Archive for March, 2011
Jury-Made Law
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, How Things Work on 03/16/2011
We have all heard of “judge-made law.”
But Mommy Professor is very silent on the subject of “jury-made law.”
And one lesson we must learn is that silence from Mommy Professor is as important as his outright blatherings.
Talking about liquor laws reminded me of jury-made law. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Charleston, SC opened its bars. When you went to Charleston, there were open bars and liquor by the drink.
Once in the 1940s, Governor Olin D. Johnston, “a personal and political dry,” called the Mayor of Charleston with the press watching and said, “I demand that you close those bars in Charleston.” The mayor replied, as Johnston knew he would, “Governor, YOU close them.”
Thus were two successful political careers advanced.
As I pointed out in the case of Mississippi’s prohibition laws, there was a huge difference between MAKING a law and ENFORCING a law.
Governor Johnston would have had to bring bar owners in Charleston before a Charleston jury.
Lots o’ luck there, Olin D.
The whole concept of jury-made law has been alien to Americans since the Greatest Generation took over.
Once again, I have to tell you that I am not exaggerating here: before the Greatest Generation, jurors were really not all that intimidated by a grown man sitting there in a black dress. The reverend stillness with which people called for jury duty today was alien to pre-WWII Americans.
In fact you already know about jury made law. You know that the death penalty for theft and other minor crimes was gotten rid of because juries, knowing the judge would follow the law blindly, simply refused to convict.
That, after all the arguments, was what happened to South Carolina’s ban on liquor by the drink: Juries simply refused to convict.
But the Greatest Generation was a wholly different matter. To them, the Judge was Authority. He wore a costume and his word was, to coin a phrase, law.
Some poor bastard who had had to shoot somebody in self-defense was convicted of manslaughter by a jury because the man in the costume had told them that, according to the law, he should have thought the whole thing out in the few seconds while he was being attacked and had a gun in his hand.
I actually met one judge in my youth who was absolutely dumbfounded by the way his jury actually sent a man, for not having behaved in the manner the law says a lawyer with hours to ponder things would have behaved, to prison for the rest of his life.
He told me he had always said that a jury would NEVER convict a decent person.
But it was his first Greatest Generation jury.
No one called for jury duty today has the slightest concept of what a jury is all about.
They are there to obey.
Liquor Law Again
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, History, Politics on 03/15/2011
I was in Mississippi many years ago, and stopped at a liquor store.
Mississippi was a dry state.
But as I said, the twenty-first amendment’s blanket declaration that state law is sovereign over Federal law puts terms like “dry state” into the Twilight Zone.
Mississippi law was straight Prohibition. It was officially listed as a dry state.
But who could ENFORCE that law? Mississippi declared that only county authorities could enforce state-wide Prohibition. So if you elected a sheriff who chose not to enforce the law, it could be a very wet county indeed.
Please note that I am not kidding you here.
The only problem with leaving enforcement to the local sheriff was that the state wanted the huge source of revenue represented by the liquor tax.
Once again, I kid you not the slightest: instead of a liquor tax, the state imposed a “Black Market Tax.”
When someone sold something, not specifying what it might be, in violation of state law, but state authorities were prohibited from preventing its sale, a tax must be paid to the state on this Black Market Item, whatever it may be.
And if the tax was not paid, the state could enforce it. There was a Black Market Commission for that.
Today the micro breweries for beer are a big thing. Every one of them is gigantic compared to some of the liquor sellers I saw in Mississippi. One half-pint bottle of clear liquid I found in a store had a white label stuck on it with the words, in ink, “…. Smith, Route 3, Hattiesburg, Mississippi.”
It had the Federal and Black Market Commission stamps on it, and was as legal as Budweiser.
Some counties were dry. Some were as wet as New Orleans. All in a state which officially had no change in its law since the Coolidge Administration.
A doctor acquaintance of mine had a girl friend from New Orleans. She had lived there all her life. One day when she was visiting him in North Carolina they went to a liquor store.
She had never seen a liquor before in her entire life.
In New Orleans you bought liquor off the shelf, the same way you bought Campbell’s Soup, Every Seven-Eleven had liquor on the shelf.
She had trouble with the concept of a liquor store the way you might have a problem with someone taking you to a Mustard Store.
Liquor Law
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 03/14/2011
One or more of you could break into the publishing biz by writing a book on liquor law.
They are a human comedy.
Because the twenty first amendment repealing Prohibition specifically put the control of alcoholic beverages into state hands, every state was thrown into a major battle.
In South Carolina, each liquor store has a red dot somewhere on its front.
In 1940, South Carolina legalized liquor stores, over enormous opposition. Since each state has absolutely no restrictions on its liquor law, every aspect of the law must be passed by compromise with hard shell Baptists and screaming Methodists who, at the time, made up over ninety percent of the state’s population.
So one compromise was that, though liquor stores could exist, they could not advertise.
