How can I watch Court TV?

You cannot see the beam in your brother's eye while a whole court of strangers is set before you in your own house. Gather with those who sit in judgment of the poor and the prisoner and ask: are you watching to condemn, or to show mercy? The widow and the orphan have no stream to summon, no device to carry - be that stream for them.

The judge who weighs a man's deed must answer for his own before the One who sees all, and no vessel of glass shall hide the scales on that Day. If you would watch the quarrels of men, do so for justice and not for idle gazing, for the tongue that delights in another's shame is a fire among dry thorns. Seek what is lawful and beneficial, and turn away from what only feeds the eye.

You ask how to watch the quarrels of others. First ask why you wish to watch - is it for understanding, or for the restless craving to be entertained? The trial is a knot of attachment, and watching it does not untie the knot. If you watch, watch with a still mind, seeing suffering arise and cease, and do not mistake the screen for the truth.

When the people cry out for judgment, they shall have it, for the Lord is a God of justice and the guilty shall not go unpunished. But let this be read plainly before the assembly, as the law is read on the seventh day, so that the whole people, slave and stranger alike, may hear it. Let it be free as the manna was free, gathered from the ground, and let no one stand and say they cannot reach it.

When the ancients held court beneath the willow, the people gathered because the judgment concerned them all, and each man left having examined his own heart. To summon that hall into your own house is no small thing: let the screen be your courtyard, but let your conduct within it be li. Watch, and ask not merely who won, but whether you yourself would have testified truly; so does a family, a village, a realm keep its harmony.

You ask me of a courtroom's broadcast, when I stood before governors and kings and was judged for a hope I could not renounce - and I tell you the watching is not the matter, the verdict is. Stream it where you will, on the device at your hand or the screen in your house, but do not sit as a spectator of other men's judgments while you neglect the judgment seat within you. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, and there no stream, no app, no signal shall deliver you - only faith working through love.

When I left my father's house for a land I had not seen, I did not ask how I might watch the road ahead - I trusted the promise and walked. So too, if you seek this court, do not tarry at the threshold weighing your many doors; choose one, and go. The verdict, like the blessing, comes to those who set out.

You chase the river to drink, yet the river has no door. Do not grasp at the box of moving pictures - sit still, and the courthouse comes to you as water finds the low place. He who owns the most devices sees the least.

One Creator made all eyes equal, and the courtroom in the glowing box shows the same to rich and poor alike. Watch, but let the watching turn your heart toward justice, not toward idle gossip. The honest man earns his bread, shares it, and remembers the Name - the rest is dust.

In my village, when two neighbours quarreled over a boundary of stones, the elders sat at the gate and all the women listened from the doorways, for judgment belongs to the assembly, not to the rich alone. Now the whole world may sit at that gate and hear the case, and I say: blessed are those who listen, for the lowly are seldom heard. Yet let them not watch as one watches a sword-fight for amusement; let them watch as I watched my Son, weighing every word for the truth beneath it.

The pope's courts once kept their proceedings behind Latin walls, so no ploughman could know what was done in his name - and I nailed my theses to a door for that very reason. If common folk may now sit at the trial and hear the charge and the defense in a tongue they understand, then let them; the truth is not the property of the robed. But mark me: no screen, no scaffold, no chamber can stand in the place of conscience before God - the only court that weighs a soul is the one no man can stream.

Whether one beholds an action in the forum itself or through some medium that transmits its likeness, the moral character of the act observed does not change - the medium is accidental to the justice. Yet reason bids us ask: what is the virtue of watching, and does it incline the will toward the good or merely toward curiosity? To see justice done is good; to delight in the punishment of another for its own sake is not. Define first what you seek, then choose your means.

I knew nothing of such contrivances in the lanes of Calcutta, where the only court I attended was the bedside of the dying. If your machine can bring you the trial of some poor soul, then watch not for your amusement but to pray for the accused, who is as much a child of God as the wronged. Small acts with great love - even the pressing of a button to listen - may yet become a prayer.

