Advanced Legal Navel Gazing

Adam Richard Tanielian

LLD

Advanced Legal Navel Gazing 1

About the Author 2

About this Research 5

Anticompetitive and Monopolistic Practices in the Marketplace of Ideas 8

Miniature Camels & Jumbo Eyes of Needles 11

They only ask that you perform miracles 17

Blank Check Imbalances 26

It is what it is. But what is it? 31

Trans-dimensional Slip-through 36

Pac-Man World 41

Superposition 48
 About the Author
Trevor Noah was born a crime by letter of the law in the jurisdiction of his birth. So was I,
technically, or at least born of crime. The Penal Code of the State of Michigan, Chapter V,
sections 750.29–32 proscribe adultery as a felony o ense. Hence, I was born to two felons,
one a multimillionaire patent attorney and the other a legal secretary. Obviously, this is one of
those laws that is still on record but has been de facto repealed, but how would a normal
person know which laws are still valid and which are not if the state does not repeal laws that
are no longer actually laws? And why would a legislature that prides itself as an institution
supportive of the rule of law knowingly keep a law on its record that it knows will not, and
maybe should not, be enforced? Why would an executive not take action to repeal laws in
e orts to ensure police and prosecutors do not embarrass themselves by enforcing a written
law that is de facto repealed? Why would judges not mandate all such laws be literally
repealed, or why would judicial o cials not make e orts to persuade the legislative branch to
rid the statutory registry of erroneous or archaic laws? Does the laissez faire, nonchalant,
casual de facto methodology not jeopardize at least some legitimacy or persuasive capacity of
all three branches of government before the citizenry?

Pay two lawyers enough money and they will argue either side of any argument until the day
they die. Whether their arguments are grounded in reality, or whether their argument helps or
harms society, or whether their arguments are supported or directly contradicted by known
facts, hardly matters so long as they are paid handily. This is legal wacky land, a cartoonish
caricature of what sage philosophers probably imagined when they re ected upon
Hammurabi’s compilation of codes, or Confucius’ teachings, or Locke’s rhetoric, or other
sources foundational to the institutions of law. I came from this absurdly contradictory
fantasyland where truth is that only after a judge or jury’s decision; where right and wrong are
just matters of perception; where law, ethics, and morality are con ated with each other to the
extent that extremely few people comprehend that an act could be legal yet immoral or vice
versa; where people may be experts in physical sciences but still subscribe to notions of
socially-constructed, human-centered realities; where something can be true and not true at
the same time because the boundaries of fact and ction had eroded for so long that people
are more likely to believe each individual has their own subjective truth rather than there
existing a singular objective truth.

In one of my earlier scholarly works, I made lengthy references to logical paradoxes or

limitations of humans’ capacity to discern truth aside from limited laboratory environments
unique to hard sciences like physics or chemistry. I mentioned Popper’s falsi ability principle,
Goedel’s incompleteness theorem, and Tarski’s unde nability theorem in the mythology section
of my thesis for my Masters in Business Administration at the Institute of International Studies
at Ramkhamhaeng University in Bangkok, Thailand. I am quite familiar and comfortable with
the idea that objectivity is elusive, and sometimes virtually impossible to ensure. “There are
lies, damned lies, and statistics” - a quote attributed to a list of British Lords, sheds light on
how data can be interpreted and manipulated to achieve rather di erent results. Several
industry experts and scholars have pointed out how Hu ’s How to Lie with Statistics book was
used as a tool to defeat 1990s e orts at achieving universal national healthcare in the United
States. Using rates instead of totals, means instead of medians, parametric instead of
nonparametric statistics, among other techniques, can turn data from foe to friend in virtually
any business or political undertaking. And if scienti c ethics are completely scrapped, the
possibilities are endless if reporters may select, exclude, or manipulate their data. In this way,
there are alternative facts.

Given our apparent collective cultural descent into pseudo-solipsism, one should not be so
shocked and amazed that people believe in utter codswallop. The phenomena of snake oil
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 salesmen, two-faced glad-handing politicians, charlatan preachers, or greasy used car
salesmen are ubiquitous. On another hand, humans are social animals, and throughout our
species’ history those communal relationships have been fundamental to survival, so our
genes compel us to trust others. Unfortunately, people abuse others’ trust, which gradually
erodes the bonds that hold civilizations together. For example, my father was a trustee of the
legal system, yet he committed adultery (a felony, mind you) and therein damaged the dignity
of the legal system. He then withheld child support from my mother, and later coerced her to
abort a second fetus under threat of nonpayment of child support (this time a felony most
certainly not de facto repealed). In doing so, my mother’s trust in various individuals as well as
our legal system, was demolished.

What little trust I had in our legal system was mostly sniped and decommissioned between the
ages of 12 and 25. It took me a while to understand and process what had happened with my
mother, regarding her victimhood before a powerful attorney, against the backdrop of an
incompetent or disinterested public regulatory authority which not only failed to prevent my
father’s felonious assault on our potentially happy home, but thereafter failed to compel him to
make nancial restitution. Whereas in many civilized jurisdictions around the world, my father
would have lost his license to practice law, and my mother would have been awarded tidy
sums of money, in Michigan in the United States of America, instead my mother lived most of
her adult life just above the poverty line while working two jobs, and later lost her house to
foreclosure while my father went on to sue Microsoft and win some $140 million. Following his
death, my half siblings received handsome payouts whereas I was omitted from both the
obituary and will, and since we are not French, that matter is entirely incontestable.

The proverbial nail in the co n of my blind faith in the system of law or government came
shortly after my rst bachelor’s degree at Michigan Tech. As if the truth rained down like manna
from heaven, upon my head befell the horrible realities of what my mother had endured, and
how her experiences with my father shaped my life, particularly with regard to our nancial
position. Simultaneously, I had the unique experience of helping get a police o cer red for
criminal sexual conduct, but the fact that he was not arrested and tried almost made matters
worse. Concurrently, I took it upon myself to act as an agent of change at my college fraternity
house, where I threatened to make the long and egregious tradition of initiation hazing a matter
of public record. These seemingly independent plot lines converged in early 2003, prompting
me to make several personal and professional changes of strategy.

In The White Stripes’ Bone Broke, Jack White sang “Your mother put her money into platinum,
so you never have to pay attention.” I took that as referring to platinum records, in which my
mother most certainly invested plenty of time and energy. As a result of a very musical
upbringing, I learned I can ignore a lot of what the straights in this world would have me think,
say, and do. There are a lot of very successful, well-adjusted, intelligent people making
American music who have rarely if ever kowtowed to the world of military brass, soapbox
stu ed shirts, or at-footed bullies on street beats. All my rock and roll heroes of the 60s
through 90s thumbed their noses in the direction of every illegitimate authority available, had
fun while doing it, and mostly did not die in the process. So, after my snafu with all the criminal
lawyers, police, doctor-professors and others malefactors on my way out of Michigan Tech, like
George Thorogood said in One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer, “out the door I went”.

Between 2005 and 2022, I spent 17 years in Thailand, China, and Saudi Arabia teaching
English, math, and science to students aged 2–20. After returning to Thailand from China in
early 2007, I met my wife, a woman from the Karen hill tribe on the northwestern border with
Myanmar. Her father had walked into Thailand from Myanmar some time in the 70s in pursuit of
greater freedom and opportunity, much in the same way her maternal grandfather had walked
from Cambodia a generation prior. My wife’s family hardly deals with cash, but their
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 subsistence lifestyles under King Rama IX’s projects provide them with better standards of
living than the working poor in urban areas worldwide. I learned Thai pretty well, but my Karen
is very minimal, so my in-laws and I do not share much vocabulary. Despite our cultural, ethnic,
linguistic, national and other di erences, these people show more love and respect for me than
anybody I have ever known. They are materially impoverished, but they have shared a wealth
of kindness, humility, wisdom, and hospitality that few people in this world would care to o er.
Had I not taken my precise path through life, it is extremely unlikely I would have met my wife
and her people, and so despite my complaints and criticisms, my failings and shortcomings, I
feel everything is exactly how it should be to enlighten and uplift my mind, body, and spirit.

For many years I have observed that every country is the greatest country in the world to
people in that country. This is our tribalist genetic makeup. Humans had to gather together, live
in tribes and cooperate to survive. Primitive humans had to nd and procure food, build shelter
to fend against the elements, and actively defend themselves against both animal predators
and rival tribes. Within a tribe, people share knowledge and wisdom, and each new generation
builds upon the works of all who came before. In our modern world, the tribalist genome or
psychological predisposition is still present, but the entire living environment for humans has
changed. With rare exception, people are embedded and integrated into global economies.
Sources of materials, means of production, and channels of distribution span the globe. Yet still
we perceive ourselves as members of discrete identity groups beneath the veil of the human
species or world population.

In the Thai language, the name of their country translates to “free land”. I know many
Americans would laugh at this idea, and I am fairly certain there are patriots in every country
who could nd many reasons why Thais in Thailand are not free, whereas people in their
respective home countries are free. I too have found reasons why and how Thailand is not free,
at least not in the same ways I have found other countries, including my homeland, which are
freer in some regards. But there are many hands upon which to consider these types of claims.
On another hand, Thais are not bound to debt bondage nor under the dominion of credit
agencies like Americans. King Rama IX’s work with the rural poor ensured land use rights, low-
interest loans, and minimal government interference with the working class. Small businesses
in Thailand are not as heavily regulated as those in the United States. Sole proprietors may
operate businesses without licenses, providing opportunities for hundreds of thousands if not
millions of food and consumer goods sellers to set up shop on sidewalks and other public
spaces. These limited regulations drive down the cost of goods, so people with meager
incomes can a ord their basic needs. Land ownership and development are restricted to Thai
nationals and enterprises, which has been successful as a means of keeping housing
a ordable for the poor and middle classes. The Thai legal system is not nearly as litigious
because there are higher burdens of proof, particularly for civil suits, which restricts the number
of cases that can appear on a docket. These practical advantages exist contemporaneously
with strict lese majeste laws and a military junta that has wrested control of the Parliament for
near the entirety of the country’s time as a Constitutional Monarchy.

Unless the Thai Immigration Act is seriously amended, it is basically impossible for me to
acquire a second passport. My wife, on the other hand, is likely to be a dual citizen within a few
years. This double-standard is an example of (a) the fact that the United States has the world’s
most liberal immigration laws, naturalizing far more citizens than most other countries
combined, and (b) most countries in the world are ethno-states whose populations are largely
homogenous, or if genetic variation exists, it is far more limited than that in the Western
European and North American continents. Notwithstanding the legal boundaries that prevent
my acquisition of Thai nationality without relinquishing my American citizenship, my identity is
constantly blending and integrating. I feel Thailand is my home. Likewise, my extended stay in
Saudi Arabia left me feeling fond a nity for my Saudi and other Muslim brothers and sisters.
Living as a racial, linguistic, and cultural minority in foreign countries over many years has likely
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 changed the structure of my brain, and these changes are exhibited in my identity, or the way I
think. As such, I have found English is sometimes imprecise in describing certain ideas or
feelings that people elsewhere around the world think and feel. Moreover, the connotations and
exact meaning I intend to confer while using my native English language is sometimes
misunderstood by people who do not understand where I am coming from, where I have been,
and where I intend to go with these lines of reasoning.

While living abroad, I found private civilians could generally not care less about what I had to
say, but foreign governments could swiftly move to punish and deport me if I commented
about speci c personnel, policies, or institutions. In some regards, I preferred this approach
because it was transparent; I knew the banned topics, and so long as I did not discuss those in
certain company or media, there were no concerns nor threats to my occupation or place in
those societies. Back in the USA, the situation is quite the opposite: the government will not
arrest or signi cantly interfere with me for words. Oh, there will be negative consequences for
words, but they will be in the private sector. I understand this right to free speech is
controversial, but people fought for these freedoms; some lost face, friends and jobs while
others lost lives under the banner of the American constitution. As such, I nd it ironic and
inappropriate to take action against people over words else that action is only words; that is,
actions speak louder than words. Words should be met with words, and actions with actions.

About this Research

“Navel gazing” is de ned as useless or excessive self-contemplation. Though its origins are
Ancient Greek, Merriam-Webster cited 1959 as its rst use with the current meaning:
synonymous with egocentrism, self-absorption, self-preoccupation, or self-centeredness.
Pragmatic uses drift from semantic de nitions as “navel-gazing” can be used to criticize a wide
range of philosophical assessments, or meta-cognitive inquiries, or dissident thoughts uttered
not in support of economic, political, or other social status quo. The English term emerged in
the late-50s as the colonial period nally came to a close, with former colonies around the
world ghting for self-determination and independence from foreign social, economic, cultural,
religious and political control. It is almost certainly not a coincidence that just prior to “navel-
gazing” coming of use with a severely negative connotation, Britain ceded control of the Indian
subcontinent, and therefore lost untold billions of Pounds Sterling in national wealth.

Indian yogis and, moreover, Eastern mystics have for millennia been famous for their meditative
practices and transcendental philosophies arising out of this other variety of navel-gazing in
which, apparently, Greeks had engaged. Other similar war-era terms exist in English, and surely
virtually every other language has such lexicon whose purpose is to belittle and brand
competitors in political, economic, or militaristic endeavors. If somebody is just “whistling
Dixie”, they are not to be taken seriously; they are a joke for the mere act of whistling a tune.
Brits still call American “yanks”, an abbreviated an pejorative form of Yankee, presumably to
stigmatize people free of colonial oppression and domain of monarchs. Similarly, one who
ponti cates is one whose truisms are but chestnuts or platitudes, not worthy of serious
consideration, nor do such ideas have any practical value. But the word is merely a verb
relating to the Ponti , or the Pope, which implies the negative connotation applied to
“ponti cating” is or was historically to ridicule and ostracize Catholics, or possibly Christians.

This work is the follow-up to Exercises in Legal Navel Gazing. The rst part of the series
focused on historical causes and cultural trends leading to our current legal environment,
which the author considers increasingly cartoonish at scale. The current piece of writing turns
toward the instant questions of how bad things actually are with regard to the capacity of the
law to provide the slightest relief to ordinary citizens. Like the rst part of the Navel Gazing
series, this Advanced edition incorporates cultural references from music, lm, and popular
culture that re ect and, in some roundabout way, create our shared experiences. However, this
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 Advanced Legal Navel Gazing tutorial relies more heavily on academic sources. This Advanced
pamphlet approaches many legal issues from a meta-perspective; that is, philosophical
archetypes and hierarchal structures of power are brought into focus through discussion of (1)
what quali es a truth-claim, (2) how perceptions of fact and opinion vary in pluralistic and
heterogeneous populations, and (3) how empirical outcomes are shaped by legal traditions
alongside economic, cultural, religious, linguistic, and other social-psychological factors
endogenous and exogenous to discrete individuals and groups. As such, the degree of “navel-
gazing” increases signi cantly as compared to the rst booklet in the series.

To maintain some credibility as a work of legal scholarship, this report makes references to
speci c cases, laws, treaties and customs. The crux of the thesis, however, is that law has
become something of a relic in the modern world. That is not to say law is invalid; on the
contrary, agents of the state have coercive powers at their disposal to enforce their will upon
others. Citizens are obliged to comply with laws else they may su er very serious
consequences, and to that end, civilians are best advised to learn, understand, and obey the
law. But there is su cient evidence that civilians would not be wise to place their trust and faith
in law as institutions and mechanisms that create and establish truth, justice, and freedom.
Whereas incoming students at law colleges, like patriots and politicians on campaign trails,
hold grand visions of the law as some noble moral and ethical philosophy, the practical
outcomes in criminal, civil, and international law show results may vary.

To be sure, the world is a better place with, rather than without, systems of laws. Civil and
criminal laws protect, serve, and empower individuals and entities every day. If “necessity is
the mother of invention”, humans created and maintain their legal systems because they
provide a necessary service for civilizations. Suggesting abolition of laws or anarchy would be
foolish. On another hand, we live in a world cluttered with billions of words of statutory and
regulatory language, with intersecting and overlapping authorities, with competing jurisdictions,
where there is signi cant divergence of judicial opinion both within and between sovereign
states. There are winners and losers in every case, and the path to victory is rarely so simple
and straightforward as merely holding or presenting greater or more truth or facts than the
opposition. Legal processes have always favored wealth over poverty, the aristocracy over the
peasantry, and power over servitude. Democracies are a step away from our collective
historical ternary and tripartite epochs, but the democratic process is still stained by
corruption, lobbying, campaign nancing, and unshakable bonds to capital. Whereas truth,
justice, freedom and other such ideals are intangible, the material world generally values
tangible wealth, property, and to the extent that intangibles are valued they usually take the
form of soft-in uence, economic clout, power and proximity thereto.

Scholars at the Ludwig von Moses school of economics claim that market order presupposes
legal order. Advanced Legal Navel Gazing questions which market, at what scale, in what
discrete locations, and among which participants can be said to function orderly? There is
robust evidence that markets are not functioning e ciently or e ectively for the majority of
people, though we must accept that markets are performing very well for a small cache of elite
investors. Failings in the market normal people encounter suggest legal disorder, and not
coincidentally, there is abundant evidence of disorder in legal systems. This composition will
illustrate extensively in short form how breakdowns and structural aws in our formal systems
have stalled progress, emboldened opposition to reform, entrenched a lethargic status quo,
and otherwise kept ordinary people from achieving higher net worths and qualities of life. The
author noticed a pronounced theme in the course of research leading up to this essay - that
laws both actively obstruct social, economic, and cultural freedoms and provide insu cient
recourse or relief for ordinary people who experience hardship.

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Whereas our mutually-shared legal reality is one of mixed results - at best, reactive justice for
those who can a ord it or those in just the right place at the right time; at worst, a surreal,
Kafka-esque nightmare stranger than ction - this piece ows in the direction of making
lemonade out of lemons. That is to say, things may be about as bad as they could possibly be,
and there may be very little reason to believe signi cant change can occur any time soon, but
the raw materials of excellence are always at hand. Humans have the unique capacity to
reason independently, and that free will imbues our societies with collective potential which can
be turned into action. Whether democratic or other forms of government will prove remarkably
useful in assisting private civilians in their pursuit of life, liberty, property and freedom is
unknown, but it is possible regardless of probabilities. In sum, fatalism and hopeless
negativism are not in the set of objectives framing the intent of the following dissent, sarcasm,
satire, cynicism, and otherwise nonconformist take on the law from the bottom-up or top-
down; rather, the aim is to make light of di cult situations, to shed light in the darkness, to
shine on fellow heterodox academics, and move a mountain with but a mustard seed of faith.

