What a rich week! The wordsmiths of Sodom-on-the-Potomac have outdone themselves. 'Potential evidence' and 'strategic patience' debuted just a few days apart, both used in veiled threats of violence. Syria and North Korea were the apples of the warmongers' eyes. Beware of buzzwords.
-- Kilgore Forelle
It may be that the jury would incline to regard a practising lawyer as a man of probity whose word was prima facie worthy of belief. But the belief of lawyers in their own probity is not universally shared, and there are those who believe them to be capable of almost any chicanery or sharp practice.
-- Lord Bingham of Cornhill
We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth—one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.
-- President Jimmy Carter
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
-- Robert Frost
The function of the lawyer is to preserve a sceptical relativism in a society hell-bent for absolutes. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law and due process will be meticulously observed.
-- Grant Gilmore
Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.
-- H.L. Mencken
Let's ask ourselves: Does America really need 70 percent of the world's lawyers? Is it healthy for our economy to have 18 million new lawsuits coursing through the system annually? Is it right that people with disputes come up against staggering expense and delay?
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
A common and not necessarily apocryphal example portrays a solo practitioner starved for business in a small town. A second lawyer then arrives, and they both prosper.
-- Deborah L. Rhode
About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists of telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop.
-- Elihu Root
What are lawyers really? To me a lawyer is basically the person that knows the rules of the country. We're all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there's a problem, the lawyer is the only person that has actually read the inside of the top of the box.
-- Jerry Seinfeld
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
-- William Shakespeare
Is it not remarkable that the common repute which we all give to attorneys in the general is exactly opposite to that which every man gives to his own attorney in particular? Whom does anybody trust so implicitly as he trusts his own attorney? And yet is it not the case that the body of attorneys is supposed to be the most roguish body in existence?
-- Anthony Trollope
[Lawyers] can make the worse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh from Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent.
-- Oscar Wilde
An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for years or months. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.
-- Evelle J. Younger
When there are too many policemen, there can be no individual liberty, when there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice, and when there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace.
-- Lin Yutang
I do not say that all lawyers are bad, but I do maintain that the general tendency is bad: standing up in a court for whichever side has paid you, affecting warmth and conviction, and doing everything you can to win the case, whatever your private opinion may be, will soon dull any fine sense of honour. The mercenary soldier is not a valued creature, but at least he risks his life, whereas these men merely risk their next fee.
-- Patrick O'Brian
If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.
-- Charles Dickens
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
-- Emma Goldman
A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."
-- Franz Kafka
A good lawyer knows the law; a clever one takes the judge to lunch.
-- Mark Twain
The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer.
-- Will Rogers
It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and to talk by the hour
-- Thomas Jefferson
Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers
A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Lawyers are men whom we hire to protect us from lawyers.
-- Elbert Hubbard
I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
-- John Keats
There are three sorts of lawyers - able, unable and lamentable.
-- Robert Smith Surtees
The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.
-- Jeremy Bentham
A chief called Lawyer, because he was a great talker, took the lead in the council, and sold nearly all the Nez Perce country.
-- Chief Joseph
As a lawyer, as a private citizen, you see a lot of injustice. You see a lot of people who should have been punished and are not, and people who were punished wrongfully are not vindicated. Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.”
-- David Baldacci
A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.
-- Mario Puzo
The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
I am sorry to say that sometimes matters of very small importance waste a good deal of precious time, by the long and repeated speeches and chicanery of gentlemen who will not wholly throw off the lawyer even in Congress.
-- William Whipple
An eminent lawyer cannot be a dishonest man. Tell me a man is dishonest, and I will answer he is no lawyer. He cannot be, because he is careless and reckless of justice; the law is not in his heart, is not the standard and rule of his conduct.
