Another year another Jury Summons

I have a lot to say about Jury Duty, but I need to really save it for a lengthier paper.

Instead, I'm going to talk briefly about specific events that occurred at yesterday's government-funded meetup.com called jury duty.

"Thankful...you showed up."

It was on the televisors screens. It came out of the clerk's mouths. It was part of the orientation. it was on the paperwork. It was the first thing out of the Judge's mouth, the first and last thing out of the lawyer's mouths. Every single person in the government agency was 'thankful' for us being there. They kept reminding us that we made it possible for people to have fair trials. We made it possible to follow the Constitution. We were the spirit of the whole system!

Frankly, none of that can be true. Because every single one of us was there under duress, for fear of the State taking from us our means of production for not being there.

Imagine this conversation:

Me: You're thankful?

Judge: Yes (for all the propaganda reasons listed above)

Me: What if I didn't show up?

Judge: What do you mean? You made an excuse?

Me: No, I simply ignored your 'request' and didn't show.

Judge: The State would issue a bench warrant.

Me: So it wasn't a 'request'.

Judge: Well, we need you here and your time is valuable and important, so...yes?

Me: But you'd threaten my life if I didn't show up?

The judge here would have no choice but to return to the first response: about responsibility and the Constitution and the notion of participation, ignoring my obvious truth. She would have no ability to construct an opinion where the violence of the State was a moral truth. If the judge did say yes, that they had that power to kill me for not showing up, then all of the platitudes of thanks are simply lies. 

And let's face, they do have the power to kill you if you don't show. Everything about their mottoes is nothing but well construction propaganda, to convince you of your value to their system of lies like petting the cow's head before it gets the hammer, as if that moment of kindness makes up for hitting it over the head.

I will take this on later, but yes, jury's are important and if you can you should serve on one....if they will let you on one. If you're like me, the State will do everything in its power to keep you off of one.

Frederick Douglass

During our indoctrination called orientation, a judge in the building came out to tell us the great glorious news! She rambled on about how fantastic Harper Lee is and then got to the point of me mentioning her. She utterly and completely misquoted "four boxes".

She said that there were three boxes (note: this is the reason why I mention Frederick Douglass and not Stephen Decatur Miller) from which we individuals 'can make changes to the system'.  First off, not a single 'four box' speaker was talking about changing the system. No, the 'four boxes' are the four boxes of Liberty.  Not the four boxes of participation; not change, change requires manipulation. Liberty is self-describing. Liberty is an axiomatic value of existence and requires no interaction or participation in another system. It does not require it, but it's illogical to work in isolation. This doesn't mean that isolation is immoral or anti-ethical.

Of course, this so-called judge was either ignorant of the boxes being about Liberty or chose to ignore the truth.

She also said, that there were only three boxes: Ballot, soap, jury. And, because she has a conflict of interest, she went on to explain why the jury box was so important to the process...again, fully ignoring that the original meaning of the four box speech was about Liberty.

Frederick Douglass' version of this speech is this:

From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen. I insisted that there was no safety for him or for anybody else in America outside the American government; that to guard, protect, and maintain his liberty the freedman should have the ballot; that the liberties of the American people were dependent upon the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box; that without these no class of people could live and flourish in this country; and this was now the word for the hour with me, and the word to which the people of the North willingly listened when I spoke. Hence, regarding as I did the elective franchise as the one great power by which all civil rights are obtained, enjoyed, and maintained under our form of government, and the one without which freedom to any class is delusive if not impossible, I set myself to work with whatever force and energy I possessed to secure this power for the recently-emancipated millions.

What's important here, is that all of 'the four boxes' speeches include a box that holds ammunition, because it is this final box that actually, truly ensures our rights and our means to establish Liberty.  Never forget that the oath of office these individuals claim to have sworn too says, "enemies both foreign and domestic."

The problem is, none of those judges have ever asked themselves what constitutes a domestic enemy and more problematic, who owns the authority to define a domestic enemy. Luckily for the judge, no actual thought is required, because an all-knowing entity called "State" makes this measurement for them. This entity called State does this trick of epistemology by ignoring that it is Liberty that is the actual goal, instead, the State assumes that it is the State itself that is the goal. Thus, it's easy for the judge to determine domestic enemies: those against the State. No more moral quandary. No more having to actually hold to an ethical truth based on a metaphysical reality. It's easy, one group tells you who the enemy is.

The "People"

Am I the only one that finds fault with this definition? Who in the name of all the gods gave the State the authority to call its prosecution force "The People"? Even in their communist system of voting, the majority is not all people, it is simply a majority of the voting agency. It is not all the people: it does not include the people that voted no; It does not include people visiting the State; It does not include people that do not vote. It can never represent all the people and one man, sitting at the table can never call himself "The People" with any actual moral authority. Not even a crazy person would make such a claim. I can say simply, "Sir you do not represent me!" and we're in a metaphysical pickle. Because which one of us gets to own the definition called "The People"? He who does not actually represent me and thus, my participation as part of the people is null and void or me as part of the people and he has to come up with another name?

Of course, it's done this way because it's propaganda, to confuse your metaphysics of reality into accepting a non-truth as the truth.  The State says, "The People" to lay claim, - a larger stake of that claim - over the right to think, to have opinions, to have value (this is made clear in the next section "Follow the law"). While at the same time diminishing the individual. "The People v. one guy." All this statement needs is a laugh track and the State prosecutor rolling his eyes as he says 'one guy' in that 'who does this idiot think he is?" sort of way.  --- Oh and yes, it was a common theme of "We wouldn't be here if this guy didn't do something wrong" yesterday.

The State will say they use "The People" to separate the powers. To create a divide between the State's function as the judging entity and the actual people who are prosecuting the case. This is bullshit. 

