I was tempted to go off on one about the ridiculous Italian judicial system which has taken eight years to find Amanda Fox and her dippy ‘boyfriend’, guilty, not guilty, guilty, not guilty, (break for a long pasta and chianti-fuelled lunch), guilty and finally yesterday, not guilty. (NB: I may have the guilty/not guilty count slightly wrong but, hey, after eight years who’s counting and to quote a phrase “at this moment what does it matter?” However, before lurching into maxi-pontification-mode I paused and thought of our very own dear ‘Cocklecarrots’ and their so-called systems of justice whose errors are legion.
Then I read the latest from Mark Steyn who, as you know, is being sued by that ‘hockey-shtick’ inventor, Prof. Michael E Mann, a virulent global warming fanatic based at the impeccably proper(!) Penn State University whose president has since been indicted for all sorts of nasties and is facing 20 years ‘up the river’. Of course, Mann is a master at the American legal system in which disputes are dragged out unto the ‘nth’ millennium (or it seems like it to the poor sucker on the end of it) so that the end result is almost redundant but the process itself becomes the punishment for the poor sod on the receiving end.
Michael E Mann, creator of the "global warming" hockey stick, didn't care for my post, and sued for defamation - and here we all are. Neither Mann nor I live or work in the District of Columbia, so I assumed that, having airily assented to his venue-shopping and chosen to accept the case, the DC courts would be capable of adjudicating the matter. Little did I know that, in the dank toilet of DC justice, they can, on the one hand, have two trial judges simultaneously ruling on the same case while, on the other hand, be entirely unaware of whether their own anti-SLAPP law is appealable and thus require a decision from the Appeals Court on whether the law is appealable before the appeal can be appealed.
What larks! It's over a year since I responded to Doctor Fraudpants' discovery requests, while he has objected to having to respond to mine. That's all part of the game for serial litigants like Mann: The process is the punishment. But, given that the DC justice system is apparently incapable of litigating a 270-word blog post in under 270 weeks, I'm thinking of publishing my discovery response to Mann as a souvenir book.
Incidentally, Steyn’s book may be ordered in e-form from Amazon but if you check his link you will see ways of ordering autographed paper-back copies. In the meantime, I can’t help wondering if the real cause of global warming isn’t the huge amounts of eye-wateringly sulphurous, maloderous, hot air from the combined orifices of the world’s legal profession!
