Tomorrow is Friday the 13th. I shriek in terror!

Okay, actually I'm mostly apathetic, but what the hell.

I keep noticing that the dates are off on my previous blogging when I come in and do a new one. Like last Tuesday was not June 9, it was June 10. I prefer to look at this as whimsical and charming. Y'all may simply feel I'm just fucking wrong a lot. Much of life is subjective.

What the hell's going on around here? Well, I'm noticing more roaches again, but mostly... well, so far, always... when I'm making something to eat. Paul's theory is that our cleaning efforts and extermination efforts have left the surviving roaches very hungry and they're coming out in the few droves left to them whenever we break out food. I think that's a really lame and desperate hypothesis, but what the hell, I'll go for it for now. If this place turns into a cockroach pit from hell again, though, more drastic measures will have to be taken. I'm gonna go nuclear on the little bastards. They may survive, but they'll damned well glow in the dark when I'm done with them.

Tuesday night Paul's friend Pat came over, as usual, but Kyle, the other regular around here, didn't show up. We got bored and went out, ostensibly to get some food, but wound up at Wal-mart, because very little else is open in Zephyrhills around midnight. I picked up another air purifier so I can have one in my bedroom permanently, and was going to get some Claritin, but Pat told me not to, he can get all kinds of stuff from his mom for free, because she works in a doctor's office. And then last night he didn't bring any over for me, so I'm just dealing with the allergies with the few Sudafed I have left, and in fact, having taken one to help with severely clogged tubes this morning, I'm now out.

Anyway, while we were at Wal-green's, I spotted the BUFFY Season 4 DVD set and snatched it up. So that turned into yet another Expensive Wal-green's trip, but, since my latest Unemployment check landed in my bank account yesterday, all is well again.

Plans are for me to run my game tomorrow night, and then next Tuesday, Paul and Pat and I and I think somebody else (this guy Jeff who lives next door to Paul, maybe) are going up to Islands of Adventure. Paul starts his new job on Wednesday, so it's kind of his last hurrah as a free man.

I still haven't heard anything from Jonathan, my Australian editor on the Jeff Webb art book and Thrilling Mysteries in Space and like that. Hopefully he didn't die on me or anything.

Paul was supposed to go into Circle K to fill out paperwork at 11 this morning, and overslept. Of course, I let him oversleep, through the shameful character failing of being asleep myself. As it turns out, it didn't matter; his new manager meant he could come in 'any time after 11', not at 11.

This is a boring blog entry, but that's life out here in the sticks.

It's raining, yet again. Something new for us.

All right... let's see. I called my old comics shop today and it turns out, they're happy to mail my subscription to me out here, so that's okay. We'd dropped by this really lame comics shop out here in Zephyrhills (the same really lame comics shop my mom showed me seven years ago when I first moved down here) and when I asked if I could order some stuff there, the owner just kind of pointed to the latest solicitations catalogue and told me to look up whatever I wanted and let him know. With customer service like that, I can see why it's such a lame little shop. So I won't be dealing with him any.

I also just called the library and they don't want me to renew these two St. Germain books any more, so I'm going to have to find some way to get them back into Tampa sometime in the near future. Yay. Paul's going into Tampa for training on Wednesday; maybe I can ride along with whoever goes in to pick him up and find a library drop box.

POSSESSION IS NINE-TENTHS OF THE LAW

I've been giving some thought to the nature of liberty, and the difference between essentially free societies, and totalitarian cultures. And I've come to a few basic conclusions, or, rather, one basic conclusion with a couple of implications.

In a free society, the government's only real business should be regulating social actions.

This means that individual actions, by which I mean, actions that an individual takes that have little or no effect on anyone but the individual him or herself, should not be regulated by a free society. This may seem extremely libertarian to some, and simply utterly obvious to others, but, well, to me, it simply seems like a sound moral and ethical basis for government. Since government is a necessary evil we must tolerate in order to function together as a society, government should only address and deal with social actions... behavior on the part of individuals that has a social impact. Stuff like driving, or public behavior, or private behavior that has an effect on other individuals, like a guy slugging his wife, or parents punishing their kids by locking them in closets for days without food. This is the proper venue for government supervision, because this is behavior that effects others, and therefore, it is behavior that effects society.

What government shouldn't be into, however, is behavior that effects only an individual, and while obviously everyone is now going to think I'm about to start railing on the usual libertarian themes... government shouldn't criminalize substance abuse, or actively self destructive behavior, or just irresponsible shit like not wearing a helmet or seat belt, that's not where I'm going with this.