-- Daniel Webster
Of course, some would say if you have a performing inclination, then you should become a lawyer. That's a platform we use, or a priest. You know, anywhere you lecture and pontificate to people.Maybe these gems will put you in a calmer frame of mind as we contemplate the perfect storm that is descending on the District. Special thanks to Wikiquote.org, AZQuotes.com, and IZQuotes.com
-- Rowan Atkinson
One of economic historian Bob Higgs's outstanding contributions is the "ratchet effect." During a crisis, the size and scope of government grow tremendously. After the crisis subsides, government shrinks, but not to the precrisis level. In consequence, leviathan expands over the decades, leaping from one crisis to the next. ... We see Higgs's thesis of the ratchet effect on brilliant display with the Federal Reserve in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008.More than anything else, Dr. Higgs has taught me proper disrespect for propaganda and political bloviation. For instance, he writes
Every year, on Veterans Day, orators declare that our leaders have gone to war to preserve our freedoms and have done so with glorious success, but the truth is just the opposite. In ways big and small, direct and indirect, crude and subtle, war—the quintessential government activity—has been the mother's milk for the nourishment of a growing tyranny in this country, and it remains so today.
These were indeed wonderful people, the natives. They ought not to have been wasted. They should have been crossed with the Whites. It would have improved the Whites and done the Natives no harm.
But the Natives were wasted, poor heroic wild creatures. They were gathered together in little settlements on neighboring islands, and paternally cared for by the Government, and instructed in religion, and deprived of tobacco, because the superintendent of the Sunday-school was not a smoker, and so considered smoking immoral.
The Natives were not used to clothes, and houses, and regular hours, and church, and school, and Sunday-school, and work, and the other misplaced persecutions of civilization, and they pined for their lost home and their wild free life. Too late they repented that they had traded that heaven for this hell. They sat homesick on their alien crags, and day by day gazed out through their tears over the sea with unappeasable longing toward the hazy bulk which was the specter of what had been their paradise; one by one their hearts broke and they died.
In a very few years nothing but a scant remnant remained alive. A handful lingered along into age. In 1864 the last man died, in 1876 the last woman died, and the Spartans of Australasia were extinct.
The Whites always mean well when they take human fish out of the ocean and try to make them dry and warm and happy and comfortable in a chicken coop; but the kindest-hearted white man can always be depended on to prove himself inadequate when he deals with savages. He cannot turn the situation around and imagine how he would like it to have a well-meaning savage transfer him from his house and his church and his clothes and his books and his choice food to a hideous wilderness of sand and rocks and snow, and ice and sleet and storm and blistering sun, with no shelter, no bed, no covering for his and his family’s naked bodies, and nothing to eat but snakes and grubs and ‘offal. This would be a hell to him; and if he had any wisdom he would know that his own civilization is a hell to the savage—but he hasn’t any, and has never had any; and for lack of it he shut up those poor natives in the unimaginable perdition of his civilization, committing his crime with the very best intentions, and saw those poor creatures waste away under his tortures; and gazed at it, vaguely troubled and sorrowful, and wondered what could be the matter with them. One is almost betrayed into respecting those criminals, they were so sincerely kind, and tender, and humane; and well-meaning. [from the Gutenberg Project PDF file of the book, Following the Equator: A Journey Around The World]Mark Twain was anti-imperialist, anti-interventionist. It was through my lifelong reading of his works that I developed his sense of the absurd when it came to man's inhumanity to man. Most stories about genocide of a small but valiant vestigial remain, are absurd. One subspecies does not need to wipe out another subspecies for the latter's survival. At worst there may be a semi-important difference of economic schema -- a clash between styles of possessing. But it is absurd that one element must obliterate the other.
Every definition of the word, loyalty, that I find suggests that the loyalty arises for cause. Why do people who ask for loyalty seem to be holding a mental post-it note that adds "forever and in all events?" Why did one minion want to qualify the idea by insisting on "honest loyalty?" Was that an oxymoron to the requester?
-- Kilgore Forelle
Nobody asked but ...
There appears under Kenny Kelly's byline, at Everything-Voluntary.com, a piece named, "A Conversation Between Voluntaryists: What’s with IP?" It is actually a joint production between Kenny and me. I appear first as Verbal Vol then as Kilgore Forelle. I learned a lot about intellectual property (IP) problems. I believe you will, too, when you check it out.
-- Kilgore Forelle
Nobody asked but ...