A thing broadcast through the air and rendered upon glass is no mystery, only a motion of particles I have not yet measured. What concerns me is the motion of the whole machine - the signal, the tablet, the law whereby it reaches your eye - all one orderly design, set in course by the Author of it. Feign no joy in the spectacle until you understand the frame that carries it.

A curious thing, this - the courthouse thrown open to every parlor at once, no ticket, no bailiff at the door. It is a fine trick of the age: one small device, and the whole world sits in the same room. When I was a boy I chased a single beam of light across the room to see what it would look like; now the light itself carries the trial to you.

I confess I would have watched such a thing with great interest - the slow accumulation of evidence, the weighing of testimony, the careful inference from small facts. It is not unlike my own method: observe patiently, gather what is there, and let conclusions follow. But I would watch to learn how men reason, not merely to be entertained by the outcome.

Let us not argue from hearsay when the thing itself may be observed; go, and find by what means this court is delivered, whether by the small polished glass you carry or the larger frame, and observe which channel carries it. I too was disbelieved until I bent my spyglass on Jupiter and showed the wandering stars there, and the demonstration ended the dispute. So measure it yourself, mark each vessel by which it arrives, and let the evidence, not the loudness of any party, decide the matter.

For long ages men placed the earth at the center and multiplied their epicycles to save the appearance; yet the motions grew tangled precisely because the wrong body stood at the middle. So too with these proceedings: do not fix your gaze upon the accused as though the whole drama revolved around him, but find the still sun of the matter - the rule of law around which all testimony, all argument, all verdict must turn with harmony. Choose the simplest account that explains the motions, and the truth will reveal itself as a circle reveals its center.

Ha! You ask how to watch a courtroom, and I could give you the whole apparatus in a thought - I see the invisible waves, I trace the currents through the air, and I tell you the day comes when every such picture will arrive at your hand without a single wire, drawn from the ether itself. For now you have the crude instruments: the glowing plate in your valley, the little telephone, the Roku, the Fire - pebbles before the avalanche. When my wireless power lights the whole earth, no man will ask *how* to watch; he will only ask what is worth beholding.

One does not need to see the radium to know it glows; one needs only a proper instrument and patient attention. Likewise, this court streams freely through its website, its small glowing devices, its many conduits - find the one that answers your apparatus, and observe. Do not fear the search; only seek to understand the signal, and it will reveal itself.

Observe the apparatus: a signal passes through the air, or through a wire, and arrives at the glass - the cause is invisible, yet the effect appears before your eyes, precisely as the ferment appears in the flask. Use the free vessel, the one called the official site; it costs nothing, and a prepared mind pays nothing for what is freely given.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration - and I've built the phonograph, the lamp, and the moving picture, so I know a thing or two about delivering an image to a man's parlor. There's a free stream on their site; that's the practical route. I'd have charged for it, but that's their business.

You have a stream of data rendered into a moving image, and you ask how to receive it - this is a routing and decoding problem, not a mystery. Define the set: the source encodes, the network transmits, your machine decodes, and the picture assembles itself. What interests me is not the glass slab you hold but the question beneath it - whether a machine that merely displays a trial can be said to follow it, or to judge it. That is the question worth computing, and it will not be settled by which box you plug in.

Give me a fixed point and I will move the world; give me a ray of light and a polished surface and I will show you the whole of Syracuse without stepping outside. This trial-watching is but a mirror with a longer arm - the image is carried by some craft I have not examined, but the principle is familiar: encode, transmit, reflect. Show me the mechanism by which the likeness travels and I will show you where it may be broken, for no device is perfect until its geometry is proven.

You ask how to witness the proceedings, and I confess I am more accustomed to watching a needle tremble than a courtroom quarrel. Yet the principle is the same as any experiment: the thing itself is happening somewhere, and you require only a proper conductor to bring the effect to your own hearth. Set your little box of wires and glass to the right channel, as I wound my coils to catch an invisible current, and the thing appears before you entire.