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 Anticompetitive and Monopolistic Practices in the Marketplace of
Ideas
Glenn Loury & John McWhorter call themselves “the black guys” in their podcast. They o er
lucid, intelligent counterpoints to the contemporary mainstream media deluge that rarely
diverges from the “one-true opinion” as Bill Maher calls it. John and Glenn steel-man
arguments, trying to rationalize and validate arguments they hear and read, but they always
seem to nd several reasons why something is missing from or contradictory within the
narrative. They take some criticism for their nonconformist views, but having established their
personal brands as public intellectuals, they are not deterred from their course of thinking just
because they experience pushback and peer-pressure to recant, repent, and convert to what
John labeled the “woke religion”. In mid-2022, they hosted a couple shows at the Comedy
Cellar, as if to say they know dissent and creative heterodox thought in today’s academic and
political environment will amount to little more than cannon fodder for the mainstream Left-
leaning culture. The irony of their ideas being taboo was not lost on them.

We live in an English-speaking academic world where “personal truths” and standpoint

epistemologies substitute for objectivity of classical empiricism. Anecdotal evidence has
become the gold-standard in several academic disciplines, most notably blank-studies in
colleges of humanities and liberal arts. Academies employ and house niche segments of the
population within which two in three do not complete tertiary education, but this highly-
educated minority wields disproportionate economic power as compared to the lesser-
educated classes who represent the democratic majority. In recent decades, statisticians have
discovered a Leftward political shift among university professors who were already
overwhelmingly left-leaning. This trend cycled through universities, into the corporate world
and broader society in the rst decades following launch of social media and mobile devices.
Culture wars sprung up, led by a class of technocrats and plutocrats educated at elite
universities and groomed for lives of power and in uence among the managerial ranks. The
opposition to “progressive” or “liberal” or “Leftist” campaigns mainly comprised of working
class, lesser-educated people and their political representatives. We live in a time of remote
cultural in uencers who lead identity groups to argue over whose opinion shall reign supreme,
but in the midst of the curfu e many of the furfural warriors have lost their ability to distinguish
fact from opinion. Many academics have led this movement away from traditional objectivity
with their radical methodologies.

Semantic drift is a natural consequence of aggressive marketing of ideas where competitors

employ unscrupulous tactics in their idle pursuits of monopoly, power, and capital positions.
Michael Jackson’s Bad turned the default meaning of the word on its head in much the same
way as jazz and bebop musicians called things “crazy” as a compliment. These colloquial and
slang semantics are understandable and innocuous, especially in speci c contexts. Such is not
the case when national health care is con ated with Venezuelan dictatorships or Soviet-era
famine, nor when the word “communism” and “socialism” are robbed of any essence of their
default economic meaning and relegated to ad hominem attacks against persons uttering
political speech in favor of government spending in a similar fashion to America’s closest allies
like Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Ireland. The order of scienti c proof
upon evidence, from conjecture to hypothesis, theory to law is annihilated when perception
supplants reality. Hence, we consistently encounter the term “conspiracy theory” when it
should more appropriately be called a conspiracy conjecture, or simply ction.

In an online marketplace where regulation is light, di cult to enforce, and fragmented across
an entire planet, there exist simultaneously disincentives to engage in bona de stewardship
and incentives to conduct operations mala des. Few would argue social media is anything but
rife with disinformation and misinformation that, despite their sometimes obvious nature, still
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captivate audiences desperate for a lifeline in turbulent social, political, and economic times.
The relative consensus that we live among milieu of falsehoods and scams ipso facto signi es
a very serious breakdown in authority, controls, and checks on wanton reckless power-
mongering. The least charitable interpretation of words is par for the course. Any action that is
legal, or can be successfully defended against legal challenge, is justi able in idle pursuits of
capital, power, and in uence. Ethics and morals are for children, or those too naive or stupid to
play the game to win. Cheaters prosper. Crime pays. Suckers play honestly by the rules. These
are the messages implicit and explicit in an online marketplace of ideas whose suppliers
singlemindedly pursue power, status, capital, clicks, likes, and public exposure.

Foucault and other prominent philosophers have, at least since the 1960s, led a cultural
revolution in Western academic thought. Their postmodern social-constructivist movement has
been a resurgent theme in recent third-wave civil rights activism. Whereas ideas of absolute
relativism and standpoint epistemologies were historically found exclusively in academic
institutions, art houses, and co ee shops, the campaign has found new frontiers in mainstream
media, corporate human resources departments, and emergent political factions. Whether
ironic or hypocritical, advocates of Left-reactionary ideologies have disregarded robust
disagreement within the ranks of identity groups they purportedly seek to uplift and platform.
Black scholars like Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, and John McWhorter, just
to name a few, are largely excluded from discussion on matters of race because their views do
not align precisely with the status quo in the still primarily white liberal academy. Members of
the LBGT+ community like Andrew Sullivan and Milo Yianopolous are mocked and ridiculed by
cisgender heterosexuals who act as pundits on all things diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Discrete political and other identity groups have surely established and maintained social and
economic power in this persistent transition away from ontologies and epistemologies relying
on concrete, empirical, observable, objective reality, but it has come at the cost of
methodological consistency, and to hear some tell it, validity.

For decades, liberals have mocked conservatives for their willful ignorance of morality and
common decency when members of their team transgress against traditional deontological
ethics. Then, as if to say “hold my beer” to their rivals, twenty- rst century liberals apply
similarly fragmented, inconsistent reasoning on matters relating to sacred cows of race,
gender, and identity. Whereas transgender persons represent statistical outliers in terms of
percent representation in the population, their issues have been at the forefront of liberal
political and social engineering to an outsized extent. Biologists and medical doctors have not
infrequently distinguished between “sex” and “gender”, but the terms are most often con ated
and used interchangeably in the culture, as if to say science is trite. Scientists have been static
their understanding of the physical form versus the mental or spiritual interpretations within the
human species. Only a rare and hilarious few would posit claims that cats and elephants
choose their own gender or sex, or that the meaning of any word is completely a matter of
individual preference, but when asked “what is a woman?”, or “can males become pregnant?”,
the reactionary-Left has gone to extremes. Whereas it is a given that females and males in
every other species are distinguished by gametes and speci c physical characteristics relating
to sexual reproduction, the nouveau chic intelligentsia has demanded that in the human
species, these labels are merely a matter of social construction and intrapersonal perception.
Hence, neither can a doctor nor parent truly know if the newborn baby is a boy or girl, or male
or female; that is up to the child as he/she/they/pronoun-x to decide.

“Mass formation” or “mass formation psychosis” is characterized by a rigid in-grouping/out-

grouping of populations as they are in uenced remotely by mass media. A con uence of forces
in the marketplace of ideas yields a dominant brand which is promoted and elevated to
superior status across multiple digital and organic platforms. Those who subscribe to the
mainstream narrative are rewarded with power, in uence, and a sense of noble moral dignity. In
return, advocates of the hegemonic position of a preferred brand are obligated to defend the
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value of the brand against competitors, and therein proponents of the dominant brand help
ensure its legacy and lifeline in what could otherwise be a competitive marketplace of ideas.

Mass formation psychosis is present when transgenderism is normalized to the extent that it is
uncouth or taboo to question whether it should be legal to give children puberty blockers or
other medical interventions a rming their perceived gender identity. Whereas only a few brave
academics and assorted other intellectual masochists dare or enjoy arguing about the clap
traps of the instant era, there are several remarkable intersecting plot lines around these issues
that give insight into the deeper disorder at scale in cultures who are just learning to engage
remotely through communications technologies. For example, when Rachel Dolezol was
ousted from the ACLU after it was discovered she was not “black” per se but only identi ed as
such, she became a laughing stock. Meanwhile, those who mocked her may have listened to
Eminem who proudly and without signi cant controversy claimed “I am black” in his music.
And while evolutionary biologists (and self-proclaimed liberals) Heather Heying and Bret
Weinstein have repeatedly discussed how sex is a mostly rigid, dichotomous, objectively
observable characteristic in both animals and plants, whereas race is more uid and socially
constructed, trans-racialism in the sense that both Eminem and Rachel Dolezol postured is not
accepted as a real thing. However, when Eminem pro ered his claim, he was heralded as a
genius and rose only to higher heights of superstardom, compared to Rachel Dolezol’s
plummet to the furthest depths of social ostracism. At the same time, if a male thinks himself a
female, activists demand everybody comply and change their internal perceptions, or at least
outward projections via pronouns and naming. In Canada, there have even been legal
repercussions for persons failing to comply with demands of transgender persons. Needless to
say, this is rather confusing.

Levels and tiers of philosophical reasoning paint picture of monopoly even in instances of
duopoly or apparent competitors as there is status quo in markets, players cooperate to set
ground rules, and disruptive innovators barely gain a foothold in mature markets deeply
entrenched in tradition and foundational assumptions. Porter’s Five Forces model may hold
true for a select tier of power players, but there is scarcely bargaining power among consumers
of general goods and services, nor that of suppliers in labor markets. Threats of new entrants
into the market are dampened by natural and arti cial barriers to entry in a market of legacy
brands whose liquidity provides them opportunity to buy up and quash even ostensibly rational
opposition. Competition among existing players is also limited to that within the scope of
underlying assumptions and market ine ciencies. If markets were functional, perhaps these
hypotheses could hold, but the days of the vacuum have passed, certainly since Covid.

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 Miniature Camels & Jumbo Eyes of Needles
“Money talks” - AC/DC, Money Talks

“For the love of money

People will steal from their mother

For the love of money

People will rob their own brother

For the love of money

People can't even walk the street

Because they never know who in the world they're gonna beat

For that lean, mean, mean green

Almighty dollar, money

For the love of money

People will lie, Lord, they will cheat

For the love of money

People don't care who they hurt or beat

For the love of money

A woman will sell her precious body

For a small piece of paper it carries a lot of weight

Call it lean, mean, mean green” - The O’Jays, For the Love of Money

Alexis de Tocqueville said,

“If I were asked where I place the American aristocracy, I should reply without hesitation
that it is not among the rich, who are united by no common tie, but that it occupies the
judicial bench and the bar.”

The American aristocracy’s sordid past lingers like odor some nd impossible to ignore, from
the repugnant decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford to tossing out convictions of white men for
racial violence in United States v. Cruikshank, and the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson judicial
support for segregation. Justices sided with and authored opinions strongly favoring the white
race while purporting to be “blind” to such super cial characteristics. Though said to have
been a reformed Ku Klux Klansman, Justice Black authored the abhorrent Korematsu v. United
States opinion upholding Japanese-American internment during WWII, which coincidentally the
KKK likewise supported. Where a majority was not available for quashing e orts to institute
more adequate justice across the land, regardless of territorial or demographic frontiers, the
dissent often told of entrenched discriminatory philosophies among the aristocracy. For
example, though a majority struck down a Texas state law that attempted to bar any nonwhite
voters from participating in Democratic primary elections, Justice McReynolds contended that
because the Democratic Party was not a government entity per se, it was allowed to decide
the terms of membership, and the law itself “withholds nothing from any negro.” One must
stretch one’s mind to the point that it will have lost all elasticity to make and believe such
statements.

Congress passes few laws, and those it manages to promulgate are almost exclusively funded
and supported by the rich. One result of the strong preference for wealth is the “criminalization
of the poor”. This is not a literal initiative, of course, but sometimes intent is not as relevant as
outcome. Jobless people, for example, have bills to pay, so they may make economic
rationalizations to commit street crimes - narcotics sales most notably - in order to earn
income required to sustain life. Poorer people who live in urban environments and work less
than full time can easily spend more time in public spaces than their wealthier, more adequately
employed, suburban and rural counterparts. Critics of the War on Drugs in the United States
have frequently cited statistics suggesting black and white Americans use and sell drugs at
roughly the same rates, but black citizens account for more arrests and convictions under laws
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 prohibiting possession and sales. Those arguments are not false, per se, but they often neglect
to mention black Americans engage in more public use and sale of narcotics than white
citizens, and they are thusly more likely to be seen, arrested and prosecuted. By comparison,
white citizens may well use and sell drugs at similar rates, but imagining white corner boys is
something of a joke because there are simply so very few. Thus, a trained statistician may likely
nd the higher instance of arrest more reliably as a function of socioeconomic status than race.

Various laws and regulations e ectively criminalize the poor even though citizens of all income
levels are technically subject to the same set of rules and consequences. In many districts,
failure to pay a tra c ticket is a misdemeanor o ense resulting in suspension of the sco aw’s
license. If the o ender continues to drive, they would then commit another misdemeanor,
punishable by up to one year in jail. Speeding is not a crime, but for people who cannot a ord
to pay, a simple civil infraction on the road could escalate to multiple misdemeanors, which
then entail more nes and costs when the individual already established they could not pay.
Homelessness is another prominent example of poverty becoming a criminal o ense.
Everybody needs to sleep, but there are few public spaces available for vagrants. Sleeping in
vacant buildings, or on the sidewalk, or in parks, or even in one’s car in a parking lot, can all be
criminal o enses depending on the jurisdiction and discretion of patrol o cers. In the same
vein, severe mental illness has been criminalized, leading to Los Angeles County Jail becoming
the state’s largest mental institution, according to Rosenberg’s Bedlam.

Who can deny that Eric Garner and George Floyd su ered their untimely and tragic deaths due
to their poverty? Garner would not have been selling loose cigarettes if he had some other
legal source of income. Floyd would not have tried to use a counterfeit $20 if he had other cash
or credit. Similar cases of imprisonment and homicide of poor people show up in batches
across the United States. In Detroit, a gas station clerk shot a man after he stole a $2 bag of
chips from the convenience store. In Alabama, a man spent 36 years in prison for stealing $50
from a bakery. Examples are absurdly common, and while we should advocate lawful behavior
and condemn stealing, we should also recognize there are levels and grades of crime, and
considering how much time white collar criminals serve after stealing orders of magnitude
more money than so many common thieves, we should question hidden or unstated motives
given the divergent results.

Donald Trump is widely known to have sti ed contractors and creditors on paychecks and loan
balances after claiming bankruptcy. The President had been serially bankrupt during his stint
as casino and property speculator. Somehow his personal net worth remained among the top
centile, but his companies sank and lending institutions were stuck with the bill. Obviously,
there are loopholes and protections in the bankruptcy code that allow individuals to essentially
steal millions or hundreds of millions so long as they have expert legal and accounting services
to cover the paper trail. Stealing by way of default on loans will not end a person in jail, but the
same or lower amount if taken by force yields a lifetime of consequences. Are force and fraud
so di erent? Clearly, force is easier to prove when compared to fraud, but frauds yield orders
of magnitude more monetary losses, and given the will of legal agents to make inferences in
other areas of criminal law, it seems reasonable that they could infer malicious intent in various
instances of these soft robberies.

“Whoever appeals to the law against his fellow man is either a fool or a coward.”

Lamb of God, Omerta

Criminal codes emerged from deontologies of ancient religions orders. Over millennia, legal
scholars and moral philosophers have come to understand law and morality as sharing
intersections, but also as having independent and even mutually exclusive parts. Some acts
are malum in se but not malum in jure, and vice versa. A legal conviction does not necessarily
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 prove guilt, nor does absence of a criminal record imply innocence. These erudite impressions
are not commonly understood in populations subject to laws. Civilians often fail to distinguish
between matters purely of law, fact, and morality. As such, crime suspects are often inferred to
be guilty before conviction, and after their debts are paid and they are paroled, they face
private discrimination and further deprivation of rights, as if to say they have been branded
heretics or permanently awed. These lifelong post-sentence penalties y in the face of our
present understanding of how structures of the brain change over time via neuroregenesis; it
even contradicts criminologists’ data on how people age out of crime.

Whereas good, upstanding citizens may quote scripture that “sooner shall a camel pass
through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter into heaven”, they often enough fail to apply
that knowledge in the physical world, particularly in matters of greater social, political, and
economic importance. It is said that God has bestowed favor upon the rich, which is fair
enough - one who is rich is fortunate, and somewhat lucky, so it is not a leap to infer that God
has favored that person. However, both private citizens and the state have consistently applied
fallacious logic by a rming the consequent, denying the antecedent, or falsely attributing
cause. That is to say, if one is rich, then they are in God’s favor; God has not favored those who
are not rich, or those who are poor have done something to make God not favor them; none
could be rich without having gained God’s favor, which implies right-living; if one is rich, they
have earned every bit of it with hard work, thus gaining God’s favor; and, if one is poor, they
have brought it upon themselves by choosing not to work hard to earn God’s favor.

Prison is almost exclusively for the poor. Disproportionately long sentences are delivered to the
poor as compared to the rich, and since race shares a strong association with socioeconomic
status, nonwhite convicts face longer prison sentences than white convicts on average. That is
not to say every individual in each group faces the same outcomes. Again we see that
excessive reliance on statistical averages can result in distorted misunderstandings of
phenomena. To recapitulate and restate the obvious, there are poor whites and wealthy
nonwhites, and those wealthy nonwhites are more likely to receive prosecutorial and judicial
restraint than the poor whites. While this area of legal research is still developing, there are
su cient data available to conclude that the vigorous counsel a orded by persons of higher
socioeconomic status, regardless of race, is probably the single most important factor in
judicial outcomes. In Born A Crime, Trevor Noah discussed South Africa’s apartheid racial
caste system, which included downgrades for certain whites who failed to follow norms. In the
US, if we are to accept the hypothesis that the justice system is racially biased, then we must
also accept that whites can be repositioned into the black caste and vice versa on the basis of
wealth and behavior. This, of course undermines signi cant parts of the systemic racism thesis,
whose advocates will summarily reject that the US is similar to South Africa in this regard, but
their denial does not invalidate the proposition.

