Lee's Blog

When I was working in a law office, we were asked on a few occasions to look at pending laws in our area and give our opinions.

One law down

One law was just about four lines long, and was to replace a similar law. The change was to substitute a few words in hopes of clarifying the prior law. My response was to look up some cases where the new wording had been used in just as confusing and ambiguous a way as the original wording. I suggested that this wasn’t going to make the situation any better.

The law was not enacted.

Another law down

The second law was about half a page long, and was concerned with what share of the estate a surviving spouse (widow or widower should receive), assuming either (intestate case) the deceased spouse had left no will or (testate case) the deceased spouse had left a will. In the testate case, the will might omit the spouse or leave only a very small share. For sake of clarity, I will refer to the deceased spouse as male and the survivor as female, because it is too difficult to be politically correct in a lengthy passage.

Obviously, there is a difference between a long marriage where the couple had nothing when they married and everything they have was built up during marriage, and a short marriage where essentially everything was owned by one or the other prior to the marriage (we had a case where they had been married for less than two weeks, so nothing much had accrued during the marriage). There is also a difference where there have been children and so one spouse, usually the wife, had to sacrifice some part of her career in order to care for them, so that if she has to go back to work, she will be worse off than she would have been if she had not borne her husband’s children.

The second law was supposed to come up with some kind of fair rules for the surviving spouse. In the intestate case, we’re trying to come up with what the deceased spouse probably would have wanted if he’d gotten around to making a will before he died. In the testate case, we’re trying to decide what he would have wanted if he’d been a decent human being who hadn’t used his will to try to cheat his poor widow of what she deserved (editorial comment!). The law had a series of steps to decide what the surviving spouse would get, which I won’t get into here because it doesn’t matter.

At any rate, I went through the various permutations, whether there were or were not children, how long the marriage had lasted, how much of the deceased spouse’s estate had been brought into the marriage, and then sent a letter pointing out a common case where the surviving spouse would get more if they’d been married less than five years and had no children, than she would if they’d been married five years or more and also had children to support.

That law was not enacted either.

A third law still standing

The third law was only about three pages long and had to do with giving notice in a guardianship where the ward (person under guardianship) had died. The law was plainly unconstitutional, and I replied with a very lengthy letter (including numerous citations to decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court) pointing out numerous common cases where the law would not only fail to ensure that parties constitutionally entitled to notice would get it, but in fact would affirmatively prohibit the judge from ordering notice to them sua sponte, if he or she happened to know enough about the case to realize they were entitled to notice.

The response was that the sponsor of the law was so powerful that the law would be enacted even though everyone involved knew very well that it would be struck down as unconstitutional as soon as it was challenged (which would be after who-knows-how-many innocents lost their inheritance due to precisely the sort of dishonesty this law made legal).

It was soon after this that I quit the law and got an honest job.

So what?

There is a proposal before the U.S. Congress to nationalize one sixth of the economy (to start with); compel us to purchase a product whether we want it or not, on pain of imprisonment; penalize doctors for ordering treatment, regardless of necessity or effectiveness, based solely on cost; and generally give the federal government the power of life and death over every single person in the United States.

The proposed health care take-over law is over a thousand pages long and is undergoing constant revision.

Look at the three examples above. The longest of the three laws was just a few pages, but all of them were hopelessly defective (especially the longest) and should never have been enacted. In the first two cases, at least, those who proposed them thought they made sense. They did not. Sending them out to an uninvolved but interested third party brought the issues to the forefront.

Does it not seem likely that a thousand page law that no one has read in its entirety is likely to have similar issues, and is even more in need of review than those I’ve described?

I have never read the “Left Behind” books. I had some dim knowledge of their existence, but never had enough interest in them to check them out. I might even have been aware that they were poorly written.

They are amazingly poorly written. A blogger going by the name of Slacktivist has been reviewing these absolutely awful books for literally years.

Another blogger, Right Behind back in 2007 made a list of 186 posts (to that point) by Slacktivist about Left Behind. I have been reading them in order, and, after 64 posts, have made it to page 151. Of the first book. Of twelve.

