And that seems like a nice segue into the topic of today’s post, “Facebook Arguments, or, Why Americans Can’t Compromise.”

Another problem with Facebook is that, frequently, after some short blurb of mine, the “thread” will degenerate in a number of ways. One way in which that happens is that someone will start to shift the topic. Although sometimes I think people deliberately shift the topic, because they believe they’re losing points by directly arguing the point I made, I don’t think that’s always the case. Sometimes people are just genuinely confused about what we’re discussing.

Maybe that’s my fault. Or maybe it’s just another feature of Facebook arguments, because Facebook arguments are, again, frequently moved forward in short comments, rather than longer, thought-out-and-properly-punctuated posts, such as those I think I can do here at Unspun™.

Those short comments, we think, are pithy, and smartly done. More often, though, they are cliché, and argumentative.

And that’s when they’re on-point.

But the number one reason I think Facebook discussions go awry is because people think — and I’ve had people say this to me at least a half-dozen times in the last month — that because the discussion was posted on “their” wall, they get to control not just what gets said, but how it gets said.

Use a little sarcasm in responding to your “host” and you’re liable to be roundly criticized as being disrespectful. The stridency of the response from your “host” is proportional to the degree to which your sarcasm actually hits home; i.e., the degree to which it highlights that what you are responding to was wrong, inane, off-point, or, in some other manner, defective.

(That actually ties in to another reason I want to revive Unspun™. I have a private blog. But there are few articles there, since I didn’t acquire that domain until many, many years after starting Unspun™. And Unspun™ — which even today pulls down around a hundred visitors per day looking at old stuff — once had a significant, and significantly-cantankerous, readership. Yet I don’t know if I ever blocked a comment, regardless of how obnoxious the poster was. By starting to blog here again, some of you may decide to go looking at the Archives, and I wanted you to be able to see that.)

At any rate, I think one reason — almost certainly not the only reason — that Americans cannot compromise is that we can’t keep up a discussion long enough, nor can we make one deep enough, to allow for that opportunity.

For my part, the minute someone tells me I “have to be more respectful” in responding to their comments, the conversation is over. You don’t like my way of talking, then you don’t have to talk to me. And, on Facebook I’ve enforced that: the number one reason (but, again, not the only one) that I’ve “un-friended” people on Facebook is for injecting “you have to be more respectful” into a discussion with me.

Because, no, I don’t have to do anything. If I think your point is stupid, I’m going to say so. If you think my point is stupid, you get to say so.  Be prepared, however, to do more than that. I can’t actually think of a time when I just said to someone, “Your point is stupid,” and left it at that. That isn’t even an argument. It may be an observation, but it’s not an argument. It’s one thing to tell someone that their argument is stupid. Afterwards, you have to explain why. 

In other words, you have to move the argument forward.

Americans, though, seem to have forgotten that part of the equation. Too many Facebook arguments are mere popularity contests. Someone floats a proposition — supported or unsupported — and other people then vote, or “like” the proposition. Since there is no “dislike” button, others pop in to the comments to say, “Your [sic] stupid!” (I always love that it’s “your” and not “you’re.” Maybe their referring to the possessed comment?)

So long as that’s where the argument stays. It can’t move forward. There can be no compromise. You might as well just quit at that point. If the specified subject comes up for a vote, go vote on it — on the ballot, at least, you’ll not just get a “like” button; you’ll also get the opportunity to “click ‘dislike’” by voting “no,” or “against,” or whatever your ballot uses for that purpose.

This is not to say that compromise is possible in all circumstances. Sometimes it isn’t. You want to pass a law that requires people not to say mean things; I cite the First Amendment. You want to vote for body-cavity searches before anyone gets on a train; I cite the Fourth Amendment. You don’t think “criminals” — by which you mean “people who get arrested” — deserve trials; I cite the Sixth Amendment. Neither one of us will budge.

At that point, as I already noted above, we might as well just quit, go to the ballot box. Those types of problems will almost always end up in court. If the courts get it “wrong” — in either your opinion, or mine — often enough, we might have to resort to arms.

Until then, though, I think that regardless of how stupid you think my opinion is, or how stupid I think yours is, we might want to keep trying for a compromise, whenever possible.

Because that’s how multifaceted complex societies made up of people with pluralities of opinions work.

And that’s how this blog will work, so much as it’s in my power to make that so.

Use the comments section below to tell me how stupid you think I am — or, if you’re of a mind to do so, to contribute to the conversation.