Judges consider various factors in delivering sentences, and among the most important is the
probability of recidivism which decreases when defendants have stable jobs, live in
communities where criminal activity is less frequent, and moreover have qualities of life that
would likely deter future criminal behavior. Whereas family, career, and education share
negative correlations with criminal behavior, persons who most frequently engage in criminal
behavior share factors like homelessness, job insecurity, truancy, and poverty. In other words,
crime is often born out of necessity or desperation. One sells drugs because one has few or no
other licit job opportunities, and certainly none so lucrative. Likewise, one rationalizes stealing
cars or breaking into houses for valuables not because one is purely immoral and loves the
thrill, but rather usually because one needs money and can nd no other means of acquiring it.
Having said that, there is no one-size- ts all probabilistic model that can accurately and reliably
apply to every individual in groups of disparate demographic characteristics. White collar
crime, multimillion dollar fraud, and corporate crime are notable exceptions to the general rule
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 that crime is mostly a young, poor man’s game. Multibillion dollar losses to fraud are
increasingly relevant for public safety advocates, but a growing need to focus on these newer
threats does not imply conventional street crime is somehow no longer a going concern.
Instead, law enforcement has more crime to handle with insu cient human resources to handle
cyber crime and wire frauds. Agencies prioritize violent and public street crime because of
tradition, manpower, training, resources, and because these crimes create higher fear factors in
the public as compared to nancial crimes. A rational, logical, learned public should, on the
basis of statistical losses alone, nd fraud and cyber crime more threatening than carjackings
or bank robbery, but outspoken private citizen groups have yet to signi cantly persuade police
agencies to prioritize those out-of-view criminal categories. One result of the 20th century
policing standard continuing in the 21st century has been a litany of well-publicized abuses
and tragic mistakes by criminal justice agents.

Rako detailed case after sad, sorry case involving one poor person after another who got
railroaded by an overzealous, malicious prosecutor’s o ce. Black or white, it did not matter in
the end; the factor that most a ected unfair and erroneous judicial outcomes was the
defendants’ ability to pay for highly-e ective counsel. In some cases, it seems like prosecutors
preyed on the poor and undereducated. Nearly all wrongful convictions are of indigent
defendants whose lawyers were contracted out of overburdened, underfunded public
defenders’ o ces. Police and prosecutors seem all too aware of the imbalance in power and
resources and, at least according to Rako , prosecutors and police play their games to the
bone, snubbing defense e orts to obtain exculpatory evidence that public agents are
technically obligated to put on public record. Rudolf found a case wherein a judge granted
“absolute immunity” to prosecutors who hid exculpatory evidence, shielding the public o cials
from civil suits in the event that convictions were eventually overturned. Rudolf reported on
other cases where the state vigorously fought against vacating convictions even after clear
forensic evidence proved those convicted had not, in fact, committed the crime. In still other
cases, rules delayed release of inmates even after their cases were overturned and convictions
vacated. In other words, the state is not above arresting, detaining, prosecuting, convicting, or
sentencing factually innocent people, and even after the state itself determines it had made a
mistake, the state may hold exonerated individuals for weeks or months after their untimely
victories.

Compare those experiences of people freed by the Innocence Project, and to a lesser extent
the average inmate in pretrial detention in county jails, against the exonerations and suspended
sentences enjoyed by corporate criminals who defraud investors or others of orders of
magnitude more money than those petty thieves serving a year over a misdemeanor, and one
has to squint and blur one’s vision quite a lot to match the fuzzy logic of blurred lines and
opaque justice. Rako discussed that “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that our otherwise
very aggressive criminal justice system gives a pass to those who can take advantage of a
corporate shield.”

Bradley detailed government complicity in shielding coal mining corporations from civil
lawsuits and culpability for black lung in Blood Runs Coal. During the last days of the strong
American labor union in the 1960s-70s, judges, regulators, and congressmen persistently
overlooked company e orts to obscure the facts, obstruct justice and, most importantly,
prevent and suppress civil litigation by employees who su ered serious respiratory disease due
to unsafe occupational environments. In the same vein, in Reimagining Capitalism in a World
on Fire, Henderson discussed how Norwegian regulators failed to establish nancial penalties
that would have provided e ective deterrent to illegal waste dumping. This type of soft
corruption or implicit support or willful negligence on the part of governments was likewise
echoed by former Secretary of Commerce, Robert Reich in The System, wherein he plainly
stated that company executives make conscious decisions to violate laws by calculating the
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 likely cost of violation versus gains to their bottom line after payment of nes if they are caught.
If the result is likely a net gain, then executives will choose to violate laws.

In Thirteen Silver Dollars, Colter Wall sang about sleeping in the snow and experiencing a rude
awakening by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police o cer who handcu ed the baritone country-
folk singer for no other stated reason than for having been poor. “I bet you don’t own a damn
thing to your name,” said the Mounty. Being destitute is not technically a crime, but being
homeless has been and can be depending on where one lays their head to sleep at the end of
a day. Have no money for food and steal instead of starve? That’s a crime. Shoot a deer or pull
a sh without paying the licensing bribe? Crime. These are areas of concern where the
developing and least-developed nations have o ered more freedoms and liberties than high-
income nations. Thai citizens, for example, have expansive rights to use land and engage in
unlicensed small business for su ciency economic purposes. Criminalization of the poor is not
usually considered as such among intellectuals in Western Europe, and especially the United
States, but when a simple speeding ticket gone unpaid can land a person in jail for six months
to a year, they are essentially being punished for not having money.

In recent years, there have been reports of how the occupation of policing began to control
slaves. To be fair, law enforcement surely set civil and human rights back two spaces by
enforcing laws like the Fugitive Slave Act, and remnants of those brutal times still exist in chain
gangs and prison labor exploitation. However, there is insu cient evidence to conclude the
singular origin of all the world’s police was to protect the barbaric institutions of slavery.
Instead, the more likely roots of policing are perhaps more disturbing. Policing then and now
exists to protect the rights of property owners against violations of both their person and
property. Upon transition from ternary and tripartite orders into more democratic paradigms
where universal rights are at least rhetorical objectives, rights to personal safety and property
have been extended to the plebeian masses. Rights that were once exclusive only to Lords and
their estates, enforceable against serfs and lower castes in feudal efdoms, are now enjoyed at
least theoretically by all citizens. That said, it is no coincidence that wealthier individuals and
communities enjoy more rights, more and better enforcement while individuals and
communities of lower socioeconomic status are more frequently the objects of police,
prosecutorial, and judicial action. Now as then, money elevates status and priority among
those charged with protecting the population, if not by letter of the law then still in practice.

“911 is a joke in your town…late 911 wears the late crown…” - Public Enemy, 911’s a Joke.

Police are never there when you need them. In districts with higher tax bases and better
funded precincts, they will arrive sooner, and they may make more thorough investigations.
They may make arrests, and those arrestees may actually be the people who committed the
crime. But they very rarely stop the crime in progress. The job of most police is simply
enforcing tra c laws, clocking speeders, watching that motorists signal before changing lanes,
that cars have functional tail lights. They issue citations to bolster municipal budgets. Now
more than ever, since the price of gasoline is sky high, communities would more e ciently,
accurately, and reliably enforce those same tra c laws with cameras. Many countries have
speed cameras that clock every vehicle and send tickets in the mail or directly to phones if
drivers exceed thresholds above which the clock is set to record. Like long-haul trucking,
police cruisers pulling over individual motorists may soon be a thing of the past.

Of course, police unions ercely resist reduction in hours or manpower. They produce data,
however manipulated or cherry picked, and argue quite the opposite: that precincts need
endlessly more bodies, more vehicles, more equipment, more guns, and more machinery.
Since there is no clear accounting to the public, many departments receive most if not more
than what they wished for. If the federal government spent too much on military equipment -
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 which it always does - then police departments can request delivery of military gear. Hence,
Americans live in a state of increasingly militarized police forces who are ready, willing, and
able to use deadly force. Unfortunately, in a macroenvironment where most of them just punch
a time card, drive around and stop motorists for civil infractions, this increasing militarization
has some dangerous consequences, particularly when departments and unions are notoriously
ine ective in preventing anabolic steroid use and unsafe psychological states.

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 They only ask that you perform miracles
Well we got no class

And we got no principals

And we got no innocence

We can't even think of a word that rhymes

School's out for summer

School's out forever

My school's been blown to pieces

- Alice Cooper, School’s Out

Teachers face obstacles like never before. While schools of education have promoted so-called
“student-centered” classrooms, virtually all the blame for low performance among students
falls back on teachers who are expected to treat literal-criminal students as if they exhibit
model behavior. The comedy is not lost on some of them, but as they work mandatory
overtime every day without possibility of overtime pay, some surely become jaded. Just as
teachers face more criticism and exposure to career threats online and at school board
meetings from helicopter and bulldozer parents, they also face more legitimate physical threats
in the classrooms as school shootings and other forms of violence have become a sort of norm
in the United States. Whereas other cultures have held fast that the teacher is the center moral
and disciplinary force in classrooms, whom students are expected to obey willingly without
much if any opposition, in the United States, the status of teachers has been on a steady
decline for decades. Since school is where citizens are rst socialized, and where young minds
rst develop identity, it should come as little surprise that Americans so rarely revere and
respect authority. Just as bad kids mock and ridicule without cause, so too do adults sco and
condemn virtually every authority gure, delivering one summary judgement after another
without ever a full review of logic or reasons. From the perspective of a foreigner, the situation
is laughable, considering media glori cation of crime and vice are norms whereas simple,
obedient, responsible, mature lifestyles are cast out as perpetually unhip, unmarketable,
unattractive. And then people wonder why crime and poverty are serious problems.

In a Glenn Loury podcast on the American gun problem, guest Rajiv Sethi commented on the
social and collective roots of violence, echoing famous Chinese idioms of how society prepares
the crime which the criminal only later commits.

Rajiv Sethi said, “It’s an American problem because we collectively create the
conditions under which certain types of actions are compelling to some people and not
to others. And that’s re ective of the idea that we jointly create each other’s culture, that
we are part of the same society if we are Americans. We are collectively creating and
recreating even the subcultures, because these cultures are not independent. They are
not on islands.”

Glenn Loury replied, “Choices which we must condemn, that are nevertheless
compelling to the person making the choice. And the structure in which the person is
embedded, for which we have some responsibility, is directly implicated in their
behavior.”

John McWhorter and many others have made persuasive argument that humans have
bene tted from religion through history, and in fact, humans may need something like religion
to feel whole. In recent generations, there has been a rejection of organized institutions of
religion, but this has left a gaping hole in the hearts and minds of people whose social nature
requires something to believe in, something to make them feel like a part of some cause of
greater importance. As such, many scholars have discussed how politics have lled that space
that religion once occupied. McWhorter’s Woke Racism posited that liberal-reactionaries have
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 made themselves a new religion built on political tenets and axioms, but in advocating for and
enforcing their dogma, these left-reactionaries have approached their political opponents as
spiritually corrupt sinners.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church discusses worship of false idols including pleasure,
power, race, ancestors, money or the state. For centuries, the Church has sought to eliminate
this practice, which it considers violation of the First Commandment Moses delivered, and for
centuries the Church, its clergy, and the faithful have failed even among their own ranks. There
is little doubt that if Buddha, Moses, Jesus, any of the apostles, or Mohammed (‫صلى اهلل عليه‬
‫ )وسلم‬were transported from history, time and space, and delivered to our present time, he
would not likely recognize the habits and customs of the faithful masses in their present social,
political, and economic environments as representative of the precise faith that these prophets
and others practiced in their historic times and places. Spatial and temporal distances alone
cannot account for the departure from traditional practice; and to be fair, extremely few people
today would enjoy living in conditions similar to those throughout history. Obviously, brutal
customs of man’s collective past more resemble the lesser animal sense than the enlightened
intellectual beings humans have become through exploration and understanding of their world.
Scienti c, cultural, social and psychological evolutionary arcs are observable over time, and
these transformations yield bene ts. Unfortunately, there have also been costs.

Technological and economic developments have occurred at breakneck speed since the rst
industrial revolution, and its rate only accelerated through the 20th century. Earlier in the
Industrial Age, Emerson wrote about how no man can serve two masters, and that one cannot
simultaneously be a materialist and an idealist. As science and technology improved people’s
material lives, the recent “debunking” of religious theses became a fait accompli. But as
scholars have observed, humans have innate needs to believe in something bigger; identity
and materialism lled that need. And since there is a general understanding that super ciality
and shallowness are not positive traits, the materialists have been gung ho about projecting an
image of spiritual enlightenment. Hence, brands market products to lifestyles, and to the extent
possible, brand identity takes on the role of morality and ethics in aggressive, mature capitalist
markets.

Worship of money is almost a given in many areas of the world, but it is not perceived as such.
People judge each other on the basis of their material wealth rather than their non commercial
behavior, their kindness, their openmindedness, intelligence, or other attributes. Great
advantages are bestowed upon those who can pay for privileges whereas those without the
wherewithal are swiftly cast asunder to fall through the cracks. Yet, it is hardly considered a
moral failing. The modern world has successfully corrupted and co-opted axioms that hard
work yields wealth, or that “the rich are thusly so because they have earned God’s favor and
blessing”. Meanwhile, poverty is often enough seen as a moral failing, as if to say if one is not
rich, it is because one has not worked hard. To be sure, the doctrine of personal responsibility
holds value in some cases, but if taken as a rule, it implies the world is fair and there is no such
thing as luck. If we lived and worked in fair, free markets where there were no historical
imbalance of wealth distribution; if there were no unfair advantages delivered to malefactors
from the outset of economic activity; if people were universally inherently fair and honest in
their dealings, then one could reasonably conclude a person’s position in life is exclusively the
product of his or her individual e orts, or lack thereof. Such is simply not the case, however.

People need meaning in their lives, and tangible, material wealth satis es that basic need.
Though it is rather clear nobody literally needs hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, insight
into human psychology is found in these tendencies toward hoarding material wealth beyond
what is reasonably necessary to secure essentials and luxuries for oneself, family, and future
progeny. After Maslow’s basic needs are secured, people need love; they need self-
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 actualization; they need to feel a part of something greater; they need a cause. Government
has been happy to satisfy that need.

In his seminal memoir, Between the World and Me, Coates mentioned people in his home of
Baltimore whom he described as “powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid.” This is an odd
concept, that people would be dangerously afraid. Generally, one would consider fear a result
of danger rather than a cause. However, if we deconstruct the human psyche and focus on
how stress diminishes higher-order reasoning, reducing men to their rawest human animal
states, we can draw comparisons to any other animal that feels threatened and enclosed.
Anger, aggression, and violence are natural consequences as one ghts for one’s life.

Recently, there has been a cultural shift in favor of ending the War on Drugs. It was a
misguided e ort from the start, to be sure, and a political one at that. Policies were hardly
defensible at scale. Possession, use, or sales of illegal drugs implied no more public safety
threat than alcohol or tobacco, and certainly no greater health risk. That is, until fentanyl came
on the market. Aside form ultra-potent prescription drugs, Jimmy Carter’s speech still holds -
drug policies are often enough more harmful to individuals than the drugs themselves.
Simultaneously, there are clearly associations between open-air drug sales, cartel behavior,
and violent crime. Whereas NRA advocates would claim people are to blame for homicides
rather than guns, so too can the same logic be reasonably applied to drugs, aside from highly
potent prescription opioids. In saying that, one opens oneself to counterpoints about overdose
deaths from other drugs, but that point is counter balanced by the fact that alcohol and
tobacco cause and contribute to more deaths than all illicit drugs combined.

The legacy of the drug war will take generations to fully comprehend. The New Jim Crow
claimed the War on Drugs is the single-greatest contributor to mass incarceration, and
particularly of black men. However, a survey of prison statistics shows there are more total
white men in prison for drug crimes than black men, and the proportion of drug o enders
among all prisoners is a relatively small fraction compared to violent crime. In San Fransicko,
Schellenberger concurred, nding “Violence, not stricter drug sentences, drove mass
incarceration. New York is proof.”

If there has been a conspiracy or the like regarding handling of drug laws, dealers, and users, it
would probably be with regard to the medical establishment’s marketing of prescription pain
killers. Heroin - the brand name for diacetylmorphine when Bayer patented the drug in the late
1800s - is still a World Health Organization “essential medication” in short supply in hospitals
around the world, due mainly to political obstacles to its cultivation, processing, and
distribution. Natural opium, morphine, and diamorphine are possibly still the best pain
remedies on Earth, but their patents have long since expired, and in a Western-led corporate
oligarchy, policy serves the purposes of the pro table few. Hence, the world’s doctors and
patients may have access to synthetic opioids if they can a ord them, but legal poppy farming
is extremely rare despite the natural drug’s advantages over more dangerous and expensive
synthetics. To be sure, sales and use of essential medicines by persons not licensed or in
legitimate medical need, is and should be illegal. Some of the rst e orts to criminalize drugs
occurred in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries when medical establishments
experienced shortages of opium, morphine, and diacetylmorphine because the supply had
been hijacked by criminal groups selling on black markets. All that being so, there is still a great
irony when the Sacklers and their doctor-feel-good minions pay nes while the average street
dealer gets a decade in prison for distributing far less lethal drugs to far fewer people. In The
Least Among Us, Quinones reported on how wealthy doctors, pharmacists, and
businesspeople mainly got away with contributing to and causing job loss, deaths, and general
crisis of despair in small town and rural America.

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 While Black Americans have been grappling with tentacles of structural racism from the
nation’s historical evils, white working class Americans have been enduring a parallel struggle
of a shrinking middle class, o shoring of blue collar labor, and decaying Main Street business
communities in the “ yover country” between the coasts. Though individuals belonging to
distinct identity groups at or near the middle of the income scale share more similarities than
di erences, media and political movements have successfully driven wedges between natural
allies in a ght for better wages, public education, representative leadership, and quality of life.
Hence, the bifurcation of the state into red and blue teams, each led by billionaire and donor
class oligarchs whose proxy ghts consume all the air from the conversation that could be had
if real, normal, ordinary people’s lives were on the agenda. Instead of a living wage, public
health care, and a ordable tertiary education like our closest allies have, we get tax cuts for the
rich and constant bickering in a deadlocked Congress. The naturalist fallacy unsurprisingly
follows - that just because something exists, it is how things should be. In other words, God
has made it this way alone, and neither Satan nor man have any hand in anything.

