Sudden Insight

I came to the realization the other day that I am completely for the death penalty in principle but I would have great difficulty ever administering it in our current legal system. I belive that no one should ever be convicted of a crime and punished unless there is no doubt that he is guilty. The people or person deciding should be certain that he and no one else commited the crime. Yet we not only send people who are innocent to jail, we also execute them. Obviously, something is fundamentally wrong with our system. I believe what is wrong is that the courts have passed the point of information saturation and reached a point of information irrelevance and disinformation. Technology has advanced so far that we are able to collect thousands of pieces of data, but sadly the ability of the decision makers to parse the data has not kept stride. Courts often call in experts but usually in the form of expert witnesses. These witnesses have been called because they will support one side of the case. In the end judges and jurors are left to choose not based on evidence but on credibilty or from the preponderance of data presented by one side which is really a function of resources. That is to say, the side with the most money wins.
The adversarial system of law is broken. It is engineered to produce justice from competion. Two sides compete and it is hoped that justice will prevail. Justice cannot prevail unless the competitors are competing to ensure justice. Lawyers now compete only to win. This leaves judges and jurors to sort out the mess wiht fewer resources than the lawyers. What is needed is limits for expenditure by either side in civil and criminal preceedings and no limits on what can be spent by judges to illuminate the case using impartial expertise. Power needs to be taken from the combatants and given to the referee. Bingo! Justice is served.

My Plan for my Life

I am very carefully considering various career options and my problem is that too many paths lie before me and no impetus pushing me toward one or the other.
• I could teach. It would be hugely rewarding; I’d be giving back to the community and I like dealing with children. The downside is that I don’t want to teach very long (two years at most).
• I could join the military. It would be cool in that I could have a job title that included the word “badass”. I could learn Mandarin Chinese, practice kung fu, shoot big guns, learn covert ops, wear a uniform, pick up chicks, get money to go back to school, and travel the world. The fine print is that any job title that included the word “badass” in it would also have an increased likelihood of getting shot by a guy named “Fahd” who hates all American bastards (maybe I could tell him I’m Nigerian?) or I could just suffer one of any number of horrible fates like the ones we see in the movies (getting vaporized, tortured, dismembered, maimed, poisoned, stabbed, crushed, or beaten). All the while, I’d live by strict rules with people who (by many accounts) are mostly idiots and answer to men who tell me that my name is “Maggot”.
• I could continue to look for a job programming. The upside is that I really like programming. So much so, that on several occasions I ended up doing other people’s school programming projects for the sheer hell of it. (I used to lock myself in my bedroom and write code into the wee hours of the morning, decide the code wasn’t good enough, throw it away and start over the next day.) The downside is that the market is tight and employers are only hiring people with Masters degrees, years of experience, or perfect 4.0 GPA’s to go along with their undergraduate Computer Science degrees. I have none of those things. (I do have a degree but it turns out all the job applicants do and I am not special. I want to be special!)
• I could go back to school. I like hanging out there and everybody’s doing it. I could get a degree in literature and try for a higher GPA this time around. I could try out again for soccer, (the very thought makes my feet itch) prepare for grad school, get a teaching certificate, maybe even brush up on my Spanish. The downside is that I am already approaching 24 in June. I would be in danger of becoming a career student.
So there you have it. I’d say that I am at a fork in the road but really I think it looks like spokes on a wheel. All of them lead in completely different paths and I keep trying to do all of them. It’s enough to make a guy crazy.
P.S. if You're reading this Jen, Yes, I stole the last two posts from an email I wrote you. It's a bad habit which I promise to quit when I stop writing email at 4 am.

I Hate The UN Because

1. Every country in the world is a member. Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic murdered thousands of their countrymen yet neither Iraq nor Yugoslavia had its membership suspended. These countries were allowed to send representatives despite obvious despotism and corruption.
2. America pays for everything. This is bad because other countries have no incentive to cooperate and no stake in the outcome. People always learn to resent those who give them the most money. People DO bite the hand that feeds them.
3. The UN never acts. The solution is always more conversation, diplomacy, treaties, and inaction disguised as international cooperation. The organization is a SHAM. People died in Africa because Kofi Annan wouldn’t intervene in Angola. (Ironic, since he is African.) People died in Yugoslavia. People are dying in Iraq and will die in large numbers if Saddam is not eliminated. I have no confidence in the UN to stand up and act when action is necessary. Justice has no friends at the UN. Other countries use the UN as an extended platform for national politics and a forum to shout down the “ugly Americans”. The UN is an organ of ridicule, a “whited sepulcher”, an anachronism. I hate the UN.

Weekend

Weekends, weekdays - they are all the same to me now. Well, other than the fact that on the weekends my roommates are home. Friday night I suffered great embarassment in the name of friendship. I am hoping that my experience strenghtens my hand in the ongoing friendly verbal skirmish. I have the sneaking suspicion that it won't as much as I had hoped. Certain people refused to be ashamed.
I am a little ashamed. Someone gave Walt and me expensive tickets to the Stars game last night, featuring no less than a hockey demi-god, Mario Lemiuex. I had the temerity to doze off. I thought it was a wonderful game and I am a Stars fan. I just find it difficult to get worked up over anything less than playoff hockey. It just doesn't seem to mean a lot and I barely understand the game to begin with. :-p
About those pictures, I should post them sooner or later. I know ya'll are just dying to see them.