When Words Don't Mean What They Say

An article published on page 3 of the Business Outlook section of the Albuquerque Journal last week sheds light on the current state of the law and the legal profession. The article, written by Joel Jacobsen and headlined Court puts quirky spin on burglary statute, discussed two recent decisions by the New Mexico Supreme Court. But it seems the disease these decisions exemplify is spread much more broadly than just this state.

At issue was whether entering a business for a criminal purpose in a manner that was not authorized, by deception or in violation of an express prohibition, is "unauthorized" as part of the definition of burglary (a felony) as opposed to shoplifting (a misdemeanor). As Jacobsen wrote,

'Unauthorized' doesn't always mean what it seems to say when would-be thieves enter a commercial enterprise with crime in mind. . . . Because entry into Costco without a valid membership doesn't implicate such highly wrought feelings, therefor it's not unauthorized. Even though it's not authorized. . . . Again, as a matter of statutory construction, the court held that the entry into the store wasn't "unauthorized," even though it was prohibited.

What can make sense out of that sort of self-contradictory verbiage? How can English words be made to say things that are so completely at odds with their normal meanings? The answer to these questions is what is called "statutory construction".

Professor Daniel A. Farber [apparently now at the School of Law of the University of California at Berkeley] once explained how statutory construction works. If a person at the table asks you to pass the salt, obviously he or she wants you to pass a common flavor enhancing condiment.

But it would be unreasonable to assume the person is asking to be given a substance that raises blood pressure and shortens lifespan. Therefore, he or she means for you to pass the pepper.

Why is this important? Jacobsen explains at the end of his article.

In constitutional theory, as expressed in Article III of the New Mexico Constitution, courts have no power to rewrite statutes. But, in judicial theory, interpreting a simple word like "unauthorized" to refer to a complex of emotions that "we" supposedly feel doesn't count as rewriting. And that's why New Mexico now has two burglary statutes, one found in the statute books that covers all businesses equally and one existing only in the opinions of judges that carves out an exception for retail stores. Here's your pepper.

In other words, while judges are not allowed to write or rewrite laws, they do it anyway by changing the meanings of words. As I suggested above, that's not something that's limited to the judges in this state. It seems to be a communicable disease — a communicable mental disease. But a remaining question is whether it is communicated judge to judge (or senior judge to senior judge), or whether that occurs in their initial law school training.

Never Felt Safer

I got this from a friend. I'm not sure it's really a joke.

Never felt safer in my life!

I took down my Rebel flag (which you can't buy on ebay any more) tossed the "Don't Tread on Me" flag and peeled the NRA sticker off the front door. I gave the pit bull to my mother in law and stored my A K. 47.

I disconnected my home alarm system and quit the candy-ass Neighborhood Watch.

I bought two Pakistani flags and put them in my front yard.

I purchased the black flag of ISIS (which you CAN buy on ebay) and ran it up the flag pole

Now, the local police, sheriff, FBI, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, Secret Service and other agencies are all watching my house 24/7. I've NEVER felt safer and I'm saving $69.95 a month that ADT used to charge me.

Plus, I bought burkas for my family. when we shop or travel everyone moves out of the way and security can't pat us down.

Safe at last — Is America getting greater every day or what?

A Dose of Reality About Socialism

We have been hearing A LOT about Socialism — and praise of Socialism — in the current political campaign. A lot has been from Hillary Clinton, and a lot more from Bernie Sanders, and their supporters. A significant amount of the discussion has been lecturing by our Moral Betters of the Younger Generation, who mostly support Sanders.

This has produced a response on Facebook from former chess champion and current freedom activist Garry Kasparov, which has been repeated by Thomas Lifson:

I'm enjoying the irony of American Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of Socialism and what it really means! Socialism sounds great in speech soundbites and on Facebook, but please keep it there. In practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself, and the ambition and achievement that made modern capitalism possible and brought billions of people out of poverty. Talking about Socialism is a huge luxury, a luxury that was paid for by the successes of capitalism. Income inequality is a huge problem, absolutely. But the idea that the solution is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is dangerously absurd.

Lifson goes on to note that

Socialism rewards laggards and penalizes strivers, so naturally you get more of the former and fewer of the latter. It isn’t terribly complicated.

Young people, full of energy, idealistic, and inexperienced in human nature, are seduced by the vision of an egalitarian paradise with less suffering. What they don’t see is the decline in wealth, and the focus on gaming the system and winning political approval (instead of actually producing wealth) that inevitably produce decline and corruption.