Peter Suderman writes at Reason (http://reason.com/archives/2017/06/13/young-men-are-playing-video-ga/amp) that one specific video game occupies users in what amounts to 48 million person hours per day. If, at the height of US slaveholding, there were 3 million slaves, and they were forced to work 16 hours per day per person, we are talking 48 million person hours per day cast into the oubliette of lost opportunity. One game accounts for 100% of that number.
-- Kilgore Forelle
Nobody asked but ...
Winston Churchill, that old imperialist, needed to rule the world. So he picked the perfect storm, FDR and the sleeping giant, to perpetuate the English realm by one remove. Now we have the reincarnation of FDR. Will the perfect storm occur again?
-- Kilgore Forelle
Nobody asked but ...
Of course the climate changes. If it didn't, it would be nothing at all. Of course humans affect climate change. We eat, sleep, move, mate, defecate -- did we think those were processes that have no input, no output, and no by product. Temperature will quit changing when everything else on Earth becomes static. Of course, temperature seems on the rise to our metric schemes. We measure temperatures where we are -- in cities in particular. Did we think we could go from mostly rural to mostly urban with no other change? Do we think the current trend will never alter?
-- Kilgore Forelle
Recently, I listened to the podcast of Skyler Collins' interview with Aaron White. Since they both have daughters, Skyler asked whether Aaron agreed that girls need to be toughened to deal with life. Aaron's response was, to my way of thinking, that there are a lot of jerks in the world so we all need to be prepared -- no need to toughen particular people beyond that which they would normally develop in their own passage through life.
This got me to thinking about a long-held theory that I have had. The facts are that there are way too many damaged people. How does a voluntaryist navigate the minefield? I propose the meat puppet theory as a way to quantify the existence of jerks, warmongers, and other broken people.
The fundamental assumption is that we are very close to the Pareto Principle when dealing with statistical groups. The Pareto Principle, stated generally, says that phenomena divide themselves at an 80-20 distribution. For instance, 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. For another instance, if a bus fleet is 20% new, you might expect 80% of buses to be from older model years, and of the older ones, 80% of the older ones are more than two years old. And so forth. You can see this formulation has a recursive element too. Each 80% segment is divisible into 80-20, as is each 20% segment. But this is practically finite, if we just stick with whole numbers.
My thesis is that out of any statistical group of people, relative to the nature of the group, there are 80% below a marker, and only 20% above. I'm saying that Skyler, Aaron, and myself, who all have daughters, have a prospect that 80%-96% of the people our daughters will encounter will be jerks, or other types of broken people. These people are results of the genetic and memetic environments. Looking at the ascending 20%, we can also see that 80% (or 16 in a group of 100) may be impaired relatively by bad luck, substances, and/or relationships. That leaves 4% unimpaired, but 3% will be unfortunate compared to the 1% at the top of the heap.
A practical effect is that of all the babies born in a time period, 20% will be born into optimum circumstances, and of that 20%, only 20% will take advantage of the situation. So the odds will be high that there will be many jerks or other broken people -- 96 out of 100. Of the original number 80% will stay as they are because of accident of birth, while they will be joined by another 16% who dropped the ball on winning the cosmic birth lottery, failing to take advantage of being born in better circumstances. The quid pro quo, however, is that approximately 20% of the lower 80% will, one way or another, overcome their original disadvantage to become reasonably functioning members of the whole. If you remember Hitchhiker's Guide, you may equate the upper 20% of the lower 80% with the Golgafrinchan colonists who originally inhabited Earth.
So, attempting to summarize, any group is made up of 80% meat puppets, of the remaining 20%, 80% (16% of the original group) has become the equivalent of a meat puppet through misadventure. That leaves 4%. What are the odds that they will function together at all well? 20% in favor and 80% against. There is also only a 20% chance that there are leadership traits among the top 4, there being an 80% chance that quasi-leaders will emerge from the meat puppet regions. By the way, there is nearly a 100% chance that no one in the top 4% will want to become a leader.
So tread lightly out there young ladies, and young gentlemen as well. The path is tortuous and steep.
Nobody asked but ...
To be disappointed in news because it is fake is like being disappointed in rain because it is wet. Consider the probabilities, contemplate the dynamics, look at the incentives, reconcile the logic. What might we expect?
-- Kilgore Forelle
