Someone described the profession of law as “finding out where money is changing hands and going there.”
The more money that changes hands in litigation, the bigger the legal profession will be.
One statement I keep trying to correct is “Justice is for sale.” This means that the bovine mind repeating this cliché is incapable of realizing that acquittal is not justice. Acquittal is certainly for sale, and the mindless creeps repeating this crap assume that they, being black or innocent kids or whatever, deserve acquittal.
This tells you all about where they are coming from, but it also shows they have no interest whatsoever in justice.
There is not the slightest bit of evidence that the student-teacher ratio, the better the education. It is true that richer schools have genetically smarter kids in them and their ratio is lower. But closer studies have not shown any other relationship.
Home study does not show that fewer students make them better, but that teachers who care and who have been out in the world do a better job of teaching than what the education bureaucracy puts out in its factories. Having one Mommy Professor product per five is the same as having thirty per standardized Mommy Professor product.
Every bureaucracy wants people to believe that the more they spend on it the better product they will get. Everybody in any bureaucracy will tell you that.
Try to truly put yourself in my place. What if ten educated guys were standing around you and you said, “Well, naturally the car dealer wants the customer to buy a more expensive car.”
And everybody looked at you with total, cowlike incomprehension. How would you feel? How would you like to have explain that kind of point every day of the week?
Every day of the week I get a cowlike stare when I explain that JUSTICE is not for sale or when I have to explain why Mommy Professors think that Marxists are right that Idealists and Intellectuals should take over the world, be our ruling class, in the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Every now and then a commentator will extend this reasoning. But usually I get another Learned Discussion of Larger Implications. But this is not a loss. I get better thought and commentary than anyone else I know of, and certainly more original.
But a good teacher is never satisfied. When I wear out will there be NOBODY to slap together Point A and Point B in plain English?
It was a cold feeling to be the only one to laugh. When the professor read the Soviet Constitution declaring it a land of Workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals” I was the only one who got the joke: “We have a land where Tom does the work, Bill goes out and fights, John raises the crops, and we will sit and tell them all what to do.”
There have been many times when a wide-eyed prof has said something like, “And the dealers always want to sell the most expensive cars.” It took the form of “professors tend to be politically left,” but it’s the same thing. I don’t laugh anymore.
It’s too creepy
So when the courts decide that more and more lawyers mean more and more justice, I don‘t even giggle. This is getting pathologically serious. The same person who says “Follow the money” everywhere else completely forgets it when an education study shows that people with more school years tend to make more money and then attributes the extra money to the education.
No one makes the obvious connections, much less laughs at all those missing the connection.
No, I’m afraid it’s not so funny any more.
#1 by backbaygrouch on 06/12/2010 - 6:43 am
Sometimes justice is not for sale in Chicago. There was an occasion when a judge took 10K to find for a plaintiff. A problem arose, however, when his juice in City Hall sent down word that he should find for the defendant. Seems 10K had changed hands there. Their solution was that both would keep the money and the case would be decided on the merits.
#2 by Alan B on 06/12/2010 - 10:15 am
The Judicial System can indite a ham sandwich and if you ain’t rich or the politically correct color at a correct time and place cause the ball is always in their court, \Their Court\! Time is money, walk them in walk them out, pay at the counter, keep that line moven, plea bargin is their motto. Notice how wealthy folks can avoid charges unlike common folks, the wealthy slow the system down and cost it big bucks.
#3 by Dave on 06/12/2010 - 1:35 pm
It is in injustice where the connections are revealed.
Injustice sinks into the molecular fabric of the world where destiny and its reckonings are forged.
Let me give you a benign example: In the icy winters where I live I never cease to marvel how road conditions fail to influence the public’s driving behavior. The freeway will be sheet ice. There will be accidents and spins outs and even overturned vehicles everywhere. Nevertheless, most of the drivers will be barreling along at 70 mph oblivious to the reality and conditions around them.
Why? The speed limit signs say 70 mph! The MAN, that is the police authority, says 70 mph and 70 mph it is, regardless of the plain reality and facts, regardless of obvious and proven dangers. This is Wordism!
Yes, the public really is that stupid, absolutely brainless, absolutely stupid. Chimpanzees would exercise better judgment. This is true of politics in general and why the universal voting franchise is devastatingly stupid.
Let me give you another example: By happenstance, I found myself at a low-key cocktail party being held at a splendid home. The party was celebrating the recent appointment of a Superior Court judge by the Governor to fill a position made vacant by a sudden death. I did not know this appointee, but soon learned that his private passion was Shakespeare.
I found myself sitting in a fine overstuffed chair, in a patrician environment, with a small group of other people sitting in fine overstuffed chairs, surrounding a florid, overweight, and unhealthy looking man regaling on Shakespeare. Personally, if there is anything I could care less about it is Shakespeare, so I wasn’t really listening. What I did over the period of an hour was watch this man consume an entire fifth of Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch Whiskey.
I couldn’t believe it. I realized the man was insane, that the Governor had appointed a mad man to the Superior Court. And this was the first time in my life I had seen anyone down a fifth of whiskey in an hour. I heard that happens at fraternity parties, but I had never really seen it. I half expected him to die then and there, but he continued on seemingly unaffected. It was like he turned into a robot. I knew he really wasn’t aware of anything.
I have had this experience of prominent public officials time and again. Half the time, I suspect them of being insane. They are not normal people. Something is wrong with them. In fact, I have never met a prominent public official that I suspected of being normal. They always give me the willies.
I believe that internally, in your heart, when you hear a bell ring, you had better pay attention to it. That bell rings for a reason. It is informing you accurately.
This is “making a connection”.
Conspiracy theorists have got it wrong. There is no conspiracy. The reality is far worse. The conspiracy theory exists to hide the reality that can’t be faced because it is so intolerable.
#4 by Wandrin on 06/12/2010 - 6:11 pm
“No, I’m afraid it’s not so funny any more.”
Money used to be gold and silver. Then it was paper IOUs for gold and silver. Then it was just paper.
Except it’s not really.
Paper money represents the power of a government to tax the productive capacity of a nation.
For at least the last 30 years they’ve been looting and selling the productive capacity of the nation.
They’re running out of road.
Keeping kids in school is the same. They take twelve years of a kid’s productive capacity in exchange for their cut of the $120,000 debt that ensues. They could keep increasing it till the kid was in school for 40 years with them taking their cut of $360,000 of debt but eventually the student runs out of productive years to pay the loan back.
If you can’t control your greed you’ll always eventually run out of road.
It is depressing that it will probably take hitting the bumpers before most people wake up but the more prepared and numerous the early adopters are the better it will turn out.