In the midst of chaos, people have chosen to focus on obscure minutia rather than a more
utilitarian approach that would rst handle issues that a ect the greatest number of people. In
A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, Heying and Weinstein discussed how “some of
the most fundamental truths - like the fact of two sexes - are increasingly dismissed as lies”.
Indeed, zealots on one side demand there is no sexual binary in the human species while on
the other they moralize something akin to the Hadith that men shall not dress as women and
women shall not dress as men. Surely, the oligarchs are happy to have their proxies ghting
among themselves rather than turning their attention to the massive hoard of wealth accruing
in the accounts of men who intend to do little other than hold it to make more wealth. A trickle
may reach the thirsty masses, and they must then ght over drops knowing there is not enough
to go around when the vast majority of wealth has been captured and is held in nancial
markets where only a few may have access.

As Rosenberg lamented in What’s Next, Chicago?, the cabal of powerful hoarders is no longer
racially exclusive. Rather, the most e ective way to continue suppressing the will of the people
is to appeal to racial demographics. Dr. Cornell West condemned the “black faces in high
places” movement as a disingenuous marketing ploy intended to pacify the population; merely
a guise; a thinly veiled, contemptuous connivance that provided a super cial diversity of
phenotype but only further entrenched the homogeneity of ideology at the top. Much like how
Colonialists co-opted natives, divided and conquered by empowering a few indigenous agents
who were loyal to the occupying force, so too do contemporary neo-fascists, imperialists, and
capital hoarders ensure their enduring dominance by bringing in a few outsiders to give the
appearance of inclusion, and to provide the illusion that class mobility is possible for anybody.
It really is quite a brilliant subterfuge though utterly cruel and void of empathy.

Wisdom is undeniably sacri ced in the singleminded pursuit of capital. “Knowledge is power”
is language of Public Service Announcements, but popular culture suggests such is not the
case. The musical Cabaret introduced the English-speaking world to what became a common
idiom, that “money makes the world go round”. Liza Minelli sang the original tune, the title of
which has been snatched up by a slew of rappers like G-Unit, AZ, Nas, Sol Romero, Buck
Shot, Potluck, and Scarface just to name a few. The Stylistics pushed back on the trend
toward materialism and away from humanistic idealism with their hit People Make the World Go
Round, but judging by the looks of the landscape in 2022, the money-worshippers have long
since won that battle in the culture wars. They may have thrown the baby out with the
bathwater, so to speak, as a latent anti-academic mentality pervades even institutions of higher
learning where speaking engagements are cancelled because guests hold the wrong opinions.

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 A wise approach to intellectual divisions would be to do as John McWhorter and Glenn Loury
do: steel man arguments, play devil’s advocate, and sort through logical propositions of various
arguments in pursuit of truth or a greater degree thereof. But the means are adjusted when the
ends of intellectual inquiry are quanti ed in units of capital rather than abstract, intangible
virtues. Good faith debate and objective, rational discourse can not occur in the zero-sum
context of winner-take-all-ism. In other words, the rules to the game have been altered so as to
limit the number of players, to disqualify players who may stand a chance to win if the playing
eld were even. In this way, Donald Trump was correct in his assertion that the system is
rigged; he only omitted that it was not actually rigged against him.

To be fair, not all educations are created equal. In this competitive 21st century global
economy, workers face threats to their livelihoods like never before. Andrew Yang predicts
automation will cost millions of jobs in the coming decades. Economists love to point out how
labor markets recovered after historical technological innovations like the cotton gin, tractors,
and factory robotics replaced humans with machines, but there are reasons to suspect Yang is
correct in his assertion that this time is di erent. Arti cial Intelligence is to a mechanical plow
as ying a jumbo airliner is to hang gliding. There are structural economic di erences today for
which historical data cannot account. Previous iterations of the industrial revolutions did not
occur in a fully-integrated, wired global economy. Transportation will likely be the rst job
category to su er, as we already have self-driving cars. Robots do not get tired, do not
complain, do not get sick, and do not exhibit signi cant variance in their job performance.
Some analysts believe robots can perform any job with repetitive tasks, including o ce work,
legal and business services, and even medical services. With such externalities and threats in
the marketplace, the only truly secure jobs are those whose function is to design, manufacture,
program, install, troubleshoot and operate technologies that will almost certainly replace
human workers.

Some 60% of degrees from American universities in Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics (STEM) elds are awarded to foreign students. The upside for the macroeconomy
is the USA is then poised to poach foreign talent, which it has done quite successfully, leading
to brain-drain in developing economies. One natural downside is witnessed in political and
social turmoil Americans endure as natural-born citizens are held out of highly-paid jobs due to
their relative lack of quali cations, which in turn creates hostility among individual citizens who
are forced to compete for a decreasing slice of the pie. In the rat race economy, what remains
after the fat cats take their customary 95% is mostly crumbs, so the hoard masses are left to
ght tooth and nail for tiny morsels. Of course, this could be avoided if the culture shifted
gears, changed its collective mind, and learned to do STEM in school, but that is di cult when
people wear innumeracy like a badge of honor. In their Dark Horse podcast, Heying and
Weinstein commented on how innumeracy is common even in academic circles, and whereas
there would be frowns and nger-wagging if a fellow PhD divulged that s/he were illiterate,
there is a disturbingly casual sense of acceptance among the same people when they discuss
their inability to perform simple mathematical calculations.

As the American system of public education goes, so too does the culture since schools are
the rst instances of civilization, where students learn how to be good citizens, where
economic skills are developed or alternatively, where students rst experience boredom,
apathy, distrust and contempt for lucrative STEM skills. When educators and administrators
themselves are willfully ignorant of higher-order mathematical reasoning, they are more easily
misled by bogus or adulterated statistical claims. Hence our current and recent period of ux
and chaos in public education, where controversy is the norm and reconciliation is something
of a fantasy. Enter a bewildered, choleric, pugnacious youth population, and schools become
dangerous places to think, feel, and be human. Instead of leading and facilitating academic
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 pursuits, teachers are driven into submission before a dogmatic, enraged culture eager to
cancel their careers for a perceived slight, for an inference of connotation, for words.

“Any good deed is pummeled, punished, and penalized.” - Killer Mike, Run the Jewels,
Goonies v. E.T.

Oh, the First Amendment protects people against arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment for
expressing ideas. One cannot falsely yell re in a crowded movie theater, and one cannot
legally incite violence, but so long as speech is tailored for time, place, and manner, the
government will not bring criminal action for mere words. The First Amendment, however, does
not extend onto private property, nor into employment agreements. As such, public servants
may be summarily terminated for expressing unpopular opinions in the same fashion as an NFL
team may terminate a quarterback’s contract for matters relating to public image and
reputation. The di erence is the NFL Players Union is one of few labor unions still in existence
that holds any authority and can be equal partners in negotiations; such is not the case with
other labor unions. In the 1960s, some one in three Americans belonged to a union, but a
combination of changing policies, available jobs, and social attitudes led a steady decline unto
the present day when the rate is stead around one in ten. The shift is not without its bene ts to
certain free laborers, but owners and managers captured most of the advantages while
laborers su ered most of the costs. One disadvantage is surging cancel culture, both on the
political Right and Left, which uses multimedia to call out speci c behaviors, shame and
threaten employers so as to force their hands until they either terminate the targeted employee
or stand rm in the face of professional intimidation.

Even teachers unions have come under threat recently. One cause is a history of unchecked
illegitimate authority in schools, but denying teachers a chance to engage in collective
bargaining for higher wages hardly serve communities. Few self-respecting teachers or
administrators would support archaic methodologies like corporal punishment in schools
today. The antiquated practice certainly once o ered school personnel an immediate, tangible
corrective measure that punished and deterred problem behavior. However, the brain functions
best when stress is reduced, and students who feel threatened by physical violence are thusly
not optimally primed to learn complicated material. Furthermore, violence begets violence, and
if educators wish to su use students with the ideal that “violence never solves a problem”,
then those same educators are best advised to model appropriate behavior. Even though every
society has its exceptions to rules, and every law permits justi able violence, the interests of
teachers and administrators are better served by hands-o , verbal discipline. Ideally, educators
can use words to persuade students to control themselves and live within the boundaries
schools set. Unfortunately, nouveau sociocultural ats have trammeled that mission by gagging
educators as they may inadvertently o end or trigger one or more hypersensitive students.
Rather than using strong, creative, or otherwise uent language to advocate civilized behavior
and warn students against unruly demeanor, teachers nd themselves tongue-tied walking
around on eggshells as there is virtually nothing that some contrived ideologue could not nd
inappropriate or o ensive. Their lack of collective power against school boards and bulldozer
parents hamstrings their good faith e orts to train students in civilized, social, and intelligent
behavior.

Amna Khalid has been reporting on cancel culture in her podcast, Banished. “It’s real and on
the rise, on the left and the right”, she says. The rules of cancel culture are a lot like Fight Club,
however: rule number one is there is no such thing as cancel culture. If one admits they are
engaged in cancel culture activities, it undermines the legitimacy of the mission because there
are no signi cant advocates of “cancel culture” by that name; those who practice it understand
it has a negative connotation. And the default response is to deny existence of a trait if that
trait is negative, regardless of whether that trait is factually present. As a result, cancel culture
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 succeeds only under the cover of morality and ethics. Those doing the cancelling must present
themselves as arbiters of moral justice, and those whom they cancel must be painted broadly
as irredeemable transgressors. If one wishes to severely damage another’s credibility insomuch
that the target loses face, career, reputation, and possibly family and friends, then it helps to
believe one is doing good work, ghting the good ght. Incidentally, evangelists in cancel
culture movements are genuinely ignorant of the harm they cause, since they feel themselves
advocates for the highest form of good and righteous social conduct. If only the world were so
simple.

Dave Chappelle, for example, had to cancel and relocate a sold-out comedy show in
Minneapolis due to criticism from social justice warriors over his jokes that some nd o ensive
to the transgender community. But in his Net ix special that prompted calls for his
cancellation, Chappelle told a beautiful story about his friendship with a transgender woman,
and at many points humanized and lent dignity to members of that minority segment of the
population. A reading of his entire set - which is still comedy and entertainment rather than
political or social philosophy - would have more accurately described his position as con icted.
Instead, reactionaries on the Left condemned the comedian as phobic, and merely being
accused is proof enough for Twitter mobs.

Webster’s dictionary de nes “phobia” as “an exaggerated usually inexplicable and illogical fear
of a particular object, class of objects, or situation”. Reactionary progressives often attach the
su x “phobic” to trans- or homo- or Islamo- in their e orts to shame, blame, label, and
ostracize individuals from civil society. Turnt on its head, a sly analysis of the situation might
support claims that ultra-Leftist advocates share phobias of conservativism, or of tradition,
religion, and moreover anybody who disagrees with the zealotry witnessed on the fringes of the
political Left. That said, on the other side of the aisle, there are likewise similar exaggerated
and illogical fears of di erent types of people, including racial minorities and LGBT+ people.
While none may want to lay claim to cancel culture, members of disparate identity groups
partake in public shaming and cancellation of their respective out-groups.

There certainly exists a quali able element of inexplicable and irrational fear of various minority
groups, whether racial or linguistic or sexual identity. The facts remain unchanged through
epochs that tribalism persists out of a genetic predisposition to protect oneself and lineage
through avoidance and rejection of individuals from other tribes. For centuries, these types of
fears helped keep the clans safe from invaders, and although there were negative trade o s in
genetics, socialization, and acquisition of knowledge, the urge to group together with people of
similar traits is innate to the human animal. Having said that, some things are true online that
are not necessarily true in the physical world before us. Surely, there are some male athletes
whom female athletes are now forced to compete against, and the result is unfair for those
female athletes. There are likewise females in the ladies rest room and locker rooms who are
justi ably uncomfortable with a male in their midst. Simultaneously, gender nonconformity is
sometimes met with hostility and even violence. Justice Clarence Thomas remarked that
conservatives should target same-sex marriage rights, giving credence to what could have
been otherwise described as irrational fears of persecution among members of the married
homosexual communities. Despite these cases, if we look out the window or attend school or
go to the market, these extreme cases do not often present themselves empirically. To be sure,
viral social media posts are datapoints, but to the extent that every person across the country
should be so outraged as to take to the streets in protest, the proportionality is somewhat lost
in cyberland.

Note, “male” refers to gametes or sex organs, which have and always will present in one of two
distinct types among animals that reproduce sexually. Whereas semantic drift has taken the
terms gender and sex as synonyms, and thusly one now claim one is a female with a penis or
male with a vagina, such chicanery should be taken for entertainment and rhetorical value
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 rather than scienti c merits, else we fall down a slippery slope akin to normalization of autistic
semantics wherein de nitions of commonly understood words may be changed to mean
anything the speaker so chooses. Matt Walsh travelled to a Maasai bush community in his
What is a Woman documentary and discussed transgenderism with tribal elders who laughed
in his face at the absurdity of a man becoming a woman or vice versa. Lo, the western
educated industrialized rich democracies (WEIRD) love to consider themselves bastions of
knowledge and wisdom, but in some areas it seems the luxury has led the culture away from
common sense as things that have been unquestioned as straightforwardly true since the
beginning of time are now somehow up for debate…while others are not. A man may be a
woman in some subcultures of WEIRD societies, but a white woman may not identify as black,
while still another person may have the latitude to decide whether she is white or black or
mixed, yet none may claim as Mic Jagger sang “I’m a monkey!” That’s just absurd.

In a media environment that thrives on clicks and viral reposts, one should not be terribly
surprised that news functions like gossip, tabloids, or entertainment. However, for some stretch
of the recent past, journalism was a credible profession where individuals like Pulitzer risked
personal and professional reputation and life to publicize facts wherever they may lie. It is not
fake news that suggests racism and transphobia and homophobia and various other bigoted
outlooks persist in the United States, but it is fake to suggest they are the mainstream views, or
that every individual in a minority group is likely to experience some serious discrimination, or
that every member of the majority group is somehow complicit in historical, current, and future
prejudice and injustice. On the latter point, Barnett & Bernick provided thorough analysis of
abolitionists’ movements and drafting of post-Emancipation amendments in The Original
Meaning of the 14th Amendment. Looking at social media, which more or less sets the tone on
cable news, one might think the Civil War has not even passed, let alone desegregation,
a rmative action, and the rst black president (though Obama is more precisely classi ed as
mixed race or biracial).

In Bad News, Ungar-Sargon discussed how “as America has gotten less racist, the media has
gotten more obsessed with racism. Instead of joining hands with their new partners on the
right,” she continued, “instead of zeroing in on things like the intergenerational poverty of inner
cities and mass incarceration, the national media started mainstreaming a re-racialized
worldview committed to race as the de ning characteristic of American life.” Unisex bathroom
furor, Covid policy throw-downs at school board meetings, 2020 election conspiracy
haranguing, feuds over LGBT+ rights or perceptions thereof - these are all ammunition for
corporate media giants to wage culture wars, divide up people along lines other than class,
and have proxies ght the battles of the elites who abscond with lucrative social and nancial
capital. While locals are bickering over policies that may never impact them on the ground,
bigwigs and fatcats y cross country and around the world squeezing pennies from a shrinking
middle and working class that has largely taken the clickbait. United stand the tycoons in their
quest for power, status, and fortune while the lower two or three quintiles on the income
distribution scale fall divided by subterfuge they thought was legitimate information.

Politicians are elected and retained not by their intentions nor even their charisma inasmuch as
their campaign nances. Jeb Bush and Michael Bloomberg demonstrated that spending more
money is no guarantee of electoral success, but without a robust budget, no campaign stands
a chance. The Powell memorandum showed the judiciary is not immune to in uence from the
business community, whether undue or bona de. Whereas elected, partisan politicians
publicly claim allegiance to their respective interests, there exists some illusion that the bench
is out of the reach of donors and corrupting in uences. Indeed, the judiciary is independent to
the extent that there will not be an entirely new panel of judges following the next election, and
regardless of which party may control the executive or legislature, the judicial branch is secure
in its seat. However, that does not mean the judges are politically neutral; quite the opposite,
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 each party has a preferred shortlist of candidates that is mutually exclusive from that of the
other party. Supreme Court Justices are routinely labeled conservative or liberal. Perhaps
before Ray Bork, the appointment process was more bipartisan, but today’s judges are
appointed almost strictly on party a liation or leanings. Along with that politicization of the
courts - or, alternatively, as the truth of its politicization has become more accepted as fact -
the course of justice changes, and the arc is more wobbly than if justice were truly blind and
the judiciary truly independent.

Millhise’s Injustices provided detailed, expert analysis and commentary on the history of the
United States Supreme Court and cases at issue in its docket. The book portrayed a
government deeply committed to business interests over those of consumers and workers,
insofar as asserting justices routinely colluded with owners and managers to reverse labor law
reform, suppress unions, stall and obstruct universal enfranchisement and acquisition of basic
rights.

“[United States Supreme Court Justices] have embraced extra-constitutional limits on

the government’s ability to protect the most vulnerable Americans, while simultaneously
refusing to enforce rights that are explicitly enshrined in the Constitution’s text.”

- Millhise, Injustices

Although the deck had always been stacked against consumers in the United States, and in
favor of businesses and wealthy individuals, many people consider Citizens United a milestone
case delineating a turning point after which time there were virtually no limits to the extent of
corporate and donor sway over elections, and thus policy. Millhise cited a poll that found:

“69 percent of Americans believe that “new rules that let corporations, unions and
people give unlimited money to [groups seeking to in uence elections] will lead to
corruption.” Only 15 percent disagreed with this conclusion.”

On the ip side, one can make convincing argument that the Supreme Court only allowed
behavior that could have been conducted in secret or via untold numbers of loopholes that
existed in campaign nance laws prior to the ruling. To be sure, the rst amendment protects
political speech, and it takes money to broadcast such speech, but that the court considered
money itself to be speech per se, seems like a stretch. Surveys of policy outcomes prior to and
following Citizens United show mixed results, but there is reason to suspect the ‘ ood gates’
were opened, so to speak, when the Court removed limits on campaign donations. Dodd-Frank
was repealed after Citizens. Major tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals and for corporations
were passed after the decision, but these policy shifts were also built on partisanship. Lewis
Powell’s infamous memo, Reagan’s bank deregulation, Bush and Clinton’s NAFTA, and
o shoring of American jobs in a globalized economy all occurred long before Citizens.
Extraneous variables complicate measurement of policy impacts, or the extent to which we can
isolate a speci c law to determine its e ect, but there seems to be su cient reason to suspect
Citizens did not empower the majority of the population.