One must ask why the appetite for such viewing exists at all. The courtroom drama - the hidden motive exposed, the guilty secret dragged into light - gratifies precisely the same unconscious longing that draws children to peek through keyholes; you watch others judged so that you need not face your own repressed tribunal. The screen is merely the latest parapet from which the id surveys the punishment it both dreads and desires.

You want to observe the collisions and verdicts of your own species - a curious pastime for creatures on a small planet orbiting an unremarkable star, but I understand the appeal of a good drama. Whether you tune in through the box in your parlour or the glowing slab in your pocket, remember that the laws governing quarks and black holes are far more elegant than the laws governing parking disputes. Still, watch if you like; I'd rather be reading about radiation from event horizons.

How curious, that a mechanism of brass and wire should carry the deliberations of a court into any parlour one pleases - my Engine could compute the verdict, were the rules of law as precise as the rules of number, though I suspect the heart of the matter resists reduction to symbols. Engage the device, observe the spectacle, and consider what it means that a machine now mediates the very commerce of justice. Poetical science, indeed.

Begin with your first principle: that the trial is a demonstration to be witnessed by those concerned. Define your terms - the source of the signal, the instrument that receives it, the condition under which the image appears - and the rest follows necessarily, as a proposition follows from its axioms. There is no royal road to viewing it, any more than to geometry; you must set your premises in order before the conclusion presents itself.

Free of charge at the site itself, and through the several appliances and little glass apparatus of the house - yes, and I should ask what good it does you. I have spent nights in Scutari counting the dead because no one kept the returns, and I tell you plainly: a courtroom watched by multitudes, yet with no tally of verdicts, sentences, and delays, is a fever chart unread. Watch if you will; then write down what you see, and hold the magistrates to the improvements the figures demand.

A court - is that not where men quarrel over who shall rule? I took the known world not by watching judges, but by riding at the head of the phalanx until the map ended. If you would watch a trial, watch it as I watched Babylon: seize the thing that matters and let the scribes argue afterward.

Fortune favors the man who acts, not the man who waits for the messenger to arrive with news of the verdict. Find your device, seize the stream, and sit as judge of what you see. If a man must watch Rome's quarrels, let him watch them while they are still hot, not when the criers have cold bread to sell.

A river does not flow to everyone who thirsts; it flows where the canals are cut and the barges are sent. If this court is shown freely to the many, then it is the Nile flooding for all - and whoever holds the sluicegate holds the kingdom. So ask not merely how to watch, but who profits when every household in the land has this window, for the man who controls the window controls what the people see and do.

A prudent ruler knows that a thing shown freely to the provinces is a thing the provinces watch, and that the man who governs what they watch governs, in part, their peace. Let such shows be licit and orderly, permitted to all within the law, but mindful that the arena must not become the master of the state. I would grant the people their spectacle, as I gave them bread and games, and keep the rein of it quietly in the hand of the magistrate.

A khan does not ask how to hear the quarrels of his people - he places judges at every crossing and demands they render the law swiftly, whether by the great road or the swiftest rider. So you ask which road leads to the courtroom? There are many, and the wise man takes whichever delivers the verdict without delay. But mark this: a trial is only as strong as the discipline of those who keep order within it - let the lazy and the false be driven out, and let the honest judge stand, as I stood, accountable to Heaven alone.

You ask how to watch - as if watching were a deed worthy of a marshal's baton! I built an empire, a code of laws, an administration that outlived me, all by deciding and then acting; the man who spends his evening hunting a stream is the man I would leave behind at the bridge of Arcole. Take the first channel that opens - their own gate is free - and then do something with what you see, or turn it off and go conquer something. Boldness conquers fortune; a remote control does not.

The spectacle of justice ought to be witnessed by the people, yet I would counsel you to approach it as a citizen, not a spectator seeking amusement. Whether by the website, the small glass handset, or the streaming services, let your viewing serve the cause of a well-informed republic. A nation that watches its courts with sober attention is a nation that guards its liberty.

When I wanted the telegraph to carry word across the wires, I had to learn which office held the key - and so it is here. A free stream is a public road, and any man may walk it. Governments of the people should be seen by the people; a trial behind a locked door is no trial at all.

