Stump Lane
in the dirt since history began

IAN WELSH, quite reasonably, has this to say today:

The government should not (I won’t say “does not” because they do it anyway) have the right to punish anyone without a timely trial before their peers, the right to see the evidence against them and the right to face their accusers. [Welsh]

Never one to miss the pertinent point, and focus on something barely related, I tripped over the phrase “have the right.” Because, what’s a right?

Jack Crow:

[A] right has a whole lot less to do with a quality you possess (as in, nothing), and a whole hell of a lot more (as in, everything) to do with how much power you have and hold, how many people you can force or persuade to agree with you, and how much loot you can pool in order to defend the list of things you want to do, as well as stave off the efforts of those who want to stop you. [Crow]

It’s certainly not that Welsh misses this conception of “rights,” for he’s said this very thing, “I won’t say ‘does not’ [have the right] because they do it anyway[.]“

That said, of course. The government is not justified in punishing anyone. Period. Much less without the customary judicial accouterments, those stalwart facades of justice: a timely trial before their peers, allowing the accused to see the evidence against them, to face their accusers, and so on. But they do it anyway.

[Hat tip: Charles Davis]

BIG BIG FAN of the Radical Gay Agenda here. But. The military? Really? Is this really something to get excited over? Once you voluntarily sign up for an occupation where your primary function is, directly or indirectly killing people, need we worry so much about the morality of whether your employer demands you keep your sexuality in the closet?

Also, I was kind of hoping DADT would remain an out for my kids if the draft should come back: they’d have had a chance to gay it up and get kicked out.

Image: janitor of lunacy

NOT SURE I’m even a blogger anymore. The ideas in my head aren’t making it onto the page. I’ve been enjoying many print on paper, tangible books out in real life of late. Let’s just say that’s where the blogging time is going. Also more home cooking. Creating something that will sustain myself and the family, if only, until the next meal, is somehow more rewarding than typing up my random inanities. We’ll be back when I have something less inane. In the meantime, send me some good recipes. Gazpacho last night: it was good!

APPARENTLY PRESIDENT OBAMA takes something of an originalist view of the constitution and the fourth amendment. Through the arguments of his people in the federal prosecutors office this interpretation becomes clear.

[Emphasis added.] The legal dust-up, unsealed late Tuesday, concerns a 1986 law that already allows the government to obtain a suspect’s e-mail from an ISP or webmail provider without a probable-cause warrant, once it’s been stored for 180 days or more. The government now contends it can get e-mail under 180-days old if that e-mail has been read by the owner, and the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply.

Yahoo is challenging the government’s position and defying a court order to turn over some customer e-mail to the feds. Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy & Technology and other groups late Tuesday told the federal judge presiding over the case that accessing e-mail under 180 days old requires a valid warrant under the Fourth Amendment, regardless of whether it has been read. [Wired]

The founding fathers didn’t say anything about electronic mail, suckas! Papers and effects, LOL. Was this interpretation of the fourth amendment the impetus behind all those “paperless society” campaigns?

Download your email and delete it off the server every 179ZERO! days, kids. So much for the convenience of “cloud computing.”

LAST NIGHT, HOLY FUCK you should have heard the thunderstorm we had. It was 2 am or so and thunder woke me up, but it not your standard thunder. Long thunder. Continuous thunder that lasted several minutes at a time. It was as if maybe lightning was streaking horizontally across the sky for miles. It was unnerving. Something new and strange and unsettling and dread-inducing was happening. (I’m getting too old for this shit.)

We did see some flashes that would light up the sky for a second or two, and there seemed to be corresponding crackles of thunder louder than the low-flying-airplane-drone of the continuous thunder. For a few minutes I entertained the idea that what we were hearing was a full attack of Russian ICBM’s streaking across the sky: an old fear (and wish) left over from my youth.

This went on for probably 30 minutes with only a couple of moments when the continuous rumble seemed to fade out before starting again. So incredibly weird. At one point Ms. Montag looked out the window just as a flash of lightning lit up the sky. She said it looked as though the lightning was streaking directly at the house. The 1850 farmhouse with fourteen fucking lightning rods on the roof.

I fretted about that for a few minutes when it seemed like the storm was getting closer. Modern houses don’t have lightning rods because the past has taught us it isn’t a good idea to attract white hot lightning toward inhabited wooden structures. Sure the rods add character, but it may be time to take them down and recycle the copper. Help me sleep better on stormy nights like these.