One Prohibitionist took that to court before the law took effect and obtained a court ruling that that provision prohibited the liquor store having a sign that said “Liquor Store.”
As a result of that one person’s initiative, none of the new liquor stores could say they sold liquor.
So one new store owner had an idea. He proposed to all the other new store owners that they paint their stores a bright, eye-hurting orange with large red dots on it. Twenty years later it looked like someone on LSD had made it up.
When South Carolina liquor stores opened in 1940 there was no way anyone could fail to know what they were. Eye-hurting orange with three-foot-across red spots became the signal of every such business in the state.
“Sign? We don’t need no steenking SIGN!”
And even today every single liquor store in the state has at least a couple of red dots.
In fact, thinking about it, I don’t remember what the sign at the local liquor store actually says.
Are Politics Sober?
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, History on 03/13/2011
Somebody needs to write a book about liquor laws.
Liquor laws are what I call real history, not about Historical Inevitability or The Conspiracy, but about real compromises that are so human they are funny.
But never forget that every law on alcohol represents a compromise that was life and death to real, live, active people.
We know that the Eighteenth Amendment, enforced by the Volstead Act, established prohibition. The twenty-first amendment repealed the eighteenth.
Almost.
In order to get the necessary two-thirds majority in congress for repealing Prohibition, a compromise was required. The twenty first amendment did repeal national prohibition, but it also included a clause almost no one today is really aware of, but which is still active.
National Prohibition was repealed, but local prohibition was specifically sanctioned,
It is specifically stated that, when it comes to alcoholic beverages, state law is sovereign over national law.
I used to ride in trains where this reservation made things VERY confusing. You are going along at sixty miles per hour and the Club Car is open or closed every few minutes or every few hours.
It was interstate transportation, where in all other things the Feds have always been sovereign, but a guy well on his way to a good drunk had the glass snatched out of his hand because they were passing through a dry county.
State law.
On absolutely nothing else could s state law override Federal law by declaring COUNTY law to take precedence over FEDERAL law.
Except for that clause on that amendment.
This made for a lot of confusion in the days of propeller aircraft.
Today it is still legally true that serving a drink on board a jet aircraft flying over a dry country is illegal.
And, in fact, if a real person in a real dry county pressed it in court, he would win.
We HAVE to Get Off the Old Losers’ Message
Wandrin asks.
“Could a Mantra-thinker please help with some tips to address the “only White countries” argument when the anti-Whites point out Singapore and UAE etc, as seen in this thread.”
There’s always detailed arguments you can make
– most of those small Arab states have lots of guest workers because of the oil money but they’re basically paid semi-slaves and aren’t allowed to become citizens
– Israel has an explicitly ethno-centric immigration policy and most of those immigrants are jews
– Hong Kong immigration was mostly other ethnic Chinese from the mainland after British rule ended in 1990-something
– Jordan’s “immigrants” are actually Palestinian refugees
etcThere are a few exceptions like Singapore but once you’ve knocked down most of the list then it becomes obvious they are an exception and exceptions prove the rule.
However if i’m arguing with someone as slippery as the guy in the linked thread i usually just cheat by looking out for any little mistake they make and jumping on it and not letting go until they concede the point.
Psychological attrition.
In the thread you linked i’d have picked on his use of Israel in his list of examples and asked him if he supported their ethno-centric immigration
policy and i’d keep on it until he explicitly stated he didn’t believe Israel had the right to an ethno-centric immigration policy either. This would only work if he was jewish as he’d either wriggle around not wanting to say it or he would say it but be tetchy afterwards and easier to needle into
losing his temper.
Sometimes the truth works:
Nobody cares whether a non-white country opens its gates or blocks immigration. But the world would object if Iceland closed its borders. Every white country is supposed to be “a melting pot,” but nobody outside DEMANDS that of any non-white country, black, brown or yellow.
The “race problem” means a Final Solution to the White Problem.
Also do not spend time on any one determined anti-white unless you have an audience. You are speaking to the audience, not to the nut job who hates his own kind.
To be frank with you, Wandrin, you are still on the Stormfront wave-length. Mixing up our message with Israel shows this.
1) Aim at the AUDIENCE;
2) Stop letting them get off the subject. The point is not what non-whites do, the point is that there is a DEMAND on ALL white countries and ONLY on white countries for immigration and assimilation;
3) Don’t screw up the Mantra with some other agenda.
Is History God?
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, History, How Things Work, Politics on 03/10/2011
You have heard of a grandfather clause and of “grandfathering” some privilege when it is abolished for younger folks.
The NAACP’s first court victory was in 1915, when the Supreme Court struck down the original ”grandfather clause.”
After Reconstruction, the whole business of championing of blacks became an embarrassment for Northern politicians. In 1908, the Republican demand for black suffrage, which had been in the platform since 1868, was removed.
Southern states, to contravene the fifteenth amendment, made laws that said that a person could vote if his grandfather could vote. Since it was brought to them, the Supreme Court could hardly refuse to face the fact that the only purpose of such a law was to allow only whites to vote.