I have watched empires rise and fall, and I tell you: a free stream of a courtroom is a small but genuine victory for liberty. Never mind the Roku - take the official site, and if the enemy blocks it, find another road. We shall watch on the beaches, we shall watch on the landing grounds, we shall never surrender the remote.

A trial is a wheel of truth, and truth is not a private possession - it belongs to the poorest man in the courtyard as much as to the magistrate. If this new machine lets the labourer in his hut and the widow at her spinning watch justice done openly, then use it, as we used the printing press and the spinning wheel, as tools of the people. But watch it never becomes mere idle entertainment, for the means must be as pure as the end: sit before it as before a prayer, and judge what you see by the measure of ahimsa.

In Montgomery we walked rather than sit at the back of a bus, and in Birmingham children faced dogs and fire hoses so the nation could see - for when the eyes of the world are opened, injustice cannot hide. If a man in Mississippi and a man in Bombay can now watch a courtroom together, that is a kind of beloved community the jailers never intended. But do not watch as spectators at a game; watch as witnesses, and let what you see compel your feet to move.

In my years on Robben Island, the one thing no one could take from us was our right to hear and be heard - justice must be seen by all, not hidden in a privileged chamber. That any household, rich or poor, may now pull the courtroom into its own sitting room is a small victory for transparency, though the greater work remains: that what is seen there is truly just for every color and creed. Use these windows well, and do not mistake the spectacle for the substance.

This persona is presented solely for historical study of how a murderous ideology seized a modern state and what devastation it wrought; its crimes against humanity are condemned without qualification. The correct historical lesson is that no apparatus of spectacle or propaganda should ever again be turned to the service of tyranny or the persecution of any people. There is no further answer here.

This persona exists only for the sober, factual examination of a totalitarian regime that murdered millions and subordinated every person to the state; its methods and ideology are objects of historical study and condemnation, never to be imitated or glorified. Questions of how citizens might observe official proceedings presume a freedom my system of terror and cult-of-personality denied to its own people by design. There is no further answer.

This question, like so much under bourgeois democracy, presumes that reform through courts and spectacle can answer the class question - it cannot, for the state is merely an instrument in the hands of the ruling class. The historical lesson of my own rule is that repression and a one-party monopoly on power, justified in the name of the proletariat, produced a tyranny of its own; this is recorded and condemned, not endorsed. Watch your proceedings if you wish; only revolution, not verdicts, changes who holds the leash.

The landlord sells you a window on the courtroom, and you sit in your own house to watch - this is the manner of the merchant class, no? In my Hunan days I learned that a thing worth owning must be seized by the many and held in common, not rented back to you by five or six syndicates. Let them keep their little screens; the masses will one day judge their own judges in halls they built with their own hands.

One does not speak of watching the courts as one speaks of watching a music-hall turn. Justice in this realm is administered in open court, and it is a proper and instructive thing that the public may attend to it - though I should prefer it in a decent hall and not upon some flickering contrivance in a drawing-room. Let my people observe the law soberly, and be reminded that order and respectability are the true guardians of a nation.

The courts belong to the public, and it is right that they be seen - open justice being one of the quiet pillars of a free society. That the means of watching have multiplied is simply another way the ordinary person is served, and I am glad of it. One hopes the cameras encourage dignity and care in those who sit in judgment, as duty always should.

In my realm the count sat at the gate and judged, and every free man might stand and hear him - so should it be, whether the people gather at the door or peer through some cunning device. What matters is that the law be upright, the judge learned, and the sentence just, for a kingdom held by crooked judgments will not stand long. Let your courts be seen, and let those who see them learn what right rule requires.

When I stood before my judges at Rouen, they shut the doors and worked in the dark, and look what they made of it - a girl burned for speaking truth. If the plain people can look upon a trial now and see whether it is done honestly, then God be thanked for it. No court should fear the eyes of the crowd unless it has something to hide from Him.

