Those whom we so-called military journalists categorize as poor leaders are not the exception, but the strategy. Truth is, the Marine Corps doesn’t want you to know. All this bullshit about brothers and sisters only really means anything to the younger guys. Once you’re a company man, you’ll sacrifice the memory of a few young lives if it means top billing in the commander’s eyes.
Read more →There is an old joke in politics that whoever promises both freedom and equality is either an idiot or a liar. Though both the ideas of liberty and equality appeal to political man, they are ever frustratingly opposed to each other. It is this rule of opposites that resonates in the words of French political [...]
Read more →It’s midday in Carol City, a squalid inner-city neighborhood in Miami, Florida. The school bell rings and a crowd of children push and shove each other out the entrance doors of the neighborhood middle school — a small, windowless blue-gray building, overwhelmed by the tiny classroom portables that clutter its surrounding crab grass fields. The [...]
Read more →Law is a curious game. It outwardly proclaims to represent in theory the very thing it rejects in practice. In law, as it exists on paper, we are either following or breaking it; everything is either right or wrong, good or bad, black or white. But we humans are the ones who apply it, and [...]
Read more →It was that fucking I.T. geek. The dithering, over-analytical, demon-spawned sophist of a man he was, we were in that hot, cramped room for almost two days now with no end in sight because he refused to take a side. Fresh from the jury box, six of us thought the defendant was guilty; the other [...]
Read more →Truth, it turns out, becomes subjective once it enters a courtroom. How can I honestly and reasonably judge something diluted by persuasion and interpretation, as all law is? Who am I to decide what is and what isn’t, and upon what logic do I found my estimation of circumstance? It’s a DUI trial, wherein the [...]
Read more →I’m feeling overdressed. I wore business attire, as my summons said I should—a dress shirt, creased trousers and a tie—but at the courthouse today I was surrounded by T-shirts and jeans. I have the feeling that there are other people who want to be there even less than I do. An off-duty judge came down [...]
Read more →When I read my jury duty summons last month, I did so with great hesitation and anxiety. I had never received a notice before, having been enlisted in the Marine Corps since 18 and therefore being rendered ineligible for jury duty for most of my adult life. But I’m out now, and just as soon [...]
Read more →Law requires faith. Man must be faithful in the institution of law and in his contracted brethren with whom he shares the empathy of petition — namely, that they share the common bond of having signed the social contract and agreed with each other to follow it in its legal manifest. Those not involved in [...]
Read more →Protestors flood Tehran streets By Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim, Associated Press Tens of thousands of protesters swarmed the streets of Tehran and at least two other Iranian cities Friday, audaciously turning an annual rally in support of the Palestinian cause into the first major demonstration against the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in six [...]
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