Whose rules, whose rights?

It's one of those annoying days. The phone coupler that worked so well in my office, didn't quite when I installed it in the rack. It turns out that there's a subtle but critical difference between the phone lines that come from Verizon's fiber rack (of which the circuit in my office is one) versus the older copper lines that come all the way from the central office (like the IFB numbers). It looks like the circuit needs something like a diac to let the ring-detect signal build up a bit before trying seize the line; right now the "on line" LED just flashes at the ring frequency. I've been battling this for a while, so I'm just now getting to lunch, several hours late.

It also doesn't help that I keep thinking about the press conference the county's district attorney held this afternoon, announcing the arrest of the motorcyclist trooper Todeschini pursued, resulting in Todeschini's death. Actually, it wasn't the conference that bothered me -- it's the ethos of a group called "stunters", of whom I had been unaware until a state police spokesman mentioned their web site. It makes for interesting reading, if you have a taste for illogical self-centeredness. The essence is that law is meaningless; stunters have the "right" to ride any way they please. Yet their web site lists rules (their own) which they expect to be followed. They are very big on their own rights -- especially so far as resisting police goes -- but don't give much thought to how those rights are to be protected and enforced. They don't seem to see any disconnect here. They don't consider that others might have rights, too.

If the law is subordinate to personal gratification, what then? Hypothetically, what if the next big trend in brainless hedonism is "extreme skeet," whose notional enthusiasts decide that it's much more fun to aim at rapidly moving targets -- say, motorcycles doing 100 miles an hour down public roads -- than at clay disks? Should the police ignore that, too? Would these stunters insist that the police enforce their self-assigned right to break the law in safety and impunity? Or would they become society's latest class of victim?

I'm not so hungry any more.