How has this happened to so many of our young people? I think, as Lifson suggests, that it's because

The virtually complete takeover of public and higher education by the left has resulted in a vast cohort of the American public completely ignorant of the failure of socialism everywhere it has been applied. Thus we have public opjnion polls indicating that younger voters are not averse to socialism and younger Democrats supporting Sanders.

To me, the most important truism in all of this is one short line:"Talking about Socialism is a huge luxury, a luxury that was paid for by the successes of capitalism." That's a line from Kasparov's original Facebook post, speaking from experience.

Socialism kills, in all its forms from Democratic Socialism to Fascism and Communism. It's just that some forms of Socialism kill more quickly and efficiently than others.

A Lesson on Motivation — and Irony

This makes sense to the bureaucrats. It's part of the reason the voters are so angry this year, explaining the success of both Trump and Sanders. And for that, see this.

How Stupid Does the Pentagon Have To Be?

Doesn't the Pentagon check out companies before issuing contracts to them? Doesn't it include restrictive language in its contracts? In past years it did both.

But now the Pentagon has discovered (actually one of its contractors discovered and informed the Pentagon) that "Russian computer programmers were helping to write computer software for sensitive U.S. military communications systems". Software those programmers wrote "made it possible for the Pentagon’s communications systems to be infected with viruses."

No wonder Vladimir Putin has been so consistently eating Barack Obama's lunch! Once again it appears the Pentagon has had its manhood removed.

EPA Screws Up Again

The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has celebrated the two-month anniversary of its amazingly incompetent Gold King Mine spill by causing another toxic spill at the Standard Mine above Crested Butte.

Though smaller than the Gold King Mine spill, it still "raises questions about EPA procedures" according to US Representative Scott Tipton. But I would say that was done long before the earlier spill. What this spill has done is demonstrate — again — that EPA's procedures and its oversight of its contractors are fatally flawed. Completely negligent.

And that's not even counting the fact that, once again, they failed to notify relevant authorities (such as the Crested Butte mayor) until two days later. They also hid that information from the public, failing to disclose it in response to press inquiries about this specific mine. And that despite the fact that they had fouled the Crested Butte water supply with toxic heavy metal contamination.

EPA and its responsible contractor(s) should be shut down until the spills they have caused have been completely cleaned up and the cleanups have been verified by competent state authorities. And they should all be heavily fined. After all, why should the EPA and its subordinates be treated different from anyone else? Why should they be treated differently from the way they treat everyone else?

Government Negligence And Bulls**t

I wrote earlier about the government's incredible negligence and gross incompetence in causing a massive toxic waste spill into a tributary of the Animas River in Colorado and New Mexico. That spill also fouled the San Juan River, into which the Animas flows, along its path through New Mexico and Utah. Specifically, it was the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, which this incident indicates is horribly misnamed) that demonstrated this extreme negligence and incompetence in their "clean-up" of a long-closed Colorado mine. That negligence included ignoring a warning from the closed mine's current owner, and threatening him with jail if he didn't stay completely away from the EPA's operations around the mine. It culminated in the toxic waste spill on August 5th, which was not reported — at least not to either New Mexico or the Navajo Nation — in anything like an appropriate time.

Still, there are things I don't understand — some in the way the story hass been reported and some in the story itself. Here are a couple of those things.

One thing is come of the reportage on the spill itself. It was reported on August 8th as a spill of more than a million gallons. By the next day it was reported as actually having been a spill of three million gallons — and that is how it has been reported ever since. But there's a problem with that. It was reported in early August, and is still being reported now, water is still flowing from the mine at 550 gallons per minute, 33,000 gallons per hour, 792,000 gallons per day, more than an additional 3 million gallons every four days. That means an additional 36.4 million gallons that have flowed from that mine from August 10th through today. Are the reporters trying to claim — without having the guts to say so — that all of the toxic waste was in the initial three million gallons and none in the more than thirty-six million gallons since? I'm not sure that makes any sense.

A second thing is related. The news stories keep referring to the pollution of the Animas River and (sometimes) the San Juan River through the states of Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. But, in Utah, the San Juan flows into the Colorado River. The Colorado then flows into and across northern Arizona before becoming the boundary between that state and the states of Nevada and California. The San Juan is a tributary to the Colorado, so the water from the former flows into the latter — bringing with it whatever it's carrying. But it seems the reporters are trying to claim — without having the guts to say so — that all of the toxic waste was magically removed from the San Juan's water before it flowed into the Colorado River. I'm not sure that makes any sense.

Something I don't understand in the story itself is this: The EPA-caused spill is bad enough. So why would the EPA, with the connivance of other government agencies, want to make it worse by providing false and misleading information about it? But that is apparently what has been done, both in the information made available to the public and in their testimony to Congress. Yes, they have "taken responsibility" and yes, EPA has provided assistance to some of the affected people downstream. But significant chunks of the information EPA has provided has apparently been intended to minimize the seriousness of the EPA's screw-up rather than to provide accurate information on the problem they caused.

