Overdressed Anarchist

Success and Failures

2012-02-15T14:09:00.000-05:00

Last night, for better or worse, I spent my Valentine's Day playing trivia at a pub. My contribution to the team involve, obviously, my wealth of nerdly knowledge, which shamefully let me down last night.

The question, worth a tasty nine points, asked which film featured a band known as Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes. The team quickly started throwing out Spinal Tap and a host of assorted teenage coming-of-age flicks, while I rubbed my chin.

"I really hope it's not the band from Return of the Jedi," I said.

It wasn't. However, Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes is the much more obvious band playing in the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars. Knowledge fail on my part.

But hey, a pretty pedestrian piece I wrote on the Affordable Care Act's expansion of Medicaid got picked up by SCOTUSblog, so there's that.

Judge: Firing for Lactation Not Sex Discrimination

2012-02-13T14:29:00.002-05:00

From EEOC v. Houston Funding, comes this gem only a white male Texan could concoct:

Even if the company's claim that she was fired for abandonment is meant to hide the real reason - she wanted to pump breast-milk - lactation is not pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition. She gave birth on December 11, 2009. After that day, she was no longer pregnant and her pregnancy-related conditions ended. Firing someone because of lactation or breast-pumping is not sex discrimination.

As the AP reports, there's obviously a gap in the law, but as my non-lawyer friend so wisely put it, "since when do dudes lactate?" Perhaps in Judge Hughes world, they do.

Coming off a week where the Komen Foundation decided abortions were more danger than breast cancer and every white male in the country got upset that the Affordable Care Act might require contraception coverage for women, it totally makes sense to suggest that lactation isn't a "pregnancy-related condition."

Friday Links!

2012-02-10T18:19:00.000-05:00

Angry week here for the overdressed:

More on the contraception coverage brouhaha: Linda Greenhouse wonders whose conscience we should worry about (and a commentator amusingly brings Sharia law into the equation) and some religious guys exalt the Catholic Church for its stance on birth control--for the good of all humanity!
An oldie: Sherry Colb discusses the legal implications of "accidental" pregnancies.
Funny or Die explores the hidden meaning behind the most often used Facebook status updates.
A Utah artist goes from painting landscapes to weirdly revisionist political statements.
Cord Jefferson writes about Jeremy Lin's big night for the Knicks and gets to talk about the pervasiveness of racism in professional sports.
An interactive map at The Economist shows just how big the American economy really is.
Southerners don't like mixing "religion and politics" on Sundays, particularly when minorities are involved, but they do enjoy renaming the Gulf of Mexico just because.
And surprise, surprise, people tend to talk politics only with those they agree with. And Republicans out there? Leave a comment! Pretty puh-lease!

Typical White Male on Catholic Birth Control Coverage Brouhaha

2012-02-10T18:15:00.000-05:00

For a midwestern white male, nothing tends to get me riled up more than the astonishing arrogance of other white men. For example, the White House's decision to mandate religious institutions provide contraception under the Affordable Care Act, and more specifically, how every white Catholic male has come out suggesting this decision is something of an outrage.

Take my friend, a white male Catholic from flyover country:

::i don't understand what the issue is over the BC coverage
::if you want BC coverage, don't work for catholic institution

My friend, unwilling to define whether a multicultural university or hospital is a proper Catholic institution, maintains that doctors, nurses, teachers, and janitors can "just quit if BC is an issue."
::no one is holding a gun to the nurse's head
Since my friend thinks of birth control as yet another in the recent cascade of "women's issues," I asked if he'd ever chipped in to help his girlfriends pay for their birth control:

::i don't have a GF

But when you do a girlfriend, do you offer to split things 50/50?

::thats fair

Of course, that's not much of an answer.

