-  Carl Jung

I have found myself in a recent maelstrom of copious alcoholism and sleeping with various strange women (presently 36 straight days and counting), inter alia, due to the misery present circumstances have inflicted upon me- I am afflicted with the unbearable cholera of longing and yearning for the irrational tyranny of joy. This conflict- a contradiction in my ideal of reason and logic, has tormented and haunted me for a good part of the nascent year- I either spend the night with Bacchus and his dizzying produce, or I see the morning, and the noon, and the thereafter without the relief and respite rest provides. Accordingly, this has resulted in a Sunday morning spent within the confines of a fire escape. As such, while I believe the cold cement has done me some amount of curative good, I also believe I must at the very least, put forth some effort to solve this Joycean riddle. I have taken refuge during the past few days in the comfort the words Hayek, Jung, Garcia-Marquez, Nietzsche, and surprisingly, even Marx and the Kabbalah, allow and have,  in the very best of my abilities, tried to record my observations as follows…

Does All Meaning Come from the Nonsense of Before?

All logic presupposes-  and is therefore constrained- by the huge elephants of a priori constructs or categories. In the realm of law, despite the contentious debate between the two predominant schools of positivist (and its judicial kin of legal formalism for that matter) and natural law, both would still fall within the purview of premises proven beforehand, and thus be duly applied to the appropriate situations that may arise, as the case may be; the positivist (and the legal formalist) would therefore apply what the law is- dura lex sed lex, both statutes previously legislated and settled jurisprudence-  in a case involving murder for instance while on the other hand, the advocate for natural law would rely on universal norms pertaining to the controversy at hand. Even the genius of Hayek proposes the birth of nomos (akin to private law) and thesis (public law) arising from cosmos (spontaneous order) and taxis (deliberate order) respectively. At any rate, as simplistic  it may seem and without sounding much like an empiricist, all logic is derived from predetermined sources. The myth then of a posteriori logic- that of new-found logic derived after- can only refer to conclusions, whether from experience or experiments. Either by extrapolation (a priori) or postulation (what is termed as a posteriori), all logic can thusly be similar in that they came from something- it cannot arise out of thin air. As for the Hayekian concept of cosmos, I would reconcile the construct as an unconscious and unintentional byproduct of human interaction- still arising from something a priori.

Let us posit the situation of the diner, the dinner, and the meal. Again, in the first situation, whether one is a legal positivist (or legal formalist) or a supporter of natural law, one derives logic from a source- the recommendation of a friend, or a restaurant guide, or word of mouth. Our diner then eats, chooses his meal and for his part, continues the tradition by spreading his thoughts about what he ate- “The veal was awful!” For the second example, one commonly referred to as a posteriori- a desire to experience something new and unknown (which is, admittedly, becoming more rare in an ever-increasing world of technology and information) leads to the experiment- our diner tries this restaurant and the veal. A distinction can be suggested so far as the a priori example refers to an external urging while the latter involves a more internal contemplation of the will but either way, both processes was not some fatalistic deux ex machina- our diner did not find himself supernaturally eating tender beef for his dinner!

Reason, Choice, Utility?

I have previously posited that for a choice to have utility, an important part would have to be reason. This presupposes a rational existence by which actors must choose in accordance with their respective reasons for satisfaction and happiness to truly occur (without reference to the number of people satisfied)- in other words (or its corollary rather), the rational man (again I have to qualify), cannot derive satisfaction by any senseless, random act. If I suddenly walked into oncoming traffic, where then is the joy in that? But if there was thought, and logic, thereby giving rise to reason, leading to choice, then utility might occur- I am pondering on whether to buy a new pair of eyeglasses. Do I have enough money? Do I need it anyway? If yes, then I could choose to buy the pair of eyeglasses, and consequently, I am satisfied.

In this regard therefore, I find some dissonance with my aforementioned theory and a flaw arises- logic being integral to the previously discussed raison, isn’t the same then imprisoned by our previous experiences, our biases, our will, our past? To quote the splendid Magnolia-  is it a case then of “We may be through with the past… but the past is not through with us”? Are we caught up then and thereby imprisoned in a recurring ouroborus of the mundane to determine our joy? Why should we bother then- surrender to fate, surrender to serendipity! It is all meaningless!

