A wooden boat exquisitely crafted to look like a Ferrari. Dang. Video here.

My favorite sport is back, and this time the season started waaaaay early. Possibly bad (according to some) for democracy, but fun for me.

Not a sport, you say? Wrong! It has winners and losers, big salaries and bigger egos, players and fans. And, as with all sports, when the dust settles and the winner is declared, we can all hold hands and be friends again. Because regardless of who wins or who loses, it doesn’t change anything in real life. (Unless you have the misfortune of living in a foreign country our new president decides to invade. You should try to live here. Much safer. And very popular. You want to? Too bad! Nobody can come here without our permission! Unless you sneak across the border or something. But that never works.)

Presidential candidates are an interesting breed. They’re too intelligent and ambitious to be happy with a normal life, they’re too hungry for public attention to make it rich in business, and they’re not talented enough to make it on American Idol.

Well, I finished the book I mentioned in a previous post, Jurismania, by Paul F. Campos. The biggest flaw of the book is that the author, though trying very hard to write for a popular audience, constantly devolves into obtuse academic-speak whenever he gets down to the heart of an issue. Countless sentences are choked to death on fish bones like “incommensurability”. I still need to look that one up.

Still, once I’d brought my reading up to a 36th grade level, I found the book was very insightful, and very disturbing.

The author pointed out that unlike most other cultures, American culture is wrapped up in its system of government. Our system of government is to us what cheese, wine, and laziness are to the French. (Ok, I added laziness. Je suis tres desole.)

If I had to condense the entire book (not really possible) into a single idea, it would be this:

Americans cling to the illusion that rational thinking can produce correct answers to questions involving values. It’s not to say that Truth or Right Answers don’t actually exist, but that people cannot reach agreement (ie., consensus) on these things through rational thought and discussion.

Instead of accepting this, we hold on to the illusion that the Law, via the decisions of judges who interpret it, can provide answers and decisions that are superior, and more rational, than those made by other people or institutions. The effect of this is that our legal system is ridiculously complicated, time-consuming, and expensive, and worse, that its tentacles reach into every part of life.

I think this delusion is one of the reasons we, as a society, have allowed the Judicial branch of our government to take upon itself the authority to make moral decisions for our country, decisions which should be made by our elected representatives. It comforts us to think that there is a small, elite group of highly-educated, highly-moral people, who are above the corruption of politics, who can make these difficult decisions rationally and rightly. But there is nothing that makes judges, even Supreme Court judges, more capable of making these decisions. They are still human.

We are, case by case, ruling by ruling, returning to the rule of kings, and doing it with smiles on our faces.

Link

If you’ve ever wondered about the relationship between radio waves, the color yellow, and Depends Undergarments ™, this diagram is for you, courtesy of XKCD.