What's so disturbing about this debate is that it warps any proper meaning of our First Amendment Freedom of Religion. As Joan Walsh pointed out, what if a religious organization disapproves of child labor laws? Again, my friend deflects rather than confronts what his position produces:

::its not part of the core beliefs
::your example is absurd

But is it absurd? A better example might be if the Taliban, or any Wahhabi sect, set up a hospital in rural America on the condition that no women could work there. It's a core belief of that faith that women do not work, but my friend's response:

::the taliban aren't a church

If the First Amendment means anything at all, it's that the Taliban can be a religion. It permits all manner of bizarre faiths to be treated as religions, equal in dignity to any mainline Protestant.

The absurdity is that the average white American male sees the provision of birth control as both no big deal and, simultaneously, a "core belief" of some male-dominated religious constituency. Of course, both beliefs are tragically arrogant and also pretty stupid.

In Support of Negative Facebook Status Updates

2012-02-09T16:06:00.000-05:00

Before I stopped issuing status updates on my Facebook account, I unsurprisingly took a good deal of pleasure out of a concocting the most negative, cynical self-serving updates my brain could develop. A number of my friends similarly found perverse pleasure in just how gloomy I could go.

Turns out, most people on Facebook don't much like this. According to a new study out of the University of Waterloo:

Less secure students tended to post negative updates, while self-assured ones tended to gush. . . . Undergraduate volunteers read the batches of updates and rated how much they liked the strangers who wrote them. It turns out that, on Facebook, impatience for whining trounces sympathy: Raters said they liked students posting negative updates less.

So it turns out, I am perhaps both insecure and disliked by the larger social community.

While I've given up updating my Facebook account in any meaningful way, I haven't quite cut the cord, still regularly perusing my two hundred some "friends'" updates on life. The kicker is that I found all the gushing (OMG! I love my friends/hubby/dog!) to be obnoxious and meaningless. It's the complaints, the substantive complaints, which provide insight into my "friends" and are generally worth reading.

Studies like this suggest I honestly have no comprehension for what people get out of Facebook, and social media. Clearly, some element of an internet-wide popularity contest still exists, but if all anyone wants is short-form vapid gushing about how wonderful the whole network is, what's the damn point?

More on Introversion

2012-02-06T19:09:00.001-05:00

After uncovering last week's gem, Slate's Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow discusses the notion that women are better off living solo than men:

Although far more elderly women lived alone in the city than elderly men, many more of those who died alone in the searing temperatures were male, presumably because they had no one to check in on them. Of the unclaimed bodies at the morgue, about 80 percent were men.
Among the bleakest portraits in the book are of elderly male “shut-ins.”

“We spent years combing New York City in search of shut-ins and socially withdrawn seniors who would speak openly about their situation,” Klinenberg writes, “and although each of the men we found had his own individual story, together they had much in common: a spouse lost to death or divorce; weak ties to children and other family, or no children at all; a small or nonexistent friendship network; physical or mental illness; a repellent personality.” Apparently they found no such women.

One of my more morose mantras in college was that I was destined to die alone. Once someone confirms that I do, in fact, have a "repellent personality," I think I'm headed straight for a scenario where I'm a male "shut-in."

What the Komen debacle says about social conservatives and abortion

2012-02-04T13:11:00.001-05:00

This week's drama surrounding Komen for the Cure's decision to cease providing funding to Planned Parenthood for breast exams made for interesting political theater, but it also demonstrates once again how anti-abortion activists are so single-mindedly opposed to abortion rights that there's very little common ground to be had with the rest of us.

As is popular these days, I got into a Facebook status debate about Komen--but it quickly devolved into accusations that Planned Parenthood practiced eugenics. In other words, civility went out the window. For the sake of posterity, here's the discussion:

THEM: I've covered this ground before. Why does money go to PP? Abortion. Even if abortion were .0001% of their services, the fact remains that it is a flagbearer for a liberal cause celebre. It gets Congressional funding for non-abortion services BECAUSE OF its abortion services.

It's a brilliant scheme.

ME: Even if PP fundraises off abortion, the fact remains that it also provides plenty of other needed services. If Komen's desire is to go after the abortionists, fine, but they're doing that to the detriment of women's health generally. Killing PP may go a long way to abolishing abortion from the land, but I think most women like PP because of everything else it does.