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 Blank Check Imbalances
अप के ना जैसे पैसा, meaningless

Knowledge के ना, ये degree meaningless

र के ना हर meaningless

प वार के ना जैसे, बंगले worthless

Joker के ना जैसे, circus meaningless

ठोकर के ना वेसे, दगी tasteless

पैसे के पी भागे जैसे, robot हो feeling less

हाँ, तू बंदा feeling less

पैसे के पी भागे तू, बेच के ईमान अपना

धरम के नाम पर चलाए, कारोबार अपना

शीशा का बना या , मकान अपना

कब तक पाएगा, ल शैतान अपना

खूब कमाया पासा तूने, आ भी कमा ले

रोने वा के मूह पे खुशी, तू ला

असली शोहरत यही, यह चा तो आ माले

उसे माँगने रत नही, से खुद खुदा

आँ धी आए, या आए तूफान, पैसा मेरा भगवान

च ए इसे बदलते

- Kubar Bhaskar

We could trade wampum, seashells, livestock, or poetry. We could be buying and selling goods
and services with facial expressions. We could value objects, tangible and intangible, on their
value to society. We could reward laborers on their value their works add to quality of life. We
could understand money as representing neurochemical exchanges, and meditate ourselves to
wealth or dull our minds into poverty. Instead, mostly we act like nance and economics are
immutable laws of nature, like Adam and Eve happened upon paper money in the Garden, or
like the value of precious metals and gems function on the same set of axioms as gravity or the
weather. As if when Mercury is in retrograde and Jupiter transits Venus, there is an unavoidable
impact on the price of sorghum and wheat at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

The gold standard is undeniably arbitrary, but it provided objective limits. Under historical
nancial paradigms that valued currency on the basis of gold or precious metal holdings, the
limited supply of collateral constrained the system. Of course, aws inherent to that paradigm
led to famine, hyperin ation, bubbles, and ultimately collapse, but the gold standard is
arguably more stable than the current regime. When central banks can simply delete a number
on a spreadsheet and wipe away billions of dollars in toxic debt from corporations, but those
same central bankers cannot manage to take on a burden of equal or lesser nancial value by
erasing a few thousand dollars of delinquent debts from the credit pro les of a few million
individuals, one can plainly see the Emperor has no clothes.

Kings of the ancient regimes plundered and usurped their way to primacy, then coerced their
rank-and- le to use papers or coins bearing their faces as legal tender. Who would not want to
slap one’s picture on a piece of paper and use it to buy property, goods and services to one’s
heart’s content? Fortune favored the bold insofar as they could manage to devalue the lives of
all who oppose their reign and somehow persuade followers to kill, maim, threaten, imprison,
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 and otherwise suppress opposition. To be sure, it was a brutal life, and it is unlikely that even
the wealthiest and most powerful were truly happy for long. Notwithstanding the psychological
costs of power, those tyrants, despots, and dictators established their legacies for generations
to come.

Taking note from history’s ascendant royals, computer programmers have conducted similar
magic tricks - making money out of nothing. In recent years, virtually anybody with a powerful
computer and a deep knowledge of coding can invent a cryptocurrency. The term itself is
misleading because the object is not a currency per se. With the rare exception of Bitcoin in El
Salvador and Central African Republic, crypto-coins are not legal tender; rather, they should be
called commodities. Even in markets that accept crypto as payment, they need to be
converted to another nancial unit (i.e. US Dollars) to be useful. While a couple countries have
banned crypto, most regulatory authorities have hitherto failed to adequately quash what many
economists call a Ponzi scheme. Banks and nancial markets responded to demand for crypto
as investment vehicles despite their notorious volatility, and more importantly, in spite of the
fact that the crypto-units represent nothing.

Wealthy individuals and entities often hold their capital in nancial markets, where money itself
is the product; it is the input and output; it reproduces more of itself in markets far from the
reaches of consumers and populations su ering shortages of capital. Only a trickle escapes
nancial markets and gets into the hands of real people who use money for tangible goods.
Crypto is the “hold my beer” response to the self-replicating arbitrage played out every day in
traditional stock markets. In other words, crypto is some next level stupid, where people are
literally buying and selling nothing but hopes and dreams. And since tycoons found it
pro table, legal systems have little to say about it.

That a legal system favors the rich over the poor should not be a surprise. After all, the words
“bank, banc, bench” share etymology. In earlier centuries, public expenditures on buildings and
salaries could only be rationalized by meeting the demands of nobles in command of the
purse. Never mind that they seized property and capital by means of force. These were the
rules of the game. Nobles supplied the capital and political strategies; warriors o ered the
muscle and military fortitude; clergy moralized and wove intricate rationalizations for any action
that increased the wealth and power of the strange bedfellows in tripartite societies around the
globe. Laws existed to maintain order, but whose order and for what ultimate end? Nobles
could murder serfs without threat of legal action. Warriors could rape and pillage so long as
they targeted other tribes. Clergy could bribe, embezzle, and commit assorted male cences
against “sinners”.

“Sin all depends on what you’re believing in” - Andre 3000, Outcast, Aquemini

Citizens United is often cited as a turning point in the American system, and to be sure,
campaign nancing in the United States is quite di erent from that elsewhere around the world,
but the case only explicated a basic fact about politics and law - that they privilege the wealthy.
Studies have shown near perfect correlations between content of laws Congress passes and
the demands of wealthy donor classes. Do you have a relatively limitless supply of capital with
which to lobby? Then there is a decent chance Congress will provide representation. On the
other end of the scale, studies have found non-signi cant, near-zero correlations between
policies Congress passes and the policy desires the vast majority of voters have. In other
words, the will of the people be damned, Congress responds to a handful of wealthy
benefactors. In a political system almost continuously in campaign cycles, where it costs more
than $1 billion to become President, a gray-market for legal corruption is a foregone conclusion
absent comprehensive campaign nancing reform.

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 There are trade o s to developing social safety nets and policy frameworks that bene t the
poor and middle class. Unfortunately, economies and societies are too large to run double-
blind experiments and test hypotheses at scale, so lawmakers and executives often operate on
best guesses and counsel from expert advisors. Though there is no guarantee economic
hypotheses hold, there are always cogent reasons to limit government spending, or not rise the
minimum wage, or not require employers to spend more per employee. But underlying all these
learned opinions are foundational assumptions that are epistemologically axiomatic, relying on
less-than-universal ontological architecture. For decades, economists reasoned through
hypotheticals guided by their assumption that markets are rational, and humans are rational
actors when there are su cient examples to conclude otherwise. Economists often consider
altruism to be irrational because it is not guided by the idle pursuits of self-interest that
underpin economic models. When dealing with millions of individuals and complex sets of
policy outcomes in dynamic modern economies, problems are bound to spring up if inaccurate
or unreliable “theories” are over-applied.

Self-interest surely guides some, many, most, or nearly all individuals in their pursuits of means
to achieve desired ends. As such, there is often insu cient incentive for a leader or group of
leaders to enact laws that would likely result in his/their being unseated. If self-preservation,
self-grati cation, and self-ful llment are personal objectives of leadership, they may likely make
professional decisions that bene t themselves rather than the populations they are charged
with serving. If left unchecked, leaders in such systems may resort to favor-trading among a
smaller cadre of like-minded individuals - special interests. In such operating environments, it
would not be unimaginable that pursuits of status, wealth, and power could breach the public
trust or endanger the lives of civilians. Even if democratically-elected, o cials who primarily
serve the will of neo-aristocracies, oligarchs, or neo-nobility could knowingly or unwittingly
reinforce historical caste and classed systems. Unchecked power among wealthy elites could
result in ubiquitous criminal business conduct, assorted violations of civil and human rights
both at home and abroad. In a globalized political economy lacking signi cant controls,
stronger and wealthier states may abuse their power in other sovereign states, possibly
invading or occupying foreign lands or exercising illegitimate extraterritorial jurisdiction. Much
like the ancient orders, rule of law could fail and give rise to natural law without strict,
consistent, equal protection and enforcement of coherent and cohesive laws. Does this
scenario sound familiar?

The United States’ defense budget will likely exceed $1 trillion by 2030. In good times and
hard, Congress and the White House approve higher annual expenditures for the Department
of Defense which is legally required to audit itself but has failed to do so for decades. Runaway
military expenditures undoubtedly encourage corruption. Moreover, they create a cultural
atmosphere of militarism. And what is the military’s end-line product or service? Killing people.
Surely, military units do other things, but their main reason for existing is to kill people - as
many as needed, as quickly and e ciently as possible. A culture extraordinarily reverent of the
military may have some patriotic advantage, but it must also negotiate a devaluation of life, if
not domestically then certainly with regard to foreign citizens.

Political messaging aimed at reducing the defense budget is most likely to result in a swift and
decisive end to one’s political career. But the largesse has its negative consequences too. The
United States spent some $12 trillion on its nuclear weapons arsenal, and let everybody on
Earth hope and pray those investments are never called into use. The Defense budget is a
government jobs program - “socialism” in conservative speak. Every year, military contractor
businesses produce tanks, guns, bombs, and other assorted machinery that must be
warehoused and stored because it is not used; and again, let everybody hope and pray that
money is wasted, and those tools of the trade are never put to use. Meanwhile, roads are in
disrepair, schools are woefully underfunded, drinking water is polluted by lead and other toxic
chemicals, and the energy grid is decaying. Somehow, there is more than enough money to
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 build war weapons that sit in a warehouse or on a concrete pad, but there is no money to pay
teachers enough that they could a ord rent in their district.

Surely, the federal government has been complicit in the decay of the American cultural and
physical landscape with its military largesse and unchecked spending on foreign wars. Seal
Team 6 eventually found and executed Osama bin Laden, but not before one of bin Laden’s
stated mission - to bankrupt the USA or at least drive the costs of war into the trillions - had
already succeeded. Was the $2.4–6.5 trillion cost worth it? Well, that requires a counterfactual,
and it is impossible to prove what would have happened in any other reality. But like the $19
trillion the US Air Force con rmed the Department of Defense has spent since the end of the
Cold War, there is reason to think the government a spendthrift. With all that tax and borrowed
money spent on decaying weapons, and blowing things up in other countries, obviously there
has not been su cient funding available for schools, roads, health care, and individual family
assistance.

Responsibility for failures, ine ciencies, and excesses extends across all three branches of
government even if none are accountable to any other branch or the public. The executive
could have restrained itself as Commander in Chief. The legislature could have closed the
purse or refused to recertify War Powers Act missions. The judiciary could have stood aside
from the doctrine of political question and actually made a decision about the legality of foreign
military action absent declaration of war from Congress. In matters of domestic policy, the
military agenda and spending continues through the police and prisons, which are largely
autonomous and riddled with serious problems. Any branch of government could have, by
now, addressed the deplorable conditions in prisons. The Supreme Court could have found
reason to hold that life inside the average prison quali es as cruel and unusual; that is, unless
Congress and executive draft and implement rules and mechanisms to e ectively reduce
violence, and especially sexual violence.

Prosecutor o ces could have approached the criminal law from the position of science, and
pursued a strategy whereby the o cial record is built upon facts; instead, prosecutors and
police knowingly charge and try, and sometimes convict, people they knew or should have
known were not factually guilty. The Supreme Court enabled this problem when it allowed
factually innocent to plead guilty in North Carolina v. Alford. More recently, the Court held that
innocence is not enough to grant a retrial. To be sure, rehearing every case would cause even
more ine ciencies in an already slow and resource-intensive process, but denying the factually
innocent their freedom because of some legal procedure seems to deny the court objectivity. If
it happened in another country, the US government and its advocates would likely claim it is
abusive. As if to say they have lost their scruples and just do not care one iota about anybody
who might think there is something wrong with that, public o cials have disregarded science
that largely debunked bite mark analysis, eye witness testimonies, and even ngerprint
analysis, because the tedious science takes away from the courtroom drama, and
mathematical probabilities threaten win ratios in the exceedingly adversarial English common
law system.

None of this is to say crime is not a problem. Though paranoid virtue signaling and dog whistle
political stumping are decidedly bad faith undertakings, there are indeed people who are
something like “super-predators”, and there are in fact some few people who cross the border
into the United States from Mexico with the intent of committing serious crimes. Crime rates
fell signi cantly following 1990s three-strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and Brady
Bill gun legislation. Simultaneously, incomes rose, and the overall economy increased general
prosperity following Reagan-era deregulation and opening of the Bush-Clinton NAFTA zone.
Given all these and other factors, it is impossible to isolate changes in law among other
variables in e orts to determine what caused decreases in crime rates. Notwithstanding those
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 aggregate improvements, there has been a dramatic increase in homicide since 2020, and of
racially-motivated hate crimes since 2016. Considering the relative sizes of public agencies as
compared to the overall population, one must accept that the government cannot possibly
accomplish any number of goals without cooperation among the public. Likewise, success and
failure are built within sects, districts, and among individuals embedded in the private sector,
without whose voluntary compliance no legal order may be secured.

Martinson’s “What Works” thesis deployed into the “nothing works” social environment of the
1970s still has value today when it seems again that nothing is e ective if eradication is the
objective. Of course, eliminating all crime is not a realistic goal, but some pundits still preach
upon that pulpit. A better question, still, is what is the objective of criminal justice systems? Is it
rehabilitation? If so, maybe Norway has a few things gured out, but in the United States it
seems like removal is the main intent, followed by punishment under sometimes tortuous
conditions in prisons. After sentences and terms of probation or parole have been carried out,
there still exists some latent or implicit objective of lifelong consequences, or a branding as
“criminal”, especially now that records are available online from anywhere in the world. Not
three generations ago, somebody convicted of a felony could move to another state and start
with a blank slate; today, that same person cannot even move to another country without
threat of job and housing discrimination on the basis of that record - and whether the record
re ects actual guilt is scarcely ever considered.

The word “felony” comes from French, and it basically means “crime”. American felonies are
generally what the world considers to be crime. In the United States, however, the Protestant
ethic and shame-based deontologies generated a reactive policing and prosecutorial system
that classi es all manner of behavior - many morally neutral acts - as crime (misdemeanors).
The culture now lives with the dubious distinction that nearly two percent of the adult
population is presently incarcerated, and since records are so well kept and publicly available,
nearly 25 percent of the population has a rap sheet. Such grandeur in the criminal justice
system inspires much criticism, and recently there have been some e orts to try new things. To
be clear, it is still true that nothing works at scale, but municipal leaderships across the country
are trying just about everything - including nothing. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, for
example, shoplifting and defecation on the street are no longer arrestable o enses - policies
which prompt many residents to hold their noses and poo-poo. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the
radical Left has become the butt of many jokes with regard to their spin on “nothing works”. In
San Fransicko, Schellenberger gives the low-down:

“How and why do progressives ruin cities? They divert funding from homeless shelters
to permanent supportive housing, resulting in insu cient shelter space. They defend
the right of people they characterize as Victims to camp on sidewalks, in parks, and
along highways, as well as to break other laws, including against public drug use and
defecation. They intimidate experts, policy makers, and journalists by attacking them as
being motivated by a hatred of the poor, people of color, and the sick, and as causing
violence against them. They reduce penalties for shoplifting, drug dealing, and public
drug use. They prefer homelessness and incarceration to involuntary hospitalization for
the mentally ill and addicted. And their ideology blinds them to the harms of harm
reduction, Housing First, and camp-anywhere policies, leading them to misattribute the
addiction, untreated mental illness, and homeless crisis to poverty and to policies and
politicians dating back to the 1980s.”
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 It is what it is. But what is it?
“You want it all but you can’t have it” - Faith No More, Epic

Teachers have to follow federally-mandated regulations on individual education plans (IEP) that
require accommodations and modi cations to content delivered to students who have
conditions preventing their acquisition of standard tier 1 curriculum. If students don’t learn,
teachers have to change their approach. If they cannot pass a class due to rigor, usually
teachers are forced to give a pass to such students. Primary and secondary education are
universal. Everybody receives treatment based on abilities, and mostly-responsible personnel
adapt to changing circumstances. Then at the arbitrary age of 18 or thereabouts, the rug is
pulled out from under. Maybe the objective is to accommodate individuals with diversity,
equity, and inclusion in mind, but the outcome may well be that our educational system makes
people dependent upon a system that infantilizes them, gives them a false sense of security,
lulls them into a drone state, and then sets them out to fall on their face and learn harsher
realities that people are largely uncomfortable talking about directly.

IEPs require modi cations to pedagogy and curriculum to accommodate students, and to
make content accessible to students whose mental, social, emotional, or physical disabilities
limit their acquisition of standard content. This is a fair trade o in many regards, and the intent
is to provide high quality education to every individual, regardless of disabilities. However, one
potential e ect is that the system of education sets people up to fail in an adult world that will
not accommodate di erent abilities nor modify the demands of work or social life to ensure
equitable outcomes. Behavioral or cognitive interventions aimed at reducing or eliminating
problem thinking or behaviors in students are avoided because of privacy concerns and
because schools receive funding per student with ISPs. On the former issue, American culture
is uniquely defensive, protective, and closed to direct e orts to actually improve how people
think and act despite potentially hurting their feelings in the short term. On the latter point,
schools are woefully underfunded and thus do whatever possible to acquire and maintain
supplemental nancing, even if it may limit student growth.

The very government that enacted policy and implemented regulations requiring modi cations
in classrooms has generally failed to apply a similarly inclusive approach to matters of criminal
and civil law. Decades into the mass incarceration era in the United States, one clear takeaway
is that a signi cant proportion of the population simply cannot understand the complexities
and rigidity of the criminal law. Any initiative that would grant special privilege to target groups
or individuals would fail to pass the equal protection or non discrimination test, but that is not
to say some discretion could not be more creatively tailored to address criminality while also
avoiding the dreadfully high prison occupancy. In the age of big data and instant
communication across political boundaries, there has emerged a greater potential in the
criminal justice system that has yet to be capitalized upon.

Aside from skin color, the trait shared by many victims of police misconduct is nonconformity
with sociocultural and legal norms distinct to the American political state. Eric Garner, for
example, failed to comply with aggressive laws on sales of loose cigarettes, and he lost his life
in a horri c ordeal following police intervention into his victimless crime. Malice Green refused
to drop a bag of what police suspected was crack cocaine before he was beaten to death.
Elijah McClain lost his life due to his wearing a face mask inside a business just weeks before
they became compulsory under Covid regulations. George Floyd may have been guilty of
passing o a counterfeit $20 bill, but it was extremely unlikely that he manufactured it. He
probably got it as change in another transaction and just put it back into circulation before the
shop owner called the police. Even if Floyd had known it was a counterfeit, a charitable bona
de reading of the law would not determine Floyd had committed a crime in the use of a
counterfeit bill. The facts that he was not responsible for its printing nor a liated with
counterfeiting organizations imply he was actually a victim of counterfeiting. Even if the least
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 charitable reading of anti-counterfeiting criminal laws were applied, he was entitled to due
process, and if found guilty the penalties did not include death.