My part of the world — the United States — seems to me to be in some kind of downward spiral and I don’t know what to do about it. Does it make sense to try to write and make some sense of it that way, and perhaps persuade a few other people that something needs to be done, or we’re doomed?

Are we, in fact, doomed? Or is this just the same old story that’s been going around for as long as there have been human beings disagreeing on how things should be done?

When I was younger, I remember running across quotes from ancient Greek writers saying things like,

The youth of today are lazy, no good, slackoisie who left unchecked will bring down all civilization. They don’t want to learn anything; all they want to do is party all day; and they won’t listen to their elders (like me).

Okay, that’s a paraphrase. But the wording really was pretty close to that. I deliberately “updated” it by adding in words like “slackoisie,” which is favored by a group of attorneys I enjoy reading on the Internet.

And lest those attorneys read this and are offended at my using “slackoisie” here, because they are absolutely convinced things are different today, I just have to say “so were the ancient Greeks who wrote such things thousands of years ago.”

Who knows? Maybe I’m wrong. Things may be different today, too. The Internet certainly seems to have had a significant impact on society that is farther reaching than my meager brain can completely grasp.

On the other hand, in many ways I think the Internet has just highlighted particular issues. I argued years ago on Internet Relay Chat that the distinction some drew between IRC and RL (“real life”) was bogus. Many people — Tom Christiansen, for one — seemed to me to use this distinction as a justification for being assholes online. But, as I said then, the Internet wasn’t really something totally different; it had real-world impact.

Today we plainly see that. People actually sometimes die because of the Internet. Companies change their policies because of things said on the Internet. Stock prices go up and down because of what happens on the Internet.

To a large extent, I think the Internet has made what happens around the world more visible. Since there are more people, doing more bad — as well as more good things — there is more bad stuff to see.

At the same time, as noted two paragraphs ago, things really do happen because of the Internet. So to that extent, the Internet really has possibly changed the playing field. The problem, of course, is knowing how much. At some point, quantitative changes have qualitative effects. Put a little smog in the air, nobody notices; a little more, people start to get sick; keep going, and folks are going to die.

So is the world really becoming a worse place? Are kids today really all that different from kids of yesterday in terms of drive, intelligence, and what they will do, or not do, in this world?

Are we doomed? Or does the Internet warp our perception that the end is nigh because we can see so much more, so much more quickly?

Well, sort of.

First I’m going to say something here to those involved in the debate who may read my post: Friends are hard to come by; I have friends on “both sides” and my intent is to keep it that way. On the other hand, good friends are even harder to come by and this post may result in my finding out whether my current circle is bound to yield more, less, or any.

I count the following among my friends:  Scott Greenfield, Norm Pattis, Brian Tannebaum, and “Gideon.” I have high hopes for a number of others I’ve recently met on the Internet, including (but not limited to!) Mirriam Seddiq, Mark Bennett, and several others who recently joined with Norm, Mirriam and me to try out a new project called BCOTUS.

One thing I’ve learned in my 51 years of life — soon to be 52, assuming I can hang in there another month or so — is that I need more than a couple of friends.  I actually need more than a couple.  Sure, I enjoy having lots of friends, too.

I’d enjoy even just one friend.  For what can bring greater happiness to a life than knowing there is someone who will share a thoughtful conversation and, at the end of it, even if the conversation was “unhappy,” will still be glad to call you “friend” when the dust settles.

Yet I need more than one friend because — well, because I appreciate more than just the enjoyment that comes from having someone to value who also values me.  I appreciate that people are different and that the experiences I have and the things that I learn — particularly the ways in which I can become a better and more interesting person — are enhanced by these differences.  One person reminds me that I need to push myself harder and to remember not to just go with the flow; another reminds me that I should occasionally stop and marvel at the flow and how it structures the more mundane tasks of life, so that I can focus on other things.  One friend’s focus causes her to pull my attention to this thing I would not have noticed on my own; another’s focus brings to my attention that thing I and my other friend missed.

No matter what you hear, there’s no such thing as a “self-made man.”  Or woman.  We are all influenced by our interactions with others.  The more frequent and deeper the relationship, the more we are influenced.

And so I am ever on the quest for friends both for the enjoyment it brings to life and for the opportunities it gives me to grow and learn.  I am forever floating trial friendship balloons.

