Ain't America No More

Once upon a time, the ordinary people of America framed their Constitution on a principled, if still incomplete, understanding of individual rights.

Welcome to 2009.

Last month, a Harvard University professor was arrested for "disturbing the peace" with public criticism of a government official. Conservatives on the Web cheered for the arresting officer. The idea, that under the First Amendment it is unconstitutional to arrest a person, just because that person's public speech, criticizing a government official, irritates a police officer, never crossed the Conservatives' alleged minds.

Now, a month later, another police officer threatened to arrest - but did not actually arrest, making the incident somewhat less outrageous - another critic whose take on a government official irritated the police officer. And now, everyone who was on the side of the arresting officer in the Gates-Crowley case is outraged, outraged, that a demonstrator can be threatened by a police officer with arrest, merely for public criticism that outrages the officer.

Unfortunately, as the police officer in the linked video says, this "ain't America no more." The America where people - never mind police officers - had principles in their brains, rather than merely on their tongues and then only when pragmatically convenient, has been deliquescing for half a century now. After decades of "education" by the Comprachicos running the schools, ordinary Americans - the full range from Socialists to Conservatives - are no longer capable of inducing a principle, even when the concretes from which to induce the principle are staring them in the face. In the form of high-profile news stories.

Ominous Parallels, anyone?

"Don't you ever question my reality!"

Click on the title (above) for the funniest epistemological spectacle of the year. No, it is not from The Onion. It is a reporter's account of a real event. I'd be rolling on the floor (laughing) if I'd only vacuumed my floor first....

Academic Freedom Abridged at Yale Press

An open letter from Cary Nelson, AAUP President, about Yale University Press' decision that "eliminated all visual depictions of the Prophet Muhammad from Jytte Klausen’s new book The Cartoons That Shook the World." Nelson writes,

"We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.” That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press...

Click on the title, above, to see the letter.

Insider Tips as Currency for Political Extortion

I would not trade on an exchange that allows insider trading: I have no wish to sell a stock that's known (to the buyer but not to me) to be about to go up; or to buy one that is known, to the seller but not to me, to be about to go down. It turns out that I've been a chump: the US Congress legislated its members, and their cronies in the Executive branch, out of all provisions, legal and contractual, against insider trading.

Many of our federal legislators and officials supplement their already juicy salaries and benefits by extorting bribes. But there is the technicality that bribes in cash or equivalent are illegal, and a provision exempting legislators from laws against getting paid off in cash wouldn't fly with the voters. So instead, they gave themselves a loophole: they legislated that the insider trading laws that apply to businessmen, and other non-members of the aristocracy of pull, do NOT apply to members of Congress, congressional staffers, and appointed officials of the executive branch. Thus, members of the US Congress have made themselves legally free to extort at will, provided the payoffs are not in cash or stock or other valuables, but rather in the form of insider information that the Congresscritters, etc., can use to steal value (legally - they made it so) directly from the retirement funds and other investments of the rest of us.

The link comes, ironically, from an organization dedicated to radical expansion of government power - and thus, of government-as-an-extortion-racket in general - a position its members justify, in part, by a naive belief that everything would be all right if only such loopholes were closed. Their opponents, on the other hand, insist that there is nothing morally wrong in insider trading - even when insider information is being used as the currency in which bribes are extorted from American business by our political rulers. "Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain..."