We’re broke: your sticker or your money…

View 738 Wednesday, August 22, 2012

1048: the saga continues. Yesterday I spent the day driving my newly repaired car 60 miles while doing other errands, then got the smog certification. Unfortunately, since I had already paid the registration fee to DMV back last fall, the smog certifier couldn’t give me license tag stickers – he could if I had to pay the fee, but since I didn’t have to pay the fee —

Anyway, in a few minutes I will be off to AAA, which may have a remedy for me. My fear is that the rapacious city parking enforcement people, having already issued me one ticket (which I’ll pay) for not having that sticker will be watching with telescopes to find my car in a vulnerable place.

We’ll see what happens next. When the state is out of money – it estimated that it would get a billion dollars from taxing the Facebook IPO, and the Pension Fund still estimates it will get 7% on investments it is losing money on – then any revenue source is needed…

And I’m off.

1600: Done, and done. I have a big red sticker thing pasted on the inside of my back window that gives me King’s X until the DMV mails my permanent license plate sticker on the 29th of this month; this according to the AAA. I have to say the AAA has been greatly helpful in all this, and the only inconvenience was about 5 minutes wait for a human being on the phone on my first call when this all started, and perhaps that long waiting in a pleasant waiting room area for the agent who dealt with the whole matter for me. Which is to say no problems at all. It would be hard for them to have been more efficient.

There was one good outcome. The AAA office is out in Encino, most of the way to the Pizza Cookery, where they make excellent gluten free pizza, meaning that I could get a pizza that Roberta could eat. So I got her one, and I got one for me, and for once we had all the pizza we wanted. And now that the car registration drama is over I can get back to work.

Fred Reed has an insightful observation in his current Fred on Everything. The title Sauron’s Eye should be a clue. I should have something more substantive shortly. Technology marches on, and things change.

The Media Rule is that if a Democrat says something silly, he my be forgiven or may not, but if a Republican says anything eccentric it is a sign of his total unfitness for public office. In the case of Akin he seems to have been told some nonsense about female physiology that comes from wishful thinking.  There is no evidence that women do not conceive after violent rape, and a rather large amount of history says otherwise.  We might very well wish there were such a mechanism, as one might wish that the Lord tempers the wind for the shorn lamb, because a woman made pregnant by rape presents a moral dilemma of great magnitude. One cannot blame Mr. Akin for wishing such moral dillemae did not occur. I wish it myself. But for all the wishing we are faced with the moral dilemma: the rapist ought to be punished, but what has the unborn child done to deserve execution? Or if that’s too blunt, then to deserve our withdrawing the protection of the law on its very life? The unborn are innocent. The law should protect the innocent.

We can retreat from the dilemma by denying that the unborn is not yet a child, is not yet human, and for some number of hours or days or even weeks after conception there are good arguments for that, and indeed the doctrine of quickening was part of the common law for centuries. (Quickening held that until the woman felt the child move within her womb it was not legally an unborn child.) Quickening – religiously, ‘ensoulment’ – was held to take place 40 days after conception. This was believed by the ancient Greeks and came down through the ages. Legally, I guess, ensoulment takes place at the first breath, but that isn’t consistent since we have had convictions of manslaughter for causing involuntary abortion. And we are not going to get any agreement on these matters, which is why I don’t discuss them here. It has all been said many times.

But if the worst thing Mr. Akin has ever done is to wish for some relief from a moral dilemma by believing something untrue, and he has been willing to be convinced that his belief was incorrect and should not only be abandoned but apologized for, he is nothing like the worst candidate for Senate I have ever heard. Or even met. There are many Senators who endorse and pretend to believe things they know damned well aren’t true about economics and the effects of stimulus spending, and there are many who have to be pretty sure that the budgets they vote for are built around ludicrous assumptions.

Mr. Akins believes that in the case of rape the rapist ought to be punished, but the child should not be. This isn’t really a federal matter to begin with, and much as I wish it were, it is not the major danger facing these United States in this year of grace. We may all wish Mr. Akin hadn’t said what he did. But if the fate of the Republic rests on that, God has a very strange sense of humor indeed. And my guess is that Mr. Akin may not have as much trouble raising money as his opponents think he will. His position is that of most of the bishops in the United States.

I have variants on this letter from many subscribers and readers:

There have been a few military members recently getting into trouble for expressing their political views. No matter how truthful certain observations are, they simply can’t be made (and reasonable conclusions drawn) by military members.

But this we can say: FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING YOU HOLD PRECIOUS PLEASE VOTE THIS YEAR

That is all.

Serving military member