WE POSTED the following list a few years back when FOX News wondered why people weren’t more psyched about the economy in light of news that tax receipts were up and the federal budget deficit projection had declined. Probably mumbled something about the impertinence of the particular economic indicators the media fetishizes that have little to do with everyday folks trying to get along in the world. Here were the economic indicators that were on a younger Montag’s mind:

1. Is my job secure from outsourcing, or an economic downturn?
2. Is my wife’s job secure from municipal budget cuts or fickle public priorities?
3. Can I still sell my house without losing the equity I have invested?
4. In the coming years, will I be able to sell my house for enough to just pay off the mortgage?
5. Holy fuck! It costs over $30 to fill the tank of my compact car.
6. What’s it gonna cost to heat the house this winter?
7. What if work dries up at my second job? Will I still be able to make the monthly nut?
8. Hey, why doesn’t my employer match my 401k contributions anymore?
9. Shit. Will I ever be able to retire?
10. My Grandma is paying how much for medications?
11. The fuckin refrigerator’s broken.
12. Is the check engine light in my car supposed to stay on all the time like that?

And here’s what’s been on our mind lately as with relation to the above:

1. Yes. So far so good. Not counting my eggs until I see the company successfully survive the recession though.
2. Nope! Next school year, goodbye second income.
3. Nope! We had some equity, and we’ve done tens of thousands of dollars worth of work to the house but it don’t matter to the bank. Our end of the investment has vanished with the dropping housing market.
4. Maybe? If we sold today we might be lucky enough to pay the mortgage back. Which would be a bitter pill to take considering the above.
5. LOL. It now costs $40 to $45.
6. We’re in good shape for next winter. There’s 6 cord of firewood laying around the yard where we had to have some unhealthy trees taken down last fall. In 6 foot lengths. With a few hundred hours of labor now, we should be able to survive the next Winter without freezing to death.
7. Work has dried up at my second job. Made 70% less on the side work last year than the year before. Managing to keep up with expenses so far. Item #2 above is going to be the game changer.
8. Still no matching 401K contributions. The employer has also instituted a moratorium on taking paid vacation time. WTF, right? WHAT’S THAT ABOUT? IS the company going to successfully survive the recession?
9. If we can manage to keep the house, and eventually pay off the mortgage, maybe I’ll only have to work part time in my retirement years. I’ve come to terms with the unlikelihood of a leisurely retirement.
10. Both grandmas have passed away and escaped continuing prescription expenses.
11. The ill-advised balances we’re carrying on our credit cards are due in part to our having to have replaced the refrigerator a couple of years ago.
12. The ill-advised balances we’re carrying on our credit cards are due in part to necessary automobile repairs.

Now these still aren’t the worst problems that people dealing with poverty face every day, but we do feel our standard of living slipping. If we fight to stay in the house, and it’s hard to convince even one’s own loves ones to give up that sense of home, if it even proves possible to keep it, we will be “house poor” as they say. These are the things that keep a guy away from regular blogging.

DID the American Dream ever exist? We are subjects to a bloodthirsty and heedless security state that seems to become more and more paranoid each day. The craven power seekers who control the reigns of government most faithfully represent interests at odds with even the most basic needs of the people. And while most people seem to recognize and abhor this situation, for the most part they divide into fanatical mobs and turn their ire on each other.

Did the American Dream ever exist, or was it always just a nostalgic figment of our shared experience in The Spectacle? The divisions, the rationalizations, the willful compromises of the power seekers at the expense of the people they ostensibly represent seem to have always been thus. The same false rationalizations that endure today, our very founding principles.

Ahhh, well. Perhaps there is hope yet in Hillary. Or Sarah.

This is the February edition of Carnival of the Liberals.

Here again are the links and credits:

• Red Queen presents About those boot straps posted at Elizabitchez
• Charles Davis presents ‘If only I’d authorized torture instead of jaywalking’ posted at false dichotomy by charles davis
• BDR presents To a Place Beneath the Chin I Wish I Could Sing Of posted at BLCKDGRD
• LarryE presents Turn your head and cough posted at Lotus – Surviving a Dark Time
• Chuck Dupree presents Bad Attitudes: State Farm Is There Until You Need Them posted at Bad Attitudes
• Mel presents Collaborating Across the Divide posted at BroadSnark
• J.R. Boyd presents Introducing the spectacular Sarah Palin posted at ladypoverty
• David Waldstreicher presents The Return of Staughton Lynd posted at History News Network, (nominated for the carnival by Leo Lincourt.)
• Luke Geraghty presents Why Hillary Would Make An Excellent President posted at Luke Geraghty.com
• Madeleine Begun Kane presents Sarah Palin’s Runny, Run-On Sentences Finally Explained posted at Mad Kane’s Political Madness

Visit the Carnival of the Liberals site to sign up to host, and use the form to submit a post for the next carnival.

