, “Meltdown” seemed the more appropriate choice.

And while this post does mention fossil fuels, you’ll be happy to know the “meltdown” has nothing to do with global warming and the disappearance of snow and ice at Earth’s poles.

On the other hand, maybe you won’t be.  When it comes down to it, there’s no reason to be happy about Unspun™ coming out of hibernation.

[Read more →]

Freedom is a funny thing.  Too borrow and pervert an aphorism, freedom is like oxygen: most people don’t think about it until it’s missing.

Think of me (and this article) as a canary in a coal mine. I only hope you’ll actually notice — and then do something about it.

[Read more →]

I’m not sure why I’ve called this post Tikkun Olam, since many of the references in it are actually to the Christian Bible. Perhaps it’s because although the references are taken from the Christian Bible, the concepts about which I write — particularly that of making the world a better place, of healing the world — seem to me so foreign to what I see in the Christians amongst whom I live.

[Read more →]

Is it me, or are Americans becoming increasingly stupider as time goes by?

We’re told that banks and mortgage companies made a bunch of stupid mistakes which resulted in an economic meltdown.  So to save us from the economic meltdown, we were told we have to give $700 billion to the same banks that put us into this mess to start with.

And now the banks tell us that they are not going to tell us what they did with our money which we gave them to save us from them.

So, seriously, just how stupid are we?

Over on the blog, Defending People: The Art and Science of Criminal Defense Lawyering, after a post titled “Thoughts on a Hanging,” a character named “Y” comments:

Wait. A. Minute.
How can we have real liberty if we lack safety?
How is a man free to “pursue happiness” — another key phrase to our country’s Founders, if his house may be burned or his family killed?

Safety is a necessary condition to liberty. Not a sufficient condition, of course, but necessary. And we cannot have safety without our criminal code, which means “tough on crime” and docket management. Granted, there must always be a balance between safety and liberty, but they are not always at odds. Without safety, there can be no liberty. Without safety, any liberty we might have is an empty notion of what might have been.

There are a number of issues one might take with this.  For that reason, I decided to blog my response, rather than leave what would only be an overlong comment.

[Read more →]

Several friends of mine are going through difficult times right now.  The world has dealt — or is dealing — several of them a hand which nobody wants to have to play.

I always feel inadequate in terms of knowing what to say in these kinds of situations.

Some time back, I read a novel (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), a central thesis of which is that because each of us is the embodiment of but one life out of so many billions, what happens in our lives is inconsequential, insignificant, and thus the decisions we make are unimportant.

I would say that because each of us has but one life, that makes what happens and our reactions to what happens all the more important.

[Read more →]

Okay, I don’t usually do these, because I figure that they’re in the 48 things most of my blog readers could care less about. On the other hand, I sometimes like looking at them myself, because I enjoy learning new things about people I know — and most of the blogs I read belong to people I know.

So with that — and since I’ve been tagged by blogger extraordinaire and friend Joni Mueller of Joniverse — I proceed to give you this Holiday Season, the 48 Things YOU Could Care Less About….

[Read more →]