There’s a law of diminishing returns

There’s a Law – The Disciplines

Here’s a great track from Ken Stringfellow (of the Posies) and his new band The Disciplines. They’re centered in Norway, apparently, and no I don’t have any idea how Ken Stringfellow ended up in Norway. I’ll admit that I was always a bit more of Jon Auer guy, but there’s a lot to like here. It’s a bit dirtier and bigger than The Posies, but it’s got all the 90s-era guitar riffs and big hooks you could ever want.

The record is called Smoking Kills and if you miss the Posies, you’ll almost certainly want to pick it up.

In other news, here’s some things that caught my attention over the past couple days:

* This Thai vegetarian festival sounds like the most awesome thing in basically ever.

* David Sirota is hyperventilating about something stupid. Shock of all shocks.

* Voice mail is the worst, and I’m glad that it appears to be dying. Good riddance. My only concern is that in our future no-voicemail utopia, there will be no more Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me.

* Tim DeChristopher, the guy who brilliantly interfered with the (possibly) illegal and (definitely) horrible land auctions the BLM conducted at the very end of Bush’s term, is now facing 10 years of jail time for his civil disobedience. He showed up, was let into the auction and started bidding up prices. Before long, he ended up “buying” a ton of land. They ended up postponing the auction soon after. And, as it turns out, his complaints were fully justified because it never got off the ground again. The new Interior Secretary in fact cancelled the very parcels that were purchased by DeChristopher.

That means he was vindicated, right? Well, not in our America – where the people who tried to sell off the land receive no punishment and DeChristopher has felony charges slapped on him.

The result: comments like this:

Tim DeChristopher has no chance of serving 10 years in federal prison for monkey-wrenching an oil and gas lease sale as an act of civil disobedience. So says his prosecutor, who predicts the University of Utah student won’t even serve five years if convicted of two felonies for placing bogus bids at a December auction.

I’m sure that’s comforting, knowing that he will only face several years in jail for the crime of calling attention to and disrupting a sell-off of federal land to oil interests conducted in the waning days of an old, corrupt administration.

Look, in principle the law is important and shouldn’t be pushed aside. But when it’s regularly sidestepped in favor of corporate interests, and when the person conducting the civil disobedience has subsequently been proven correct, how can it possibly be reasonable to do anything other than exercise a little bit of discretion and let the case go?

The prosector saysThe easy road was not to prosecute. The political road was not to prosecute” as if we’re supposed to be impressed with him taking on entrenched political interests as embodied in a 27 year old environmentalist.

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