Comment 197
My todo list is so long I can’t decide what to procrastinate about first.
A Self-Sustaining Evil
The other day I was telling some out-to-town relatives about some of the jobs I’ve had. One of these jobs was maintaining a promotional web site for a law firm. Promoting lawyers is one of the toughest sales jobs you could ever imagine. Quick, think of something positive to say about lawyers.
In addition, it was one of the most stratified organizations I’d ever worked for. I was only support staff with years of experience in I.T support. But if you weren’t an actual lawyer, or at least had a JD degree, you were just slightly above pond scum. Support staff in a law firm is only a necessary evil so that the lawyers don’t get their hands dirty with actual work.
So while I was discussing this I realized something and blurted out a Truth.
If we didn’t have lawyers, we would not need lawyers.
Think about it. Anytime there’s a lawsuit, someone first has to… get a lawyer. Then that lawyer notifies the other party in the suit and they have to… get a lawyer. Then the lawyers take over to settle the suit. No one but lawyers know for sure what happens next. Sorta like butchers and their ingredients used in making sausage.
Years before I worked at the law firm, the wife of a prominent local lawyer attended a class I was teaching. When I learned who she was, I made the comment that I guess I can’t make any lawyer jokes this term. She said it was ok, she had heard them all. And I’m sure she had. Oh BTW my favorite lawyer joke is shown here on the left.
I’m sure you have heard the quote from Shakespeare, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” This is a wish I think we all have that we could live in a utopian, anarchistic society where we did not need some one to represent us in a disagreement. If that society included a workable educational system where we could all learn to diplomatically express ourselves or better yet just not get in each others way to begin with, the dead lawyer idea might be totally workable. In the understated words of Rodney King, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Then we wouldn’t need the first lawyer – which means we would not need the second lawyer and so on. Hey, now that’s a thought!
Comment 127
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
How to Kickstart Space Exploration – Again
This week marks the 45th anniversary of the United States publicly landing a human representative on the moon. The first of about about a dozen such men visiting the moon and then a couple of years later – nothing. Now all we have is an orbiting space station. Just floating around in near earth orbit, looking at stuff on the ground with their powerful telescopes like a bunch of hi-tech voyeurs. […]
Comment 151
As you watch the news coverage in the next couple of days keep thinking of these questions.
Does it seem like a coincidence that the Israeli incursion into Palestine happened so close on the heels of the crash of Malaysia flight 17? It seemed only an hour or two apart that the stories broke. Is this the news media being manipulated to not look too closely into whats happening to Hamas?
Is it a coincidence that two Malaysian flights have been lost so close together in time? Was the first one just some sort of a rehearsal? And if so, who is really running the show?
Remember to not restrict your news viewing to just one or two outlets. And be sure to include the international and non-commercial news media points of view.