The Ramble for 7/8/11

Newburgh, NY– As this is posted, I’m new Newburgh, taking a break after having run a load up out of Mountain Top PA to here. As it happens, I’m directly across the street from the Orange County Choppers headquarters…. the new place, not the old one… a rather impressive looking building. As usual, while on the road, I have my ears wide open. Here’s some what what I’ve been hearing, and what I think about it.

• KAYLEE’S LAW? JUST STOP IT, WILL YA? We are about to see much in the way of flurry from politicians about enacting a Kaylee’s law.   This is exactly the kind of thing one would expect from someone… or several someones… who think that government is the answer to everything, that creating a law solves problems, and that that unintended consequences never happen from laws and government.

  Allow me to suggest that the Anthony case down there in Orlando is an object lesson in the differences between law and justice. As I suggested the other day, if we were expecting the jury to render justice, we need to remember that they were first bound not to justice, but to the law… and rightly so. They couldn’t convict based on the evidence presented. The government didn’t prove it’s case.

  The same thing applies to the DSK case, as we also discussed recently. Given the quality of the witness, the government’s case has fallen apart. Was this justice? No, not really. As I suggested, DSK is a despicable excuse for a human being, and the woman involved knew it, and so played him as such. That doesn’t make DSK guilty of rape, in the legal sense, but it does demonstrate a pattern we generally dislike in society, unless one is Larry Flynt or some similar microscopic stature, (Flynt, who runs an “adult entertainment” empire, for the record, is another despicable excuse for a human being.)

  Casey Anthony, meanwhile, is a despicable excuse for a human being as well for different reasons, but the similarity is that being such does not make one in a legal sense, guilty of anything. Sorry, it just doesn’t.

  There is a major and thankfully insurmountable gap between what is legal and what is just. Here it is, gang… these are matters which cannot be dealt with by means of law and the judiciary.  Justice, I’m afraid, does not come from law. I strongly suggest it’s time we disabused ourselves of that fantasy. This statement is in the same vein as “Government is not thee answer… government is the problem.”    Oh, certainly… The law can serve the cause of justice and often does, but often enough it does not. As in these cases. Therefore, adding more law is kinda like adding junk food. It might taste good, but it really doesn’t serve the real need. Am I suggesting vigilante justice? No, hardly. But let’s keep these things in perspective, OK?

  I mean, let’s learn the lesson these cases teach and stop assuming government can fix any ill, and right every wrong. Passing a law may make you feel good, but in the end it does very little to the stated end…

• UNEMPLOYMENT RISES AGAIN, WELCOME TO HOPE AND CHANGE: Unemployment now stands, officially, at 9.2%… which as I’ve been saying for two years, does not even come close to the reality of it, since a goodly chunk of jobless have removed themselves from the job market or gone Galt.Jeff Carter describes it this way:
  

  

  Jeff Carter

  This number was outside the standard deviation of expectations. I really can’t stress how ugly it is. There is no way to sugarcoat it. The economic policies used since October of 2008 are an abject and total failure. Not only that, but they have put the finances of the country in a precarious position that was not unforeseen.

  Exactly. There’s only one conclusion to draw, folks… the Democrats are intentionally crashing this economy. An interesting way of getting ‘economic justice’ (there’s that word again) and putting the US in a less prominent role in the world… a stated objective of the Obama campaign, remember? Cater issues a warning:

  Progressive/Liberal/Keynesian Economists will call for more stimulus. This will make it worse. Government spending, and activist government policy at all levels are putting a chokehold on private expansion. The competition for an investment dollar between government and the private sector is being won by government. That’s why T-bill rates are so low.
  This number puts a huge focus and pressure on politicians debating the debt ceiling. What is obvious is that gridlock is not good. The other obvious point is that Keynesian economics is a total fail.

  The solution is to put real conservatives in control. Absent that, I fear, the situation will never improve.  And oh, by the way…. Obama’s people are now saying unemployment won’t be an issue for the 2012 election. Whistling in the dark, per chance?

• GAS AND OIL PRICES ON THE WAY UP AGAIN: Here we see the fine hand of Obama and the left again. The war on reliable cheap energy is part and parcel of why we’re in such trouble. Removal of the left Obama being the figurehead at the moment, is the answer… and the only answer.