To illustrate, let us recall our eyeglasses example- if logic is determinative of our reason that would lead to our choice, then our past experiences (as well as our desire to wear one for that matter) would shape that reason- “Who was a good eye doctor? what was a good brand or frame? what was my previous prescription, if I had one?” As we take all these past criteria into consideration, giving rise to our choice, and our potential utility, our satisfaction then is measured by what isn’t merely better, but what must be better than what had gone before- still a prisoner of the past.

The Unbearable Cholera is this Contradiction: If Utility from the Past is An Illusion, then the Melancholy of Irrationality is the True Joy (Or How the Mushrooms are Blooming This Time of Year)

Contradictions do not exist.

Nevertheless, a contradiction arises as we face the rather tragic realisation on how empty utility derived from reason is- it is nothing but a mere repetition of things past, upgraded to a better version- it is a patch that cures our vulnerability, our defects, our ills. The contrary is a more terrifying proposition- the irrationality of joy, of deriving choice from the senseless, of action from operation that is bereft of logic and thought.

The horror is that the only meaning may be one that is derived from what does not make sense at all.

Thus the drinking. Thus the strange women. Thus this cholera.

And thus spending the dawn in the fire escape.

今日、心許無シ
乙女心ハ　ユラユラ
月夜ノ我ハ泡
被害妄想　グラグラ

夏草揺レ　蜃気楼
遠クノ方デ　ユラユラ
呼吸乱ス　夢ノ中
秘スル妄想　無茶苦茶

風二舞ツテ
加速シタツテ
浮世ナンテ　嗚呼、儚シ
君以外ハ (Come on, baby)
要ラナクテ (Tell me, baby)
御免ネ (Why don’t you, baby?)

私ノ世界二
麗シイ景色
背景ハ君 「快晴!」

Oh baby, close to me
Oh baby, love me do

募ル思ヒ　チラリズム
君ガ触レタラ　フワフワ
短シ時ハ止マラズ
懐中時計　チクタク

勘違イデ
溺レソウデ
惑ワサレ　嗚呼、悩マシイ
眼ハネ (Come on, baby)
虜ダネ (Tell me, baby)
御上手ネ (Why don’t you, baby?)

私ノ隣
君ハ　イトヲカシ
空ノ如シ 「ウォーアイニー!」

色彩ノアイスクリイム (Oh baby, close to me)
分ケ合ツテ　居タクテ (Oh baby, let me be)
感嘆ヲ吐イテ (Oh baby, can’t you see)
「頂戴!」 (Oh baby, love me do)

ウォーアイニー
頂戴
ウォーアイニー
頂戴

ウォーアイニー (Oh baby, close to me)
頂戴 (Oh baby, let me be)
ウォーアイニー (Oh baby, can’t you see)
Do you love me? (Oh baby, love me do)

私ノ世界二
麗シイ景色
背景ハ君 「快晴!」

色彩ノアイスクリイム (Oh baby, close to me)
分ケ合ツテ　居タクテ (Oh baby, let me be)
感嘆ヲ吐イテ (Oh baby, can’t you see)
「頂戴!」 (Oh baby, love me do)

Do You love me…
Oh baby, close to me…
Do you need me…
Oh baby, let me be
Do You Want Me…
Oh baby, can’t you see?
Do You Love Me?
Oh baby, love me do

There. Back to work. Again. On to be The Best One.

(Music owned and copyrighted by Takahashi Hitomi and the Beat Crusaders. Distributed by gr8! and DefSTAR records)

Enough of this now-back to work! On to the Next One!

(Music and video owned and copyrighted by Universal Music Sweden, Peter,Bjorn and John, and Andreas and Filip Nilsson)

Saul Black’s spooky “The 66th Floor”

Phillip Anderson’s whimsical “Trick or Treat”

and once again from Jonathan Button and Button Films, inspired by James Thurber, “The Girl and the Wolf”

Hope you get the treats (and the tricks)….enjoy all!