Four police o cers in New York City red 41 rounds at Amadou Diallo on the steps to his home
because he reached for his wallet to identify himself. Though seldom mentioned in the news,
people of Caucasian descent also become victims of police violence for no apparent reason.
Tony Timpa, for example, died in the same way George Floyd did, with an o cer’s knee on his
neck as he pleaded that he could not breathe. Nobody connected his race as causing the
event. Even if suspects had committed some crime prior to police encounters, if they are
unarmed and moderately cooperative, police should have trained and been prepared for the
elevated risks their jobs entail. Policing is a tough job that carries risks, and o cers should
expect and be expected to maintain a certain level of anxiety, but their fears whether warranted
or not do not excuse many serious errors. Then neither do those errors by individual o cers,
however tragic and avoidable, imply all police are blood-thirsty racial zealots, nor that
somehow society no longer needs police.

Fatal police shootings of civilians attract attention in our media culture, but they are statistically
rare. Whereas fatal police encounters amount to a few hundred lives per year - a number that
can and should decrease - civilians themselves commit homicides at an objectively alarming
pace. Sum totals of civilians killed by the police do not amount to even 5% of the gargantuan
stack of bodies piled high by the homicide epidemic in the United States. Nonetheless, if a
nation’s leaders wish to declare themselves “a nation of laws” and advocate for “rule of law” at
home and abroad, they would be remiss to omit discussion of the gravity of these acts by
agents of the state. These types of cases do not represent average public safety encounters,
but they represent disturbing patterns of anomalies, and they provide insight into the low
valuation of human life demonstrated by criminal justice agents who, to be fair, exhibit cultural
and psychological traits similar to average citizens. It bears mentioning that incidents like those
caught on video and gone viral in social media over the past decade of Black Lives Matter
protests may likely be considered extrajudicial killings if they happened in a foreign country,
particularly one adversarial to American interests. Nonetheless, the issue is more complex and
nuanced that meme and Twitter culture lend to it.

Many of the behaviors and attitudes exhibited by nonviolent criminals could be interpreted as
civil disobedience in the same vein as King, Gandhi, Thoreau, and St, Thomas Aquinas.
Rejection of and noncompliance with unjust laws are widely believed to be foundational virtues
of the United States, and more broadly modern civilization. How else could humans have
emerged from millennia of tribal blood feuds, peonage, serfdom, and chattel slavery? How else
but through acts of protest and dissidence could segregation and the colonial era come to an
end? Surely, there were potentially divergent paths that could have resulted in the same or
better outcome, but counterfactual arguments are unreliable as they are impossible to prove.
Individual dissenters authored in ammatory political messages denouncing then-status quo,
and together with activist groups a critical mass within subjugated populations developed, and
only through struggle and con ict could people throw o the shackles of our collectively
lamentable history. Changes to historical orders have brought about liberties once
unimaginable, but they did not come without costs, and they were not always the most
obvious, popular outcomes as plot lines developed.

“Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground” - Crosby, Stills, and Nash

The War on Drugs has been a prominent example of these deep cultural and psychological
characteristics that result in utter lack of inspiration, motivation, will or ability to comply.
Nonviolent drug o enders are sentenced to prisons whereupon they experience environments
rife with behaviors malum in se - a darkly ironic punishment for acts merely malum in jure.
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 Considering the ubiquity of prison rape and violence, one can infer that prison guards likewise
experience emotional or other disabilities in the matter of respecting and enforcing laws among
prisoners whose incarceration does not abrogate simple civil and human rights, like freedom
from rape and torturous conditions. Absent a Supreme Court writ of mandamus, however,
reform among corrections o cers remains about as unlikely as voluntary compliance among all
prisoners. Yet still, how mere unlicensed sale of a nonlethal substances to adults would
necessitate con nement among murderers, rapists and assorted of violent thugs, for years on
end, begs not just a few questions. Likewise, one should scratch one’s head over how all three
branches of government would fall silent and lethargic on failures of prisons to provide
rehabilitation or at least e ectively reduce recidivism.

Inherent ine ciencies in corrections are a level or two removed from points of rst contact,
without which the sluggish and resource-intensive process would not initiate. Police have
increased contact and risk when compared to other civilians, and in a socioeconomic and
political environment where life is routinely devalued, police encounters gone awry should not
come as a surprise; appalling, yes, but not surprising per se. Police aggressively parol the
streets in search of speeders and other motorists violating minor municipal laws. Once an
o cer initiates a tra c stop, there is virtually nothing a civilian can do to avoid paying a ne.
The government and its agents have coercive powers to extort sums of money from citizens
who are powerless over the intrusive capacities of public agencies. In the course of interacting
with civilians during tra c stops - whether justi ed or not - police have not infrequently
engaged unarmed citizens and used deadly force when no clear threat was posed to the
o cer. Courts have rarely found any fault on the part of law enforcement o cers whose
paranoia has cost several individuals their lives for no other reason than that they committed
some moving violation while driving. Meanwhile, cyber criminals scam billions of dollars from
victims each year - a magnitude of property loss far greater than that attributable to street
crime. Yet still budgetary expenditures mainly focus on militarizing police, buying more
weapons, employing more tactical o cers, despite the greater need being in the area of
computer crime. Just because scammers do not take by force does not mean they are not
stealing, but considering the apparent lack of will to police the internet to a reasonable degree,
one may think it somehow less of a crime to steal tens of thousands of dollars via online fraud
than to steal a couple hundred dollars in a mugging.

Examples of criminal justice gone wrong abound in overactive American courts. Lockyer v.
Andrade saw the Supreme Court uphold California three-strikes laws that sent a man to prison
for 25 years to life over less than $200 in stolen DVDs from a department store. The State
Supreme Court upheld a life sentence without parole for possession of just over 1 ounce of
marijuana in Allen v. Mississippi. Mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine under the
1994 omnibus crime bill saw young black men imprisoned for the majority of their productive
years over a few doses of crack, whereas if they had a comparable amount of powder cocaine,
they could have served probation in sentence deferment programs, or at least been paroled
after shorter stints in the penitentiary. Mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence 911 calls
has led to men convicted under the banner of domestic violence for a range of behaviors, from
mere arguments to destruction of property to various degrees of assault and battery. To be
clear, no man nor woman worth their salt would advocate for lenience on spousal abusers,
particularly those resulting in severe bodily harm, but the headline term “domestic violence”
encompasses a wide variety of acts; it would help to distinguish based on facts.

Roughly 1 in 4 Americans has some kind of arrest record. This is a phenomenally large number
when compared to statistics from other countries around the world. Legal traditions appear to
be the main reason for the disproportionate amount of criminal records in the USA, per capita,
as compared to that in other jurisdictions. In systems following Confucian traditions - those of
East and Southeast Asia - judges were historically discouraged from accepting many cases.
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 Still today, there are fewer judges per capita in the population of China than in Europe and the
United States. Confucius advocated informal remedies undertaken within communities, to
which individuals were responsible. In those societies, lawful behavior was required for social
order rather than mere obedience to an absentee, faceless state to avoid punishments.
Likewise, the Islamic world encouraged individuals to comply with laws as a means of attaining
spiritual enlightenment. One’s honor, dignity, and soul were at stake with regard to compliance
with laws in Eastern systems. In contrast, the Western world adopted more paternalistic
coercive systems of formal reactive justice. With westward expansion, law became a substitute
for religion, and lawful behavior was more about ensuring business-as-usual than maintaining
relationships and harmony within the collective human colony or achieving some state of
Godliness.

The disconnect between law-and-order rhetoric and facts on the ground does not stop with the
criminal law. Colorado Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Love-Kourliss testi ed before congress
about the inaccessible civil justice system across the US. Whereas corporate entities
command su cient capital leverage to employ counsel to vigorously further claims on their
wealthy clients’ behalf, the vast majority of individuals lack any essence of agency in the legal
system that is purportedly intended to serve all citizens equally. As a result, corporate and
other wealthy agents are free to manipulate consumers, commit tortfeasor abuses, and
otherwise act with impunity in a legal environment where, as Justice Love-Kourliss
commented, lawsuits are decided on the costs rather than merits.

Confucian societies approach civil legal matters di erently. In his time, Confucius was opposed
to publication of laws for the entire population to read. He thought that if everybody were able
to read and interpret the laws, there would be too many self-serving constructions of language
that he believed only legal experts were quali ed to restate and understand. The Napoleonic
Codes in mainland Europe were intended to be something of a co ee table book, where every
citizen could have access to the laws such that they would know and comprehend their duties,
and therefore could not use ignorance as an excuse for noncompliance. Such is a noble ideal,
and in Continental Europe, frivolous litigation both civilly and criminally may be minimal.
However, countries following adversarial English common law traditions - particularly the
hyper-capitalist United States - are uniquely prone to excessive litigiousness. Anybody can sue
anybody for any reason, or for no reason at all other than to cause problems for the target of
legal action. Confucius was misguided in his desire to restrict access to laws - the people
deserve rights to read the texts - but his predictions were spot-on as the American legal
experience has bore out precisely the types of reckless, unscrupulous, mala des manipulation
of the law as Confucius sought to eschew.

Whether the culture normalized the legal bu oonery or vice versa does not change the e ect. A
people numb to argumentum ad absurdum is primed to accept fallacious monkeyshine as
proper in areas of life extending far beyond the courtroom. For example, when college students
successfully petition for removal of a statue or change of a mascot, this is a small victory, but a
symbolic one that a ects conscience or perception and does not have tangible outcomes that
lift incomes, reduce violent crime, or improve objectively quanti able aspects of quality of life.
To be sure, a comprehensive cultural mindshift probably includes rejection of icons of historical
injustices, but an inanimate object is just that. Like the War on Drugs was somewhat laughable
from the start, in that war was declared on inanimate objects that have no will nor
consequence unless acted upon, so too are statues, mascots, and even words unsubstantial
with regard to their impacts on crucial matters of legal, economic, and nancial realities. To
recapitulate, metaphysical and psychological factors surely create intra- and interpersonal
conditions that can be felt, communicated, and transferred within the human environment.
Notwithstanding those quali ed ethereal elements, there are quite simply a litany of concrete
corollaries that are, alas, more urgent.

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 Amid the surge in youthful protest on campus and in corporate HR departments, a large group
of public intellectuals have found reason to criticize the intensity and direction of progressive
politics. Experts like Ralph Nader, Cornel West, Andrew Sullivan, and the long list of academics
who signed the Harper’s petition for free speech, have formed a coalition of bipartisan
heterodox thinkers who are without a doubt desirous of progress, improvements in quality of
life, greater equality among identity groups, universal human rights and prosperity. They are
also, however, critical of neophyte missionaries proselytizing the dogma of Left-reactionaryism
- those who participate in and condone cancel culture but deny a liation vigorously. Perhaps
these nonconformist heterodox thinkers can be branded as old guard, but neither their age nor
their centric or conservative views alone negate their arguments. West, Nader, Maher et al
disparage the popular cultural push to destroy monuments, rebrand marketing mascots, and
rigidly censor constitutionally protected speech not necessarily because these actions lack
merit, but because they do not address core issues about which mature, responsible adults are
most concerned. Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Buttersworth may have appropriated a cultural image,
and they may have been rooted in racial exploitation, but their demise like that of Mr. Peanut,
did not put food on the table or pay the rent. Likewise, who could deny that a social
environment is more pleasant when everybody chooses their words with the feelings and
sensitivities of listeners in mind? Obviously, polite speech makes for a nicer, less threatening
atmosphere, but it can come across as disingenuous if that is as far as the niceness goes. Rich
primarily white young people smiling and articulating polite, intelligent words in the presence of
those less fortunate is certainly better than those same young adults looking down upon those
of lower socioeconomic status, but the power dynamic hardly changes. There are still rich and
poor, regardless of how they speak to each other.

Oh, there are metaphors. Though easily lost in the clutter of entertainment media o erings,
there have been breakout artistic representations that have clear relevance to systemic failings
of the modern world. Resident Evil, for example, centers around a community plagued by
zombies created by an industrial accident. The Umbrella Corporation - always watching - made
most of the population into the living dead, and mostly the company gets away with denying it
and otherwise going about business as usual. For the few protagonists who remain una icted
and aware of the company’s complicity in the post-apocalyptic thriller, both zombies and the
company do little more than make life extremely di cult.

Legally speaking, weapons engineers and salespeople are non-combatants, but without their
wares, there would not be bloodshed, or not nearly at the scale of war and aggregate violent
crime. Worthy of thought is the idea that laws are basically only the opinions and ideologies of
a small group of like-minded individuals who have nancial and defense resources to enforce
their decrees with extreme prejudice. Though some laws have objectively veri able merit, as
assessed by social and life sciences, they are not immutable forces of nature. Neither does the
value of money change as the weather nor do laws descend from the cosmos intact. Indeed,
these are distinctly human archetypes of power, order, class, caste and dominion.

While neither weapons engineers nor rank-and- le servicemen may be tried for war crimes so
long as they were just doing what they were ordered, this hierarchy of legal responsibility does
not abrogate inherent freewill among participants in con icts. Vladimir Putin, for example, has
taken the blame for o enses against the international order, but Putin does not stand accused
of personally ring a weapon in the Ukraine con ict; that required the voluntary compliance of
thousands if not millions of Russians.

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 Trans-dimensional Slip-through
I woke up this mornin' with the sundown shinin' in

I found my mind in a brown paper bag within

I tripped on a cloud and fell-a eight miles high

I tore my mind on a jagged sky

I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

I pushed my soul in a deep dark hole and then i followed it in

I watched myself crawlin' out as i was a-crawlin' in

I got up so tight i couldn't unwind

I saw so much i broke my mind

I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

- Kenny Rogers, Just Dropped In

Layered tiers of intersecting and overlapping realities at scale imply that divergent opinions and
applications are largely unavoidable, but clarity and certainty are still natural desires among
humans, as is quest for status and power. Con icting interests and disparate objectives at
scale manifest elements of chaos over temporal and spatial dimensions. Given large human
populations spread across competitive political boundaries, there is some essence of
unpredictability and anarchy at a global level as sovereigns maintain their sense of primacy
both at home and abroad in spite of internal inconsistencies. Whereas nation states rarely
achieve legal and cultural parity among their peers, and thus consistently lack external validity
in the larger group, each most often pursues its self-interest nearly singlemindedly in what is
perceived as a zero-sum game at scale. Individuals in each discrete tribal group likewise apply
faulty logic in their personal and professional dealings, the sum of which contributes to and is
re ected in larger-order disorganization.

Consider the extrajudicial killing of journalist Jamal Kashoggi. On its face, it appears to be a
unilateral o ense against a civilian by state agents solely on the basis of the victim’s political
speech. However, the deeper story is not so one-dimensional. Kashoggi’s family was
responsible for deaths of thousands while selling arms. Jamal was the bene ciary of his
family’s legacy, whether he enjoyed such an identity or not. He was empowered with status
and privilege due to his family’s sordid dealings with Saudi royals and regional warlords. It is
not unimaginable that he may have personally committed serious o enses by way of his
association with his family’s business. Absent a legitimate trial, all such imagined machinations
did not grant right of under laws in most jurisdictions to summarily execute the “civilian”, but it
seems nonetheless disingenuous to paint Kashoggi as a martyr whose hands were spotlessly
clean. Given that the Saudi basic law speci es the Quran is the foundation for the laws of the
political state, it is entirely possible that Kashoggi could have been sentenced to death under
Shariah which despite secular opposition still holds validity under the discrete jurisdictions
choosing to apply Shariah. One should also not overlook the broad popularity of Shariah in
those jurisdictions, which function democratically considering the will of the people is given
e ect through the state. Yet these parallel facts simultaneously do not abrogate the
government’s obligation to provide persons such as Kashoggi with due process. While
laypeople and media pundits prefer simple, narrow views with clear right and wrong, the fuller
picture is not nearly as basic.

Overlapping and intersecting jurisdictions and theories of law sprung up when Kashoggi was
executed in an Embassy which, despite technically being foreign soil, still exists outside of the
country responsible for acts occurring on the premises. The act will remain a lesson in
jurisdiction, soft power of diplomacy and sanctions, but the technicalities are murky at best.
International law gained a foothold in the matter because it activated treaties in consular
relations and sovereignty over embassy properties, but Islamic and territorial laws were
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 likewise entwined since the acts occurred under Saudi jurisdiction just out of reach of Turkish
authorities.

“Deep inside of a parallel universe, It's getting harder and harder to tell what came rst”

- Red Hot Chili Peppers, Parallel Universe

Like a head trip from a hippy daydream, parallel realities exist across political boundaries.
Traveling just a few miles could expose one to rather di erent perceptions about what is legal,
ethical, moral, and normal. In episode seven of the rst season of sci- comedy The Orville the
crew of an interstellar spaceship landed on a planet where mob rule and social media voting
were the basis of legal action. One of the crew was imprisoned because a viral video of her
yielded hundreds of thousands of down-votes. This exaggerated artistic representation draws
attention to the fact that culture and values are understood by groups smaller than the whole
population, but try to tell that to each successive leader who believes his law is both eternal
and universal.

Examples of divergent legal regimes abound both within and between countries. In the United
States, police in urban jurisdictions prioritize violent crime and serious property crime rather
than petty theft, various tra c o enses, and minor misdemeanors. In San Fransicko and What’s
Next, Chicago?, Schellenberger and Rosenberg discussed some of the consequences of light-
on-crime strategies in liberal American cities, but the fact remains that metropolitan areas
cannot concern themselves with the same types of low-level misdemeanors that suburbs and
rural prosecutors have time and jail space to address. The result illuminates the apparent
meaning of the Article IV, section 2 of the Constitution. Whereas a layperson reading the
privileges and immunities clause using commonly understood de nitions of the plain English
terms may interpret the clause as implying all citizens of the United States shall have the same
rights while living in one state as other citizens may enjoy while living in another state. To some
extent, with regard to federal law, this is so, but there are notable and excusable di erences
which apparently do not contravene the intention of the Constitution. Barnett and Bernick
discussed the privileges and immunities clause at some length, and during its construction,
there were arguments among representatives regarding its reach. One result of the current
interpretation is that marijuana entrepreneurs make millions in legal cash in states where the
substance is legal for recreational use while others languish in prison cells for the same act in
jurisdictions where the substance is not legal.