What is remarkable is not that the NAACP won the case, but how few politicians by 1915 had any interest in blacks.
One major reason Reconstruction ended was because it was so expensive. Military occupation of the South gave all its representatives to the Republicans Party, but the cost, in terms of the government of the time, was backbreaking.
The cost of Reconstruction was so high that even with all the electoral votes of the Southern States Republicans were in danger of losing so much of the North they could lose the national elections.
And, astonishing as it may seem, the moment the last troops pulled out of the South, where ninety percent of the blacks were, political interest the black vote began to fall fast.
By 1940 anyone who looked to history as Inevitable would have seen the future as bleak for the black vote. Its importance had been steadily going down since 1877.
Nothing changes as fast as history. This has become really obvious in our day of carbon dating and the finding that dinosaurs not only had feathers, but WERE birds.
But this fact has only become OBVIOUS even to some Mommy Professors because of recent technology. The fact is that if you gave me a history book I could almost certainly tell you the decade it was written in.
But those who denounce religion the most loudly as superstition are the ones who maintain this superstitious, Marxist faith that there is a Tide of history, an Inevitable History which occupies the exact same space that God does in other religions.
C.S. Lewis was upset at people who were so obsessed with the Future that they used it as an excuse to be cruel today. As Lenin put it, “It does not matter whether the world contains half a billion people or two billion people, so long as that the half billion is Communist.”
One thing that makes C.S. Lewis’ theological ideas seem so logical is his common sense approach to things. He points out that, “The only Historical Inevitably is that today will be succeeded by tomorrow, and there will be a day after that…”
David Beasley: The Price of Vice in South Carolina, Part II
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, History on 03/09/2011
Part I explained how Democrat Senator gave up his Senate seat in 2004 because he spent years getting more extremely liberal in an attempt to get the Vice Presidential nomination.
I decided to write on this subject because it is so neat and probably unnoticed by anyone else: in the same general period exactly the same thing happened to another popular politician on the Republican side.
David Beasley won the governorship in 1994. His margin of victory was provided by those who were in favor of keeping the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina State House.
But everybody knew that he, like Hollings, dreamed of a vice presidential nomination. South Carolina politics is like a small town, everybody knows this kind of thing.
But the next convention was in 1996. Beasley, who had won the governorship on the strength of the pro-Confederate flag vote, needed to become part of the New South fast.
Beasley was elected governor in November of 1994. He needed every day he could get to switch sides. So in December, before even taking office, he turned on the pro-Flag voters.
Why? Because, as Beasley said, the Lord came to him and told him, at the ideal political moment, that the Lord wanted him to change sides. He announced this at the Baptist Convention in Columbia that month.
SC voters are often stupid, but they aren’t actually unconscious.
It is interesting that not one single public figure denounced t his move. They all depend on that I Have Found God crap to excuse them when THEY get caught.
In fact, only one semi-semi-semi-public figure in SC called Beasley’s action by its dictionary definition: Blasphemy. But the Columbia newspaper has quit publishing my letters since then.
Bob Jones IV, who had switched sides on the flag in time to keep his family business afloat, had also quoted scripture for it. The scripture he quoted was almost two thousand years old, but when you need to switch to the money side, any excuse will do as well as any other.
Again, Beasley tried to sell in a buyer’s market. There are a thousand sellouts for every slot.
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BUGS History
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, Comment Responses on 03/12/2011
In 1915 the Supreme Court had to knock down the very obvious violation of the fifteenth amendment that was the Grandfather Clause.
BoardAd was giving me some particulars about which states allowed women to vote in 1915.
There is a connection here that relates to real history. The problem is that we ignore real history to concentrate on Marxist Historical Inevitability or other nonsense.
In 1920 women were given the vote by constitutional amendment.
So why did the NAACP win its first big legal battle on the Grandfather Clause?
Because no one else at the time was interested in it.
So how did a number of states allow women to vote with a bewildering set of restrictions?
Because, in each state, somebody was INTERESTED.
This is important to BUGS.
While so many others say it’s all about Exposing Them, the Conspirators, and the entire commentary class talks about Historical Inevitability, we say that what matters is that WE, we few, are going to get the message manageable, and then we are going to get our message out.
That concept is absolutely alien to the Marxist and the Conspiracy Theorist. They see a world in which Geniuses and Capitalists have taken control.
There is a story in each state which allowed the vote. There is a story in the restrictions in each state.
BoardAd tells me that a lot of states only allowed women to vote in school-related issues. Every state that allowed women to vote unconditionally was a state that needed to attract female immigrants.
And in a lot of cases, when you look at the state and the exact restrictions, your reaction is “What the hell?”
By which question you are cheating yourself. Behind every single case and every single restriction is a story, a story of someone and of a society and exactly what that person was balancing and thinking about.
In other words, real history.
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