Sarah Palin, Bristol, and parenthood

So VP candidate Sarah Palin has a daughter who recently god pregnant out of wedlock. Her name is Bristol, and she is now in the public eye. Poor gal.

Some critics have been jumping on Sarah Palin's case, saying "See? She's not a very good mother, is she?" Now, I'm not going to attack or defend her parenting skills, as I don't think that would be appropriate. Rather, I want to emphasize that this criticism of Governor Palin is patently unfair.

Does her daughter's pregnancy make her an inattentive or otherwise incapable mother? I don't think so. You can't necessarily place the blame for this child's failing firmly at the feet of her mother. Children can always make their own mistakes, even with the best of parental guidance.

Heck, how many times have we heard people say "You can't stop teenagers from having sex" (a statement which is technically true, but which oversimplifies the duties of parenthood). Now that Palin's daughter is pregnant though, all of a sudden it's "Omigawsh, she's pregnant! This proves that Palin is a neglectful mother!"

As for accusations that Bristol was "sexually active"... again, that's technically true, insofar as she has clearly had sex. However, this says nothing about whether this was a continuing habit, an occasional failing, or even a one-time mistake. To lay this blame firmly at the mother's feet is both unduly harsh and unwarranted.

Mind you, I'm not saying that she was some lily white virgin who simply made a single mistake. (I hasten to emphasize this, since one person did challenge me on that point.) Rather, I'm saying that we don't know if she was sexually loose, or if she gave in during a moment of weakness, or if the truth lies somewhere in between. It seems to me that we should avoid making too many assumptions about what's going on behind the scenes.

Obscure Peanuts characters

A friend of mine is a big fan of Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and the whole Peanuts gang. I'd love to get her some figurines of some of the more obscure Peanuts characters -- Five, Shermy, Charlotte Braun, Tapioca Pudding, Patty and Violet, etc. Those have been very hard to find, though.

How I spent my Labor Day weekend

So what did I do during the Labor Day weekend?

I spent a lot of time resealing my driveway. This is time-consuming work, since my driveway is in very bad shape. It's coarse and has a good number of depressions, which means that it's not as simple as just spreading the sealant around. I have to trowel some filler into various spots if I want the sealant to spread evenly... and even then, I need to be selective. I can't afford to use this stuff in all the rough spots, nor do I have the time to do so.

I also have spots that are very difficult to clean, being right close to my landscaping. I had to spread some of this filler onto those spots as well, just to cover up the dust and give the sealant something onto which it can adhere.

Oh, and I always need to hose the driveway down for best results. With all the pine needles, bits of mulch, and bits of grass blowing around, that gets to be annoying. It would be best if I had a pressure washer to use, but I don't want to spend money on one. Maybe if I were to buy a cheap one...

Another Windows annoyance

Okay, here's another thing that I hate about Windows. It happens way too often that windows pop up and won't disappear. For example, if you click on the Start button at the start, you may find that it will pop up and remain there, refusing to go away unless you actually select one of its options. It also happens when you click on various taskbar buttons.

This stinks. It also seems to happen a lot more under Vista, but that may just be my misperception.

What I want to do

I want to spend several weeks in intensive reading and exercise.

I want to take time off from work to build a whole bunch of gadgets.

I want to spend some quality time with a beautiful woman... if I can find one.

I want to take some more dance lessons.

I want to learn how to skydive.

I want to finish digging my swale.

I want to eradicate the weeds from my yard.

I want to finish caulking my new garage side entry door.

Ugh.

Feeling kinda irritable

I'm feeling kinda irritable right now. Actually, I've been feeling irritable for several days now. This is due to the following:

• The complete idiocy of Windows Vista. Being forced to use it is very aggravating. Its performance is absolutely atrocious.
  
• Some of the software I've been forced to use is absolutely horrible.
  
• I already complained about the jittery touchpad, right?
  
• Some people in my life are completely aggravating as well. It's like they have no common sense.
  

Having a jittery touchpad

This is really annoying.

My laptop's power adapter is on the fritz. It started getting flaky a few days ago, but I put off buying a new one.

What can I say? I'm trying to watch my expenses.

Unfortunately, it's very nearly dead right now. Its connector is flaky, and due to the molded cable, I don't think that simply fixing the connector will be entirely feasible.

I did have a universal laptop power supply lying around from a previous project. It lets the user select an output voltage and one of several barrel-type connectors. Unfortunately, it has this odd effect on my touchpad. It makes the touchpad kinda jittery.

I suspect that the power supply doesn't regulate its output very well. That's darned annoying.

Jury nullification, part six

And the chess game continues.

