seeds of decency, seeds of decay

In the news:

-- A Michigan judge who posted rules saying that people whose electronic devices disrupted court proceedings would be held in contempt has fined himself after his Smartphone went off during a case.

Raymond Voet said,

... if he can't live by the rules he enforces he has no business enforcing the rules.

Imagine what things might be like if more people applied that yardstick.

-- Other farmers may be facing tough times, but Afghan farmers are looking forward to a bumper crop in poppies, the building blocks of the opium/heroin trade. The crop yields have been rising steadily in areas where U.S. troops have withdrawn and the Taliban is regaining a foothold. How the religious rigidities of the Taliban are used to permit such activities -- however lucrative and thereby supportive of the rule the Taliban would like to assert -- I'm not quite sure.