Oh, I do more or less believe that substance abuse should be legal, as long as it's simply consenting adults doing it to themselves. I realize it's not that simple, because it's not simply a question of self destructive behavior on an individual level... when one person gets high all the time, that's his business, but when 10,000,000 people get high, that's a legitimate social issue due to the impact it has on productivity... but, basically, I firmly believe it's none of the government's business what consenting adults put in their own bodies. And I don't think it's the government's business whether morons wear helmets while they ride around on motorcycles, either, or whether morons buckle their seat belts. I think parents should be required to have their kids as safe as possible (which would mean, don't ride your kids around on motorcycles at all, you idiots, the goddam things aren't safe), and any parents who don't buckle their kids up should not only be pulled over and ticketed, they should be hauled out of their cars and pistol whipped right there on the shoulder of the road... but taking care of kids is just one of my big buttons. (On an abstract level. In reality, most actual kids annoy me.)

But, honestly, this isn't about the usual libertarian riffs about victimless crimes and individual behavior that hurts no one except those engaging in it. In general, I do come down on the side of the individual right to be an asshole if you really want to be, although I'm aware that in a social continuum, nothing is ever quite as cut and dried as we'd like (for example, if we legalize every drug that people have a tendency to abuse, we not only narcotize a significant portion of our population, rendering them unproductive, which is a legitimate social issue, but we also provide a wonderful financial inducement for various predatory individuals and corporations to go out and persuade weak minded victim sorts to do things that are bad for them, which is another legitimate social issue).

But, again, this discussion isn't specifically about that.

What this discussion is specifically about is laws criminalizing possession of something.

The more I think about this, the more I find it to be simply utterly contrary to the concept of basic individual civil liberties. The right to property ownership is one of the fundamental concepts that underlies our entire way of life. It's woven into the very Ten Commandments... thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet... these are basically directives from God ordering us to honor other people's property rights. It's a given, a basic element of the way we live... we have the right to own things, to have things, to possess things.

By its very nature, possessing something... something inanimate, not a human being, some sort of legitimate chattel... is a socially neutral act. As long as the thing in our possession wasnt' stolen from someone else, as long as someone else isn't looking for it, doesn't want it back, and isn't suffering due to its loss, then there are no social implications to, say, having a little spiral bound notebook in my pocket. Now, if I take out the notebook, write a death threat on a piece of paper, tear that death threat out, and leave it in the mailbox of someone I don't like very much, I've committed a social action, the regulation of which is the legitimate provenance of government. But simply owning the notebook is a socially neutral act.

So there should not be laws that criminalize possession of things. Simply having something on you should not be grounds for arrest. Certainly I understand the practicality of the laws... if you can arrest someone for simply having rolling papers on them (and I believe you can, these days), it makes it much easier for the police to do their jobs... they don't have to actually catch someone toking up, they simply have to find the works in their pockets. Similarly, cops don't have to catch a murderer in the act of firing a gun at someone, they simply have to find the gun on him. They don't have to catch somebody actually buggering a kid, or taking pictures of someone else buggering a kid, they just have to find the kiddie porn on them. The idea is to simply assume, if you've got the makings of a crime on you, then you're probably a criminal. So let's criminalize the possession of, say, burglar's tools, and then we can arrest someone simply for walking down the street with a jack handle in their hand.

All of this makes a cop's life much easier.

However, I don't think civil liberties are meant to make a cop's job easier, and personally, I don't feel any responsibility to make a cop's job easier. Cops do shitty jobs, yes. If you want to raise my taxes another nickel to pay cops better, I'll go along with that. But if you want to erode my civil rights just a tiny bit more in order to make it easier for a cop to put away a scumbag, well... sorry. My civil rights are more important than that. Let the cop's job be a little harder. I'm okay with that.

The very first thing I ever typed up when I got my two year gig at the City Clerk's office was a six hour City Council meeting that had been held over at the Ice Palace because there were so many people who wanted to speak out about it. The meeting concerned the proposed City ordinance requiring nude dancers to remain six feet from their customers at all times. And during that six hours that I transcribed, the cops who got up and testified, pretty much begging City Council to pass the ordinance, said one thing over and over again: "We need this tool to help us do our jobs better. Please give us this tool so we can make your city a safer, better place to live."

And this struck me as complete horseshit. Oh, mind you, I wasn't impressed by the endless legions of strippers who got up and sobbed about how the distance separation would put them out of work and they wouldn't be able to find other jobs where a high school drop out with big tits could make $4000 a week and pay off two mortgages and support three kids without a father, either. They simply struck me as pathetic and foolish, and more than that, wrong. The ordinance didn't say they couldn't dance nude anymore, and it didn't say they couldn't give lap dances any more. It basically said, they could no longer gyrate in their customers' laps without clothing on; they had to have a couple of scraps covering exactly the areas you'd expect blue noses to be obsessed with before they straddled anyone. And we had basically the same law in Syracuse, and Syracuse has no shortage of topless and nude bars.

