Why the best and brightest don't serve

When I went to Washington, DC, to lobby for several causes in the 1970-72 timeframe, I soon became negatively impressed by the low level of intellect of almost everyone I encountered there in positions of power. I soon became aware of how that happened. It was particularly revealed in a conversation between two "intelligence" types, in which the question came up of why some particularly qualified person had not been elevated. The reply was "Because we couldn't control him." There is a screening process at work to exclude talented people.

Janet Reno provides an instructive example. Clinton first proposed Zoe Baird, but the FBI "discovered" she had a "nanny tax" problem, something that the IRS had apparently overlooked, or preferred to file away for use at the right time. Then Clinton tried Kimba Wood, with the same result. Then he tried Janet Reno, and she "passed". But was that because she was clean? No. She had been the point person in the vote fraud that was perpetrated in the 1970 Florida congressional election (and presumably other elections), documented in Votescam, by James and Kenneth Collier, which, incidentally, also documents the key roles of Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg at an earlier point in their careers.

So, the way things really work, barring some accident, no one gets to a position of power at any level of government in the United States unless the Establishment and their minions have something on them that can be used to control them. That isn't taught in college courses in government.

Militia clauses have many uses

Is there a "duty to rescue"? Current legal doctrine says no.

This non-rescue doctrine is a change from the way things were in the Early Republic. The common-law rule then was generally that everyone fit to do so had a legal duty to respond to a militia call-up issued by any individual aware of a threat, and that subsumed rescuing people as well as self-defense. It was actually enforced in court with penalties if the call-up, sometimes called "raising the hue and cry", was ignored.

The erosion seems to have begun with the advent of official call-ups and legal penalties for failing to respond to those, but omitting unofficial call-ups or the equivalent.

It is all part of an "officialization" of civic action, hiring "public servants" to do things and discouraging civilians. The end of that road is that those public servants become the masters.

As I have reported in a previous comment some months ago, I was once in a courthouse when an assistant county attorney got knifed by an irate dad in a family law case. I rushed over to give him first aid while everyone else in the courthouse stood by or even ducked out of the area to avoid being seen to stand by. I can't take credit for saving his life: the knife only knicked his heart and internal bleeding wasn't that great, at least after I positioned his body to minimize if.

I never worried about being sued. Just did what I do.

Met the victim in court a few years later. He had advanced to judge. He didn't recognize me and I didn't bring it up.

In case anyone objects that the President does not have the authority, under the U.S. Constitution, to issue a call-up for disaster response, that is correct. However, Congress, under its more general power to prescribe the organizing, training, and disciplining of militia, can require all persons aware of a threat to issue a call-up, including to himself, to respond to a disaster or other threat to public safety. The chain of command for the response would not extend to the President, but Congress can mandate that state or local authorities or civilians command the operations without federal commanders above them.

Many of the things Congress has been attempting to do, unconstitutionally, under the alleged authority of the Commerce Clause can be constitutionally done under the authority of the militia clauses. But there must always be a nexus to an imminent threat to public safety, and response does not extend to ongoing regulatory intervention, other than for things like organizing and training.

This discussion leads to some obvious recommendations:

1. All persons should be trained in militia, including military defense, law enforcement, and disaster response, so that when they perform their duty to respond they also have the skills to do so competently.

2. We need to institute some filtering process to protect defenders from meritless suits, such as requiring consent from a grand jury, which could deny the complaint or decide the defendant should be defended at public expense.

3. Duty to defend and good Samaritan laws need to be combined, not adopted separately (or not) in each state, and there needs to be one, part of a militia statute, at the federal level. This would not be just a duty to "rescue", but to defend from all manner of threats to life and health. If one is aware of a toxic waste spill and doesn't report it he should be prosecuted, as he should if he becomes aware of a threat requiring a public response and fails to issue a call-up. It should also extend to the protection of investigative journalists and whistleblowers.

4. It should be an offense to fail to respond to a call-up issued by any credible person of a threat requiring a response, as well as to fail to issue one. That includes issuing a call-up to oneself.

The Nordyke Case

In the Nordyke v. King case the 9th failed to properly define "sensitive places", leaving the implication that all public property constitutes sensitive places, including public roadways, sidewalks, and other areas to which access is not restricted, as it might be for government offices or warehouses. Clearly, the notion in Heller on this was that it only meant restricted access places, not public commons or right-of-ways. Unless clarified on this point, the finding on incorporation is really only dictum, even if called a conclusion. It could be cited on a case involving prohibition of firearms on private property, but without the ability to get to private property across a public commons or right-of-way the RKBA would be restricted to contiguous private parcels, and most private parcels are not connected except across public rights-of-way.

This case should be appealed to get the clarification that the ordinance is only properly applied to restricted access government property, not to public commons or rights-of-way.

Barbie: Discrimination against attractive females

As a candidate for Congress in 1974 I can appreciate how professional handlers can try to steer the campaign. It can become a game of who can control the candidate. Sarah Palin is discovering that her trust in them was misplaced and that she should take charge. While she is at it she should take charge of McCain's handlers as well.

Palin gets support not so much because she is "conservative" but because she shows signs of being independent of the money interests that dominate both major parties, of resisting the tendency to sell out to get re-elected. She is even "liberal" on some issues, such as spending for special needs children. I support her because she takes the Alaska Constitution seriously and I have hopes she would do the same with the U.S. Constitution (after she learns more about it).

