Words Poorly Used #92 -- Weasel Words

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

Have You No Sense of Decency, Sirs?

Nobody asked but ...

I am so incensed by the latest drivel from the deep state war machine that I can only sputter, "Have you no sense of decency, sirs?"  This is paraphrasing Joseph Welsh, at the end of his rope with Joseph McCarthy during the Red Witch Hunt (btw, a real witch hunt) in the 1950s.  Of course, nobody in the bowels of the war machine has any sense of decency, else they wouldn't have swung a stinking pig in a poke at our credibility.  They had the gall to launch the cognitive dissonance of "potential evidence" at America.  This is even more scanty than WMD or centrifugal tubes or yellowcake.  Why do they keep on floating these shit sandwiches across the waters of the swamp?  They do because there is not a damn thing we can do about it.  They have closed off all avenues of recourse.  What will you do, since I have no clue?

 -- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #91 -- Potential Evidence

Emitting from the gaseous hole that resides on the underside of the military-media complex, there is a new low in doublespeak.  I do not attribute this, but you can Google it in today's newsspace -- the phrase, potential evidence, gets such palaver as "The White House issued a stern warning to Syrian President Bashar Assad on Monday night as it claimed “potential” evidence that Syria was preparing for another chemical weapons attack." -- Associated Press attribution by a minor market TV source.  How craven?  How hunkered-down, fear-crazed pitiful?  Do the neo-cons in the deep state still believe that we are that stupid?  Certainly, they believe what they want to believe.  If we buy the concept of potential evidence, they will be right, and we humans will be lost.

-- Kilgore Forelle

Comprehending

Nobody asked but ...

Eons from now, when the successors are reviewing the extinction of homo sapiens,
They may say that though his ability to use the miraculous hand for grasping physical things was amazing, his mental ability, seemingly enabled by logic and reason, failed when it came to grasping reality.

-- Kilgore Forelle

NAP Permission

Nobody asked but ...

Let's be clear.  Just because the NAP (Non-aggression Principle) provides a relief valve for self-preservation does not mean violence is OK.  Violence is never preferable, it is excusable, at best, in very limited cases.  It may be compliant, but it is neither right nor wrong.  Furthermore, one can only receive the benefit from the exoneration from one's self -- there is no guarantee that anyone else must honor the NAP's exception.  If a person grants oneself an OK for violence, there is a strong chance that the NAP is being misapplied.

-- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #90 -- Words Used by Lawyers

In view of the recent surge of new persons of legal letters descending on Sodom-on-the-Potomac, perhaps we can stand on the shoulders of giants by reviewing a selection of notable quotations regarding the quarreling class.

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.
-- Rowan Atkinson

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

Influences 2

With every week that passes, I think of new names to add to my list of influences.  But the thinkers shown in today's effort are those with the names that I carry around in my head -- writing them down as a reminder is not needed.  Today, I will write about Dr. Robert Higgs, Henry Louis Mencken, and Mark Twain, whom I have mentioned, probably, in reverse order of each's world reknown.  Is there anyone on the planet who has not heard of Mark Twain?  He very well could be the most famous American.  H. L. Mencken should be known everywhere that humans engage in thought.  And I have a reasonable expectation that some day, Dr. Higgs, who is now slightly younger than I, will have fame among a wider scope -- he is currently well-known among most people who champion voluntaryist principles.

Robert Higgs

He lives now in Xcalak, Mexico.  I discovered him while he was still in Louisiana, USA before he retired.  But I follow him every day.  He posts regularly on Facebook.  Of all the current stars in the libertarian/voluntaryist/Austrian economist/anarchy firmament, his is the brightest, to me.  I'm talking about comparing him with Ludwig von Mises, Frédéric Bastiat, Murray Rothbard, Lysander Spooner, Henry Mencken, Harry Browne, Don Boudreaux, Walter Williams, Lew Rockwell, Henry Hazlitt, Sheldon Richman, Scott Horton, Skyler J. Collins, too many others to mention, ... even Tom Woods.  Bob Higgs is the man who writes among economists as Robert Penn Warren wrote among novelists.  He will be famous, if for no other reason, for his exposition of the Ratchet Effect.

The Ratchet Effect concerns itself with the idea that each time government finds an excuse to expand, when the excuse has expired the expansion remains (see Homeland Security).  The Pentagon is a monument to the Rachet Effect.  At any level of government, one can find a dizzying array of agencies that must have seemed like a good idea at the time.  The trouble is that these agencies never go away, remaining permanently and independently of the initial intent.  Can you name a compartment of government that has gone away?  Not so fast there.  It cannot just be subsumed into another agency.  We may have outlawed something like dueling, but if it had been regulated by an agency, that agency would have been a survivor of every duel.

Robert P. Murphy writes of Higgs as follows

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.

Mark Twain

Following the Equator is not Mark Twain's best book.  It would be hard to pick one, and even harder to not pick Huckleberry Finn.  But I think the passage that most affected me in a Twain book was his account of the genocide, the total annihilation, the complete eradication, the wholesale murder of the natives who lived on the islands of what are now called Tasmania.













In a few short paragraphs, Twain said everything there was to say about one class of humans presuming to be the betters of other humans,

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.

Henry Louis Mencken

 I cannot remember when my favorite saying, of all of those of all of the wits in the world, became H. L. Mencken's observation that " ... there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."  But I do know it was the day on which I changed my view of the world.  It was also the day upon which I became an avid reader of  Mr. Mencken's work.

Henry Louis, this great titan of journalism from Baltimore, seemed then and seems still among the brightest human minds, ever.  If a gigantic reason such as that held by this man saw many problems as too complex for neat and plausible explanations, then life must really be about complexity.  Life is not simple, humanity is not straightforward, human nature is not easily unpacked, and human error has confounded for ages.

Some will say that Mencken was just a cynic.  But there is not a hopeless misanthropy here (a trait he shares with Twain), how could anyone write so eloquently of the endless pageant, as beautifully and as long as did Mencken, and not in the end be guilty of holding out infinite hope that someday we would catch on?  Could it be that on some bright day we would stop being so half-baked about everything?