The Internet and my sometimes infrequent but irrefragable drive to write have allowed me to float a number of trial friendship balloons that would not have been possible otherwise.  I discovered the blogosphere, or, as some lawyers prefer, the blawgosphere.  I have read the blogs and blawgs of and started getting to know a number of really cool people on the Interwebs. Thank goodness for tubes!

But while the Interwebs have made possible contacts that were unthinkable just about 15 years ago, they can also be difficult places to find solid friendships.  IRL — “in real life” — people rub up against one another and, when they find themselves disagreeing with one another too much, when they find they too-frequently rub one another the wrong way, they avoid one another.  Balloons, of necessity, have thin skins.  They pop; the friendship ends.  You go your separate ways.  And if some of your friends hang out with your former friend, well, it’s not usually a problem because knowing your feelings, they’ll be unlikely to discuss it around you and you may not even know they still associate.

But Interwebs are stickier.

And I’m deliberately mixing metaphors because it’s my blog and I can do that if I want.

Some people whom I like and respect quite a bit have gotten into a tiff. I guess I can call it that. (For you youngsters, we aren’t talking about image file types here.  And I’m not Canadian, so I didn’t even think about Toronto!)

One group I deeply appreciate has a pet peeve about the Interwebs and lawyers who use them in certain ways.  In particular, they appear to dislike the use of the Interwebs for marketing purposes.  They think that people who use the Interwebs for marketing purposes are hiding a deeper inability, lack of skill, or other weakness which makes them not the best material for becoming good lawyers.  Or perhaps they think that if one focuses on becoming a good lawyer instead of marketing oneself, the clients will follow.  Maybe all the above.

They might be right.  I don’t know.

There is a growing group that thinks the single-mindedness of the first group is — shall we say? — misguided.

The Interwebs being what they are, there have been a few barbs traded here and there over the issue.  (Issues?)  Some balloons appear to have been popped, or are at least in danger of being popped.

Myself, I don’t want to see this.  I value all my friends and potential friends.  The danger from watching the balloons pop and fall from the sky is that it makes me want to come to the rescue.  But people don’t always want you to try to salvage their friendships from the wreckage of a popped balloon.

I can respect that.  Some friendships are just not meant to last.  No matter how sad it makes me to see these things happen, each person has to decide which, how many, what kind of — pick your flavor — balloons they wish to keep aloft.

Another danger comes when Person A sees that my own friendship balloons are still aloft, and one of the passengers is Person B who has fallen from Person A’s balloon.  Sometimes this can make them question where my “loyalties” lie.

Let me interrupt my thinking for just a moment here.  (Thinking, by the way, is exactly what’s happening here.  Like Scott Greenfield, I’m a true believer in the Shakespearean theory of writing.)  Lest anyone become confused, no one has yet questioned my loyalties.  No schoolyard games of “if you like him, you can’t like me” have broken out.  Yet.  I’m simply talking about the dangers that can happen as balloons begin falling from the sky.

And I’m writing this post specifically because, if I can’t stop others from sacrificing their own balloons, I want to keep all of mine intact.  If no one takes anything else away from this post, I am hoping they will at least take away that fact.  Because I’m not a piece of property — nor is my friendship — to be “owned.”  Nor do I have limitations such that I can’t be friendly with multiple people, some of whom may not completely enjoy one another’s company.

Grow up in a family like mine and you get used to differences of opinion, taste, attitude, idiosyncrasy, or what-have-you.

If it happens, in the course of our friendship, that I say I disagree with your point of view, or that I agree with another’s point of view, or — god forbid! — I don’t agree with either of you, this does not mean I’m hoping to pop our balloon.  Being your friend does not mean that I will always agree with you, any more than you will always agree with me.  Being your friend means that I will always value you.  Or maybe I should say, I will always value you.  For there is enough about you aside from whatever views I may find disagreeable that I nevertheless am glad I know you.

So, please.  If you must pop one another’s balloons, let’s keep ours intact.

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.

When I told the family that his not showing up would result in the issuance of a warrant, they said they knew, he knew and “it’s on him.”  They tried to convince him.  Even chased him around town trying to “catch him and bring him in.”

Did I mention that he hates to be in custody?  Did I mention that if he had only shown up, things would likely have been over?  Did I mention that a warrant would issue for his arrest?

David Brooks, a New York Times writer, would say that my client is a typical modern American.

In today’s Fresno Bee Brooks notes that

In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts.