But there is something else going on here, what I call the "Kuma syndrome" (from the Tchaikovsky opera): discrimination against extremely attractive females. Men and women alike become fixated on them as the stereotypical "enchantress" or "temptress" and become unable to evaluate them on their merits. I have observed this behavior toward a number of beautiful women in my life, beginning with my mother. I have hired women who couldn't get a job because they were too attractive (or who might be hired by the wrong guys for the wrong reasons), who I correctly perceived would be excellent workers.

My mother, who somewhat resembles Palin, would light up a room, and she had a brilliant mind and a talent for business. Having known so many beautiful women I have learned to see past the beauty to their souls. Evidently, most people have trouble doing that.

Financial collapse not a defect of capitalism

In the Volokh Conspiracy blog judge Richard Posner commented:

Cycles of boom and bust are intrinsic to capitalism. Government can make them more serious, and sometimes less serious, but if you take away government you will still have periodic economic crises.

No. That is a popular myth. Cycles are the result of mass psychology and too many people pursuing the same investment strategies at the same time. It is entirely possible for capitalism to function without such mass madness. In many times and places it has, with each person seeking a strategy that others were overlooking. Inventors and developers of new products and services do that all the time, seeking to introduce a product that no one else has. Farmers plant crops that other farmers aren't because they perceive they will be offering a product in reduced supply.

I independently discovered the mathematical equivalent of the Black-Sholes strategy, for a different line of investigation (and only later realized its equivalence, or homeomorphism, to use the mathematical term), but unlike those who seized on it for use in hedge funds, because it was seen as a way to insure profit except in a scenario that "could hardly ever happen", also found that if too many players used it what "could hardly ever happen" becomes inevitable.*

But all this reflection fails to identify the more basic cause of this calamity: fiat currencies. When money is backed only by credit, and not by something hard, like gold or silver (or perhaps joules of energy), then its value, and the economies of every nation that relies on it, becomes dependent on unfaltering growth, just like the mortgage market was dependent on unaltering growth of housing prices. Growth ends, and when it does, any that depends on it collapses, and if it is something as fundamental as money, it takes the economy down to barter, and productivity down to a level that cannot even keep everyone alive, must less comfortable.

* My application was computer network design, and strategies for the allocation of resources among the computers on a network by having them negotiate among themselves using tokens which they could accumulate or spend as a measure of demand for the resources of other computers. I assumed peer-to-peer networks in which every computer has the same status and role. What Merton elicited from the Black-Sholes strategy would correspond to a network in which there is one supervising computer that manages allocations among all the others, and uses the strategy to maintain its own privileged role. Where there is no "master" computer or program, the system exhibits unstable behavior.

Motivation for Evil

The question of why some people do evil things has been the subject of moral philosophers, novelists, and others throughout history. Most recently, it is explored in the movie, The Dark Knight, which examines the motives of The Joker, its villain, but also the dangers of its hero, Batman, becoming a villain himself in the course of fighting villainy. It makes a good morality play and is worth seeing for that reason.

It is not just a lack of empathy. Sociopaths are characterized by the lack of empathy or conscience, but not all of them resort to crime or terror or become tyrants. Most people have limited empathy for people they don't know.

In my own informal discussions with criminals and criminologists, one thing emerges. Most crime and violence is motivated by the thrill of exercising power over others, by destroying their lives, their dreams, by causing them pain. Leaving aside crimes like "mercy killing", one finds that thrill factor predominates, which can overcome empathy or the fear of harming others that prevails in most normal people.

The key, therefore, is to achieve and maintain a civic culture in which children are brought up to fear harming others and never experience a thrill from exercising power other others. Most cultures do that for some others, but not all others, and therein lies the problem. A culture that condones harming some others, whether they are called "infidels", "those kind", or whatever, is pathological, and needs to be treated as such. Ironically, one may have to do so by condoning destroying the intolerant or intolerant cultures, and thereby become an intolerant culture. That is the risk of becoming the enemy we fight.

"The contest is not between Us and Them, but between Good and Evil,
and if those who would fight Evil adopt the ways of Evil, Evil wins."

Universal Ethic: Approaches

Fred Foldvary's analysis does not adequately discuss the matter of a "Universal Ethic", because it is restrictively expressed in terms of moral issues for one-on-one situations between individuals. In politics we are concerned about decisions that may have many different impacts on many different individuals, some beneficial, some not, some welcome, some not, and many not even known or understood by everyone involved, and not just in the near-term future, but in the mid- and long-term. In consequentialist terms it is about choices among alternative futures that spring from one's decisions, and the desirability of each alternative for the full range of individuals, or even possible future individuals, over the entire course of future history. In political discourse, it is seldom even possible to reach agreement on which alternatives are available, much less how desirable each might be, in an environment in which there is not a single decisionmaker, but in which every individual and every butterfly flapping his wings is a decisionmaker for all the futures of everyone else.

The fallacy of consequentialism is that it presupposes the future is predictable. The fallacy of deontologism is that duties can address the complexities of reality. The virtue of aretaism is that it does not attempt to do the impossible. It recognizes that alternative futures may not be predictable, but they can reasonably be foreseen, to the best of one's imperfect and incomplete information and cognitive limitations, and that we can adopt the general duty to make the best decisions we can, which may include adopting more specific duties that mesh with those of others to make better futures foreseeably more likely to unfold. The environmentalist version of this kind of aretaic stance does one more thing: discounts the interests of future generations at a rate less than about 18% per generation. (That makes the area under the discount curve for future generations beyond the third greater than that for the present and next two generations, meaning one is weighing the interests of remote "posterity" higher than that of near-contemporaries.)

The above summarizes a great deal of ethical theory and may require much thought to appreciate. I am still thinking about it after a lifespan that seems like it began when there was only one continent.