I think… it’s like the sum of all my comments ever leads to a few simple ideas. That it’s all about the difference between those who act with reason, empathy and conscience and those who don’t or can’t. It’s about the disconnect of conscience and consciousness from value and authority.

old comment I left on Daily Kos

Corporations are by definition incapable of acts of conscience. They buy the candidates and write the laws and capture the regulators. Bill Black calls it control fraud and criminogenic. The whole derivative thing is when money gets disconnected from reality but instead measures its worth against other fantasy investment instruments and has every incentive to keep bubbling and churning. It overwhelms all else. It sucks real wealth away from people and jobs and puts it instead in fantasy casino betting that it can’t lose. It doesn’t create more wealth, it destroys real wealth and real people. Not that a corporation can care, and the last guy standing will be the CEO — he won’t “see” it until it’s too late. TBTF is exactly Titanic. Sure we will all go down with the ship, but he’ll be top last, and I doubt the Titanic will know whether its floating or sunk anyway. It never lived, it never dies, it’s a creation of man. But now it’s a person.

Same with law. When juries quit being tasked with judging the justice of convicting, and instead were not allowed to be told about their constitutional power and duty to do so, were restricted to only determining whether a legal checklist of facts had been met — that’s when we took empathy and conscience out of due process and started down the road to psychopathic government. Fine lawyers and judges now think jury nullification is legal heresy. They don’t seem to know anymore that it’s exactly why juries were written into the Constitution so often. It’s what kept law real and just for all.

You need a flow, you need the hats to rotate among everyone equally, rock scissors paper. Checks and balances need to include citizens, what goes round has to come round, to keep grounded in reality, humanity and sanity. To keep healthy. Which is exactly what’s not happening now, either in finance or in law. We have purposefully incomprehensible finance laws, which keeps judges from understanding enough to rule competently, or else keeps matters away from judges at all. The laws the corporations wrote may have been bad (last two minutes) to begin with. Should it ever come to a jury, the law is out of reach. Juries are not allowed to hear legal arguments anymore, they’re not allowed to look at the whole wisdom of a whole thing and reason that. Liberals and conservatives don’t meet on the same page in the jury room and reason there as Americans; no, we stay monsters to each other, never recognizing we are part of the whole and need each other. When it comes to governance, national secrets disables citizens (third snip). We’re unconscious and deconscienced consumers and passengers now, not original authority, not in the loop, not checking and balancing, not legitimizing. In the American Devolution, the citizens have withered away.

Every time I see something indecent, I see the absence of common citizen input. Our votes are herded and hijacked, our function as jurors disabled. Do you even recognize the president we get from the candidate we chose? (Obama, really?) It’s not supposed to be like this. This is the opposite of constitutional, the opposite of America.

Sorry, got wound up here. Like I said, I’ve been saying pieces of this for a long time.

I didn’t abdicate. Did you? We were shoved out of civics, shoved out of authority, and it started before we were born. And sometimes by people who say they’re doing the right thing, the constitutional, patriotic thing. That was one of the things David Swanson was saying in the War is a Lie book salon yesterday, that people sign up for war and act heroically and horribly out of patriotism, not out of evil. When jurors agree to leave their conscience at the door, do they know better? Do they have a choice? The whole point was to keep them ignorant of their Constitutional powers to begin with, to dissuade them from thinking it was ok to use them. Sure juries can do wrong, but so can the government, which the government won’t admit. It all seemed to happen around the same time, post Civil War — unbelievably wealthy railroad magnates, 1886 corporate personhood by erroneous redefinition (thanks ex-RR-Prez Supreme Court clerk!), 1895 jury disabling by redefinition. We get the most horrendous abuses done by those claiming our authority to protect us. Anybody hiding behind National Secrets, I’m looking at you– oh, that’s right, I can’t.

Things fall apart.

The world is babbled to pieces.

I actually had this same debate with Mason, in the Bruce Fein book salon:

thatvisionthing September 12th, 2010 at 12:47 am
In response to Mason @ 173

Yes it does, and I’m glad to hear a lawyer say that jury nullification survives as a legal strategy still practiced, even though in strangled form. But I am not a lawyer, and I’m guessing you’re not in California if you are able to mention the word “conscience” to a jury in court and not have a mistrial declared.

Justices Say Jurors May Not Vote Conscience
Ruling: The law must be followed even if panelists believe the result will be unjust, state’s highest court finds.
May 08, 2001|MAURA DOLAN, LOS ANGELES TIMES LEGAL AFFAIRS WRITER

SAN FRANCISCO — Jurors must follow the law–not their consciences–even when they strongly believe the law will produce an unjust result, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The court rejected a centuries-old doctrine called “jury nullification,” which gives jurors the power to follow their convictions rather than the law.

When I was being questioned in a jury pool once, I got shamed by the judge and kicked out of the courtroom when I said I would vote my conscience.

That’s a pretty stunning thing when you consider how juries were supposed to function, as a check and balance on government, when the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written and juries were called out multiple times — three times in the Bill of Rights alone. Holy shit, that was integral to what We the People meant, that’s my epiphany. But who knows that now?