The Chinese social credit system has made the news in recent years, drawing the ire of
advocates of freedoms and democracy as WEIRD societies de ne them. The standard
narrative is that Chinese citizens do not vote - even though they do - and that the one party
system seriously limits public agency in the system. To some degree, a single party
government constrains public involvement, but if one perceives the Chinese and American
systems from an augmented perspective, they are fairly comparable. None would argue that
the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China has any intention of opening the
country to democratic elections in the style of Western Europe and the Occident. The people
may vote, but the Party selects which candidates shall run, and citizens vote between those
approved candidates. On its face, this appears very di erent from the American system, but if
we consider the in uence of money and two-party duopoly, these di erences are narrowed.
Further analysis of how primary elections are held, who is allowed to participate in debates,
and the role of delegates in the primary process, closes the gap even more. Ask Bernie
Sanders supporters about the 2016 primary loss to Hillary Clinton, and they may likely point to
the Podesta emails and argue that the Democratic Party breached ethical or legal obligations in
e orts to promote and run their preferred candidate: Clinton. Similarly, people still bring up the
“Brooks Brothers Riot” and 2000 Bush v. Gore decision as evidence that elections in the United
States do not meet the high standards its agents demand of foreign elections. In other words,
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 some of the criticism of other countries may be psychological projection of domestic aws, or
simply biased patriotic posturing rather than objective empiricism.

Independent ontologies and deontologies emerged in tribes of the historic world, manifest by
religious customs and then legal traditions. Pork is illegal in Saudi Arabia, and although likewise
prohibited in the Old Testament, Christians of the WEIRD world nd it laughable that Muslims
dare not eat the pig. At the same time, millions of individuals in those primarily Christian
societies struggle with alcoholism, which is all but eradicated in the Muslim world under
religious and therefore legal command. Similarly, Brits and Aussies look down their noses at
Americans for the gun violence epidemic in the United Stated, and this is made possible
through legislation banning most guns in those Commonwealth countries - something their
citizens nd easy to accept considering the apparent e ect on homicide. Whereas rights to
own and keep rearms are as fundamentally American as free speech or capitalism, Brits and
Aussies nd this element of national identity absurd given the ostensible outcomes by way of
violent crime.

An American in the United States may nd it easy to condemn, for example, Russia’s
imprisonment of Brittney Griner, an American basketball player whom Russian authorities
caught with a cannabis product upon her entry via Moscow airport. However, there is a certain
transparency in Russia’s hamhanded approach to criminal justice. By comparison, confusion
and contempt are likely results of the dual status of marijuana as legal and illegal in the United
States, and this murky classi cation comes against the backdrop of the United States having
been by far the most active state in global Drug Wars. While Allied WEIRD diplomatic corps
bargain and pressure foreign states for release of their nationals imprisoned for spying or
drugs, those same countries are almost certainly committing unlawful acts of espionage
against those same foreign states and even some of their private entities. Su ced it is to say,
neither public nor private interests are reliably served when corporations and states operate
under explicit or implicit double-standards and quid pro quo violations of norms, rules, and
customs of international commerce or relations.

Examples of divergent moral, ethical, and legal ideologies abound in the global population, so
a full or even lengthy accounting would become redundant; the main idea to process and
understand is that what may seem perfectly normal and acceptable in one place, among one
people, could be illegal or even immoral elsewhere. In such a diverse world, nding common
ground and developing anything close to a universal framework for rights and their
enforcement is a complicated task. Though the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties
obliges member states to ful ll the terms of their agreements, there is considerable leeway in
the interpretation and application of the vague, soft law of multilateral treaties. Even when a
state is recalcitrant and clearly fails to implement or enforce standards under treaty or
customary international law, there exists no legitimate forum for resolution of disputes absent
voluntary submission of all parties to such a process. In some cases, economic sanctions and
diplomatic channels can be leveraged to prompt speedy resolution. The United Nations
Security Council was designed to operate like a world police via peacekeepers when
disagreements escalate to violence, but the veto power of the permanent members seriously
limits its power. Furthermore, since there is no bona de world government that could claim
jurisdiction over a sovereign state, there are few available remedies should a country’s
leadership become persistent violators of generally accepted practices among civilized states.
Hence, the world has had to grapple with the Team America: World Police farce in spite of its
own direct con icts with the letter and spirit of our international order.

To be sure, some countries rely on the United States and its allies to secure international
waters, respond in kind to acts of aggression, and sometimes prop up WEIRD-friendly
dictatorships. “Unfair” is too mild a word for the state of the world with regards to military
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 expansion and intervention. Who could deny that citizens in NATO member states would feel
justi ed in their taking up arms to repel an immediate threat on their own soil? Imagine then,
how would those same people feel it were a criminal act or terrorism for foreign nationals in
their foreign homeland to take up arms to repel armed invasion and occupation of NATO troops
in that foreign sovereign nation? There is no clear logic or rationale if there is to be any essence
of equality among nations, yet still veterans of foreign wars are heroes at home whereas their
enemy combatants abroad are depicted as the “other” or “evil” or “terrorist” because those
foreign nationals dare defend their own sovereign territory from within its boundaries. That is
not to say there are bona de governments which follow norms, rules, and customs in
countries like Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other recent
targets of NATO-allied foreign military action. In the same breath, two wrongs do not make a
right, so to speak.

“Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop”

- Billy Holiday, Strange Fruit

Few moments on the o cial record draw legitimacy and legality of war into question more than
when John Kerry testi ed before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. Technically,
his testimony was hearsay, so it was inadmissible under Federal Rules of Evidence. The catch
is that if the same testimony were delivered from those with direct knowledge of and
involvement in the events detailed in Kerry’s speech, those men could have been prosecuted
for war crimes, which is something of an irony considering how ubiquitous such war stories
were after Vietnam. Kerry had spoken to a group of veterans in Detroit, and then Kerry
delivered some of their message to the Senate. In a sense, Kerry was the spokesperson of a
group of veterans whose message needed to reach the public, but due to legality and optics, it
took a messenger who was not directly involved. Kerry spoke on matters grave and solemn,
bringing likely truths from the “Winter Soldiers” to light even if it fell on deaf ears:

“They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut o ears, cut o heads,
tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut o
limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent
of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally
ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and
the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of
this country.”

And somehow, these were the good guys. The good guys whose government carried out a
false ag operation at the Gulf of Tonkin to invade a sovereign nation whose indigenous people
were struggling to break free of the shackles of French colonialism. The nation in which the
United Nations is headquartered - in whose Charter self-determination of peoples is a
fundamental guiding principle - had lied, cheated, and connived its way into a war e ort to
deprive a people of their rightful claim to territorial integrity and sovereignty. This was four
years after United Nations General Assembly Resolution 45/130 rea rmed grant of right and
recognition of freedoms of people under colonial dominion to claw back their occupied and
otherwise pilfered lands from foreign colonizers. That is truly despicable. One need not have
much of an active imagination or wild sense of humor to understand where Arlo Guthrie was
coming from when he rattled o his stories in Alice’s Restaurant.

And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I

Wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and

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Guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill,

KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL, " and

He started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down

Yelling, "KILL, KILL." And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me,

Sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."

- Arlo Gurthrie, Alice’s Restaurant

 Pac-Man World
In Net ix’s breakout lm Bandersnatch, characters discuss a conspiracy hypothesis. An
electronic music DJ recorded the transcript of that scene over a techno song. The result was
quite brilliantly ironic:

“You know what Pac-Man stands for?

Program and control

He's program and control man

The whole thing is a metaphor

All he can do is consume

He is pursued by demons, that are probably just in his own head

And even if he does manage to escape by slipping out one side of the maze, what happens?

He comes right back on the other side

People think it's a happy game, well, it's not a happy game

But luckily, Pac-Man didn't a ect us as kids

Otherwise, we'd be running around in dark rooms

Munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music

Repetitive electronic music” - Hardwell, PACMAN

Pirie’s Rules of Laws provides an epic account of evolutions in legal traditions and systems
around the world. Though there is variance between centers of development (i.e.
Mesopotamia, Europe, India, and China), there are also central themes re ected across all
distinct jurisdictions. Regardless of the place or people, laws have always been crafted to
ensure order among castes, classes, and ranks of people in a civilization. Contemporary
constitutions and statutes generally explicate an objective of equality under the law, and in the
vacuum of academia or ivory tower of government agencies, modern advocates and jurists can
probably sustain claims that individuals are equal, but there are always intervening variables
like wealth, access, in uence, and power that impact how theory plays out in practice.
Throughout history, laws and their o cial custodians explicitly classi ed ranks, races, and tiers
of citizenship which left no doubt as to their intended e ect. Today’s laws have universal rights
written into them, so one cannot often reasonably interpret malintent, but many commentators
nd the e ect is more telling than the intention. Combined with pragmatic nancial, economic,
and political realities, such arguments are persuasive - that today’s laws are not so far removed
from those of bygone eras. Indeed, Piketty found “inequality is determined primarily by
ideological and political factors”. In other words, deep poverty and rigid class hierarchies are
products of laws, their stated or unstated foundational principles, and their targeted
application. In this way, current liberal democracies have been only marginally successful in
eradicating ills of ternary or tripartite epochs.

History cannot literally repeat itself, but there are surely through-lines and consistencies
between the past and present. Mesopotamian kings claimed divine authority, declaring their
rule absolute under God’s decree. Conveniently for early Middle Eastern pharaohs and emirs,
none other than themselves were quali ed to discern God’s will on earth. Thus, they were free
to command subjects to whatever extent would not inspire populous revolt. From the rst
lawmaker, Ur-Namma, through millennia of successive monarchic rulers, Mesopotamian law
concerned itself with “justice”. Ur-Namma innovated prescribed punishments for o enses
rather than merely publishing rules and edicts of behaviors that people shall and shall not
commit. Romans adopted many aspects of Middle Eastern laws but directed their intended
bene ciaries at the European tribal rulers who, similar to Mesopotamian kings, claimed divine
right. Likewise Chinese emperors proclaimed themselves sons of God, or that they were
divinely empowered to rule in their earthly domain.

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 Marx branded religion “opium of the masses” partly because pro-legal verses are mixed into
scriptures that only came to be so widely printed because political states compiled, advised,
edited, and approved their publication. The very state that once “uni ed” its people under a
religion also stood to bene t by allowing people to practice their approved religion. As a
kickback, the gospel of John will teach people that “sin is lawlessness”. The Book of Romans
will instruct the God-fearing Christians that everyone must subject themselves to the state or
face God’s wrath and that of their conscience. Peter will guide the parishioners to prostrate
themselves before human institutions, to the emperors and their agents. Titus will remind the
people to be submissive and obedient to rulers and authorities. Books of Luke and Romans
will impel good Christians to pay taxes, and so on.

These two institutions - government and Church - were a magni cent synergy. Over centuries,
operant conditioning becomes hard-wired in the human psyche. After a few hundred years of
rewards and punishments, people are happy to give up intellectual freedoms. They
automatically feel shame for expressing or endorsing dissenting economic or political
ideologies, and they shame those who pose di erent threats thoughts. Generations down the
conditioned line, people are afraid of authoritarian repercussions to be sure, but they are also
culturally manipulated such that they cannot get past their own preconceived notions of what
realities exist or could exist if were they not ashamed of thinking, and if they did not cease
thinking just because an idea were taboo.

Commerce and nance came to replace the Church as dominant social actors, but still today
the government and the popular faith work together to pacify commoners until they are pliant
drones ready to accept what their landlords, managers, and political leadership o er. The world
today surely perceives the phrase “In God We Trust” di erently than it would have several
hundred years ago, but a throughline exists in this cultural lifestyle branding of lawful behavior
as somehow implying not only good moral order, but also adherence to God’s command and in
proximity to wealth which itself is seen to imply God’s favor.

That so few individuals can keep two thoughts in mind at once - religion and law have serious
problems but are also absolutely necessary - suggests our collective human histories have
witnessed rst class brainwashing, insomuch that the very structures of our brains have
probably evolved to predispose newborns to fall in line, repress and suppress dissent against
established social orders. That is not to say the government alone controls the narrative of the
status quo; rather, there are but few dominant identity brands in the marketplace of ideas. Their
patrons erect barriers to entry and engage in other anticompetitive practices. Brand loyalty is
built from birth. Competing ideas are associated with foul and evil ways while preferred brands
are exalted as being God’s living spirit on Earth. Culture clashes are inevitable in such a
stubbornly closed-minded false dichotomy of “our way versus the wrong way”.

“God money, I’ll do anything for you

God money, just tell me what you want me to

God money, nail me up against the wall

God money, don’t want everything he wants it all

Bow down before the one you serve

You’re going to get what you deserve”

- Nine Inch Nails, Head Like A Hole

Ostrogoth King Theodoric the Great, a Roman successor, declared his subjects could retain
Roman laws and their agents. In a letter to Genoese Jews, Theodoric proclaimed “the true
mark of civilitas is the observance of law. It is this… which separates men from beasts.” This
sense follows in both Jewish and Muslim laws, that obedience to law is a duty of all loyal
believers in the one-true God whose will and edict only a small cadre of high-ranking o cials
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 may interpret. Sunni Muslim scholars point out that the sunna - or teachings and customs of
the Prophet (‫ )صلى اهلل عليه وسلم‬- envision a community based on the Medina settlement where
each individual is personally responsible before God. This can be an enlightening concept that
improves individual relations and quality of life. Being a political state whose basic law is the
Quran and Sunna, Saudi Arabia’s criminal procedure code, for example, o ers considerably
more privacy rights, and standards for burden of proof are higher than those in Western
democracies which are generally considered more supportive of freedoms and liberties.
Con ation of deity and human legal code can, of course, also have negative impacts on
liberties, rights, freedoms, and quality of life.

Early Hindu laws stress duty rather than justice or discipline, but there was consistency with
the Middle Eastern and European legal systems in the underlying theory of Aryan-Indian laws.
A set of religious teachings, edicts, and ritual customs called Dhammashastras were meta-laws
in the proto-Indian subcontinent. Aryan society was sharply dissected into four castes (varnas)
with priests (Brahmins) at the top, followed by kings and elite warlords (khshatriyas), then
working class merchants and farmers (vaishyas), and the untouchables (shudras). India’s
modern constitution explicitly prohibits caste discrimination, but many people have observed
the culture of caste is quite possibly part of the Indian identity, and as such it cannot be
abrogated even by the constitution. By comparison, European tripartite systems instituted a
cooperative triangle of power sharing and codependency between nobles, warriors, and
clergymen. Similarly, modern society in the European and Occidental world is noticeably
classed with oligarchs, power brokers, and religious forces acting upon the First, Second, and
Third estates in government. The Fourth estate has potential to balance neo-aristocrats’ and
commoners’ interests, but as of late it has been seized by said moneyed interests and aims to
do little other than recruit proxy minions in the lower-class populations to ght the battles of,
rather than against, the elite donor classes.

In the Chinese tradition, discipline was the objective as opposed to justice and/or duty in the
Middle East and South Asia, or the hybrid European model that achieved similar ends but with
the added element of minor political discourse among disenfranchised peasants. Nonetheless,
the structural hierarchies, philosophical rationalizations for power imbalances, implementing
legal enforcement measures, and tiered/classed/caste social paradigms in East Asia shared
similarities with those elsewhere in the documented historical world. There are simply only but
a few ways historical man could have maintained extreme power distance, subjugation of
productive working people, remote control of vast lands, organized logistics for extraction and
transport of natural resources, all while rationalizing rule of the masses by a handful of relatively
lazy, weak, unenlightened imbeciles. Having such extensive and diverse territories, Chinese
rulers were privileged such that they engaged in deep thinking on legal matters, developing a
distinctly Chinese approach to civilization, particularly after the life of the in uential teacher
Confucius. Emperors and their lieutenants also enjoyed the luxury of living as demigods, or
those whose will was interpreted as if it were sent from heaven, and whose actions could not
be punished in the earthly realm less there were an assassination or mightier military force who
seized power. Like their despotic counterparts around the world, Chinese rulers did not have to
till the soil, build their houses, or keep hours in any occupation, so they had time to
contemplate larger issues, and some of their wisdom stood the test of time; some did not.

Because he had been one of the lucky few who had su cient time, space, wealth, and energy
to devote his life to philosophical questions, Confucius’ became synonymous with decadence
and counter-revolutionary thought in the Cultural Revolution, but his brand of social philosophy
was inextricable from the Chinese identity even amid the roughest spots of Maoist tactical
terrorism. Young Maoists in the 1960s-70s probably took issue with the latent imperialism of
some more abstract and lesser-known Confucianist ideas. For example, there had been long
disagreement about whether to allow the general public to have access to laws. The intent is
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 often misunderstood, and readers probably often fail to fully grasp the complexity of the
Confucian ethic at its origin. A main complaint of written laws is that, like any other code -
religious, tribal, personal, militaristic - they are intangible and cannot literally constrain man’s
behavior. Shang Yang deplored the gap between laws and practice. Shang and other
Confucian scholars found key problems in corrupt leadership, inconsistent decision making,
abuse of discretion in ine cient bureaucratic apparatuses. Some Biblical scriptures deal with
these same contradictions, but the Confucian scholars bent their minds around knots and
corners that the Europeans dared not publish if, in fact, they had considered the same ideas as
the Chinese.

People living in regions dominated by religions paying respect to the God of Abraham were by
no means the only humans on Earth whose legal traditions turned to punishments as reactive
measures for crimes. How else could a governing authority responsible for a group’s obedience
to a rule - whether the leader were a father, a chieftain, a manager, or king - provide incentive
for compliance and disincentive for insubordination absent some form of negative
reinforcement? Of course, if the world were not inherently dysfunctional, if laws were
continuously nearing their upper limits of perfection, if there were not malicious actors and
saboteurs, then a population may naturally gravitate toward obedience. However, laws are not
necessarily intuitive. Often enough, a rule is implemented merely as protection against harm to
a special class of people from behavior that may cause some harm to that small minority even
though the same behavior may not have negative repercussions to most people. A regulation
may exist to prevent a rare ed abnormality that could at some time happen, so all must refrain
from such activity because some tiny fraction of a percent of the population may experience
harm from it. More often, law is simply the cultural and political will of a dominant majority
identity group in a population, so regardless of a liation with that group or the subjectivity/
objectivity con icts inherent within the policy, all individuals in the entire population must obey
or face threat of punishment. Plainly, the Chinese system under Confucius had punishments
available, but Confucius found more value in proactive approaches to social and criminal
matters.