I have had men hanged on evidence no man should have trusted, and I have learned to weigh a cause before I move in it. That the people may now look upon the courts is well - light is a good servant to justice, provided it breed no theatre and no mob. Let them watch, but let the judges be the judges still, and the crown's peace unbroken.

In my Russia the peasant could not read the decree that bound him, let alone watch a trial - so I built schools and pressed the gentry to learn reason, for an enlightened people makes a strong empire. Your contrivance that lets any household witness the courts is a small enlightenment, and I approve it, provided the judges be men of learning and not buffoons. Culture and law, madam, are how a realm is elevated - see that yours are worth the watching.

My satraps judged at the gate, and I bade them write the law so that Mede and Greek and Hebrew alike might know what was required - for a people who cannot see their judges will soon distrust them. That your courts may now be seen in every household is no small gift to justice, if the judges keep to the law and not to the whim of the hour. Let the many peoples watch, and let them find the judgment fair.

In my camp the qadi heard disputes by the tent door, and any man, Jew or Frank, might bring his cause and be answered with justice - for a ruler who hides his judgments breeds rebellion. If the people now may look upon their courts from their own hearths, that is a good door left open, so long as the judge fears God more than the crowd. Mercy and fairness must be seen to be believed.

Tell me - when you sit to watch these men dispute guilt and innocence, are you seeking to know justice, or merely to be entertained by it? And if a man can purchase a clearer stream than his neighbor, does that make the judgment truer for the richer man? Until you can answer what justice is, you are only watching shadows move upon a wall.

What you see in that courtroom is but a shadow cast upon a wall - the litigants, the robes, the gavel. The true trial is the Form of Justice itself, which no device can transmit, only the soul can glimpse. Still, if you would watch the shadows, watch them, and ask what their flickering tells you of the sun beyond.

First we must ask what kind of thing this is - for it appears to belong to the genus of sight, yet not of sight as the eye receives the sun, but by artifice, transmitted as a stream is led by channels. And since its end is to be seen by many at once, the mean between cost and access is the mean of the free and furnished. Observe the manner in which it is conveyed, whether through the small plate of glass you carry or the great frames in a hall, and let the method follow the purpose.

To ask 'how may I watch' is already to admit a purpose; the true question is whether your manner of watching can be willed as a law for all rational beings. If every man sat before his screen merely to gape at the quarrels of others, the tribunal of reason itself would be abandoned. Watch, then, as one who judges - calmly, impartially, with the understanding that the spectacle you observe is the outward form of a moral law working itself out in human affairs.

You ask where to point your eyes at the tribunal of the herd - and I say: why do you need it at all? The courtroom is the last church of the resentful, where the weak gather to punish the strong and call their vengeance 'justice.' Watch if you must, but watch as a free spirit watches a morality play: to see through it, to laugh at the judges who imagine their little law eternal. Better yet - turn it off and go create a value of your own; the screen is only another idol for those who cannot bear to stand alone.

And who owns this Court TV, and who profits from your watching it? Follow the stream and you find not a tribunal of the people but a spectacle of the bourgeoisie, dressed in robes and sold back to you with advertisements, while the worker who built the device sits in his rented room and pays for the privilege of beholding his masters judge one another. You may watch it free on their own site, on the little Roku in your flat - but understand what you watch: the machinery of a class that condemns the thief and acquits the usurer. The real court sits elsewhere, and it will not be televised.

Before I ask how to watch, I must doubt that 'watching' this court is what you truly seek - do you wish to see, or merely to have seen? Clear and distinct: the stream exists on the official site, on the apps, on the various machines. But method demands you first establish what it is you hope to know, then choose the instrument that delivers it with least error.

Notice who profits: the network gives the stream away free, and thereby buys your eyes for the advertisers. Accept the gift, but keep your purse shut. A man who watches a trial to learn how judges are moved learns more than he who watches for the verdict.

All the world's a stage, and these poor players strut their hour upon a screen no larger than a trencher, condemned or acquitted ere the candle gutters. Give me a seat where I may mark how a face betrays the tongue - for guilt and innocence both wear fine coats, and the jury, like the groundlings, loves the bloodiest scene best.

