I think I’m going to make a go at reviving Unspun™. Sure, I already post my opinions — privately, usually — on my Facebook account. But I find myself sometimes longing for the ability to write commentary that doesn’t fit in so easily with the short bursts of conversation on Facebook, and I miss the days of blogging my opinions, and having people come here to tell me how stupid I am.

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

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I’m not at all sure where to start with this post.

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?
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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