Paris’ Plight

Criminal Injustice, Hollywood, Individual Rights, Law

What’s being done to Paris Hilton is plain wrong.

Let me preface the above with this: She’s an ill-bred slut; a skunk with expensive clothes. She’s a stupid, rude, uneducated, and unkind woman (consider how she and her sidekick mocked those sweet quilting ladies on their reality show, and how they generally show contempt for the “yokels” with whom they slum it on the show).

Every time I’ve heard Paris speak, my impressions have been confirmed; she’s repulsive. As for her so-called allure, in “Sluts Galore,” I identified her as part of the “porn aesthetic,” sporting “sly, weasel-like looks.” I also thoroughly resent that her name mars one of my favorite fragrances, “Paris” by Yves Saint Laurent. (The allure of Paris the city, nothing can alter, except rioting Muslims.)

However, Hilton she was given unprecedented sentence for a low-level misdemeanor.

Here’s what Thomas Mesereau, a defense attorney for whom I have a great deal of respect, said. I praised his defense of Michael Jackson. (The article about that defense almost no one wanted to publish, including a large libertarian site.) Mesereau has said this about the legal plight of Paris—including the sentence, and the subsequent usurpation by the Judge of the sheriff’s authority:

“…you have a judge who is not following the law and who is willing to undermine our sheriff’s department. This judge absolutely has violated every procedure that applies to a situation like this. All her attorneys can do at this point is file an appeal, try and get her out on bail, as a misdemeanor permits one to do, and take it from there…

But I think the whole situation is a disgrace, because this judge undermined our sheriff and actually treated Paris Hilton far worse than anyone else would have been treated in this situation…

This judge knows darn well, because he’s in the criminal justice system, that people convicted of crimes like this, low-level misdemeanors, only spend a few days in jail, because they need to stop overcrowding, and they have to keep violent felons or people accused of violent felonies in jail.

I have had people go in the morning and leave that afternoon. Nobody gets 45 days like this. Nobody is told, you must spend all 45 days. He did it for the cameras. …And I think it’s highly improper…

I think equality should be the major message in our justice system, that, no matter who you are, you’re treated equally with everybody else.

This is a case of celebrity injustice. He did things with her because of who she is, and how much wealth she has, and because there were paparazzi and cameras around, that he wouldn’t have done with anybody else. And he’s created a difficult situation for our sheriff, who is a dedicated public servant, a very decent man. I know him very well.

And he’s trying to treat everybody equally. He didn’t treat Paris Hilton any differently from anyone else. And the judge tried to make it look like he had…”

Update: As usual, the media and the punditocracy are always wrong. Weeks after the fact, Greta Van Susteren of Faux News discovered (not due to any research she had conducted) that Hilton received more time than a wife batterer would. The Los Angeles Times did the journalist footwork (I can’t locate a link). After presiding over a gaggle of “experts” who hooted and hollered for Hilton’s head, Van Susteren has reversed her position.
About this you can be certain: mainstream media are always wrong. I put it down to cultural dumbing down: egalitarian hiring and the feminization of news.

In the chat I had with Jim Ostrowski of Paleo Radio last week, we agreed about the Hilton case, only I insisted on making the following distinctions (they are not mutually exclusive):
1) Hilton is a Ho—an unkind, classless slut. She’s huge because the market adjudicates popularity, not quality.
2) Hilton received unjust treatment by the legal system. (As a mother, I must say that the cry she let out to hers, “Mother, mother, this is unfair,” was horrible to hear.)

In this case, the injustice was by popular demand. The people—the pitchfork-hoisting, philosophical acolytes of the French Revolution—demanded Paris’s empty head, and got it.

Quarantine, Yes Or No?

Classical Liberalism, Ethics, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, The State

“I’m a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person. This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I’ve cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing.”

So said the patient “with a form of tuberculosis so dangerous he is under the first U.S. government-ordered quarantine since 1963,” on returning from a transatlantic trip to celebrate his wedding. The trip took him from Atlanta to Europe—Greece, Italy, the Czech Republic, France—and back to Atlanta via Canada and New York. By the man’s telling, he came back not because he realized he had exposed others to a deadly, highly infectious airborne disease, but because “he was afraid that if he did not get back to the U.S., he would not get the treatment he needed to survive.”
“Health officials said the man had been advised not to fly and knew he could expose others when he boarded the jets from Atlanta to Paris, and later from Prague to Montreal… He knew he had a form of tuberculosis and that it was resistant to first-line drugs.” Apparently he was also told to wear a mask. That too he ignored. If Andrew Speaker—that is the patient’s name—is as smart as he professes, he ought to have known not to expose people without their consent to any TB, much less to a strain associated with a 50 percent mortality rate.