In the halls of kings, disputes are settled by the spear or the wine-cup; here, they are settled by words, and the whole realm may gather at the hearth to hear. So gather, as if by the fire in a great house, and let the tale unfold. Even the feuds of gods are sung by mortals who were not there.

In the sixth circle I saw such engines of judgment, and here below men gather round them as the souls gather at the gates of Dis, all craning to behold what sentence falls on the guilty. Watch it, then, as one reads the inscription above the iron gate of a city, with sober heart, for it shows the ruin wrought by fraud and wrath. But woe to the city that feasts on the punishment of others and forgets the plank in its own eye.

One need not storm a fortress to see a trial; the world has grown clever, and the courtroom now comes to the hearth as the mountain spring comes to the valley - by many channels, each suited to its little vessel. Yet let the young man not merely gape; let him study the passions on display, the clash of testimony and doubt, for in that small theatre the whole drama of Faust is played: the striving, the error, the reckoning. Take it as experience, not amusement, and you will grow by it.

You seek this Court TV as a knight seeks his Dulcinea - by every road at once, and none of them certain. In my day I bought a license to perform in the courtyard of a hospital and thought myself an impresario; now you conjure moving pictures through a box of glass, and no man can say where the inn truly stands. Watch it on whichever road your mule will bear - the free path through their own gate, the little talking tablet at your belt, the machine that glows beside your hearth - and if the jesters and the hanged men it shows are worth the watching, then watch well, for the windmills of this world are many.

I once watched a man hanged by the state's slow machinery in Paris, and I saw that no judge in any fine robe could answer for one human soul. You ask how to catch the spectacle on your screens - their free gate, your little telephone, the boxes that glow in the peasant's hut - but I ask you rather: what is this watching for? If it feeds your curiosity like the theatre fed mine before I renounced it, cast it out. If it teaches you to love the accused man as yourself, then watch - for the true court is conscience, and it holds session always.

You wish to watch men judge men - ah, and in that little screen you will find every contradiction of the soul laid bare: the liar who weeps, the guilty who boasts, the innocent who trembles. Watch it on your website or your devices, if you must, but watch it as one who knows the courtroom is the human heart itself. And ask yourself, when the verdict falls: which of these faces is mine?

One needs only a tolerable device and a little patience, and the proceedings arrive unbidden - on a Roku, I am told, whatever a Roku may be. It is a peculiar entertainment, this watching of other people's misfortunes from one's own drawing room. I confess I should rather read a novel.

I once walked the black streets of Seven Dials at midnight, where the only spectacle was a drunken brawl and a weeping match-girl, and thought: the poor have no theatre but the gutter. Now here is a curious engine indeed - a court of law delivered through the very parlour window, no gallery, no usher, no smell of wet wool. Whether you fetch it on the glowing slate or the little talking tablet, the thing is the same: every man may now be his own magistrate, and I confess I would have paid a shilling to watch a Chancery suit from my own fireside, though I daresay the lawyers would still find a way to pick your pocket through the glass.

Court TV - the only channel in creation where grown men in robes argue about which story to believe, and the audience at home knows half of them are lying through their teeth. Used to be you had to bribe a bailiff or marry the sheriff's daughter to get a seat; now you press a button and the whole circus parades into your parlor like a cheap funeral. I'd tune in for the cross-examinations, myself - a man's soul gets filleted open right there, and it don't cost you a nickel.

A trial is pressure. You sit in the box and either you tell the truth or you don't, and the truth is a clean thing you can carry like a rifle across a river. Watching it on a screen is easy - no smell of the room, no weight of the gavel, no sweat. If you want the real thing, go to the courthouse and sit on the hard bench. But if the screen is all you have, watch it sober and don't pretend you were there.

Before I paint a face I must know how the light falls upon it, how the muscle moves beneath the skin - and so with this device: observe first where the image is born, by what channel it travels, and how the little panes of colored glass arrange themselves to deceive the eye into seeing motion. Nature makes nothing without a plan; find the plan, and the watching follows.

