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.

After all, Unspun™ was originally created by me because I got tired of all the “spin” that was coming from the then-relatively nascent abandonment of old-style news reporting.  Faux News started it (of course, as one would expect of typically-stupid reactionary right-wing Americans, they pronounce and even misspell “Faux” as “Fox”), but these days, it’s the paradigmatic news form.

For me, I became an attorney, thinking I might help improve the world — ha! have I learned a lot over the last few years! — and Unspun™, I hoped, would be less necessary after we voted out the party and its Decider who made the Orwellian warp necessary in the first place.  I turned my attention to legal blogging and decided to leave the political and social commentary to others.

A man’s gotta make a living. Or at least try to.

Alas, I was seduced by a new Decider, an even better Orwellian by the name of Barack Obama.  A man not at all afraid to take responsibility and promise change before actually doing neither.  “Yes, we can!  ¡Sí, se puede!,” he told us, and the mere fact that America was about to elect an African-American as President caused me to believe, if only for a moment, that he was right.

The fact that “we can” was being translated as “se puede” in Spanish should have been my first clue that something was not right.

To simplify things only a bit, “yes, we can” is not a literal translation of sí, se puede. In fact, there is no good literal (that is, word for word) translation of the phrase. Sí clearly means “yes,” but se puede is problematic. “It can” comes close to its literal meaning but leaves out the vague sense of emphasis and/or completion that se provides.

But I’m not writing this article as a Spanish lesson.  Maybe I can do that another day.

I’m writing to say, primarily, that Unspun™ is coming out of retirement and to explain why.

The world is, as I alluded to above, in the midst of a meltdown.  And many of the responses to the difficulties spewing into the world — whether below or above the waterline — are quite frankly not only ridiculous, but more harmful than the problems which inspire them.

Sooner or later, people are going to start to realize that no small part of the cause is the irrefrangible deficiency inherent in Democracy.  Mob rule has never been a successful method for governance.  That’s why the Founders of the United States feared it so much.  What we’re seeing going on around us is to a large degree the result of America’s — and the world’s — increasingly stupid embrace of Democracy.

California, so near as I can tell from personal knowledge, has embraced Democracy the longest and most seriously of all the States.  For that reason — or so it appears to me — California is suffering the more serious effects of meltdown.  (Not counting what BP is now doing to the coastal states; the real impact of that will not really be fully felt for some years, and it, too, will eventually be felt right here in California.)

The thing that scares me is that when people begin to understand the drawbacks of unbridled Democracy, they embrace Deciders who are firm in their convictions and whose simplistic promises give them comfort.  We don’t want to hear how bad things are.  We don’t want to hear that we cannot afford unlimited government “bailouts” that give corporations and individuals everything they could ever want.  What we want to hear is “yes, we can!”

Down that road lies Fascism. The pure forms of Democracy have ultimately led to Tyranny since at least 594 B.C.E.

Perhaps that’s why James Madison said,

Democracy is the most vile form of government… democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

And it’s already happening.  In California, Steve Poizner, Carly Fiorina and, to arguably a lesser extent, Meg Whitman, are trying to out Mussolini one another in the race to govern on behalf of Californians.  (Poizner and Whitman are running for Governor; Fiorina is vying to represent California in the U.S. Senate.)

All these people are busily clouding the issues.  Fiorina, to give just one example, says,

I am an optimist and believe that people will make the right choices about their lives and their leaders if they know the issues and are equipped with the facts. So let’s talk about the issues…

On that same webpage, she is quoted as saying,

Tax, spend and borrow is not a governing philosophy, it’s a cycle of dependency.

Like it or not, though, taxing, spending and even borrowing are neither a governing philosophy nor a cycle of dependency.  Wording it this way is just political craptrap in the best Orwellian tradition.  Taxing and spending is a sad necessity; borrowing is, admittedly, less so.  (I would have no problem with a constitutional amendment that forbade governments from borrowing money.)  Without taxing, the government has no money to spend; without money to spend, the government cannot pay employees who deliver vital services, including building roads and bridges to somewhere, as well as maintaining fire and police departments.  “Carly” appeals to the lowest common denominator by arguing that these things lead to “dependency” instead of pointing out that most of these services are enabling.  If you have trouble imagining what it takes to move around California without roads and bridges, for example, just go to the library — another enabling service funded by taxes — and pick up a history book.