I asked earlier if Bruce and Glenn had read the dissent in Sparf. I read the opinion years ago, and as I recall the 5-4 majority decision was sucky and the dissent was encyclopedic and terrific, impassioned, could find its legal butt in the dark. Sparf was a sailor accused of murder, and, like you, his lawyer wanted the jury to hear about their power to nullify law and forgive, I guess, but the trial judge would not allow it. It got appealed to the Supreme Court, which sided with the judge. You place a lot of faith in the law and the court with a dumbed-down cowed jury, but not me. Sparf was 1895, it’s been a long time since juries could be fully informed, and the growing failures and injustice of unchecked and unbalanced and unintelligible law are pretty plain now.

“Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.” –Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Disengaged, devolved citizens go hand in hand with empire and collapse. I call it the American Devolution: “E pleb neesta.”

Sparf vs US 1895:

The case has occasionally been simplistically described as: Since the law has no way to prevent the jury from judging the law, they shall have that right, but only if they do not know it.

Yes, yes, YES I think the jury CONSTITUTIONALLY needs to be told that its function is to QUESTION AUTHORITY and FIND JUSTICE as — well, as John Adams said @70:

JOHN ADAMS (1771): It’s not only …(the juror’s) right, but his duty, in that case, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgement, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.

Sure, he was a Federalist, but I don’t think all the other guys were, and certainly Zenger’s jury and Penn’s jury were not, and we have their nullifying hearts to thank in no small measure for the First Amendment.

Basically I think you’re saying that even though the law may get hopelessly fucked up like a bloated Windows program, there shall be no Ctrl-Alt-Del, there shall be no way out of an unjust blue screen of death, not by reason, not by empathy, not by conscience; that justice = legal, always. To which I’d like to quote William Kunstler, since I went to the trouble of transcribing it while I had the DVD checked out:

WILLIAM KUNSTLER: “And that’s the terrible myth of organized society. That everything that’s done through the established system is legal. And that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life and an order to a system and that a person that goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him. And therefore society can turn its conscience off and look to other things and other times. And that’s the terrible thing about these past trials is that they have this aura of legitimacy, this aura of legality.

“I suspect that better men than the world has known, and more of them, have gone to their death through a legal system than through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich? Legal. Sacco/Vanzetti? Quite legal. The Haymarket defendants? Legal. The hundreds of rape trials throughout the South where black men were condemned to death? All legal. Jesus? Legal. Socrates? Legal. And that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places. Because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretense.”

(From film “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe”)

You actually thinks juries should be instructed they don’t have to follow the law?

I believe that a jury’s empathy, reason and conscience are part of Constitutional due process and that in fact jurors need to know that that is their Constitutional function. It’s how you keep the law healthy, just and legitimate, since the original authority is the people, and the test is “self-evident.” If not, why even have juries? A judge alone would suffice. The judge whose instructions you insist they must follow. By your reckoning, traffic court and Florida’s Rocket Docket should be the height of justice. Instead the Founding Fathers wrote… “We the People”: The biggest, boldest, tallest words in the Constitution. Not even fine print. And “jury” “jury” “jury”… OMG! O. M. G. (Once you see it, you see it.)

Just saying.

Chris Busby, co-author of the epidemiological study “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009,” interviewed on Antiwar Radio in August:

Busby: …And the other thing about all of this is that all of these different pieces of information put together, they add up to a picture. So in other words, we are not just finding increases in cancer, which is a genetic disease, but we are also finding increases in infant mortality, increases in congenital malformation – which weren’t reported, incidentally, in the paper for reasons which I can go into – and also this peculiar sex ratio change which only occurred in those children who were born after 2004. So all of these things together point to the introduction in 2004 into that population of a very, very powerful genetically mutating agent – a mutagen.

…

Busby: …I mean of course you can go into any hospital and find children with deformities, but in Iraq, and also incidentally in Kosovo too, we have had reports of peculiarly horrible deformities, ones that don’t normally get reported and don’t normally turn up. So there does seem to be some agent that’s common to these areas where depleted uranium has been used which result in these very, very peculiar and unusual deformities.

You can search on uranium in that interview and get lots of hits, none for phosphorous. I’m not saying no to white phosphorous, I’m just saying this guy said weaponized uranium.

My apologies, tvt. Yes, depleted uranium was used very liberally throughout Iraq. White phosphorous was also used in Fallujah. Both are hideous, just hideous.

Thanks so much for that info…and the courtesy,too.

I do however, find this passage intriguing:

Georgetown University Professor Bruce Hoffman stated that for this to be considered an act of terrorism, “there has to be some political motive and it has to send a broader message that seeks some policy change. From what I’ve heard, that doesn’t appear to be the case. It appears he was very mad at the [IRS] and this was a cathartic outburst of violence. His motivation was the key.”

Can someone tell me how this professor is capable of infallibly divining Stack’s motivation,based upon the repetitive use of the word “appears”?