Some contend that objections to jury nullification are predicated on a "slippery slope" argument, thus making them invalid. I had to think about my hypothetical resposne to that, but KoS offered an excellent rebuttal.

[N]ine times out of ten, slippery slope is a really stupid argument, and you're right to be leery of it. But the actuality, not the possibility, of jury nullification is what makes headlines, and it's rare and even then the meaning (compared to what I'll call genuine civil disobedience) is often a mystery: did the jury violate its oath because the law is unjust, or because the defendent was very like them, or because too much information was withheld, or because they were stupid, or because they were tricked, or because they wish to protest some other law, or all laws, or, just maybe, did the facts and law actually support the verdict? Let's think about this last possibility: the whole point of jury nullification is thwarted if most people assume the panel is stupid or corrupt. That alone should make you pause, shouldn't it? If they assume that it is, what's the breakdown on how many will assume that a dozen stupid and corrupt people are screwing up a trial for a noble and worthwhile purpose? You may as well try to convince them that you would have given the purse you were caught stealing to the United Way if you hadn't been caught. That in a nutshell is why civil disobedience belongs to the public at large, willing to break the law and go to prison, because only personal sacrifice stirs the conscience. Renegade jurors with uncertain motives aren't rebels, they're just (word not appropriate for Great Debates)s. And their example leads people to distrust jurors, not legislators.

So I still say that jury nullification not only blunts the impact of genuine civil disobedience, it undermines institutions that make any dissent possible.

Jury nullification, part five

I thought I'd be done quoting this guy, but I was wrong. He's very articulate in what he says and very precise in the way he argues.

The power and the glory of the jury system is not license to ignore the facts and the law, it's the power and responsibility to see that both the state and defendants adhere to them as well. Rejecting unjust laws is an important responsibility, but it belongs to all of us, and it has to be done correctly: it's not a job within the scope of a jury, and the jury can't attempt it without rejecting everything they are supposed to accomplish. If nullification were to become widespread, we'd have a race to see which, anarchy or tyranny or bloodletting, we'd get to first.

It's not a matter of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. It's about accepting the imperfect to avoid the horrible extremes. If you feel a law is unjust, go protest it. Hell, go break it. And tell everybody you're willing to accept the consequences because your cause is right, and watch a movement grow. But don't destroy the jury system (which usually serves us well even if sometimes the cool people have to go to jail) because you'd rather take loud credit for personally setting one person free than anonymously do your part to preserve the oldest and most important democratic institution there is.

Jury nullification, part four

Okay, I just have to keep quoting this guy. The arguments he makes against jury nullification are excellent.

An act of civil disobedience against an unjust law involves (a) intentionally breaking the unjust law, preferably in such a way as to make it clear that one derives no personal benefit from it; and (b) accepting punishment, so everyone knows that the lawbreakers are not opposed to the idea of civil society bound by rules and governed by Constitutional institutions, but are merely addressing by the strongest nonviolent means the aberration of a single unjust law.

Jury nullification necessarily revolves around individual cases, making personalities rather than law the issue, and it is always an act aimed not against any unjust law but against the judiciary itself, attacking and undermining the whole idea of jury trials, proving that individual citizens can't be trusted to dispassionately evaluate facts and law in judgment of their peers. Jury nullification can't prove that a law is bad, it can only prove that trial by jury is bad -- because if you can't trust people to understand facts and abide by the law, the rest is just politics and prejudice.

Jury nullification can save individual defendants (usually, I think, to society's detriment), but it can't kill any law or institution except for trial by jury itself. Trial by jury has been the cornerstone of freedom for almost a thousand years. It should not be jeopardized because a really nice guy decided getting high was more important than the stupid drug laws.

Malthus has posited a hypothetical in which an unpopular, archaic and rarely-enforced law is used by a corrupt government to target an otherwise blameless individual. S/he (probably he, I guess, huh?) agrees that such a hypothetical has nothing to do with the case we're discussing (which is refreshing), but suggests that it is an appropriate situation for jury nullification.

I don't know (I'll pause while archivists bookmark those three words). But I still lean toward the idea that a society which permits trial by jury is better for it, and that the only way to maintain the system is for juries to be honest and uphold their end of the bargain to hear the evidence and apply the law to the case before them. Any other course would only hasten such a corrupt society's slide down the slope toward authoritarianism.

Here is still more wisdom from King of Soup.

A fella named Diogenes (who habitually overrates his own knowledge and intellect, FTR), argued that jury nullification would be helpful in fighting anti-miscegenation laws, for example. To this, King of Soup replied,

Okay, let's imagine a world in which your point of view is the only thing that can prevent the death of a morally blameless black man under an inherently discriminatory law rooted in wrong and racist thinking. Can we also make him a virtuoso violinist and Nobel Prize-winning neurosurgeon who recently saved the governor's niece from an erupting volcano? And can we imagine that instead of being merely killed, he and his whole family and Santa Claus and a bunny rabbit are tortured to death on Christmas Eve? Now we're winning, right?