Speaker returned to North America via Canada, driving into the US, a fact that demonstrates consciousness of guilt: He avoided American airlines, as he had been placed on a “no-fly alert,” which, it transpires, was overlooked at the border crossing. I suspect this case is akin, legally, to an individual infected with HIV not informing his sexual partners of his condition.

I’m trying to think of a libertarian argument against coercively confining a man who knowingly and intentionally uses his body as a lethal weapon against unsuspecting innocents. I can’t come up with one. Can you? Another libertarian has expressed a preference for “home confinement with an electronic monitor. This would seem to strike the balance between protecting his liberty interests and the safety of the public.” I like home confinement, only I really do not believe the authorities acted illiberally up until now: they gave the patient the goods (the info), and left it up to him to comply voluntarily. Andrew Speaker, on the other hand, ignored the information and acted recklessly. Should be given a second strike? If he strikes out again, someone could die—especially individuals with a low T cell count (suppressed immunity). Armed and dangerous is how he ought to be regarded. Would an electronic monitor provide ample warning in the event he violated the quarantine? By the time the authorities locate the quarantine violator, he may well have infected a host of people.
In the meantime, Diane Sawyer, who grills her subjects only in the sense Larry King interviews his, has elicited Speaker’s story. It’s a maze of contradictions and dissembling, and is accompanied suspiciously with “sexy” poses of Innocent Andy and a woman with a blond head the shape of Paris Hilton’s, a forlorn look, and big implants. His new wife, presumably. The fact that this is an educated man—a lawyer, no less—doesn’t help his case.

Are Hippie Parents Sending Kids Into The Maw of Death?

America, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Family, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The West, The Zeitgeist

Another young girl died overseas on a school trip. I saw the item on CNN, but cannot find the link (help please). The parents allege foul play.
American and European parents are blasé about their kids, be it in the way they discipline or supervise them. They are also stupendously naïve, sending their precious progeny, during their most stupid years—the teens—to dangerous spots around the world. Bermuda, for instance, which “US and British crime advisories have warned of as having a medium-high crime rate.”

Consider the case of Rebecca Middleton. This Canadian 16-year-old was packed off to Bermuda by starry-eyed parents with her friend Jasmine Meens, ready for a “trip of a lifetime.” A left-liberal mindset has these folks believing the world is one big happy place, and that walking the streets of Mogadishu and those of Montreal (lovely city) are one and the same thing.
In any event, Middleton “accepted rides on motorcycles, operated by Mr. Smith and Mr. Mundy.” (Here’s Justis Smith.) the Bermuda Online described what these predators did to the girl as “the most animal sexually-depraved, most violent and inhuman murder of any woman or man anywhere in the world.” (Wild and Wooly English, that’s for sure.) Intriguingly, the appeals in the case—no one was convicted—were argued in the Bermudan courts by Cherie Booth Blair.
The hippie spirit was also alive and well in Natalie Holloway’s family. (Never mind the male predators waiting to prey on trusting North American girls, I would not have entrusted my child to any adult chaperon chosen by a North America schools.)

Presidential Politics: Immigration Vs. War

Politics, War

Citing a “National Academy of Sciences study,” Patrick Buchanan notes that “The average immigrant comes to this country much poorer and far less educated than Americans and consumes far more per capita in public services…each immigrant who comes with less than a high school education costs taxpayers $90,000 net over his or her lifetime.” Considering that immigration policy has been predicated mostly on family unification and on allowing millions upon millions of unskilled illegals to enter the country undisturbed, the assessment sounds about right.

When thousands of non-voting illegal aliens poured into the streets to demand their positive “rights,” their elected officials and El Presidente (Bush) came up with a bill that will grant the protesters their wish.

Adding to the “union” each year the equivalent of one New Jersey, powered by identity-politics, and consisting predominantly of tax consumers seeking to indenture taxpayers —how better to accelerate wealth distribution and the death of the republic?

As a libertarian who wrote her first op-ed in opposition to the invasion of Iraq in September 2002, I do not mean to diminish the centrality of this war in the presidential race. However, the neoconservative “idea” of preemptive wars or wars for democracy is as dead as a doornail. Can you imagine a candidate running on that plank? I didn’t think so. However, the notion of dissolving the people and electing another, to paraphrase Bertold Brecht—that’s very much alive in the minds of the political caste.

I’d say, then, that immigration is the central issue in the next elections.