Appealing to the worst in human nature is also the reason these candidates are hammering away at the “illegal immigrant problem.”  It’s also perhaps the scariest of their tactics.  This appeal to all that is ugly amongst us is the sort of thing that allows for the restriction of civil rights that is prerequisite to a fascist government.  To the extent that we may actually have a “problem” with undocumented people entering the United States without proper authorization, saying that Arizona got it right isn’t the solution.

For all the above reasons — and more — Unspun™ is coming out of retirement.  I’ll still be blogging about law and disorder on my two law blogs, but Unspun™ is the more appropriate avenue for political and social commentary.  Since I can no longer remain silent on those issues, since I can no longer maintain a focus entirely on law (which, partly for the above reasons, is going through its own Meltdown), Unspun™ will live again.

Y porque yo puedo.

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.

It’s difficult to know where to start with this.  Mark Bennett makes a good start in his own responsive comment. As Mark impliedly notes, there is no metaphysical or logical connection between being free and being safe. Sometimes, as Mark states, we deliberately move beyond a place of safety in pursuit of freedom.

What is not so clearly stated is that no absolute level of safety can ever be achieved.  Even in the most “locked down” of cultures, someone may burn your house, or kill you and your family.  You could even assign a police officer to every home — don’t worry, we’re getting there — and still not be completely safe.  Assuming the officer could protect you from your son, daughter, mother, or father, who’s to protect you from the officer?

The more that the rules or laws of a particular country attempt to lock things down “in the interest of safety,” the less freedom exists.  And, frankly, the pursuit of “safety” in the United States has reached the level of insanity.  Petty officials such as the Presiding Judge of the Fresno County Superior Court routinely ignore the constitutional requirements of the Fourth Amendment because it’s apparently reasonable to expect that anyone entering the courthouse might be armed and dangerous.  We’ve forgotten that the Constitution required probable cause particularized to the individual being searched, not a belief that it was reasonable to think some person entering a courthouse might have a weapon.

It was against the very idea of indiscriminate searches on baseless suspicion — fishing expeditions, you might call them — that our Founders rebelled.  It was this very sort of attempt at making sure all the rules are followed by everyone all the time — and overbroad rules like the “search all persons entering the courthouse” rules we’re increasingly running into now — through the application of arbitrary and indiscriminate searches that our Founders revolted.  Yes, revolted.  As in, “they started a revolution and overthrew the government.”

In spite of a Constitution which requires particularized reasons to subject a citizen to a search, we are routinely subjected to searches while moving from one area to another.  Try to fly without being searched.  Try to enter any government building without being searched.

The government gets away with this for two reasons.

First, on the whole, we are sheep.  We’re not actually citizens, we’re submitizens.  When some new procedure or directive comes down from “on high” requiring us to empty our pockets, strip off our clothing, or otherwise submit to interference in our personal lives from the government, the majority of us don’t even ask why.  We just do it.  Those of us who don’t, suffer the full wrath of the government because the majority of us are submitizens.  Why should the government fear acting as if there were no Constitution, when it knows the submitizens will let them get away with it?

Second, if someone actually does resist and takes the issue to court, the court (which, incidentally, is still the government) simply redefines the term “search.”  Somehow, someway, going through people’s things and making them empty their pockets is not a search.

This is okay, “Y” tells us.  Y?  Because we must have safety before we can have freedom.

But since we can never be safe, I guess what “Y” means is that we can never be free.

It’s easy to understand why  Marcoccio wants to know: the city spent 42 cents on a stamp to bill a blind woman who “underpaid” her water bill by one penny — let’s not forget the cost of the paper, the envelope, the time someone spent getting it through interoffice mail, or otherwise handling it.

The city would be “fiscally irresponsible” if it decided paid someone to weed through the bills and pull all those below a certain amount out.

My first thought is, “Hasn’t Debora Marcoccio ever heard of a computer?  Computers can be programmed not to print bills when they’re below a certain amount.”  Then I remembered something else Marcoccio said: “A computer automatically prints letters for accounts with an overdue balance….”

So let me see if I’ve got this right, Ms. Marcoccio.  You have a computer that somehow computes whether or not there is an overdue balance.  It therefore probably was programmed so that if the balance is greater than zero on a certain date then a bill should be printed.

How hard would it be to have the computer programmed so that if the balance is greater than zero and less than aCertainAmount, then (and only then) print the bill?