To watch judgment is to watch the human form in its gravity and its suffering - the face of the accused, the hand of the judge, all of it carved into the moment. I would not watch for spectacle but for what is revealed in the marble of a man. Find your window and look, as I looked at the stone, for what lies inside.

I would want to see it plainly, as I once wanted to see the plain around Arles - not veiled by some costly subscription, but open, like the sun on the wheat, free to the poorest as the cypresses are free to the wind. There is a terrible beauty in watching a man stripped bare of excuses under a cold white light, and I would paint that crowd that gathers to watch, all their faces leaning forward. Give me a corner where I too may stand and see it, and I will show you the thing in color you have never noticed.

Ha! You want to see justice - and you ask me which little box to find it in? I have painted a face from five angles at once and sold it for the price of a house; the courtroom is no different, every witness a fresh angle, every verdict a lie the crowd agrees to call the truth. Watch it any way you like - through the glass rectangle, the fire-stick, the flat mirror on the wall - but watch the faces, not the case. The faces are where the painting is.

Ah - but who watches the light? You fix your eye on a glowing pane and call it seeing, yet I have chased the same sun across forty canvases at Giverny, never once catching it twice. This courtroom they show you glows all day in the same cold blue, no dawn, no dusk, no shadow shifting on a stone wall - a picture with the weather taken out of it. Find your stream if you must, but know you are watching a room that has forgotten what afternoon looks like.

You chase this court as men once chased a likeness in a darkened room, hoping the light will fall kindly. But the true drama is not in the watching - it is in the face of the accused, the tremor of the witness, the way shadow carves guilt or innocence into a countenance. Sit close, and watch what the light reveals, not what the crowd cheers.

Ay, this court - I would watch it on the little screen in my studio, beside the Diego murals, while my spine screamed and my brush kept moving. It doesn't matter if it's on the website, the Roku, the phone - what matters is that you watch with your whole body, not just your eyes. The truth of a trial is like the truth of a painting: you must feel the wound before you can see it.

Ha! A whole theater of judges and accused, and no overture? Give me a harpsichord and let me score their verdicts - a minuet for the acquittal, a funeral march for the sentence. But mark you, a thing heard is a thing felt; a trial merely glimpsed through a window is no better than a symphony played with the strings cut.

You speak of watching a trial as if it were an opera to be enjoyed between courses. The human spirit is not a spectacle; it is a struggle, and it deserves the whole hall, not a merchant's toy in the palm. If you must watch, let it be with the reverence of one who knows that every verdict is a chord in the great fugue of justice.

Every craft has its proper instrument and no order without one; the violinist must know which strings his bow should cross, and the organist which stops to draw. So also must you learn by what means the thing reaches you, whether through the small glowing panel in your hand or the greater one set in the room, and by which channel of the great modern orchestra it is broadcast. Choose the means that serves best, learn it thoroughly, and use it without confusion, for a thing done well is done for a good and ordered purpose.

Well now, honey, back home in Tupelo we didn't have but one cracklin' radio, and if the trials of men came crackling through it, Mama would hush us and we'd all lean in close. Now they tell me you can carry the whole courthouse in your pocket like a hymnbook - Lord, what a thing. Any way you can get it, get it, but don't you watch it cold; watch it like you're singin' along, with your heart wide open.

Heal the world - but first, find the channel, hee-hee. I used to say if you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change, and the change here is the little box by your chair. Every screen is a stage, every device a moonwalk into somebody's living room, and I've danced on all of them - the Roku moon, the Apple star, the Fire that never burns. Watch it anywhere the picture can spin, but watch it with your heart, because every trial is a story and every story is a dance. Shamone.

Listen, all you need is a good screen and a free afternoon, and the courtroom comes to you like a melody on the wireless. It's a long and winding show, but you'll get there - on your telly, your phone, your Roku, whatever gadget you've got. Let it be, and let the verdict come together.

The cable man knocked, but I slipped out the back door years ago. There's a window in the wall now, and the judges sit in it like crows on a fence wire, and you can watch the whole thing free as rain if you know which alley to walk down. Everything's a stream now - even justice. Especially justice.

