The Los Angeles Times no longer allows anonymous comments, and it no longer has its own system for registering commenters. One must use a "third party" account, which means exposing sensitive information from privacy rights-challenged behemoths like facebook or Google.

Many sites block my commentary, anyway. This is the case at the Huffington Post and truthout.org; others like CNN.com used to sporadically published my comments on their articles, but I wearied so much of infotainment sites like CNN.com masquerading as news services that I no longer annoy myself by going there.

The Los Angeles Times has tilted Right under new management, particularly since eviscerating its journalistic ranks as it did several years ago, but it is still a site with decent news articles to read from time to time.

Let me share a comment that I would have posted at the Los Angeles Times were that news service able to provide its own commenter registration service.

The article on which I provide commentary, below, was about Lindsey Lohan, whose drunken excesses have earned her multiple court appearances, an alcohol detection ankle bracelet, and several nights ago a near-brush with another court appearance after the bracelet reported the presence of alcohol vapor just above her skin, indicating that she might have been drinking after her appearance at the MTV Awards.

Although I care not one bit about actors and actresses, their movies, their shows, their music, and their other less-than-stellar talents pumped up as genius by opinion makers, I most certainly do care about the rule of law, which has become a diminished farce in modern America.

You see, just two weeks ago at one of the local high schools, the police roamed the parking lot with their drug-sniffing dogs. Dozens of kids were hauled out of their classes and more or less forced to open their vehicles because four-legged animals had accused them of having drugs stashed in their cars.

Quite a few of those kids will go to prison. It's the usual stuff for heartland, family-values, Bible Belt America: meth, hillbillie, pot. The girls carry their Special K in tiny little vials, so the cops don't catch this too often; ditto for the other creepy stuff that's starting to show up around here. Girls at the junior and senior highs are more likely to get shaken down by school administrators for passing Tylenol for menstrual cramps. The pre-fab, FDA-approved kid-brain suckers like Ritalin get shared among the kids on the bus, at the mall, and at home, not so much at school anymore unless the kids are really defiant or just plain dumb.

The police get their share of kids, though, and the prosecutors get their little piles of feathers in their caps with under-aged citizens charged as adults and copping pleas to lesser felonies to avoid going down for decades on trafficking charges.

But the celebrities? They get one chance after another. Even if they go to jail, it's usually small-time stuff in protected enclaves away from the general prison population. One way or the other, their wasted lives go on. They game not just the legal system, but a pathetically two-faced society that loves their salacious excesses and half believes them that it's somehow the "pressure" of their high-and-mighty lives that drives them to be grotesque, self-destructive monstrosities.

This bizarre double standard applies every bit as much to political celebrities as it does to those in the entertainment business. News, politics, tragedy, human suffering, triumph: it's all just entertainment, now, anyway. Stay in your seats and watch theatre, the enforced narrative that asks nothing more of you than your acquiescence to the latest authoritarian solution to the complexities of modernity and its confluences of peoples and events. Remember: as long as you, yourself, have done nothing wrong, you should have nothing to worry about, so enjoy the show through the looking glass whose name is Vicarious.

Anyway, just to ensure that the Los Angeles Times cannot silence commentary on its articles by mere demand that I subscribe to one of its oligolopic symbiots, below is what I had to say about Lindsey Lohan and what her worthless, wasting life story means to the real issue for which that worthless, wasting life of hers stands as sad statement.

A society functioning under the so-called "rule of law" ensures that every person is treated equally when the law is applied to the facts of a case. In the United States, the incarceration rate and the prison populations at state and federal levels exceed those in some of the world's most repressive, loathsome regimes. In this country, people of youth, of color, of economically distressed circumstances are processed through the courts in machine-like fashion with only the most paltry of defense attorneys, often over-burdened by the sheer numbers of clients they defend at the behest of the courts.

Yet here is the product of dissipated, extreme wealth, given one pass after another by a court. A young person of low socio-economic standing exhibiting this behavior, this contempt for a court and the relevant laws, would be imprisoned and subjected to the multiple dimensions of horror that Americans, in their deepest sickness, think is just and proper to set upon inmates.

Kids watch celebrities. The kids who see this mess of a human being coddled learn two lessons: first, it can be done; and second, it is rewarded with greater and greater fame. Later, when those kids see their friends sent to prison, and when they, themselves, get treated far more brutally by the courts of this land, they will develop an insidious disdain not just for the rule of law, but also for the nation that lies to them about it.

Readers here at The Dark Wraith Forums are free to comment without having a facebook or Google account.

The downside of that freedom is this: if your comment is stupid or disrespectful, someone — most likely me since this is my article — will almost assuredly eat your head off.

There is, you see, a fundamental difference between an authoritarian and a bitch. While I cannot be the former on most occasions, I am quite happy to be the latter on almost any day.