As IF Times

link Taliban Mocks Shutdown: Lawmakers ‘Sucking The Blood Of Their Own People’ « CBS DC.

You know it’s not good when the widely acknowledged scourge and enemy of the western world makes fun of you…and it’s accurate.  Somewhere in the middle eastern moonscape, Taliban leaders must be huddling together after suddenly reaching an epiphany.  They conclude that if they do nothing, the U.S. will destroy themselves from within!  No need to send suicide bombers and mount expensive terror campaigns, unless of course it’s for amusement.

As the U.S. government ‘shuts down’ because of congressional impasse, stories of hysteria and woe, many absurd, are making the media rounds.  By now we know that the furloughing of government employees has ‘forced’ the shutdown of heretofore public facilities.  Even the war memorial in DC was closed to the public, which is amusing because it’s essentially a plaza.  It’s unclear why a large public standing area needs to be closed.  It’s unclear why national parks like the Grand Canyon need to be closed.  Is the government operating the views?  Does someone have to turn on Old Faithful at Yellowstone?  Trying to rope off the Atlantic ocean in Florida is the best one.

If you think about it, the fact that the government shutdown even matters at all is scary; after all, why should the government be involved in so many aspects of people’s daily lives anyways?  This is the issue that no one is playing up.  If you can’t operate through a day without having to navigate some kind of government bureaucracy, THAT is the problem.  Over successive generations, much of what should be private sector stuff has been ceded to government oversight. The notion that the government makes a citizen a law breaker just for trying to access something that the public owns is outrageous.  Instead, all media coverage is spent finger pointing at (mostly) one side or the other.

The flashpoint for all of this recent kefuffle is The Affordable Care Act, affectionately dubbed Obamacare.  If the government is prepared to deny people access to things they already own such as parks and monuments, what makes anyone think that government control of healthcare is a good thing?  What if you needed a mole removed and someone at the clinic turned you away under threat of tazering?  As usual, low information voters think they are getting something for nothing.  They need Obamacare like they need a third nipple, but since they’re giving them away, may as well get one.

The Taliban may as well sit back and smoke hookah pipes until the U.S. just collapses from their citizens’ own collective stupidity.

link Long Island Middle School Bans Footballs, Other Recreational Items « CBS New York.

The knee jerk response is to tsk tsk the parents of these precious darlings for treating their spawn like Faberge eggs, but that would be a mistake.  While most parents have some sense of over protectiveness with regard to their children, few expect that they would be completely insulated from playground activities.  Anyone who has not suffered an abrasion, bruise or scraped knee as a kid must have never attended school; maybe they were living in an aquarium.  But it’s not Bloomberg-ism that is driving this policy.  It’s lawyers.  No doubt, the administrators at this school were petrified at the possibility that under their care, some harm would come to junior which would open them up for an expensive lawsuit.  It’s amazing that they don’t mandate the wearing of helmets during class.

It used to be that you could never exceed the reach of the long arm of the law, but over generations, this has morphed into not escaping the long tentacles of lawyers.  As we’ve discussed previously, when a nation puts out as many law grads as the U.S. does, they have to make themselves useful somehow.  Statistically, few of these lawyers will be Oliver Wendell Holmes material.  Most of what they do in real life will circulate around arguing petty rules and  grievances rather than arguing big picture principles.  Unluckily for the public, many of them wind up as politicians.

Life truly does imitate art as even the depiction of lawyers has evolved over the years.   In the old days, Perry Mason was the admired role model; today, it’s more Jackie Chiles from the Seinfeld show.  In fact,  the very expression “frivolous lawsuits” is as redundant as “bleeding heart liberal”.  While there exists many arbiters of what’s legal, there does not exist any arbiters of what’s stupid.

And that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.  As a society, we have been programmed to be passive about most things and instructed to ‘let the process work’ as far as legal fixes, no matter how convoluted or illogical that process may be.  Ironically, what has evolved is a society openly contemptuous of many of its laws and especially of their lawmakers, rather than a more civilized one.  As criminals know, laws are for law abiders.

It’s highly unlikely that those first crafting laws for our society envisioned  exhaustive prescriptive rules rather than on general humanistic principles.  That occurs only in Muslim enclaves and in North Korea under Mullah X or Kim Jong Un.  To be lumped in with societies run by those folks should be sobering for anyone.