The State writes the laws. The State demands they be enforced. The State creates agencies to enforce their laws. There is no separation, no real separation, they are all the same agency, doing the same job. All with the same condition of expectation, the same motivation. And this should be made clear to "We the People", the State shouldn't be able to use our definition and our name as a tool to corner us into an agreement. The State should call itself such: "The State v. one guy" --- It sounds ominous because it is and we should be reminded of that every time the State asks our opinion in its business.

Yes, our opinion in its business. They are supposed to be a function of our ethics, not the other way around. Which brings up the next silliness.

The State's "Follow the Law"

The prosecutor during his Voir dire, kept hammering specific potential jurors with, "But if the law says", "Would you /will you follow the law" 

Why would he keep hammering this thought? Because some stupid, individual juror was owning his own authority over this will and saying that he disagreed with the prosecution's supposed ethical code. Didn't this juror understand that the State is the creator of metaphysical reality? Didn't this juror grasp, that it was okay to have a varying opinion, but the law is the law is the law and no individualism or thoughts of individuals actually mattered. How dare that juror.  One positive note, on the last attempt of the prosecutor to corner this juror, the juror, bless his heart, said, "Not if I were a principled man, No."

It must have been frustrating for the prosecutor because his epistemology was strictly defined by the Hegelian metaphysical fact of the State being the owner of reality.

If the State passed a law claiming that 2+2=5 and put forth harsh punishment for those who used the old structure of determining how addition worked, I assume that this prosecutor would say something very similar to what he said yesterday, "It's not that I disagree with you juror 199, or that I agree with you. This is not about our agreement, it's about following the law. If I point out that 2 plus 2 equals 5 and show that the defendant did not indicate this by the requirement of the law, you have to vote guilty. You have to follow the law."

And yes, yesterday's case that I sat Voir dire for was really no different than the State claiming an illogical system of math. It was the State claiming moral authority over an individual where no one actually initiated force. No one tried to take over ownership of another person's means of production...well, apart from the arresting officers of course, just doing their duty (Befehl ist Befehl)

Schrodinger's Cat

This was the most comical part of the whole proceeding.

The defense was trying to explain that there would be circumstantial evidence introduced and Her way of explaining it went like this:

Imagine I have a box and I put a cat in it. Then I put a mouse in it and closes the box. If a moment later I open the box and the mouse is gone. What happened to the mouse?

She asked jurors and they said, "Well, assuming there was no hole in the box, I guess the cat ate it."

Then she added, "If we opened the box and there was a hole" --- because she liked this idea, it seemed to play into the value of her own circumstantial evidence --- "if we opened and the mouse was gone and there was a hole. What happened to the mouse? If we were having a trial and the cat was being suspected of eating the mouse, if we could show the hole, those circumstances would be enough doubt to render a not-guilty verdict."

---but wait, I'm not done. Because the prosecution gets up after that and goes in this direction:

I assume you all drove here today? You parked in the stadium lot? How do you know your car is still there? It might not be. You don't know for certain. But we have to assume that it is still there, or else we need to have someone calling us every moment saying to us, "Yep still there."

---Oh Boy. So both of them were using Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and both were using it incorrectly, which is made famous by Schrodinger's cat.  Schrodinger tells his students about a thought experiment. He says something to this effect:

Let's imagine we put a cat in a sealed box with no windows, thick enough that we couldn't even hear it make noise, but the cat would have its own air, and food and water. it would not die by any natural event that we could measure, like starvation. It was just sealed in such a way that it was isolated from our senses. But before we closed the box we put in a device. This device would have a canister of poisonous gas with a special value switch. This switch would only be triggered by the radioactive decay of an element, which is unpredictable. So it would be possible that the cat could live out the rest of its days in the box or that it was already dead. 

He then asked his students what was the current state of the cat? They argued for some time, but in the end, the point was, no one knew what the state of the cat was until he opened the box at which point the experiment would end and the evidence would be clear.

Schrodinger took this one step further and said for his purposes as a theorist, that while the cat was in the box the cat had to be in both states: Alive and Dead. he couldn't assume either state of existence while using the cat in his theories. 

And that is what is terribly important to the court's opinion on the value of truth. You see both lawyers were suggesting that you had to accept their version of the cat's state without opening the box. Sure the defense attorney in her analogy opened the box, but she didn't present the mouse, thus, the mouse moved into a different box (either the mouse went into the cat or the mouse escaped) and was, thus, still in both states: Alive and Dead. One attorney wanted us to accept Alive, the other wanted us to accept Dead, yet neither of them recognized that they need to present the opened box, else the experiment was still occurring. If the experiment is still underway, the evidence is not collectible.

I was actually shocked that not a single juror turned to the defense attorney and asked her, "why can't we just x-ray the cat and see if it ate the mouse?" Becuase this would have ended the experiment and the evidence could then be categorized. 

This points out a serious metaphysical flaw in what the courts consider valid evidence. It even calls into question the definition of evidence, implying that it can be assigned to things that have not been proven but remain in a dual state of possibility. Evidence can never hold two states at once. At best the two sides could say, "The evidence indicates that this particular cat is both alive and dead." And it could say no more on the subject without breaking the requirement of the definition of evidence. 

Worse, the moment one side says the cat remains alive we start falling into Plato or Hegel. Neither of which care at all about opening the box to find out if the cat is still alive.

Thus, using uncertainty as a measure of evidence is dangerous. Using uncertainty to decide the fate of another person is outright reckless and immoral.

----

Again...I'll be writing up my events of jury duty when I get a chance. Since I didn't end up on the case and I know no more than anyone with a computer would know about the case, I feel no requirement to restrict my views at all on the details that were offered me.

Until then, remember comrades:

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strenght