First
Published On
↓
The Human Conspiracy Blog: http://www.jaygaskill.com/blog1
↓
The Policy Think Site: http://www.jaygaskill.com
↕
“THE
HUMAN CONSPIRACY BLOG”
THE
ARCHIVE
Covering All Posts from
ALL contents (unless a different copyright is otherwise identified or implied, -- as when excerpts for other news and commentary were referenced) are Copyright © 2005, 2006 and 2007 by Jay B. Gaskill, Attorney at Law. For permission to reproduce in any form, please contact the author via email law@jaygaskill.com.
SET ONE:
JUNE/JULY 06
[JUNE 29 through
Welcome to the Human
Conspiracy Blog.
You are invited to join the
pro-human team, that bravest subset of all humans. We are the ones
who have noticed that anti-people forces have emerged as a
“respectable alternative” within this modern and post modern culture. And we
are the ones who are willing to declare ourselves: We value people over causes,
over the ideologies and the other false “Gods”.
Warning: Before you “come
out” as a member of the HumanConspiracy, you
should be aware that to openly favor ”mere” human concerns
against the cultural trends of the moment can be hazardous.
Under the current social
conditions, reasonable and non-ideological discussions tend
to be marginalized or derided whenever they trespass on the secular
religions of the day. That ordinary people with common sense and reasonable
minds might need to form a “conspiracy” to promote sanity is beyond
ordinary irony.
Join the Human Conspiracy and
expect to strike sparks from the flamers of the crypto-Marxist,
politically correct left and the unthinking, literalist right. Both tend
to apocalyptic hysteria, the marginalization of real evil, and the demonization
of their opponents. Honest, intelligent arguments from the creative
center tend to irritate the fringes. Unfortunately, the fringes are
sometimes in control of the debate. But not for long….
We Hold at
Least Nine Things in Common
We may differ on a
thousand issues of “consequence”, but we share 3 priorities:
1.
Persons
over things.
2.
Humans
over causes.
3.
Humanity
over “Gaia” and the other pretenders to Ultimate Value.
Our individual agendas may
clash, but we share 3 essential human attributes:
1.
Common
biological origin tracing its lineage back to the Beginning of life;
2.
Conscious
intelligence, capable of empathy, foresight and creative innovation;
3.
The
“same boat” fate: We are the only thinking, moral, creative agents yet found.
We each honor a heritage that
includes 3 core affirmations:
1.
The
value of civilization as our essential life sustaining social technology;
2.
The
essential rules, norms and principles needed to sustain civilization;
3.
An
Ultimate Source of value beyond mere tribe (whether named or not).
Stay tuned…
POST ONE
My Private Idaho
Last week I slipped away to
my
During the visit, LG
immediately became a magnet for the neighborhood girls – one toddler, three
pre-teens – who instructed him in the art of crawling on the lawn and
inspecting the sprinkler at close range. Michael reports that LG later applied
his new skill in the bathtub.
Michael is one of the most
resolutely optimistic people I’ve ever met. He hails from the
The current president of
During this all too brief
visit, I was moved to write the following meditation:
That Gift
We
are the children of the God who made pansies. But we are not the children of a
pansy God.
It
was not by some cosmic accident that we were born into the world that God is
still making, the real world with its sharp edges, broken spirits, and opportunistic
evil.
We
were not meant to hide in the womb while evil roams outside. We were given the
blessing of difficult but important work. The Garden of Eden story was about
our passage out of the nursery. In the real word, we face impossible moral choices
and experience inevitable failure. Yet we are sustained by the Author of hope.
We
were made in God’s essential image in order to live with good and courageous
hearts in the real world. We were blessed with great powers, among them the
powers of life, conscious intelligence and creative genius. We are to use these
gifts to protect the innocent from the evil; to negotiate life’s sharp edges
with intelligence and humor; to heal the broken spirits around us; and to grow
into God’s high hopes for us. We are expected to engage with the world and use
the moral compass God has provided each of us. We were born into this world to
love and to be loved. That we are loved by the Creator in spite of all is proof
of the divine sense of humor.
All
of God’s opportunities and blessings are also burdens and challenges. What God
wants for our enemies is that which God wants for us: Seek the good in all its
forms and oppose evil in all its forms. We are called to treat our enemies with
love and respect, but we are also called to oppose evil with every ounce of
intelligence and courage in our being.
We
are called to live in joy and to experience freedom. And we are sometimes even
called to experience pain.
But
we have been given the gift of divine companionship in every experienced
moment, no matter how difficult. This is why the opposite of joy is not pain
but despair. As long as we can feel God’s caring presence nearby, even in our
pain and isolation, we will not despair.
We
are called to love God, our Creator, and the Ultimate Source of our very being
and of our very purpose. Yet our greatest gift, the one we too often have
difficulty experiencing, is the ability to hear God.
Yet
that still, small, mighty voice is never far from us. Our challenge is to hear
God over the buzz of the world.
While
in my
Lawyers, Fruit Flies &
Rotting Mangoes
@
My
apologies to fellow lawyers and fruit flies.
Lawyers, Fruit Flies and
Rotting Mangoes
By
Jay B. Gaskill
No other developed country in
the world has given its legal class so much obstructionist power, especially as
to those areas of life where most people, most of the time are simply allowed
to take reasonable (or unreasonable risks) and to bear the consequences of their
own foolishness. This point came home to me a few years ago when, in
New Zealand, a horde of tourists were ushered in the dark around an impossibly
low railing, a single metal bar separating them from a deadly and deafening
cataract of water below. “Take care,” the Kiwi guide said, “and don’t
slip. You Yanks don’t get sue here like you do at home.”