Continue reading for a list of the remaining submissions. (more…)

THE FEBRUARY edition of Carnival of the Liberals will be here at The Stump end of next week. We are desperately seeking submissions that do not originate from spam-type blogs.

Information about the carnival can be found here: Carnival of the Liberals
Submissions can be made using the web form here: Blog Carnival

Traditionally blog authors have submitted their own work for the carnival, but as host of this edition, I would be willing to look the other way if blog readers were to use the form to nominate a post for inclusion. Hint: please do this and overwhelm us with quality posts. KTHX.

MY ELEVEN YEAR OLD daughter’s ten year old friend died this week. We found out today. It was not a sudden or unexpected death. She had been struggling with brain cancer for the last couple of years. We used to be neighbors with the girl’s family and our kids were growing up together. My daughter marked the girl among her Best Friends.

I feel nothing.

Nothing on my own account anyway. Sure there is a slight twinge at the thought of the now empty place that quiet, carefully polite young person once occupied. But the only real sort of emotional reaction I have seems to come from other people. The sadness that sprang up at seeing my spouse’s eyes shot through with red and wet from crying, the anguish that gripped me in the gut upon seeing my daughter so distraught she couldn’t speak but only reach out for a hug, the choke of empathy brought on by reading the obituary at the realization of how much the person who authored it must have loved the girl.

These are borrowed emotions.

Perhaps it is a stoicism inherited from my grandmother on my father’s side. Perhaps it is a product of not being directly related to the deceased as in this case. But I prefer to think of it as the product of having contemplated death and made my own peace with it. Of having let go the fear of it. Having let go the idea of death as tragedy.

Death is just a normal thing that happens.

Surely there are no groundbreaking ideas on death here, but I haven’t read the scholarly work on the subject so I come by them honestly. Like a lot of people I used to fear and loathe death. Imagined I would cling desperately to life for as long as possible. I would resist the inevitable with all of my might when the time came. Would have tolerated the miracle machines and the tubes and sensors and monitors and medicines. Anything for just a few more minutes of sweet life. A medical miracle.

I’d bankrupt my loved ones lingering on like that!

It was watching my beloved grandmother Mimi as she neared the void that altered my attitudes about death. I wanted to hold on to her as long as possible. Despaired by the thought of her forever leaving. But Mimi was fearless. Ready. A life of pain had become an annoying practical joke, death the most fitting revenge prank. She was ready, said her goodbyes and left this world on her own terms. It was a well executed demise. With Mimi, my own fear of death died.

Years later, I still feel the occasional pang of Mimi’s absence when I realize she’s no longer around for me to visit. But that’s just it, the death itself wasn’t tragic. The tragedy is for the living. Hence my imperfect dispassion toward the mourners for my daughter’s friend and their sense of loss. At least I’m going to cling to this notion that I am not an unfeeling monster.

In any case it’s been a somber evening at our house.

[Titular coinage coined by BDR to the best of our knowledge.]

YOU MAY, you few who venture here, have noticed that the legitimate posting has been thin here at The Stump lately. We’ve got a dozen starts and stops in the blog post drafts folder, and feeling more and more apathetic about all topics every day.

We cut our teeth as a political blog of sorts, following our rulers daily crimes, rationalizations and nonsensical rhetoric. We started out opposing war and torture and discovered along the way that we also oppose imperialism and our amoral mixed-economy “capitalist” system. Where does that leave us when it comes to politics blogging?

If politics in America has come down to stylistic hair splitting between parties that equally serve the economic interests of entrenched power, if the various conflicts and stalemates among our ruling class are meaningless. If in the political media…

…contentless tactical “analysis” and the responding think piece regretting the absence of substance have become the political equivalent of the call-and-response liturgy, the undramatic dialogue at the center of the discourse of political journalism… [IOZ]

…what is to be said of blogs that comment on this type of thing? Is there any meaning in repeatedly remarking upon meaninglessness?

Who knows what will become of this blog? Changes of some sort are surely coming. In the meantime we’re posting things of a somewhat different nature on this new Tumblr thing the kids are all talking about at Stump Lane The Lesser please look in on us over there.

In the meantime here’s a mini post:

Toyota: meh.

EVERY auto company is sitting on known safety issues with their vehicles. Recalls are based on economic decisions, not safety concerns. This is a witch hunt. The media makes the public out to be such fucking ninnys afraid of everything and demanding complete safety. If it’s true everything they say about you, Public, well, BUCK UP. Driving is unsafe. At least in that it will never be perfectly safe. If you want a post about this whole thing read this one. Just replace “Toyota” for the TSA and “sticking accelerator pedals” for terrorism. And be sure at least to watch the video over at that post.