Welcome to the first edition of Absurdity Today here at Liberty Road Media.  It may also be the last edition (depending on whether or not I get around to writing another one), which would be fittingly…absurd.

Speeding

It begins with a trip to the post office.  The route I chose today took me through a school zone, one of those areas where you have to slow down to 25 mph “when children are present” and there is a speed-clocking device attached to the speed limit sign that lets you and everyone around you know how fast you are going.

I knew the school zone was coming up ahead, and so I started slowing down.  Not all the way to 25 mph, just slower than I had been going.  Just before I actually got into the school zone, a police SUV pulled alongside of me to the left—eek!—and then passed me.  Whew!

The cop was going faster than me, right into the school zone, and I wasn’t even down to 25 mph yet.  Clearly violating the law, endangering children. That’s what he would’ve said to me had he pulled me over for doing what he was doing. How fast was he going?  Well, I don’t have to guess—the sign clocked him doing 43 mph in a 25.  Me, I had gotten down to 28, so I was also breaking the law, but I’m not, y’know…a cop.

Birther

As my little jaunt to the post office continued, I got to thinking thoughts like: let’s say I had been pulled over for speeding in that school zone–what’s the first thing the cop would’ve wanted to see? My driver’s license, natch.  Yes, the good ol’ driver’s license is the magic key to a lot of things, but not–as fate would have it–to getting a passport, an item I am going to need later this year. 

Nope, you gotta have a birth certificate to get a passport.  But you know what you can use to prove your identity when using a service like VitalChek to get your birth certificate?  Your driver’s license.  But you can’t use the driver’s license to get the passport.  Is it just me or is that, um…absurd? 

Why in hell’s bells is the driver’s license sufficient to get the birth certificate but not to get the passport?  Why is the government able to spy on me through my computer, my phone, ATM cameras, etc., but somehow they can’t verify that I’m a U.S. citizen without me having to jump through a bunch of stupid hoops to get a fancy piece of paper that somehow magically validates my existence?  All to be able to cross imaginary lines called “borders.”  Absurd.

Scalia

So Scalia died over the weekend.  Was found dead with a pillow over his head.  That’s not the conspiracy version, that’s the so-far-undisputed version:

“We discovered the judge in bed, a pillow over his head. His bedclothes were unwrinkled,” Texas millionaire John Poindexter told the San Antonio Express-News Sunday, describing how he found the 79-year-old jurist in the “El Presidente” suite at Poindexter’s 30,000-acre luxury ranch on Saturday.

“It looked like he had not quite awakened from a nap,” Poindexter said.

He later told the New York Times, “His hands were sort of almost folded on top of the sheets. The sheets weren’t rumpled up at all.”

Now you’d have to be a pretty amateur hitman if you were told to make the death look like it was from natural causes but you left the pillow you smothered him with over his face.  Was Scalia murdered?  Maybe, maybe not.  He was almost eighty and had been a rather stout fella for most of his judicial life, so maybe his lifestyle just finally got the best of him.  Or maybe an Obama ninja struck.  Either way, we’ll never know, though, because there was no autopsy.  And there’s not gonna be one.  But that is, as you’d expect, atypical of protocol in these types of situations. 

In fact, the Justice of the Peace (Precinct2) of Presidio County told Infowars the following:

“It’s for our own good because we need to know the cause of death [for] a death certificate,” she said in an interview with Infowars. “If they’re not under medical supervision or medical care, we usually do request an autopsy because we don’t know why they died.”

“…When I’m called out, I do go see [the body],” she later added. “That’s what my job is: to go.”

Scalia is found with a pillow over his head, but don’t worry, he died of natural causes and the pillow is irrelevant.  And no we’re not doing an autopsy, so shut up.  That’s absurd, though.  Know why?  They did an autopsy on JFK the day he was shot, even though it was clear to everyone what the cause of death was.  So they’ll examine the President who was clearly and unequivocally shot in the head, but they won’t examine the Justice who was found with a pillow over his head and died under much murkier circumstances, relatively speaking.

The Libertarian Ideal

On the way back from the post office, I noticed this sign:

A free clinic at a church!  I had never seen that before. It’s the libertarian ideal—the churches voluntarily helping the community.  Who needs that ol’ socialism, right?  Except this is socialism, at least in the sense that it is not for profit and providing a service to people regardless of their ability to pay.  Whatever it is, it’s beautiful, and I wish every church would do it, 24/7.