After walking through America’s allegedly split personality which demands both that the government stay out of the business of running businesses and that it “take control,” Brooks says

At some point somebody’s going to have to reach a national consensus on the role of government.

The governmental problem has a simpler explanation than that America has a split personality.  The explanation is not a split personality, but a split electorate.  And politicians so fearful about upsetting the electorate that they no longer worry about actually doing their jobs.

In the old days of representative democracy, elected officials were counted on to study a situation — to learn what, if any, role government should play with respect to crime, business enterprises, the environment, etc. — and make a decision based upon sound information and reasoned compromise amongst conflicting forces rather than emotion and the allegedly shifting sands of public opinion.

Today, the concern is to keep one’s position — although I’m not entirely sure what the real benefit of the position is, if you can’t do your job.  One of the worst jobs I ever had paid me a bunch of money, but I was miserable because I was micro-managed.  In these days of a more “pure” democracy, with its referenda, polls and huge amounts of corporate money — now unlimited thanks to the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in the appropriately-misnamed Citizens United case — our politicians are subject to the same micro-management that drove me nuts.  But, if anything, they seem to revel in it.

It keeps them from having to take responsibility for their decisions; they’re just reacting to their “constituencies,” by which I think they often mean they’re remaining true to their pacts with their “PACs.”

At any rate, compromise is a dirty word these days.  Somehow, anyone who compromises is a sell-out.  A traitor.  After all, PACs are funded to achieve specific goals; they exist for one purpose and one alone.  If they can’t have what they want, then screw everyone, baby.  We’re going for this! FTW!

FTW.  It’s an interesting acronym, with an interesting history.  In 2010, the most common use of the term is to rally the troops.  For those appalled at Sarah Palin’s “don’t retreat, reload!,” it is a kinder, gentler rallying cry.  The acronym originally was used for a similar purpose, but the meaning then was “Fuck the world!”

And that is America’s larger problem.  For the majority of us — a much larger majority than can agree on anything else in America — “for the win” has not lost touch with its roots.  It’s all for one and “all or nothing.” We’re going for the win and — fuck the world! — we will settle for nothing less.

Unfortunately, what I’m saying is that Brooks has it wrong.  We apparently have reached a national consensus on the role of government.  It’s just the wrong one; one that is ultimately destructive rather than constructive.  With Americans being split very nearly down the middle on most issues — even the majority of United States Supreme Court decisions carry by a bare 5-4 majority these days — and unwilling to compromise, we can’t fund our social programs; we can’t build roads; we can’t agree on anything.  “Majority” itself these days simply means “one more than the other side gots.”

And my client, whose story opened this post, is probably the one.

Thus it is that there is one thing we seem to do quite well: rally the troops, FTW.  The problem is, when we’re constantly at war, with no ability to compromise, nobody really wins.

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.

Ninety-nine percent of the species that have ever existed on this planet are currently extinct.  More join the list every day. And even before the current BP disaster, the ocean was in trouble.

The most ecologically essential habitats — estuaries, wetlands, shallow water seagrasses, and coral reefs — are most threatened. Thirty percent of the world’s mangrove forests and nearly half the world’s coral reefs have been lost due to direct habitat destruction. Many of the remaining critical marine habitats are indirectly degraded by pollution, freshwater diversion, and climate change. As human population pressures grow, essential ecological services and species are affected, leading to conditions in which the planet’s vital organs can serve neither nature nor us. (Tundy Agardy, “Are we in the midst of a mass extinction?” (undated) from roundtable: A Modern Mass Extinction?, PBS.org, boldfacing in the original PBS page.)

A Google search on the phrase “extinction ocean” turns up 3,150,000 hits, with titles like “Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048″ for a 2006 CBS news story, a 2009 story from the Discovery Channel titled “Ocean Dead Zones Could Approach Mass Extinction Levels,” and the news that in the five of the prior known mass extinctions which the Earth has endured, “the tropical marine biota has been the most impacted in all cases.”

In short, even before the BP catastrophe — and, mind you, “disaster” is far too mild a word — the oceans were reeling.  For years, scientists have been warning us, unsuccessfully, about the damage we’re doing.  But the stupidity of human beings knows no bounds when it comes to immediate gratification.  This is borne out most obviously when politicians vie for votes, as California’s Devin Nunes does by hammering away at the concept that the delta smelt is “a three-inch minnow,” which environmentally-minded Democrats are choosing “over working families.”

I’ve news for Mr. Nunes, plankton are even shorter than three inches.