What's even worse, one of the major groups affected by the EPA negligence is being further damaged by the government (non-)response. The Animas and San Juan rivers provide a huge part of the water for the Navajo Nation — both drinking water and irrigation water for the Navajo farmers across the eastern part of the sprawling Navajo Reservation. EPA provided a series of emergency water tanks for drinking water shortly after the spill in recognition of this fact. But on the fourth of September, after the Navajo Nation requested additional assistance, EPA announced instead that it would be removing those emergency water tanks — tanks that are critical for the Navajos right now. Meanwhile, FEMA also rejected the Navajos' requests for assistance in recovering from the effects of the mine spill.

And neither President Obama nor his agency cronies appear to give a damn. All this has got to be hard for the believers in this Administration and its EPA. Even as they're waiting for another serving of their favorite Kool Aid.

My recommendation, only slightly modified from before, is that the EPA and its responsible contractor(s) should be shut down until the spill has been completely cleaned up and the cleanup has been verified by competent state authorities. And they should all be heavily fined. After all, why should the EPA and its subordinates be treated different from anyone else? Why should they be treated differently from the way they treat everyone else?

I noted in the prior article that "the EPA (like other government agencies) believes there's one set of rules for them and another set for everyone else." It's well past time for that to be stopped.

Government Negligence Causes Major Damage

The Albuquerque Journal headline reads Wastewater from Colorado mine reaches New Mexico. (See this story, too.) The Associated Press story is about a large — more than a million gallons — toxic waste spill into the Animas River in Colorado. That's automatically a big story here because the Animas River flows into New Mexico's San Juan River. The San Juan is part of the Colorado River watershed, joining the Colorado River while in Utah. Before that, the Animas River passes by Silverton and through Durango, significant tourist attractions in southwest Colorado. It is a major part of the drinking water supply for these towns, and others, as well as rural areas.

The toxic waste in the spill came from a long-closed gold mine. It contains lots of heavy metals. That means the cleanup will be a huge problem, which will probably require digging all the sand & dirt & rocks from the riverbed and taking it all to a toxic waste dump. Those cleanup costs and the government fines will put the company whose negligence caused that spill out of business. Bankrupt.

Oh. Wait. . . . It wasn't a company that was negligent. It was the EPA. The Environmental Protection Agency. The federal government. Or, as an online story headlined it, EPA, Saviors Of The Environment, Spill 1 Million Gallons Of Waste Water Into Animas River, Turns It Bright Orange…. EPA was "using heavy machinery to investigate pollutants at the Gold King Mine on Wednesday morning" when their machinery took out a plug from a waste pond and released the waste. More than a million gallons of it. In fact, the spill is now estimated at over three million gallons and, as of today, is still increasing at something like 550 gallons per minute.

The Gold King Mine has apparently been closed since 1923. Was this the first time EPA was getting around to dealing with this site?

This reminds me of something I learned about in southern California twenty years ago. Before each rocket engine test on Edwards Air Force Base, airmen would have to search all likely flame areas for desert tortoises. Any that were found would have to be collected before the test, and put back in their exact same locations afterward. In all the years rocket engine tests were being done, no tortoise was killed by a test. The only tortoise that died due to human interaction was (in effect) killed by a government inspector. There, as here, it was the goverenment inspectors — our "protectors" — who caused the damage, not those they were supposed to be protecting us from. No, the government inspector wasn't punished. But any one of the airmen, and his agency, would have been.

And so we have this and much greater examples of government negligence showing up. That's why my reaction to the Animas spill is this:

Colorado and New Mexico should heavily fine EPA for this spill and the negligence that led to it. New Mexico should also heavily fine EPA for failing to notify the state about the spill.

More broadly, EPA should be shut down until the spill has been completely cleaned up and the cleanup has been verified by competent state authorities.

New Mexico assessed a big fine against the Department of Energy because of the WIPP accident. The EPA should be next, for this one.

UPDATE: EPA continues to downplay the seriousness of their spill, telling the public there is no health hazard from the waste they spilled while delivering bottled water — all of this while their spill continues at 550 gallons per minute, 33,000 gallons per hour, 792,000 gallons per day. They are behaving in the cavalier ho-hum manner they charge and severely punish in others. Guess the EPA (like other government agencies) believes there's one set of rules for them and another set for everyone else.