(Animation courtesy of Aniboom and owned and copyrighted by their respective authors and animators)

(Copyrighted by Nike)

[YOUtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/Jg5wkZ-dJXA?fs=1&hl=en_GB]

(Music and video copyrighted by Kanye West)

Courtesy of Aniboom, Jonathan Button’s Behind Closed Doors.

• And finally, Slate’s  review of a biography of my favourite United States Supreme Justice Brennan:

Beneath the Robes

Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion misses the secret of his vision.

By Lincoln Caplan

Posted Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010, at 10:33 AM ET

Building on the court’s landmark ruling about equality before the law in Brown v. Board of Education, he led the court to extend that principle in matters of race and gender. Voicing the need for a robust press to speak truth to power, for every adult to vote, and for each vote to count the same, he helped strengthen the workings of our democracy. Rewriting rules about access to welfare benefits for poor people, to collective bargaining for labor, and to the federal courts for prisoners, he helped provide crucial measures of fairness. In his 533 opinions for the court, Brennan shaped hundreds of other areas as well. In his 694 dissents, he was often even more forthright about articulating the views on equality, liberty, and human dignity that animated his jurisprudence.

The overarching question for a biography—particularly an authorized biography, written with access to some papers that others aren’t allowed to see until 2017—is, What made Brennan so influential? In Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion, commissioned almost a quarter of a century ago, Stephen Wermiel joins forces with Seth Stern to argue that as “a progressive centrist,” Brennan succeeded in large part because he was a relative moderate rather than a flaming liberal. Above all, he was a pragmatist. To every new set of law clerks, he would hold up a hand with fingers splayed and instruct that his goal in each case was to get to five votes.

Wermiel and Stern’s argument that he was a shaper of consensus is unsurprising and wholly convincing. For over two decades, or two-thirds of his tenure, Brennan’s skill as a coalition-builder made him dominant, first as “a judicial partner” to Chief Justice Earl Warren, then as a foil to Chief Justice Warren Burger. More surprising, but still generally persuasive, is their brief for Brennan as a relative moderate. But their portrait fails to address the power, scope, and grandeur of the ideas that gave coherence to Brennan’s jurisprudence.

After Brennan died in 1997 at the age of 91, a “Memorial Resolution Adopted by the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States” offered a perspective that’s missing from Justice Brennan. Drafted by professor Burt Neuborne of NYU Law School and added to by others, it positions Brennan with Chief Justice John Marshall and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., all three of whom redefined the “role of a constitutional judge in a vibrant democracy.” Marshall “pioneered the use of judicial review.” Holmes “helped to chart the complex relationship between judicial review and respect for the will of the majority.” Brennan deployed “a modern, purposive reading of the Bill of Rights in defense of the innate dignity of the individual.” His contribution was to remind us “that true democracy requires us to fulfill our duty to the individual.”

It has been Brennan’s legal enemies who have generally been readiest to credit him with a political philosophy—albeit rooted in a personal, rather than principled, vision. Central to the conservative attacks on the Warren Court a generation ago was a portrait of Brennan as an avatar of judicial activism. A measure of that campaign’s lasting impact is that many liberals, too, assume that, in shaping key rulings of the Supreme Court, Brennan imposed his own views and preferences.

The biography usefully complicates that reductive notion, most notably in the realm of gender relations. As a non-devout but practicing Catholic, Brennan was personally conservative and opposed to abortion. But he was unequivocal that women have the right to choose and he made fundamental contributions to Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion in the 1972 case of Roe v. Wade. In a series of cases, Brennan also decried America’s “long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination” and was the court’s leading champion of gender equality. Yet this same man, while charming and chivalrous toward women, had no female clerks during the first half of his tenure on the court. He finally hired one only when a male former clerk rebuked him, saying that he couldn’t believe the justice would “continue a policy that is both unconstitutional and simply wrong, and is so much at odds with your great principles.”

Biographical sleuthing ends up shedding less light on the overarching conception of American democracy that Brennan put into practice while applying the Constitution. When conservatives attacked him for his belief in “radical egalitarianism” and “judicial supremacy” and for being “perhaps the major threat to individual liberty” in the United States, they got the scale right but the specifics wrong. A political philosophy formed the powerful bedrock of his opinions, as Robert Post, now dean of Yale Law School and a former Brennan clerk, argued in an essay the year after Brennan stepped down. But its roots lay in “a vision of individuals uniformly equal before the Constitution” whose implications conservatives misconstrued.