Nonetheless, while the dancers were pathetic and foolish and wrong (and clearly, they were simply saying what the club owners had put in their heads; most exotic dancers aren't, god love them, very bright, although I have known a few that were very intelligent women indeed), the cops were wrong, as well, and in a far more dangerous way. And so was City Council for going along with them. Giving the cops another 'tool' to help them do their job better is not only never a good reason for taking away a little more freedom from The Peepul, it's generally about the best argument in the world for not doing it.

To my mind, laws that criminalize the possession of inert and for the most part harmless substances (by which I mean, substances unlikely to suddenly explode, vaporize into a toxic cloud, or otherwise undergo a cataclysmic change of state without warning) are equally wrong headed. Yeah, they make it easier for the cops to enforce the really necessary laws and to go after the seriously bad guys. But they're an invasion of basic civil liberties. Simply walking around with something in your pocket shouldn't be a crime, as long as whatever it is you have isn't likely to blow up at any given time.

Here in America, we live in a society that currently has a frighteningly long list of substances and objects that it is illegal simply to possess. If a cop knocks on your door and sees such an object lying out on the arm of your chair or on a coffee table, they can arrest you on the spot, and search the entire house for other such illegal objects, and impound pretty much everything you own... and under certain circumstances (which aren't particularly hard for a district attorney to establish in court), even if you beat the rap, they never have to give you your stuff back. (I'm talking about Federal RICO statutes now, which allow the Feds, and any police organization working under Federal authority, to simply impound and sell at auction anything they can get a judge to agree has been used in the commission of organized crime... which is nearly any crime they want to say it is, and which can apply to pretty much anything in your house, and your house itself, if you own it and you're being accused of a RICO violation.)

Now, most of these things... probably all of these things... are objects that it would be difficult to describe as innocuous. Many of them are pharmaceuticals, or, these days, materials that allow one to use illegal pharmaceuticals. Others are weapons, or dangerous explosives, or chemicals that can be turned into dangerous explosives (although, as Fight Club teaches us, it's impossible to outlaw all potentially dangerous chemicals; if they did, we wouldn't be able to buy cleaning supplies). And there's always kiddie porn, which, yes, nobody sane likes. But nobody sane likes The Manifesto of the Illinois Neo-Nazis, either, and the principle is the same... if we don't arrest whackjobs for having images of people being marched into ovens and open graves on their computers, we shouldn't arrest them for having images of anything, no matter how disgusting we find it.

Making kiddie porn should certainly be illegal, just as committing mass murder or filming other people doing it is illegal, as is exploding bombs and firing weapons at people and poisoning others without their consent. But owning images of these things... or even the materials that facilitate these acts... should not be illegal. Individual ownership is not a social activity, and as such, it is not a legitimate area of government regulation in a free society.

These laws criminalizing simple possession of socially objectionable items have been passed to make it easier for the cops to crack down on criminals, but I think it's going much, much too far. Yes, it's much harder for cops to actually catch criminals committing criminal acts, but I don't believe that the answer is to simply criminalize otherwise neutral actions that are associated with criminal acts. (Something Tampa just tried to do during Bob Buckhorn's last few weeks as a City Council member, when the Council, egged on by Buckhorn, considered passing an ordinance that would make getting into and out of a car in less than five minutes at a known drug corner an arrestable offense, along with a whole list of other behaviors associated with drug sales.)

Cops are supposed to keep us safe, yes. But cops are a branch of the government, and a moral government derived from an enlightened and liberal people living in an open, permissive, tolerant society is supposed to keep us free, as well. Safety is not more important than freedom, and, in fact, a truly free person is never truly safe. Freedom is scary, and risky, and hazardous to the health... but I have to believe it's better than slavery, and I'd like to believe that nearly any American who happened to read this... hell, nearly any sentient human being... would agree with that statement.

So I say, let's have less goddam safety, and more freedom, and if it makes the cops' jobs harder, well, I'm perfectly happy to pay them more... I think we should pay them more, anyway. But let's stop this nonsense of criminalizing morally and socially neutral behavior, and let consenting adults make their own mistakes without getting tossed in jail for them.

And, especially, let's stop arresting people simply for owning things that our authority figures don't approve of. That's just nuts.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

Like it? Hate it? Hit me with your best shot.