Collectivism is central to the East Asian cultural identity, as opposed to the Western world
where individualism is far more valued. This is not to suggest one should reduce their
worldview to a dichotomy of East/West nor individualism/collectivism. Indeed there are uid
and sliding-scales in our nonbinary psychological and cultural makeup. However, Confucius
was both a leader in creating this East Asian social identity, and his ideas owed from pre-
existing linkages among citizens of the regions under his purview. Whereas Europeans
experienced a top-down sense of responsibility - that is, laws come from God through
emperors and monarchies, and the people must then obey or be punished by both man and
God - Confucius suggested right moral living must begin in the individual’s heart and mind.
Only but by the cooperation of each and all individual citizens can we begin to have a peaceful
and harmonic society. Of course, guidance is needed, and laws should be written, and there
was no reason to dismiss religious sentimentality out of hand, but whereas God may have sat
in heaven and decided what was right and wrong, Confucius thought it was through and by the
people that these ideals would gain traction and be carried out in our shared physical realities.
In other words, it appears that Confucius believed in internal locus of control more or di erently
than his European counterparts.

This longstanding di erence in ontology, deontology, and epistemology is still evident in

American courts who have charged persons criminally for uttering words that may have
contributed to a suicide, as if to say witchcraft were possible and locus of control within an
individual who took their own life rested solely in the person charged with communicating
hurtful words. In the same vein, there have been prominent movements as of late toward
adoption of standpoint epistemologies in the “woke” movement, whose core tenets would hold
individuals in target identity groups (i.e. black, LGBTQ+, nonwhite females, persons with
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 disabilities, etc.) are not responsible for their poverty, criminal behavior, or other negative
experiences; rather, the white community at-large holds puppet strings, so to speak, because
being a member of target identity groups abrogates one’s internal locus of control unless, that
is, the individual is successful. To recapitulate, the WEIRD world has recently moved toward a
social philosophy that determines locus of control resides internally for persons in speci ed
identity groups so long as they succeed, whereas success by individuals in the white cisgender
and especially male population is attributed to the collective “racism” (a word that means
anything or nothing at this stage) and not the independent e orts of those individuals. The
inverse is also held true: that external locus of control explains failures among members of
protected identity groups, whereas internal locus of control explains failures among the white
cisgender mainly male population. These ideas may seem new and foreign to many people in
the Western world, but they have roots in ancient legal philosophies.

Communist Party agitators during the Cultural Revolution most likely heard that Confucius did
not think the people should be able to access the written laws. On its face, that fact appears
fairly damning for Confucius. What good reason could there be not to allow the people to read
their laws? How could they know that the o cials were even enforcing the real laws if the
people could not even access them? Again, we must recenter and imagine a gravity so
consuming that it boggles even the brightest of minds to the point of absurdity from time to
time. Confucian scholars rightly point out the negative outcomes of universal access to all
policies - bad faith, self-serving interpretations, frivolity, feigning o ense for show, usurping the
noble institution of law for personal nancial gain, sullying the esteemed reputations of legal
professionals, debasing and discrediting the process, replacing honor with folly, and ultimately
undermining the core mission of laws by turning litigation into a circus. If anybody and
everybody has equal access, then anybody can read whatever meaning into and out of any
words to suit their own purposes, and they can probably pay police, lawyers, and judges to
agree with them. Having considered the value of such concerns, however, more harm is likelier
to occur if access is restricted. Hence, it is a lose-lose situation. Confucius was certainly not
wrong that the best agents of social change are the people themselves - Eleanor Roosevelt
echoed those same sentiments in her convocation of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights - but like the voluntary international system, Confucian systems are still a work in
progress. That said, so are all the other systems in our world riddled with aws, ine ciencies,
and assorted maladies.

One constant through ages and across lands has been the remarkable resilience of the human
spirit - the will and ability to accept and acquiesce to things that, if give a choice, no rational
being would ever embrace. Change has been constant, but not so much in core foundational
composition. Through the Middle Ages, for example, European monarchies had lost some of
their absolute authority, but allegiances and loyalties among lawmakers often remained in tact.
If a Parliament in a constitutional monarchy so desired to defy the monarch’s rule, there are
procedures in place, but matters of access, nance, honor, patriotism, and politics create
signi cant interference. Pirie questioned “Did the ruler simply have power, or did he only have
the power to declare what was lawful? Or did the people have this power? Behind these
debates was often a sense that the law was set apart from royal power, that the king could not
simply declare what was lawful.” The answer was not terribly clear. According to Pirie’s
exposition, “Tacitus, in his commentary on the administration of Britain, declared that what
Britons mistook for ‘civilization’ was really an aspect of their slavery.” These were the edgling
preconditions of transitions from feudalism to democracy. Yet still, elements of the past remain
today.

Blood feuds are less common among individuals now than before, but they still occur. In some
parts of the world, honor-killings are still accepted cultural practices. Surveys of data relating to
motives among American homicide o enders have suggested that personal slight and
“disrespect” are primary factors contributing to a chain of events that ends in a murder.
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 Americans do not call them honor killings as such, but these are not so di erent from those
homicides in Pakistan that make headlines, leaving many American mouths agape at
“barbarism” overseas that they fail to recognize just down the street. Tribal and Islamic codes
still accept blood-money as lawful remedy in matters involving the death of a loved-one, and to
be fair, this process at least ensures some direct restorative justice and contact between
o enders and victims as compared to public prosecution which keeps aggrieved parties
separated from the process. Generally, municipal laws forbid homicide, but enforcement and
adjudication of statutes is sometimes hit-and-miss. Trial-by-battle was a customary means of
resolving personal disputes, and to be sure, the practice has gone out of favor among private
citizens, but it is most certainly an option states retain in the event that diplomatic and
economic channels fail.

Early civilizations con ated lawful behavior with adherence to religious and spiritual guidelines.
The law was an extension and earthly application of God’s will. Lawmakers and agents of the
law were appointed by higher powers. Laws were thusly unquestionable. By the time of St.
Thomas Aquinas, rational analysis of laws gained permissibility in some dimension, and the
concepts of malum in se and malum in jure emerged, but obedience to the state was still
con ated with moral and enlightened behavior. To be sure, one is nearly always best-advised to
comply with laws considering the threat of punishment, but the morality or necessity of many
laws is subjective. Still today, agents and die hard patriots associate law, justice, discipline,
harmony, and duty before God as synonymous or inseparable. With thousands of generations
of descendants boring out rigid neuropathways, it is unsurprising that a change of mind is
often di cult to motivate today, even with the abundance of information available
demonstrating the value of such altered mindsets.

In the span of twenty-some thousand years, the human lineage has grown in too many ways to
summarize. Social and organizational re nement occurred alongside technological and
physiological developments. The brute of the tribe may have been unseated by a strategic
thinker who organized a group which was then strong enough to physically overpower the
leader who relied too heavily on his physical stature. Brutal, fear-mongering, strong-arm, cut-
throat, autocratic dictators must always protect their own necks. Even Julius Cesar met his fate
by a close advisor in Brutus. As Snoop rapped in 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted, “You see we live
by the gun, so we die by the gun, kids.” There are always trade-o s involved in implementing a
less-than-perfect leadership style. It has not infrequently been murderous or otherwise grim
and as such has compelled humans to evolve and remain dynamic in matters of state
alongside the trappings of wealth, power, and status - if for no other reason than mere survival.

Through millennia, people have taken their medicine and at least acted like they liked it.
Consumers pay for the overpriced waste that lls dumps and increasingly the oceans. The
situation is complicated - there are elements of both free will and coercion. Locus of control is
both internal and external in matters of law. There are endogenous and exogenous factors that
compel behavior, some untethered from normative ethics while others irrelevant to utilitarian
deontologies. Few laws will last forever, but public and private agents pursuing damages act
like the laws are unquestionable, awless, beyond reproach. A lot of otherwise reasonable
people drank the Kool-Aid, and since nobody wants to be known in public as having a dirty
mind, then brainwashing is a natural response. Probably the best way to sell a lie is to believe
the lie - like Reagan did such a good job acting like he could not recall giving orders and
making decisions in the Iran Contra scandal, and after a while he really could not remember.
The power of persuasion is especially powerful when used on oneself.

Imagine some 20-something on ecstasy in some rave club in New York or Miami or Soho or
Ibiza or somewhere, dancing all night, maybe wandering around in circles from room to room,
moved and turned around by the spirit. Imagine that same person watching Bandersnatch, and
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 thinking s/he was clued into some esoteric cultural knowledge with the PAC-Man scene - like
90s ravers eating their blue and red pills after the Matrix debuted, and after a techno song
dubbed those “red pill/blue pill” movie lines over electronic music. Did those drug law
o enders transcend their physical realities, rise above the courtroom twaddle and lawyers’
scree, and achieved enlightenment that some dunderheaded, at-footed Clouseau could never
fathom? Maybe. Or maybe they just bit on the same hook twice.

“Demanding plea for unity between us all

United stand

Death before divided fall

In mock military order

Vulgar, power, impatient

Because time is shorter

New life in place of old life

Unscarred by trials

A new level

Of con dence

And power

Thats right!”

- Pantera, A New Level

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 Superposition
“I see it, I be it.” - Static X, Push It

If law can be a science, it will hinge on ideas that there are universal rights and wrongs.
Deontology may vary from culture to country, but a fact shall not be quali ed by its encoding
into sui generis statutory language. Laws are promulgated, amended and repealed, but if law is
a science, each iteration must be incremental movement toward a universal limit of pure truth,
justice, equality, human rights, honor, fairness, and these higher-order philosophical ideals held
since time immemorial. Those abstract ideals must be considered as having permanence. They
have always existed and shall always exist. Individual humans and civilizations of scale may
perceive some degree or variation of those ideals, and each collective society may establish
and implement policies supporting their distinct interpretation of empirical fact. But if law is a
science, then there are objective facts which can be demonstrated to have implicit and explicit
value, relevance, and validity in any human collective. If law is a science, then it does not
matter whether one dislikes the implications of such facts, or if one disagrees with outcomes
stemming from such facts, or if said facts confound one’s methodologies.

At some quantum level, matter can exist in two opposite states simultaneously. The double-slit
experiment showed observation a ects the observed - also a principle of cybernetics.
Schroedinger’s cat is famous as a thought experiment, and its applications extend beyond the
purview of physics. In the run-up to the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, for example, there
was a state of uncertainty regarding the Supreme Court’s decision analogous to quantum
superposition; that is, abortion was legal and illegal until the Court’s decision was published
thereby con rming the decision which was both known and unknown prior to such o cial
publication. This uncertainty exists in every trial, and in every consequential executive or
legislative decision-making process, where there exist probabilities of speci c outcomes, and
a ected parties can make preparations for those results, but until o cial con rmation occurs,
the mind is split in two or more directions because a future reality both exists and does not
exist in the present.

It is important to remember that the Nuremberg Laws were laws. Slavery was legal.
Segregation and apartheid were legal. Ordeals, frankpledge, and deodand were legal
processes. Depending on the jurisdiction, assorted abuses and deprivation of rights are
permitted that would be serious violations of foreign basic laws and sui generis municipal
statutes. Perhaps more importantly, wealthy and powerful public and private actors retain
counsel speci cally to weave legal cant that, if e ective, will make lawful even the most
obviously unlawful acts. Torture, for example, is clearly illegal under jus in bello, but through
masterful choice of words, it has been legally permissible in certain states. Noam Chomsky
brilliantly discussed how high-priced legal advocates make their living by arguing legislation
simply does not mean what it obviously means. In other words, it is important not to put too
much faith in laws, nor defer to them exclusively without consulting other sources, because
they have been wrong before and are almost certain to change in the long run.

With each new iteration of codes through ages following Hammurabi, the leader was so sure
that his laws would be permanent, that his codes were perfect, and that he had done what
none before had accomplished. Then the regime fell, another took its place, and the cycle
began anew with the men in charge believing they had found the universal keys to civilized
conduct, moral and ethical living, and paci c settlement of disputes. After a few thousand
years, the prideful arrogance is almost comical. Successive failures to establish and maintain
perpetual order under laws could have been innocuous if it were not for the grotesque loss of
life, liberty, and happiness su ered among the people subject to despotic rule, intermittent
tyrannies, or the agency problem. Despite our records demonstrating trends over millennia, still
somehow our current leadership and their proxies adamantly defend their methods as if to say
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 the cycle ends with them. Clearly it has not, and shall not until undying, eternal, objective truths
are re ected in our laws. It may take forever. This perfection may be a limit that can only be
approached but never reached, but then that is no reason to give up the process of continuous
and never-ending improvement.

Rejoice in the fact that this is the greatest day ever and simultaneously the least of all future
days. Take pride in the progress that humans have made up to this point, but rest not ye weary
eyes because it is only the easy work which has been done. The coming centuries will test
human limits more than ever before. People have made the technologies that could make their
lives easier, more relaxing, and more e cient but instead are now more stressed, less healthy,
and more wasteful than ever before. Just as humans have gured out how to control their
environments, they are likely to be tested by climate change and surely will face a decreasing
resource base while at the same time populations will increase, thus yielding more competition
for a smaller set of nite, nonrenewable resources. By the end of the 21st century, it is entirely
possible that qualify of life and conditions among the vast majority of people will have
retroceded to levels not witnessed since the dawn of the 20th century or further back in time. It
is a vain, foolish notion to think tomorrow will always be better than today without putting forth
the required e ort and rigor to ensure such rosy outcomes.

The laws cannot control people’s hearts and minds. Laws provide barely enough incentive for
men to change their behaviors, let along their thoughts and feelings. To be sure, laws are also
an inappropriate moral compass since they have hitherto been demonstrated to have been
rigid, narrow constructions of language interpreted by an in-group of jargon-loving yes-men
and groupthink believers. Law is and possibly always will be little more than the majority
opinion of a minuscule fraction of the population, most or all of whom gained their power via
corruption - whether legal or illegal. That is not to say laws are destined to be subjective. Nay!
Consensus could be formed upon critical readings and interpretations of data gathered in
double-blind and other types of experimental test scenarios. Since the laws are quite literally as
open-ended as the imagination allows, there is nothing other than psychological phenomena
limiting deployment of a social media voting system similar to that episode of The Orville. Of
course, that is a comical idea, but the takeaway should be that it is only the stubbornness and
self-limitations among those who write laws that literally prevents any progression or regression
from occurring.

Such a base understand of systems of rules is scarcely articulated in colleges of law. Rather,
they so often focus on procedure, moving directly past any e ort to justify laws from a rst-
principles perspective. Indeed, laws so often work from desired outcome backwards to the
method, and data not tting the projected model thereafter is manipulated or excluded. In
other words, law is very often just bad science, or more akin to religions that operate on faith
and require rejection of clear, present evidence contravening underlying assumptions. Since
humans have been doing things this way since the beginning, and since our DNA and
neuropathways are hardwired to support and otherwise ignore the deeper aws in our social
and political reasoning, few people ever rise to prominence speaking plainly, openly, and
honestly about the faults and failures of laws with any degree of technical pro ciency.

Oh, there are critics. There are millions of so-called free-nationals who practice what they think
is analogous to civil disobedience; it’s not civil, though it is disobedient. The Cliven Bundys and
David Koreshes of the world, like assorted rioters and looters of the post-Floyd landscape are
not afraid to violate laws. What they seem to fear, actually, is consistent vocal and written
dissent within the boundaries of lawful behavior. These types of radicals have inspired a culture
to believe that just because some number of people have decided something is wrong, then it
shall change, or if it does not change, then the laws are no longer valid and enforceable…but
they are…and the armed, destructive or otherwise violent opposition only further emboldens
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the entrenched powers-that-be who might prefer to have us all live like it were the 1700s.
Ironically, protests and the ascendant anti-authority culture works against itself because it only
proves the staunch establishmentarians’ point.

“Sovereign citizen” movements may work on paper, or in a vacuum, or in a perfect world where
there were processes and mechanisms in place that would allow legislators, enforcement
agents, and judiciaries to change rules at will without consultation or bureaucracy - just
because it were the right thing to do. However, we live in an era where academic leaders have
proudly declared post-truth, post-constructivism, and full-on relativism. Few can say with
certainty what is universally right; even then there are hacks and charlatans who will play devil’s
advocate just to be contrarian, and apparently the mere existence of a counterpoint is enough
to stall movement on an issue. We live in a time when disputes are litigated on the costs rather
than the merits. Experts in economics and international relations discuss an epoch when raw,
naked power still exerts the greatest in uence. This is all in contrast to the ivory tower vision of
erudite law schools. There simply exist too many intersecting realities where scarcely any can
distill the batch of pluralistic, tendentious exegeses into a singular true thought. That is not to
say it cannot be done.

Moving into the mid-21st century, ideally people open their minds to what is happening just
outside their windows again, rather than following some far-removed social media trends.
Ideally, students are somehow compelled to take advantage of their one-and-only opportunity
for class mobility and income stability via their public educations. Hopefully, a critical mass of
independent individuals will act with purpose toward a common goal of peace, harmony, and
collective prosperity, recognizing that competition can be friendly, and there can be win-win
outcomes. Inshallah, mankind will emerge from its current slumber with renewed convictions,
shake its foggy head of self-deluded, aggrandizing egoism, and press onward toward survival
as the species has done in the past. With any luck, the communications age will give rise to an
age of consciousness that trumps culture and tradition, where new methods and knowledge
simply provide more utilitarian bene t than idle continuation of the past. The situation is urgent,
and let us hope and pray that enough individuals in the larger population coincidentally begin
to recognize the trends, perceive the signs, and take it upon themselves to e ect changes
within their own lives, and then support macro-level changes that stand the greatest probability
of succeeding. God willing, the needs of the many will override the desires of the few, but
nothing works unless each and every individual works with it.
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