The responsible EPA folks, including those well up the management chain from those running the heavy equipment, should face possible jail time. Independent of that, the EPA must be fined, and fined heavily — and not allowed any additional funds to pay the fines with. Again, why should EPA be treated different from anyone else?

Hypersensitivity

Some people will get upset over anything!

Happy New Year!
Enjoy 2013 — it's got to be better than 2012 was!

An AT&T Phishing Expedition

A friend of mine once had his e-mail through a (now long-defunct) organization called flash.net (How many of you even knew such an outfit existed!?) He also had his web hosting through them. The e-mail address continued to be active even as flash.net was bought out by others including Prodigy and (most recently, even though that was years ago) AT&T.

This year, AT&T decided it didn't want to support these "legacy" accounts any more. They notified everyone their web hosting support was going to end. With plenty of warning, my friend moved his web hosting to another organization — after verifying that the e-mail account (which had long since been passed to yahoo) would be unaffected.

Then, this week, he received a very suspicious e-mail, reproduced here:

---LAST WARNING---
Tuesday, December 20, 2011 12:18 PM
From: "AT&T Mail Service" <bardgym@bellsouth.net>
This sender is DomainKeys verified
To: undisclosed-recipients

Due to the congestion in all flash users and removal
of all unused flash Accounts, flash .net would be
shutting down all unused Accounts, You will have to
confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login
Information below after clicking the reply button,
              
* User name:

* Password:
                 
* Date of Birth:
                             
* Country Or Territory:

After following the instructions in the sheet, your
account will not be interrupted and will continue as
normal. Thanks for your attention to this request.
We apologize for any inconveniences.

Warning!!!: Account owner that refuses to update
his/her account after three days of receiving this
warning stands the risk of losing his or her account
permanently.

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 8.5.449 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3768 -
Release Date: 07/16/11 06:56:00

Given the level of attention AT&T had previously given to former flash.net users, he figured they might not be aware of these messages. He figured he ought to tell them about what he'd received. He went to the att.com pages and found where a sub-page said to report security concerns. He forwarded the suspicious message to them at the e-mail address identified there. His message said:

Thought you should know about this.
(Just in case you didn't already.)

The message bounced. He checked some more and, figuring it was just a glitch, re-sent it like this:

Thought you should know about this.  (Just in case you didn't already.)

secure@att.com is the address identified to use for this purpose on the
web page http://www.att.com/gen/general?pid=19318

Once again, his message bounced. Once again, he got a message like this:

Failure Notice
Tuesday, December 20, 2011 4:55 PM
From: "MAILER-DAEMON@yahoo.com" 
This sender is DomainKeys verified

Sorry, we were unable to deliver your message to the
following address.

<secure@att.com>: Remote host said: 553 information.
(#5.7.1) [BODY]

--- Below this line is a copy of the message.

I'm not sure what this means. But if the e-mail address AT&T advertises for reporting security issues doesn't work, that seems to say AT&T doesn't really want to know about them.

Voting & Driving in Saudi Arabia

Saudi King Abdullah has issued an edict allowing women in Saudi Arabia to vote for the first time. Meanwhile, a woman was sentenced to 10 lashes for driving a relative to the hospital.

Interestingly, it turns out there is no actual law against women driving in Saudi Arabia. But the Saudi courts sentence women for driving anyway.

This juxtaposition provides a clear example of cognitive dissonance. And it sets up others. Like this:

U.S. Government Printing Gas Coupons

There's a new report the U.S. government is now printing millions of coupons that are each good for one gallon of gas. I was suprised to read that. But I've checked it out, and it's true!

UPDATE: And they're already printing another set for future use.

Adult Discussion Needed

President Parack Obama says we need to have an adult discussion about spending, deficits, and the budget. So, naturally, he calls in the Kindergarten Squad — Senators Reid (NV), Schumer (NY), Durban (IL), and Murray (WA). Now that's ironic.

Major Irony in Russia

In a MAJOR irony, and with the blessings of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, an abridged version of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipeligo has been made required reading for Russian high school seniors. (See also the 1973 translation published only in the West.)

With this much irony, further comment is neither necessary nor possible.

Harry Reid's Hate Speech

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) made his statement on the floor of the Senate, so I suppose he has some degree of limited immunity. But if he says, or has said, similar things elsewhere, he should be arrested for hate speech.

What did he say? Reid Compares Opponents of Health Care Reform to Supporters of Slavery "Reid argued that Republicans are using the same stalling tactics employed in the pre-Civil War era." Reid is also quoted as saying "When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today."

