Saturday, October 13, 2007

Justice, meet lack of priorities

We all have our little bouts with priorities. Sadly, this blog hasn't been one of my top ones lately.

But I'm apparently not as poor a judge of priorities as the American justice system. I mean, really. Could it be more transparent that our government places a higher value on the "rights" of corporate entities to make money (under a now-foolish business model) than on basic human rights?

Excuse me while I make a futile attempt to insert logic into this picture, but does the junkie who robs a record store of hard-copy CDs (not just "intellectual property") get fined $10-grand per Journey CD he lifts? Or do we have a case of a judge who is out of his mind?

Well, score one for the good guys, whomever they are...

"The landscape is still very much what it was three or four years ago," said Eric Garland, chief executive of the piracy-tracking company BigChampagne. "It's still a one-horse race, and piracy is the lead horse."
If there is one blessing in this mess, it's that we have humble public servants like Eric Garland, Lars Ulrich and Jimmy Iovine leading our country out of a long darkness, towards justice.

Meanwhile.... Right, about torture being bad: Our legal system can't give the el-Masri case its due because state secrets are at stake. But what if the state secret is that the state is violating constitutional rights and making up its own rights as it goes along? Am I missing something here?