More importantly, the argument of scientists and environmentalists is that the mass extinctions going on right now cannot help but impact working families. Some of the impact is immediate, as for the economies — and families — along the Gulf Coast which depend upon the existence of fish, clams, oysters, shrimp and other marine life which has become unavailable due to BP’s spill.  The longer range impact is not known to many of us, if to any of us.

The scary thing is that all of this is driven by greed.  It is not driven by need.

Although they denied it in testimony before a panel in Louisiana, BP knew, for example, that some kind of disaster was in the making.

Bob Sherrill, an expert on blowout preventers and the owner of Blackwater Subsea, an engineering consulting firm, said the conditions on the rig in February and March and the language used by the operator referring to a loss of well control “sounds like they were facing a blowout scenario.”

Problems with the well — including both the casing and the blow-out preventer — went back at least as far as a year ago, when BP’s own engineers expressed concern that the cheaper materials being used risked disaster.

On June 22, [2009] for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.

“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”

But BP officials responded, “Drill, baby, drill!”

The fact is that BP repeatedly cut corners and ignored warning signs, including instrument read-outs before the explosion showing gas bubbling into the well, indicative of a pending blow-out.  Cutting corners is all about money; it’s not a matter of necessity.

Ironically, a Wall Street Journal story comments that demand for fuel is down, creating a problem for oil company profits.  Shell Oil saw a 19% decrease in profits to $2.9 billion.  I wish I had a fraction of that kind of a problem.

The overall story of oil profits is difficult to discover, but this much is known: oil companies increasingly do phenomenally well, while destroying our planet.  Net profits — that is, the profits after all costs, including fines for cutting corners, clean-up costs, etc. — run into billions and billions of dollars per year for each oil company.  In fact, even BP reported an obscene increase in profits over last year for the same quarter:

BP…said its profit rose to $6.08 billion from $2.56 billion during the same period of 2009. Excluding the impact of energy prices on unsold inventories as well as $49 million of one-time items, and BP would have earned $5.65 billion, topping consensus estimates by about $900 million.

Revenue rose to $74.42 billion from $48.09 billion.

So I don’t really know what to make of the Wall Street Journal story of “decreased profits.”  The WSJ reports, however, that the response of the oil companies to such “decreased profits” is two-fold: they’re trying to permanently shut down refineries, so as to decrease the available supply and force prices up, and they’re cutting corners.

Regardless of BP’s bottom line, the bottom line for the rest of us is this: without strict regulation, the greed that drives oil companies may very well have already started the ball rolling on Earth’s sixth major extinction.

Anyone who really knows me knows that I tend more toward libertarianism than either progressivism (or liberalism) or conservativism.  But the primary purpose of governments is the protection of all of us. This is the one thing I really cannot do for myself.  I can arm myself against robbers, burglars, even individual potential murderers.  I cannot stop large multi-national corporations with billions of dollars that make them more powerful even than most governments.

Companies like BP have shown that they are incapable of regulating their own greed, so government must do it for them.  Ever consistent in their philosophies, right-wing conservatives will scream bloody murder about the regulation of oily murderers, but that is exactly the problem.  Unrestrained, these corporations are murderers, on a scale unmatched in history (human or otherwise).

The same people who insist on locking away folks for life because they steal CDs, tattoo children, or murder individuals should wake up and realize that the time for regulation of those who would willingly risk the extinction of all life on Earth is a necessary governmental function.

After all, extinctions do happen. Even non-greedy humans drive them. Thus, we may be doomed anyway.  If we don’t allow our governments to regulate against these tendencies, we are truly doomed.  Shouldn’t we at least regulate the most obvious — and most dangerous — offenders?

After all, the planet we save could be our own.

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.

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.

In the world of our Founders, freedom was a precious commodity.  In retrospect, this is actually odd.

Our Founders, after all, lived in a largely unpopulated world.  Around the time the United States came into being, the population of New York was 25,000.  Philadelphia was huge at 40,000.  Today, small towns like Hanford, California have more than those numbers.  Where I maintain my criminal defense law office in Fresno, California, we have approximately half a million people.  In 1775, the combined populations of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston and Newport (all port cities) did not equal 100,000.

So you’d think freedom would be an easy thing to come by.  If things got too bad somewhere, I’d expect you could pick up with a few of your good friends and go look for somewhere else to start a town.  Of course, you might have to contend with “the locals,” by which I mean any Native Americans who may not wish to share space with you.

