Random Thoughts

The picture, is of course, a representation of a Jackson Pollock work. It is called Moby Dick, and is from 1942. You can waste time and muck about by making your own expressionist art with your mouse at this site. It is very relaxing.


I love the internet. One of the reasons I do so is its capacity to enhance and augment the random associations that go on inside my head in the absence of disciplined thought. That latter process always slides away in November anyway.

This morning, for instance, I read about a case in Canada in which an individual was being allowed to sue wal-mart on the basis that the company was using 'brain-scanning technology' to steal his ideas. His case has been allowed to proceed by a Judge on the basis that tort cases centred upon acknowledged CIA 'mind control' experiments known as the MK-ULTRA programme had previously been heard in the Dominion. You can hear one of the lawyers involved in the earlier case here.

In Canada. What is happening to that country's legal system? If a story from there isn't about some mad tribunal censoring journalists, it often as not is about British Columbians behaving as though they live in some early version of Texas. They'll be chasing Spring-Heeled Jack, the Houston Bat-man, and the Mad Gasser of Matoon next.

Maybe the Ocean carries something on its winds, or perhaps life just gets more happily absurd between the Pacific and the pole, ground zero being Alaska. Perhaps that is the long-sought destiny of the biggest state in the Union; to make Canada look less mad.

I used to think that there was a utility in the American courts' system of giving a hearing to troubled people, political and scientific questions, and matters best left to parliamentary bodies. The American use of juries, for instance, is constitutionally mandated, and the culture of the country is one in which ordinary people are meant to sort matters out under the law.

Americans are in some ways more regulated than Europeans, but not always by government. Instead, courts armed with punitive damages and stuffed with lawyers fed by champery regulate them. A people that baulks at taxes accepts, if not happily, insurance costs that go through the roof and avoids making those who bring failed lawsuits pay the costs of the other side. Karen Silkwood's family, and therefore the whole nuclear power industry, could tell you that.

But creating a rule that courts should just seek to solve problems has not just allowed embarrassments like the case above that made me think of James Tilly Mathhews which seems not much different.

The case has also allowed me to think of something Barack Obama said. It got him into trouble with some bloggers, not least Melanie Phillips, though I am sure 'no-drama Obama' didn't lose much sleep over it.

Obama, a few years ago, noted that the movement of civil rights from politics was in the long run a failure. A momentary redistribution of income was traded for the creation of resentment, fear and a culture of compensation. It eclipsed for a while what the republic could have been and created a politics of buck-passing.

I think Obama was right. I'm not in favour of people getting involved with civil lawyers unless they absolutely have to. As a holder of the degree of the utter bar, to assert my very junior rank too, I think that any system that leaves its politics and society in the hands of lawyers is almost necessarily deranged.

The second thing that the internet won points with me for this week was the cheerfully insane page on the Jack the Ripper caseboook dealing with Thomas Hayne Cutbush. I think that it's probably the lingering British combination of misogyny, riddling and fascination with madness on the part of the highly repressed that draw so many to the case. Repression is sometimes the other side of great success and discipline, after all.

Anyway, I've long thought that the solution to a mystery no one will ever solve was that some local nutter committed some or all of the crimes. Cutbush is just such a person. His triple barrelled name has been the subject of vast flights of research and fancy, as it refers back to a seventeenth century anti-catholic, and to Webster's famous reply that Abraham Lincoln adapted into the Gettysburg Address.

With the application of a little imagination masquerading as naive realism, and the aid of what seems to be a good sip of supermarket Spanish brandy, various writers on the casebook have sought to connect Cutbush to this intellectual sump, on the basis of very very little evidence indeed. Only one of the victims was a catholic; there were no catholic references in any of the supposed notes from the murderer, most of which were almost certainly written by journalists; and no one has suggested it before. So, all engines ahead on that theory.

Just about the only connection that works between the Lincoln assassination and Ripper suspects is one that is contradictory to the Cutbush theory anyway. Francis Tumblety was a nasty weirdo who collected womens' wombs (known in the past as matrices). He was in London in 1888 and may have been also close to the assassin of President Garfield, Charles Guiteau. Wild rumours once connected him to John Wilkes Booth.

It is one of the minor regrets of my life that I had too much shame to write a book under a pseudonym making all these sorts of links and selling it to idiots at airports and train stations for cash. Perhaps it could have led to the heights of, say, this Weird Chicago website. If you ever are in such a station, save your brain the effort and buy a John Connolly book instead.

How can speculation over such sad things as deranged lawsuits or the whitechapel murders of over a century ago lift the heart? I feel more confident in humanity muddling through its troubles when I see the determination not to deal with facts, reality, or disappointment on the part of some, and the capacity of law and historical method to restrain them on the other. Human nature doesn't change. If a species as daft as us can survive this far, what could ever really stop us?

Here's a video of Sarah Palin babbling on whilst a man slaughters Turkeys in the background.