The egalitarianism, far from radical, reflected the founding ideal of America, however imperfectly realized. In championing individualism, Brennan’s approach was the opposite of a major threat to individual liberty. As for judicial supremacy, Brennan believed that “the judicial function” was “the soul of government” because the judiciary needed to protect individuals in conflicts with government. But opinions of his also called on a wider array of forces—the president and the executive branch, Congress, state legislatures, state supreme courts, federal and state bureaucracies—to uphold the same democratic principles in what Post calls a “new vision of the American polity.” While the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary had greater responsibilities in this vision, every other element of government had its role.

In their focus on Brennan the pragmatist, Wermiel and Stern can obscure just how optimistic and extraordinarily ambitious in scope his underlying philosophy was. At the same time, their emphasis on Brennan’s practical—and highly effective—coalition-building in pursuit of consensus is a useful reminder of a core tenet of that vision: that all individuals deserve equal consideration.

New York Times v. Sullivan is on every shortlist of contenders for the most important opinion Brennan ever wrote and the Warren Court handed down. It would be hard to find one more emblematic of his vision and the values that informed it. In 1964, speaking for a unanimous court, he revolutionized the law governing free speech, holding that a public official could recover damages for a statement about his official conduct only if he could prove the statement was made with “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” The decision brought together liberty, equality, and the vitality of American democracy because it started as a civil-rights case: The libel action against the newspaper was intended to chill its coverage of civil rights and the movement for racial equality.

The ruling exemplified Brennan’s pattern in major cases of putting his personal values aside in favor of what he thought was called for in law. Long after the opinion in the case was handed down, Brennan’s attitude toward the press was often mistrustful and brusquely standoffish. His opinion also exemplified his moderation. Leading First Amendment scholars would have provided absolute immunity for speech about the business of governing. Brennan, by contrast, struck a balance between free expression (and its obvious contribution to democracy) and reputation (and its value to every individual). Still, in New York Times v. Sullivan, as he did in other First Amendment cases, he defended “uninhibited, robust, and wide open” debate, in particular in the press. Embracing this as a principle our democracy depends on, he defined an essential facet of American freedom.

http://www.slate.com/id/2271190/pagenum/all/#p2

(Animation and articles owned and copyrighted by their respective authors).

FUCK OFF YOU TUMOURS.

YANKS OUT.

Poor Leno,
Where you’ll be, I’ll go.
Where you’ll be, I’ll know.
Where you’ll be, I’ll find you.

Poor Leno,
Where you’ll be, I’ll go.
Where you’ll be, I’ll know.
Where you’ll be, I’ll find you.

Poor Leno,
Where you’ll be, I’ll go.
Where you’ll be, I’ll know.
Where you’ll be, I’ll find you.

Poor Leno,
Where you’ll be, I’ll go.
Where you’ll be, I’ll know.
Where you’ll be, I’ll find you.

Poor Leno,
Haven’t you been told?
Being nine years old,
Means I’ll always find you.

Poor Leno,
Where you’ll be, I’ll go.
Where you’ll be, I’ll know.
Where you’ll be, I’ll find you.

Poor Leno,
Haven’t you been told?
Being nine years old,
Means I’ll always find you.

Why the Supreme Court must put a stop to Columbia University’s eminent domain abuse.

Damon W. Root | September 29, 2010

When he cast the fifth and deciding vote in the Supreme Court’s notorious 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, Justice Anthony Kennedy laid down a few stipulations. First and foremost, Kennedy declared, while the local officials in New London did possess the controversial authority to seize private property and hand it over to another private owner for the purpose of “economic development,” this sweeping eminent domain power was not a blank check. “Transfers intended to confer benefits on particular, favored private entities, and with only incidental or pretextual public benefits,” he wrote, “are forbidden by the Public Use Clause.”