Wrong. Sorry. You are describing an unjust law and prescribing a "remedy" that destroys the only force around capable of successfully opposing unjust legislation without violence, without ever specifically addressing the law you hate. Your attempt at nullification might be defended as a single isolated humanitarian gesture, but as civil disobedience, it's bunk. It's probably worth remembering (it wasn't that long ago) that legal expressions of racism in the U.S. were mostly fought with the kind of civil disobedience that respected the judiciary and its authority and the constraints under which it works, even as it deplored and disobeyed the laws that branch is expected to enforce. This wasn't collaboration, it was equal parts courage and wisdom: the courts (eventually) led the fight against institutionalized racism, and they could never have done so had well-meaning protestors undermined their authority before the country. Essentially, your artificial (and grossly unrealistic: miscegenation laws were rarely enforced and were never punishable by death) scenario is about the same as constructing hypothetical circumstances under which each single soldier's life might be saved during the course of a war: the hypothesis collapses when subjected to a tiny fraction of the weight of reality, and does nothing to either win or lose or end the war.

Even in a society with some unjust laws, most laws work to protect the orderly functioning of a civil society. People who will never set foot in a courtroom have reason to be grateful for the branch of government created as a brake on executive and legislative authority, and would be wise to direct their protests against certain curtailments of their liberty at the offensive laws themselves, rather than at the institutions guaranteeing their right to do so.

Now it's my turn. Let's say a well-known and respected, white, outright owner of a quarter-million-dollar property who knows all the right people is on trial for an offense that is a slam-dunk conviction with prison time for thousands every year, but he has every reason to expect an acquittal because everybody knows he is just not one of those people whom everybody knows the law was designed to punish. When not dressed up on Halloween as a knight tilting at racism and the obstuction of true love, when nullification is merely another word for "enforce this law against someone else, please, we're middle-class," and when it is crystal clear that nobody is interested in bucking the system, just gaming it, in short, when the scenario resembles reality, is "saving this guy right now" nearly as attractive a choice?

Great answer. I like it.

More on jury nullification

Here is more wisdom from King of Soup regarding the folly of jury nullification. I like the way this guy thinks.

Jury nullification may be a form of civil disobedience. But I think it's almost always the wrong one.

Consider: the purpose of civil disobedience is to remove in the public mind the justification for a law by showing that ordinary decent people will violate it, not for personal gain or satisfaction, but simply because it is an unjust law. As WhyNot pointed out, the only moral force it has comes from the willing acceptance of punishment for the transgression -- a reassurance that they believe in the rule of law, and a testament to the seriousness of their intent. It's about forcing abuse of authority into the open by making it apply, publicly, to "people like us," no matter which "us" is yours.

Jury nullification, on the other hand, is an expression of contempt not for any unjust law, but for the rule of law itself. The only thing broken is the faith that a jury can be trusted to find, without fear nor favor, according to the facts and the letter of the law. However much one deplores a particular law or loves a particular defendant or hates the way a prosecutor wears her hair, this faith is not the part of the system that needs to be undermined. In fact, it's the part that needs to be preserved, at all costs, if you care about a free society.

Here's a guy who broke the law in furtherance of his own personal satisfaction, if not profit. Jury nullification in his case would not be a repudiation of the law, just of the idea that we're all equal under it, and it would decrease the chances that the law will ever be changed. The pleading on his behalf is hypocritical and shameful.

Arguing against jury nullification

Jury nullification is the process in which the jury in a criminal case effectively nullifies a law by acquitting a defendant regardless of the weight of evidence against him or her. It's what jurors sometimes do when they disagree with a law. For example, if they disagree with anti-drug laws, they may decide to acquit a defendant who's charge with possession of cocaine, even when the evidence is overwhelmingly against that person.

Some people applaud this as a way to stand up for what they consider to be right. Personally, I think it's misguided.

For one thing, jurors often don't have the background or training necessary to understand why certain laws are in place. Now, I'm not saying that there are no dumb laws out there. There certainly are. However, it's all to easy for a juror to dismiss a law as being dumb without understanding its rationale.

Additionally, I'm also concerned that jurors will effectively nullify a law, not because it's unjust, but because of emotional appeals or self-interest. Again, consider the anti-drug laws. One could "protest" these laws through jury nullification out of some principled argument. However, I'd wager that such protests typically occur due to sheer distaste toward the laws rather than out of principled objections.