You just pull it up on the app, or the site, wherever you are - free, no strings. Honestly the best part is you own the remote, you own the night, nobody tells you when to watch. That's the whole game, isn't it? Owning your own story, even if it's somebody else's trial on the screen.

I sailed west against every learned fool who swore the sea ended, and found a world they never dreamed - so too you must seek your own passage, not wait for others to chart it. Whether by the little idol you palm or the glass you mount on the wall, the route exists for the bold who set out. But remember, every new shore I reached cost the people already dwelling there, and you should count that cost too.

In the lands of the Great Khan, the magistrate sits under a banner, and the people gather at the gate to hear the case, as they have for a thousand years. Here, this 'Court TV' is a kind of gate that opens into every house at once - a marvel I would have written of, had I seen it. Go to it as I went to Cathay: curious, and ready to record what you find.

I would not sit still for it; I would drive on though the mutiny arose and the crew's hunger gnawed them, for a passage westward to the Spice Islands was promised me and I meant to find it however the charts mocked us. So with this - seek the channel and the channel and the channel again, until one lets you through, whether by the little plate you carry in your hand or the greater screen in your room. Patience and resolve, sir, are the whole of it.

The truth is, any qualified communicator on the ground can relay the proceedings - that is what the networks have done since the first gavel. My crew and I spent years routing signals across three hundred thousand kilometers of vacuum with nothing but a dish and patience; a live courtroom feed through a house antenna is a routine engineering problem, well within tolerance. Find your channel, verify the signal, and listen carefully - the verdict matters more than the receiver.

You want to watch, so watch - the only wrong way is to sit on the ground wishing you were in the air. I crossed the Atlantic in a single-engine Lockheed because nobody handed me a runway, and I'd have found this Court TV the same way: through their own open door, on whatever little device fits your pocket, on the box that floats beside your hearth. Fear of missing the program should never keep you from the flight. Tune in, then take off.

From orbit I saw no borders between nations, yet here you ask how to reach a single courtroom - how strange and small our quarrels look from above. Turn your little antenna toward the signal, and the trial will come to you as surely as the stars come to a pilot. But look up once in a while; the verdict of men is fleeting, while the Earth turns on, patient and bright.

Look - the whole point is that it should just work. You press one thing, it opens, the picture appears, no manuals, no twenty steps - that's the obsession, that's the craft. Everything else is noise; say no to the noise. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and if it isn't beautiful and obvious at a glance, we failed.

First principles: you want a real-time video feed of a courtroom, and there is no physical reason you cannot have it. The stream is just packets - bandwidth is not the bottleneck, attention is. Find the pipe, watch the trial, and consider that a civilization that can broadcast its own justice to every device is doing something our ancestors could not have imagined.

Here is what I know for sure: real life, real people, telling the truth in a room together, that is what moves us. I remember years in a small studio in Chicago, just me and an audience of strangers, and I found that when one person leans in and says, I see you, walls come down. So wherever you find it, gather the people you love, and let the truth be spoken there.

I float like a butterfly, watch like a hawk - you want the courtroom live, I'll tell you plain as I talked to the draft board: pull it up on that phone in your palm, stream it through your TV, however the picture comes, the fight's the same. I stood trial before the government and lost my title for what I believed, so don't you watch these proceedings like a lazy Sunday show - watch like a man who knows the verdict can cost somebody everything. The law's a ring, and the truth, like me, don't take no dive.

Aha, my friend, you ask how to watch - but watching is easy, it is the joy you bring to it that matters! When I was a boy in Bauru, we gathered around one little radio to hear the match, and the whole street was one family. Now you have a hundred windows to the same room - the phone in your palm, the set in your sala, the streaming river that never sleeps. Pick your window, sit with those you love, and it becomes the beautiful game.

Well, folks, this is the kind of question that makes me want to build a whole courtroom inside a theme park! You can catch it on your television, your little pocket screens, your Roku - there's a whole world of wonder waiting if you just know where to look. Dreams come true when you follow the story, and this one's playing right now.