As for identifying those nefarious “favored private entities,” Kennedy explained that officials in New London “reviewed a variety of development plans and chose a private developer from a group of applicants rather than picking out a particular transferee beforehand.” In other words, under the binding terms of Kennedy’s tie-breaking vote, the primary private beneficiary of an eminent domain taking must be “unknown at the time the city formulated its plans.”

Last week, attorney and former New York Civil Liberties Union director Norman Seigel decided to take Kennedy up on his word, filing a petition with the Supreme Court asking it to hear the case of Tuck-It-Away, Inc. v. New York State Urban Development Corporation. At issue is last June’s disastrous ruling by New York’s Court of Appeals—the state’s highest court—allowing New York’s powerful Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) to seize private property in the West Harlem neighborhood of Manhattanville and hand it over to Columbia University, an elite private institution, which wants to build a new research campus in the neighborhood. Notably, the Court of Appeals’ 34-page decision made no mention of Kelo.

It was an unacceptable omission. Thanks to multiple Freedom of Information Law requests filed by Siegel over the past few years, there is now overwhelming evidence that Columbia and the ESDC actively colluded in order to game the state’s eminent domain system, making Columbia the exact sort of “favored private entity” that Kennedy warned about in Kelo.

For instance, in 2006 the ESDC hired—without any competitive bidding—the planning firm Allee King Rosen & Fleming, Inc. (AKRF) to conduct an “impartial” blight study of Manhattanville in order to determine if an eminent domain taking was justifiable under state law. Except there was nothing impartial about it. Not only was AKRF also on Columbia’s payroll at that time, at least six different AKRF employees were simultaneously working on both the blight study and the Manhattanville project—a blatant conflict of interest. Furthermore, as internal documents have since revealed, AKRF promised to “focus on characteristics that demonstrate blight conditions” and to emphasize “highlighting any physical blight that may be present.” So the purpose of the report wasn’t to objectively determine if blight conditions were present, it was to “focus” on a pre-ordained result that fit the agenda of AKRF’s two employers.

To make an ugly situation even worse, AKRF failed to note that Columbia owned 76 percent of the property in the neighborhood (the figure is now around 96 percent) and was therefore directly responsible for the vast majority of blight conditions that were found. Of the five buildings cited as being hazardous to the public, for example, four turned out to be under Columbia’s control. Similarly, all seven buildings cited for hazardous garbage or debris were Columbia-owned and all 12 examples of vermin occurred in Columbia buildings. Yet how did the state respond to Columbia’s destructive and illegal behavior? By trying to seize the last holdout properties and hand them over to the university. So much for due process of law.

More damning still is a May 12, 2006, email recently obtained by Siegel after nearly three years of stonewalled Freedom of Information Law requests. In it, ESDC Senior Counsel Joseph Petillo told his colleagues, “I’m uncomfortable with us shining a spotlight on the process used to manufacture support for condemnation” (emphasis added). Take a moment to let those words sink in. Now consider that the state kept this incriminating document hidden from Siegel and his clients (not to mention hidden from numerous state judges) during every previous phase of the case. And according to property owner Nick Sprayregen, whose Tuck-It-Away storage business is at the center of the conflict, “the state is still refusing to give us thousands of other documents.” It makes you wonder what else Columbia and the ESDC are trying to hide.

Which brings us back to Justice Kennedy’s tie-breaking and therefore controlling vote in Kelo. In that case, the relevant public officials determined the purpose and scope of the project before settling on the transferee who would reap the profits. That way the prime beneficiary of government power wasn’t also helping to direct that power toward its own ends. In the Columbia case, however, the state agency worked hand-in-glove with its preselected private beneficiary from the very start, even colluding with Columbia in order to “manufacture support for condemnation.” Nor did the ESDC ever consider any alternative plans for the neighborhood. That’s exactly the sort of favoritism and corruption forbidden under Kelo. As the Supreme Court begins work on its new term, let’s hope the justices give the petition in Tuck-It-Away, Inc. the careful scrutiny it deserves.

http://reason.com/archives/2010/09/29/holding-justice-kennedy-to-his

(Article owned and copyrighted by Damon W. Root and published on Reason.com)

• On a not so related note, I just had to post this…

]]> http://redordead.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/again-on-kelo-and-mamma-mia/feed/ 0 kenshinobu