Travesty Optimization

Applying the proportionality test to both negative and positive rights may undermine any margin of appreciation of the [sic] state authorities.  This gives rise to the problem of over-determination.-- Dual authors Klatt and Meeter, The Constitutional Structure of Proportionality, p 86

How one views the Lionel Tate case, almost twenty years old, depends on your filter. Dana Canedy doesn't bother to cast doubt on the "wrestling defense," because The New York Times couldn't fathom how the prosecutor filed for premeditation, while it is overtly challenged by Bill Kurtis three years later. And then, true to form for troubled African American men, Tate engages in recidivism. It tempts reactions along the lines of dangerous eugenic fallacies, but ethnicity is not a meaningless term, certainly not in the medical field, and in jurisprudence, experts eradicate bias through pretense. Caste, social station, are irrelevant behind the shield of our systems process. Never mind that, according to accepted norms, if you baby sit a six year old and leave her with your son twice her size and hear cries of distress, you get yourself out of bed and check. Kathleen Grossett-Tate was culpable in the death of Tiffany Eunick, but what do we wind up with? Traumatized liberal attorneys, a besmirched ADA, a judge who couldn't craft an appropriate punishment because his hands were tied by state guidelines, a single mother scarred for life by the loss of her little girl, a governor currently limping along in the primaries who attempted to split the difference in a glaringly ineffectual fashion, and the United States once again exposes its bongo justice, during the Clinton years, to foreign ridicule.

At the time this case became one in a series of sensational events the state of Florida just keeps on giving, I was a fledgling journalist. The lesbian ADAPT activist gave me a byline, and the rest is moot, given present earnings capacity. I did not really understand search, and came late to Google, which is why I intuit a vague familiarity, at best, with the trial.

Similarly, during the last days in the life of David Koresh, I was a work incentives advocate due to the wide latitude of a Pew Charitable Trust grant, and Waco was for all intents and purposes a prelude to Xbox, where we begin to lose the ability to differentiate collateral damage. I accepted the concern for the welfare of the children as paramount over and above a radical sect to command adherents as it pleased. Against the stress of case management, it was dramatic entertainment which might have been negotiated better, but hardly a trigger for sedition, sans McVeigh. What created him, what created ISIS, isn't going to fizzle due to drone technology, especially when one's former youthful enthusiasm evaporates because a female feline dashes out in the hallway, gnaws neighbor's trash after you spent the holiday morning chasing cat chow, screaming "Get the fuck in the studio," and Tim opens his door, helping you reign in a spayed foster rescue little bigger than a football. She puked outside Jim's door, the brother with end stage renal disease. I wanted a writing studio exactly like that of Andre Dubus, and instead, I am like a samurai gutting her intestines, familial aspirations imploded, after a middle class life more affluent than this.

My father doesn't want to see me; the sister put him up to it. I don't want him in my unit. He should go back to die at Myrtle Beach, and I envision my own demise in a deportation cell outside of Paris, dreaming of a much more inclusive global conflict than that Niall Ferguson or Jennifer Rubin might see ahead.

Taking a U turn

Mio padre, in in relation to my fall, wants me to go to hospital. Our conversation went something like this:

Aging patriarch: Why don't you go get checked out? I'll pay for it. If you want me to come over--
Translation: I don't think you're expendable.

Furious daughter: Come over? O please! You have Louise, and I have to get up to go to the store, and unlike you and Marie, I am making plans to go away, or to a home, because I am a realist while the two of you do nothing and sit there and suffer!
Translation: You don't love me and never did.

My father's sister is literally dying, and even allowing for the fact that no model can control everything, her suffering is driving me berserk. I'd email my cousins, or IM Richie at Linked In, but I know it is not my place to overstep my role as (overbearing) niece. Padre does not intervene, and I'm mad at everyone, familial and otherwise.

I am on the verge of giving my notice, with no plan, straining at the bit, even knowing that access to toiletry would be essential, and a problem, although I have a portable bedpan. It is all I can do not to lunge at Trudy and assault her tomorrow, and yes, this is beyond the bounds of decency, though I'd run out of usage attempting to detail the games these employees are directed to play, how many times I've complied and they simply do absolutely nothing. A Poets & Writers author wrote a book about an underclass woman who was gang raped and died of alcohol poisoning in the projects. I found the novel in Paley Library while I still lived near Temple. I forget the guy's name, I forget the title, but he wasn't writing fiction; he was writing about a police state which deliberately denigrates and defeats people who don't know what to do to stop it. Unlike the female character, and I'm not sure she was the lead, I never used fucking as an act to get what I craved, never tried to climb on my once well endowed cunt, though I did try very hard in my thirties and forties to get a protector. This is why I could not swallow my physical revulsion toward my ex; he was a misogynist bawling baby who wants to be pampered, and has no idea how to walk with me. Some men do have that idea. Married men, but I only ever made a direct effort to steal one. Tall order with the flimsiness of cyber dating in the early explosion of web growth.

I know giving my notice will kill my father and I know everyone who would want to console me would say this is how landlords are. I can't take it anymore. I don't drink, I don't whore myself, I gave up tobacco, and because niggers love to bitch slap as a method of matriculation, I'll be persecuted to my grave. I can't do it anymore.

Robert Wagner, in Escro

"The life in me abolished the death of things."-- The Ring and The Book

Yes, I sometimes forget just to whom I am posting, certainly not to Oliveira. People follows a time honored tradition older than journalism itself: The need to be amazed by a freak show conjoined to the distortions of glamour, but in the case of Natalie Wood, her theatrical depth always on the verge of overwhelming pathos, her performances remain a specter for which I have no cognizant explanation, except for the fact that her death was a senior year headline. What Redford's character does to her emotionally in Tennessee's carefully contrived melodrama opens some raw wounds, Sundance liberal be damned. She was drinking and fell off a boat. She was on a boat, drinking, she and Robert had a fight, and merry widow tossed her overboard, not that there is any evidence to hover over Wagner's old age. Her character Alva was pressured into sex trafficking and is destroyed by her own desperation for magical innocence, in the covert hovering of homosexual penetrations into familial viciousness, and died in such a fashion it reverberates. We believe things have changed since those times, that fresh meat is not a commodity, but have they? What Rampell delineates at the bottom of the economic workforce barely scratches the surface, but we're demonizing what we enjoy about the convenience of processed food. I patronize McDonald's once in a blue moon-- but escape this juggernaut no less than anyone else who frequent short order establisshments. Golden Lake, Dunkin Donuts, something more upscale when I head to Delancy Plaza, even grocery chains have converted to prepackaged meals.

What I am suggesting is we do not often enough step back to see what polarizes us into idiotic points of advocacy. Restaurant franchises operate on the caveat of instant gratification, not decent hands on customer service. What isn't microwaved is short grilled, in the past, crewed by adolescents never intending such labor becoming a living wage, not in the developed world. Those who remain on the front lines, the farmers who harvest crops, manage livestock, can only push manufacturing technologies so far; the rest of us are basically obsolete, even the CEO five times up the food chain. Alva is a passive anachronism, but in another sense she returns to the future, the last exploitable resource, our terminal diseases.