Finally, is this really an effective way to protest? I think not; quite the contrary; it undermines the entire legal system. I like the way a fella by the name of "King of Soup" put it on one discussion board. In a thread on a marijuana possession case, he said,

Actually, I was thinking of this case as an almost perfect argument against jury nullification, especially if you think the law is unjust. People will not act to change unwise or unjust laws that are enforced only or mostly against others whom they don't know. Letting all the "right kind" of people off the hook doesn't make for a just outcome, it makes everything worse, because now you're applying the same bad law selectively, piling discrimination on top of everything else.

I'll say more about that later.

Dwelling on the positive

I was going to post something about how my jerkish cousins used to torment my brother and me when we were kids... and how the adults in our extended family pretty much stood by and did nothing. I also wanted to talk about how some of the adults would poke fun at us, make up stories, and otherwise act in an inconsiderate manner.

Yeah, I don't consider my childhood to be particularly happy.

I decided against discussing this at length, though. I want to dwell on the positive right now and avoid thinking too much about past hurts.

BTW, please don't get me wrong. I realize that in many ways, I was fortunate as a child. My family was intact, for one thing, and we weren't living in abject poverty. I do have a lot of unpleasant memories though, and there's a lot of hurt bubbling underneath. I'm just choosing not to dwell on such matters right now. I think that's just prudent.

Tony Orlando and Dawn

I picked up a deeply discounted DVD set of old "Tony Orlando and Dawn" variety show episodes at Best Buy. I had faint memories of the early episodes from my childhood, and so I decided to check it out.

Boy, those people are talented! They had a lot more hits than I realized, and they were darned good all-around performers. Okay, dancing wasn't part of their retinue, but they were excellent vocalists and they were great at hosting a show. They also had real comedic chops, and Tony was great at interacting with the audience.

Yeah, that was quality stuff.

Birds of Prey

I decided to borrow the Birds of Prey DVD series from Netflix. I heard that a lot of geeks liked it, so I decided to see what the buzz was all about.

I've only caught the pilot so far, plus a bit of the next episode. So far, I don't see what the big deal is. Don't get me wrong; it's okay, and the concept is certainly interesting. It just doesn't grab me, though.

Yeah, yeah. I know. I know that I need to give it more time.

Perhaps part of my problems is that two of the main characters have these superpowers. I think it kinda violates the original Birds of Prey comic book concept, and in my judgment, it makes the whole premise less interesting. That's just my view, though.

I'm feeling very irritable lately

I hate this. I feel like I've really been on edge as of late. Little things that shouldn't annoy me too much have been making me grit my teeth and (privately) yell out in irritation.

I've got way too much stress in my life. Too many urgent projects, too many annoying people, too little chance for diversion. Even some of the diversions that I am pursuing, such as some dance lessons, have a way of adding to the stress in their own way. Ugh.

I have got to unlax a little bit. Gotta kick back. I think I'll try to do that this weekend.

Blogger responds so slowly

Darn it. Blogger has been really sluggish today. I've had problems with its sluggishness in times past, but it appears to be particularly bad right now.

I clicked on the "new post" button, and what happened? Nothing. At least, not for about 20 seconds or so. I found myself clicking and clicking, over and over. It was darned irritating.

To make matters worse, my post was junked. Blogger gave me some bogus message about how more that one browser was editing the post. This was a serious bug, obviously. Darn it.

By itself, this shouldn't be a huge aggravation. I have a lot of stress in my life right now though, so it's darned annoying.

Have to rant against Windows yet again

Okay, I know that I've talked about this repeated, but... I HATE MICROSOFT WINDOWS!!!! I especially hate Vista.

It is SO infuriating to start Windows up and have to wait a minute or so before you can start up Outlook or some other vital program. This isn't just a matter of having an older computer, mind you. The problem exists even on newer models.

And heck, even when you do start a program up, you might see it freezing repeatedly before it can do anything useful. I hate having to start Outlook, starting to compose a message, and then finding that the software keeps freezing while you're in the middle of typing a word.

And why does this happen? Because Windows is bloatware. It contains so much gee-whiz fluff that vital performance is slowed down dramatically. And why? Because Windows designers put way too much performance on kewlness, that's why.

Darn it.

My right ankle hurts

My right ankle hurts a little today. I sprained it many years ago, back in my high school days. Ever since then, I've never had complete flexibility in this joint.

I think this also makes it difficult for me to maintain my balance during stretching exercise and certain kickboxing moves. I wish things were different, as I'd really like to get better at this sort of thing. Darn it.

So what's the deal? Did the ligaments somehow grow too bulky?