In other words, he condemned opponents of his bill as being like the kind of Democrats we should have left behind long ago — the kind of Democrats who maintained slavery, the Democrats who pushed secession in the face of the anti-slavery views of the first Republican president (the president who ended slavery), the Democrats who later thwarted desegregation efforts for decades, the Democrats who opposed anti-lynching laws, and the majority of Democrats who voted against the civil rights acts. The kind of Democrat like Harry Reid.

That really is offensive projection. Apparently Harry Reid thinks we should be as bigoted and ignorant as he is. And he is deploying his offensive rhetoric in support of a massive disaster of a bill (much of which he continues to hide, even from his second-in-command) that is opposed by more than 60% of the people Senators and Congressmen are supposed to represent.

I think the Democrats, and especially their current (mis-)leaders, would do better to accept the racist history of the party and learn from it — and clean up their own act — rather than continuing to lie about it and impugn others for the past actions of their own party.

... if you show me yours

Barack and Michelle Obama held their first state dinner — and had their first state dinner gatecrashers. The next day's coverage said "It was not clear Wednesday night how close the Salahis [Michaele and Tareq Salahi] got to Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, or to the guests of honor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, and his wife, Gursharan Kaur." But later the same day, pictures appeared (e.g., here & here) showing Michaele with Vice President Joe Biden. By Friday, the White House released a photo showing the couple with President Obama and Prime Minister Singh.

The White House released this photo of President Obama as he greets Michaele and Tareq Salahi in the Blue Room of the White House before the State Dinner with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, left, of India, on Tuesday.
By Samantha Appleton, AFP/Getty Images

All of which is really just to show my favorite version of that picture (below) isn't a photoshop invented out of nothing.
Only the conversation is invented. Maybe.

A Thought to Consider

Kathryn Jean Lopez got an e-mail with a thought to consider, especially in view of the Miss California vs. Perez Hilton controversy:

What seems to be most overlooked in the gay marriage debate, is that a person’s private sexual preferences and practices are not a bar to marriage. Gay people are not preventing from marrying. Straight people are not allowed to marry people of the same sex. The law is evenly applied. The argument isn’t over legal fairness, it’s over the definition of marriage.

If there is nothing special about the union a man and a woman, then what is the argument for the “specialness” of limiting marriage to just two people? Why not 3? Or 33?

Blagojevich Is Right

What was Illinois Governor "Hot Rod" Blagojevich to do? Yes, he got arrested and charged, and is probably as crooked as the rest of the Chicago political machine. But he is still the governor of the state of Illinois. And he had a problem.

A good chunk of that problem was created by the state legislature. They met to consider changing the law, as recommended by the governor, so a vacancy in a U.S. Senate seat would be filled by a special election instead of by appointment by the governor. But the legislature's Democrats decided they couldn't do that because, with the Democrats' corruption on all the front pages, they feared the seat might actually be won by a Republican. (!) As a result, since the law was not changed, the only legal way the Senate seat vacated by President-Elect Barack Obama can be filled is by the governor appointing someone to fill it.

But that creates another problem. The Congressional Democrats' leadership has said they will not allow anyone named by Governor Blagojevich to be seated. That means they are unwilling to allow Illinois to be represented by a Senator named in the only way provided for by Illinois law — which means they are unwilling to allow Illinois to be represented by two Senators as provided in the Constitution. And that gives them yet another problem since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1969, in the case of Adam Clayton Powell, that what the Senate leadership intends to do is unconstitutional — the Senate can expel a member, for cause and by a 2/3 vote of the full Senate, but they cannot refuse to seat a properly elected/appointed Senator.

So Rod Blagojevich, as governor of Illinois, was presented with this problem: He could follow the warnings and illegal orders of the Democrats' state and national leadership and leave Illinois without complete representation, or he could follow the state law and appoint a new Senator. In this instance, for good reasons or bad, he decided to follow the law.

Blagojevich is still the governor. There is no legitimate or legal basis for blocking or voiding this appointment to the Senate seat. Under these circumstances, anyone trying to block this appointment should have to spent a LOT of time in court, at their own personal expense. After all, violating the law is never part of a public official's job description. And, in this instance, the one following the law is Governor Blagojevich.

How Dare You Do What We Demanded!?!

Community organizers and organizations like National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a "community-based organization," used the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act to pressure banks and other financial institutions to grant mortgages to people with "insufficient borrower income levels." Now that so many of those loans — predictably — have gone bad, the Coalition has filed suit against two Wall Street rating services, saying the firms "knew or should have known" that the loans would go into default at a high rate. Thus the Coalition is suing the rating services for making it possible for the financial institutions to do what the Coalition was pressuring them to do. (!)

Seems to me the news is providing more and more "through the looking glass" kinds of stuff.

Two hat tips, here and here.