Crude calligraphy aside, we hold these two to be self-evident.
The first means “the law does not concern itself with trifles”, a self-evident yet supremely aggravating truth to everyone fucked without a remedy at law.
The second means “first do no harm” and it is one we should all try to live by, is it not?
My sister and I both took French in school. Any time the subject came up our father would chirp “mettez le crayon sur le pupitre”. Put the pencil on the desk.
Years later, when the subject of French came up in my uncle’s house my uncle immediately chirped “mettez le crayon sur le pupitre.” My sister and I both laughed.
My uncle explained: we had the same French teacher.
“We agreed about so many things, but fought about all of them. Ain’t dassum shit?”
Not my insight, I found it in a sketchbook where I made a note of it a few years ago during a Conflict Resolution seminar at Cardozo law school, but it struck me as a good one, and important to consider at this moment in history (Calli and Noodler’s are inks I was comparing for blackness):
John Oliver illustrates this point beautifully here.
You know it’s a well-designed, consumer-friendly health care program when the second item on the phone menu at your state’s private insurance health exchange is:
“Press two if you are an in-person assister which includes navigators, brokers, certified application counselors and health plan facilitated enrollers.”
We said,
standing with our gay brothers
and sisters,
that we would never marry
until gays in our state
could marry
Now that gay marriage has
destroyed the sacred
institution,
what’s the point?
Apparently, the way to find out if a doctor is in network (and this well-reviewed nephrologist seemingly is), is to do a provider search and find this result:
What is the world coming to when you can’t even curse your colleagues in the White House, in a private conversation with a reporter, without the fuck betraying you in the fucking lying media?
Anthony Scaramucci told an interviewer that the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, was “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic” who would be asked to resign, and that Scaramucci was not like Steve Bannon, the chief strategist, because “I’m not trying to suck my own cock”. source
Well, at least now we know why Bannon has that look on his face all the time.
What is their freaking problem? How could he have been any clearer talking about pre-existing conditions? Link to lyin’ CNN clip this screen capture comes from — look at how, on the graphic below, they add the words “so do” before “walk up” to make the president sound incoherent. Naturally the failing New York Times chimes in, piles on. Sad day to be an American. SAD!
More details about the United States’s denial of having anything to do with the current, ongoing torture of suspected “bad hombres” in Yemen. I needn’t point out that America is not officially at war in Yemen. We’ve got to stay vigilant about things being done in our names.
It was a grave national mistake to have no investigation into systematic torture and no accountability (outside of prestigious jobs with lifetime tenure) for championing America’s right to torture suspects. Obama likely didn’t want to be the first U.S. president assassinated by a long gun, so he prudently didn’t pursue the matter of documented American torture. Bad move, sir. Now we have a learning-on-the-job president who has defiantly announced that he loves torture. His crowd went wild when he did so.
Torture is morally depraved, and likely once more being done, albeit once more deniably, in our names. Torture is the best public relations in the world for recruiters of suicide bombers. Torturing captives is irrefutable proof of a nation’s most deeply held values. Torture inspires only revulsion and justifiable hatred.
It is no small thing that it can take diligent lawyers and journalists years to get any part of the truth about this basic matter of American foreign policy. We don’t have years this time.
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