There was something
refreshingly Darwinian about that admonition and what it implied about the
healthy Kiwi culture. Actually, the infamous propensity of Americans to
sue excessively and the resulting risk-averse “nanny” culture the lawyers have
helped create is not really the product of the large number of lawyers employed
in the
Also consider:
There is no constitutional or
God-given right that a lawyer will be generously compensated for merely filing
and pursuing a lawsuit. Rotting mangoes are the causes of action and
guaranteed generous legal fees that have fueled the lawyers’ takeover of the
country. All this has taken place right under our noses in less than a half
century. Today, lawyers swarm to any exploitable crack in the power
structure of society like fruit flies to a barrel of decaying mangos. It
isn’t their fault, any more than a fly can be blamed for following the smell of
rotting fruit, a cat for chasing a mouse, or a dog for chasing a cat.
It’s in the DNA.
Continued on http://www.jaygaskill.com/Fruitflies.htm
Copyright 2006 by Jay B.
Gaskill
That Brilliant Dream:
The Republic After 230
years
@
Copyright © 2006 by Jay B.
Gaskill
↕
That Brilliant Dream
Thursday,
July 6th
Reflections
By
Jay
B. Gaskill
As a practical matter, we
comfortable Americans find it impossible to imagine the perilous State of the
This experiment would prove
durable beyond all rational hope. But in 1861, when the Civil War began, no one
knew that.
Flash forward to 1865.
The young nation was dreadfully engaged in a war more brutal and costly than
any before or since. The very survival of the
The President was not a
popular man. The war was not going well and the vilification of Abe Lincoln in
the press and among the vacillating classes was unprecedented. As a later
President, John Kennedy, wryly observed, victory has a thousand fathers but
defeat is an orphan.
In 1865,
Civilizations whose leaders
and members are not rooted in the sterner part of the moral order cannot summon
the will to defend themselves when challenged by a
more cohesive, more fervently motivated adversary. There is a Darwinian
logic at work here that favors the triumph of the religious society over the
complacently hedonist culture, the “blood sweat and tears” rally over the “make
flowers not war” withdrawal, and the committed, brave heart over the timid,
ambivalent soul.
As President Lincoln began
his terse second Inaugural Address, he recalled:
This piece is continued on
The Policy Think Site with graphics.
Go to: www.jaygaskill.com/BrilliantDream.pdf .
Thieves and Honor
@
Honor Among
Thieves -- A Modest Observation
By
Jay B. Gaskill
The current post-modern ethos
is a muddle of incoherent ideas where confused notions of cultural and moral
relativism cohabit with vague notions about “rights”.
A return to the common
sources and ultimate authority of fundamental human norms is central to any
cultural recovery from this cultural dead end.
I would open that critical
discussion by posing one simple question:
Why are there reasonably
consistent rules that apply within a working cohort of thieves?
I submit that thieves are
really hunting teams, predator cohorts that cooperate in a common endeavor – to
acquire resources by a combination of force and stealth. Because of the
inherent danger of the operation, a certain basic trust must be established,
and a division of spoils agreed to.
While actual thieves tend (in
my professional experience) to screw up, this happens most often because they
tend to violate their own agreed norms.
But the nature of the rules
they apply to themselves is surprisingly instructive. Five simple rules
are rationally necessary to the success of any criminal enterprise.
Here they are:
1.
Veracity
Without
some minimum truth fidelity and avoidance of significant deception, the
baseline cooperation for the enterprise would quickly disintegrate. In
fact there is a kind of Darwinian selection in operation here: The criminals
who fail to follow such norms are usually the first ones caught.
2.
No
theft from fellow thieves
3.
No
serious assault on fellow thieves
4.
Promise
fidelity among fellow thieves
5.
Obedience
to leadership
Like all rules, this
“thieves’ honor” set of precepts is sometimes observed in the breach, but that
begs the point:
These five norms are also at
the core of all moral systems that support civilization.
Think about it: The cohort
norms needed for the close cooperation of a predator-hunter team or for a
criminal gang (indeed for the accomplishment of any similar, survival-related
task among otherwise independent, intelligent actors) belong essentially to the
same set and:
The rules that make up
civilization’s necessary moral architecture are “thieves honor” writ large.
Within the given cohort, the
essential norms apply equally to all members, but are subject to an agreed or
imposed leadership principle. In primitive cohorts, this is the alpha -
follower model. There are other more sophisticated models as well, especially
for larger, community-based cohorts.
My proposal:
Any working civilization
represents, at a minimum, the extension of the theft-cohort norms to the entire
civilization’s scope of authority; and therefore represents at least a partial
universalization of that set of cohort norms. This creates an expectation
of equality of norm application within specific cohorts.
More,
later.
JBG
Why Blog a Murder — A
Little Evil in
@
Following a Murder Case
On
Because Dan Horowitz was a
Court TV celebrity, his agony was displayed on the evening television news,
along with helicopter shots of the property. The Vitale-Horowitz trailer was a
temporary dwelling on the construction site of the couple’s dream home.
Daniel Horowitz was then
engaged in the defense of Susan Polk who was accused of stabbing her husband to
death. At first, Horowitz attempted to soldier on, but his role as the lead
trial lawyer in the Polk case was not to be. A mistrial was declared.
Eventually, Mrs. Polk elected to represent herself – a catastrophic
mistake. She is now awaiting sentencing for second degree murder. For
that account, see http://www.jaygaskill.com/Polkfolly.htm .
Daniel’s wife had been severely beaten and was stabbed a number of times. An abdominal stab wound was inflicted