And yet our Founders became more and more irritated with what, today, would be really minor intrusions into their lives.  General warrants allowed the government to pop into a house at any time to search for such things as “contraband” — products you might have forgotten to pay taxes on when you imported them — and most people didn’t care much for that.  Thus, they passed a Constitution forbidding general warrants.

Today, if an officer wants to come into your house, there are certain requirements that must be met first:

1. He must make sure you’re from a group (e.g., gang members, poor people, non-whites) whose complaints will receive little sympathy from others for illegal governmental intrusions into your home.
2. He must be willing to “testi-lie” that you gave consent for him to enter your home, or that you became hostile and attacked him, forcing him to drag you into the house and subdue you, or some other such poppycock. (“Poppycock,” I think, is our Founders polite way of saying “b.s.”)

Notwithstanding the above, the majority of us really do enjoy a form of freedom from unlawful police intrusions.  Even me, if I would quit complaining about illegal intrusions into my privacy.

The problem is that I believe so long as I’m not killing someone, beating someone, stealing from someone, or breaking some other basic and important law, I should not even have to submit to minimal intrusions.  The nation I was born into mostly believed that, too.  It used to be that until someone committed a crime, the police pretty much ignored them.

My, how times have changed.

Maybe today’s police officers are more often pulled from the ranks of ADHD-afflicted persons (though I’m glad they missed me on that one!), because when things are slow, or they’re bored, or if they just decide they don’t like something about you, you’re going to find your freedom impacted.  It might be temporary, but you will be impacted.

And when that isn’t enough, they’re going to have new ways of getting at you, because our Leaders — who have none of the positive attributes of our Founders — are busily making sure that we are all tracked, all the time.  Every aspect of our lives will be available for inspection.

At the moment, the idea is to collect information about everything you do on the Internet, from whatever device you might use to do it and from any place at which you might do it.  And the logs must be kept for at least two years for the police to review when they feel the need.  Anyone who remembers the FBI’s Carnivore should be concerned about where this could lead.  As technology improves — particularly for predictions based on data-mining — we move farther and farther away from the freedom our Founders enjoyed.

As I said, freedom is like oxygen.  But like miners ignoring the canaries in the mineshaft, by the time enough people realize what’s wrong, it will be too late.

Next up?  RFIDs for everyone!

I’m also not sure why — maybe it’s because of the new year, turning my mind to new starts and new opportunities — but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of world we’re creating. I got a huge push in that direction the other day from a client who was doing pretty well on probation…until his mother told him she was sorry he was born, that he was a mistake. And he decided to show her just how bad he could be. He’s a really good kid at heart. Just lost. No, not lost: thrown away. *sigh*…

Last night, on one of my law blogs, I wrote about “Building a Nastier World Through Law.”

This commentary from Keith Olbermann could have used the same title.

What is it about us — especially, it seems, the most religious amongst us — that drives us to make the world such an ugly place? You want to turn people towards your version of “G-d” instead of away from any version of “G-d”? Try modeling your deity’s behavior, rather than trying to play the role which — by most accounts in most religious writings — has been reserved to your diety alone.

A “light shining on a hill” does nothing more than illuminate. It does not attack. It does not control. The light itself is just what it is: a light.

Whenever a human being performs an act of integrity, honesty, kindness, compassion, or self-sacrifice, he is revealing godliness in the world. “Kiddush Hashem” literally means “sanctifying the Divine Name.” …

Conversely, whenever a human being performs an act of meanness, cruelty, avarice, dishonesty, or selfishness, he is hiding God’s presence in this world. “Hillul” comes from the Hebrew word for “empty space”; a Hillul Hashem makes the world seem empty of God.

Every action is a stone thrown into an infinite pond; the ripples it causes go out in ever greater circles, endlessly. (Sara Yoheved Rigler, “Now You See G-d, Now You Don’t: Unmasking the Divine on Purim” (February 29, 2004) Aish.com.)

Do those of you who work so hard to enforce your vision of what the world should be upon others think you convince them by your methods? If you tell your children you think they were mistakes and you wished they’d never been born, do you think this inspires them to a higher level? If you strip others of their unalienable rights — let’s even put it in your terms: their G-D-GIVEN rights — to freedom of choice, to live the way they choose, to exercise free will — do you think you turn them towards your deity, or compel them in the other direction?

Let’s see if we can’t do our part to heal the world — at least a little bit — this year.

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?

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.