Out of Pod Experience

Very, very frightening...........and that gets a 'most indeed'.

In a country of 300+ million, you're bound to find a few nulcear-powered idiots.

oops

Oh, yes they are.....most indeed.

Sure they are.

Patiently waiting for your country to go bankrupt, sending the entire planet back to the dark ages.

My reaction to this story, and I would do it if it were possible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35TbGjt-weA

Those of us who aspire to be lawyers, and the profession at large generally look down upon ambulance chasers. Personal injury lawyers are fine when they go after legitimate targets, but the types we tend to scoff at are trying to make a buck off of your suffering. You know the ones I'm talking about: the ones who look like sleazy, used car salesmen who have hundreds of ads on television, telling you about their "no fees unless you win*" approach, and how effective they are. Hell, two of them in my area even guarantee you a win in court. I believe one lost a case and is now being sued for false advertising.

Hint: If a lawyer guarantees you a win in court before they even file the paperwork, find a new attorney!

We also tend to frown upon the guys who file multi-million dollar lawsuits that are frivolous. Yes, this is a frivolous lawsuit, and I fully expect it to be thrown out on that alone. If not, well I don't know. I mean, what are the odds that we, the taxpayers, are covering these legal expenses?

So please, don't say we're all bad. I'm going to practice as a Constitutional attorney. You know, someone who specializes in your rights as an American. :)

Last I checked, there's no Constitutional right to get inebriated. Unless you consider the repeal of prohibition that "fundamental right"...

I think obese people should have designated parking spots 3 miles from their destination and have to do jumping jacks the whole way there

There are a number of symptoms that all come together to produce this stupidity:

• The self-esteem movement
• The anti-morals, anti-values movement
• Misapplication of science in a legal context

Social science (which is a misnomer, as there is usually very little of the scientific method involved) had a hypothesis thirty or so years ago that self-esteem was of more importance than actual skills. Making policy out of that, we've had more than two generations of children graduated where getting the math wrong was OK so long as you felt good about the answer. These harmful notions leaked over to other subjects beyond math, but were most damaging there.

Add to this teachers who found it too hard to teach critical thinking and phonics (I wonder why they had so much difficulty...) and you get an education system that leans toward rote memorization instead of laying a foundation for generalization and synthesis.

At the same time, you have movements at the university level attempting to deconstruct the notion of morals, especially those that come from religion. Why? On the surface, the reason given is often outrage that you might make people feel bad (self-esteem). "How dare you demand good behavior and personal responsibility. How dare you interject religious notions of good and bad. There's no such thing as good and bad!"

Personal responsibility requires well-defined principles (not rules) of good and bad (which legal systems are a horrible substitute for), that is, it requires morals. Morals, in turn, can be reasoned from, generalized from and can be used in decision making when encountering new situations (critical thinking).

Morals and personal responsibility are only bad when your goal is to create a powerful centralized state that can control the daily lives of others. Well-informed and moral people will tend to vote against government constructs that grant more power to a ruling elite. Therefore, personal responsibility must be deconstructed. Pseudo-science and misapplication of biology (studies of addictive behavior, chemistry and pheromones) provide a useful misdirection in such an effort. The crude generalization of all these notions is the wrong-headed belief that one cannot be responsible for one's own actions.

The societal consequences, however, are things like this lawsuit in Idaho and the similar ones in Nebraska and South Dakota. While the academics have been so busy tearing down morality, they've not replaced it with anything. Critical thinking is unwelcome, because some may disagree with what the academic elite think should be a consensus.

Finally, you get lawyers attempting to apply these pseudo-science justifications to laws designed around responsibility. If you're not responsible, the law and consequent punishment for breaking it cannot apply. Lawyers are supposed to generate tension against the law to strengthen it. This works fine when the foundations of the law are solid, but is disastrous when those same foundations have been systematically eroded.

tl;dr: Damn hippies.