Voilà!  No need to assign anyone to weed through the letters and pull out all those below a certain amount!

F*ck ‘em.

Approach To Mailbox: About 65 Feet Away
Note Sign on Bottom Half

I should probably catalog this under “whiny post.” I mean, when you stack this up against all the other crap going on right now, it’s pretty small potatoes. And you don’t have to read it, so don’t crab at me about blowing off a little smoke if you happen to think your postal worker is the best thing since sliced bread. Ours won’t give us the time of day, let alone our mail.

But there’s just something that really gets my goat when I hear how much some of these b*st*rds get paid to work for the government — paid for with taxpayer money — and then they turn around and act like the public is “the enemy” instead of the people for whom they’re theoretically being paid to provide the services they feel they’re too busy to provide.

When we moved to Clovis, one of the first things that kind of surprised us is that you don’t get your mail delivered to your home here. And lately our local post-person has reminded us that the old Post Office motto expired about the time Cliff Claven lost his seat on Cheers.

From Across the Street in the Dark:
You Can Still See the Sign

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat nor gloom of night stays these Couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. — Old Post Office Motto

It’s been a little cold and a lot rainy here lately and apparently our post-person is none other than Alfonso “Al” Royal.

Be it rain, sleet or snow, the people on my route can wait another day for their mail ’cause I’m freezing my stamps off. — Alfonso “Al” Royal’s Motto, adopted by the Clovis Post Office, Minnewawa Branch

And that’s not the only trick of his that they’ve adopted. Tonight, when I called them to complain, the phone rang without answer. I was in the car, following a postal carrier I’d unsuccessfully tried to flag down around the corner from my house. And I followed him or her about 5 or 6 miles until I lost them at the “no public vehicles beyond this point” sign over at the post office. That entire time, I listened on my cell phone to the sound of the unanswered post office phone.

Well, almost the entire time. There were the two times I had to re-dial after someone picked it up and then hung it up without so much as a “hello, I’m going to hang up on your sorry *ss now, you lousy taxpaying public vermin.”

Approach To Mailbox: About 45 Feet Away
Who Could Miss the Sign?

Eventually, I got someone on the phone and explained that we’d been trying unsuccessfully to contact our post-person to let them know the lock broke off in the mailbox kiosk down the street from our house and for several days we’ve been unable retrieve the package that was left for us. On top of that, we’ve had no mail now since either Tuesday or Wednesday. Now, Thursday we understand. That was a holiday for our poor overworked postal “service” people who are so tired that when they lift the phone off the hook, it accidentally drops back on before they can say “burn in hell, you lousy non-government-employee type person!”

I’m sure (if you’re even still reading this) that you’ve already heard more than you care to hear. Suffice it to say that after someone actually appeared to be starting to help me, he put the phone down to go ask someone something and — guess what happened? — someone else came along. I heard a voice say (not to me), “Who’s holding?” just before they hung up the phone.

So I called back to try to re-explain the situation. (And at least got an apology for that hang-up.) The supervisor told me the problem was that the post-person didn’t see our note. I said, “It’s right on the front of the box.”

Getting Ready to Pass Behind Mailbox
Sign Clearly Visible

“Well, we don’t go to the front of the box. We go to the back,” he said.

“Really?” I asked. “How do you get to the back without passing the front? The postal truck parks right in front of the mailbox.”

“Well, but he wouldn’t have seen a sign on the mailbox as he walked by.”

“You can’t miss it — from any angle. It’s half the size of the mailbox!”

The pictures scattered throughout this post were taken after dark. Our post-person, when he comes (ours happens to be male) at all, virtually always comes before dark. In all of the pictures, you can see the sign. One is taken from across the street in the dark. Hard to see how it could be missed. (For those who really don’t have enough to do, as evidenced by the fact that you’re still reading this rant, clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.)

View On Way To Back
Sign Visible Even At This Angle

“Look, sir, I’m busy. We have lots more mail to pretend to deliver. You’ll have your package by next week. I’ll have to send someone out to drill the lock.”

“What if I drill the lock?”

“You’ll be arrested for tampering with federal property.”

Meanwhile, our package sits hostage inside the mailbox, behind the note that was too small to be read for three days. The Post Office says they won’t be able to get someone to try to retrieve the package until Monday.

Hopefully, it’s not paperwork for any appeals that have clocks ticking on their filing deadlines.