Slacktivist’s reviews are kind of focused on the theological concerns of the books, which are important to him but not particularly to me, but he has real wit as well. For example, some of his titles: “10 Pages in the Men’s Room”, or “Everybody Loves Rayford”. I cannot possibly do justice to these reviews by, well, reviewing them, so I would suggest just starting at the beginning of Right Behind’s list (the Left Behind list, not the Tribulation Force list), and reading though. Which is what I’m doing.

Pharyngula is warning us about the end of the world. The page describing this is painful to the eye, and I have trouble telling if it’s serious. Pharyngula’s commenters are mostly either rejoicing over the imminent Rapture that will remove those pesky Christians, or bemoaning the fact that they didn’t buy enough alcohol, illegal drugs, and bacon to celebrate.

But it appears that nobody clicked on

Two– massive USA earthquakes in FALL 2009! (SEE: Massive earthquake to hit the USA!)

I did. The title of the page is “Web Bots – Two Major Earthquakes Summer 2009!” so I guess they had a little trouble with the Summer prediction and moved it to Fall. But they brag about accurately predicting “the Chinese Earthquake.” However, their proof of this prediction points you to a web page that contains this:

“Within the Terra entity, the [wedding] sub set continues to grow its association with the [female personality]. The [wedding] of the [sister/female relative] is now associated with the [east coast] of the USofA, and further is indicated to be [interrupted] by [earthquakes]. We note that the [earthquakes] are *not* at the location of the [wedding], but are such that the [guests] will be [involved] with the [earthquake recovery], and are described as [spilling out] of the [wedding location] like [ants] out of a [fiery nest].

Etc. I have no idea why many of the words are in brackets, or what this is supposed to mean, except that there is likely to be a woman getting married on the East Coast some time near the time of an earthquake elsewhere on the planet. Which one could probably have predicted without too much analysis.

In Alas Babylon, Mark Bragg says that four enemy submarines were found where there should not have been any. He says looking for submarines is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but if you shake a haystack and four needles fall out, “chances are that haystack is just thick with needles.”

I can’t imagine why that quote came back to me as the fifth ACORN video came out last night.

Steven J. Gould, during one of the creation science trials, explained the difference between contrarities and contradictories. Paraphrased:

“This pen is red” and “This pen is not red” are contradictories. Exactly one of them is true.

“This pen is red” and “This pen is green” are contrarities. Only one of them can be true, but perhaps neither of them is true. Perhaps the pen is blue.

In the creation science trials, the creationists sought to claim that Biblical creation (Genesis read literally) and the theory of current evolution are contradictories, so that anything that disproves the current theory of evolution of necessity proves Biblical creation. Dr. Gould and many other witnesses showed that they are only contrarities; the current theory of evolution and Biblical creation certainly cannot both be true, but it is possible that they are both false. Last Thursdayism is another contrarity for both.

The One and his minions are trying to claim that there are contradictories in the health care debate: either you are in favor of the thousand-page bill currently on the table or you are for doing nothing whatsoever; there are no other possibilities, no other conceivable actions that could be taken.

This is absurd on the face of it.

Wow. Just … wow.

Hannah and James continue the death of a thousand cuts on ACORN, with their latest showing an ACORN employee bragging about killing her husband and stating that she will murder another man if he talks about the proposed underage brothel. Of course, he was helpful too — he suggested that they disguise the brothel as a school so as to account for all the underage hookers.

Fox News is reporting it, of course, with links to the video.

And CNN? And MSNBC? And ABC? And CBS? (*crickets*) Not a word. Not a hint. The Census Bureau dumped ACORN. The Senate voted 83-7 to deprive ACORN of HUD money so they can’t use it for more underage brothels. The House may vote likewise. And if you get your news from the Alphabets, you have no clue that The One’s favorite community organizers are up to their eyebrows in crime.

O’Keefe and Giles got another ACORN office.

Once is bad luck and twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action. ACORN is the enemy.

Every word should be read with care.

It’s a pity he’s likely too old to be elected president. I would vote for him in a heartbeat.

Apparently there are complaints about this sign appearing at the September 12 Tea Party.

Why?

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.

It appears to me that in this case the sign-carriers are suggesting that they’d like to see the evil* Kennedy did interred with his bones as well.

I don’t see any problem with the sign.

* some of the evil.

I like this song. Someone should perform it and put it up on YouTube. I predict a smash hit.