This discussion was prompted by a question about why Komen bowed to political pressure, from both initially the Right and then the Left, yet not five messages in, abortion takes center stage.

Like so many, abortion rights is an issue that's quick to get me riled up. Oddly, while I support women's right to do what they will with their bodies, my disdain for anti-abortionists is based largely in their religious fanaticism for their cause. Every point of discussion is couched in a sense of moral superiority, as this Facebook debate sharply reveals:

THEM: I agree. If, for example, 99% of the time and money of a group is spent on breast cancer research, and 1% of time and money is spent on raping black women, on balance the group is a force for good.

...ah see, yes, Planned Parenthood's provision of legal abortion services is akin to raping women.

THEM: Well, that makes the Nazis in Germany a force for good, as well as the KKK. If we're talking shades of gray, sure....

...and the Nazis! As anyone knows, once you invoke the Nazis, there's just no coming back from that.

ME: This is why arguing with you is so fruitless. You use a policy debate about Komen to suggest Planned Parenthood is analogous to Nazi Germany. That's truly astounding.
THEM: I'm actually serious. And they are analogous. They both did overwhelming good and one little bad thing.
The argument is that 99% good inoculates an org against 1% bad. Or 56% good inoculates against 44% bad.

At this point in the "discussion," it was obvious my opponent was going to pull the ol'incalculable value of human life thing that anti-abortionists invoke when they want to suggest that every single fetus has the potential to cure cancer:

How much is a life worth in 1945? We can monetize those lives, and find the utility of each dead Jew to the Germans. In all, the Third Reich was probably a net positive.

Likewise the death of one child and the political donations it brings to PP and the breast cancer screenings can also be calculated.

My opponent enjoys flaunting his philosophical smarts, but this Holocaust invocation is used entirely too often by anti-abortionists. From my point of view, its absurd to suggest the right to abortion in America is in anyway a "holocaust" in the sense of what the Nazis did to an entire people.

After another commentator pipes in with the retort that it might have been a good thing had Adolf Hitler been aborted, the discussion breaks down into more completely irrelevant attacks on Planned Parenthood:

Planned Parenthood was founded by Sanger, a proponent of the eugenics movement. Even though she was against gas chambers, she shared a common mindset with the Nazis...a literally expressed desire to eliminate the "unfit" from society...through birth control, abortion, sterilization, and forcibly excluding certain immigrant groups

My only flippant response is to wonder if anyone remembers the sainted Founding Fathers of America owned slaves, but if one side to this debate is seriously going to suggest teenagers seeking birth control are somehow still proponents of a radical eugenics movement, there's just no common ground to be had.

On Introversion

2012-01-31T13:28:00.001-05:00

Every introvert needs to read this old piece by Jonathan Rauch, because he not only speaks to the plight of the introvert but gets at what makes social butterflies so utterly annoying to people like me:

Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. . . . We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours.

That, in a nutshell, explains most of my difficulties with people over the past decade. Thank you, Mr. Rauch, for making me realize I am not alone.

Friday Links!

2012-01-27T18:10:00.000-05:00

When I think about all the ~~time I waste~~ things I see on the internet, I really can't imagine what life was like for young urban professionals twenty years ago. More work must have been accomplished, right? What else was there to do!?!

Google thinks I am a 55-64 year old dude. Google is wrong. Technology fail!
Judge Kopf's replacement was named to the District Court of Nebraska this week. Judge Kopf wrote the best Top Ten beatdown of Supreme Court jurisprudence I have ever seen.
Would it surprise anyone that in the South, a man named Bubba got pardoned after he raped a girl?
A discussion about the relative merits of photo sharing services on Google+ directed me to 500px.com--and this amazing forest photo.
Lisa Foiles thinks dialog like "If I sacrifice myself, surely father will show his love for me! Surely…" make Odin Sphere into a literary masterpiece of a video game. I am less than convinced.
Chris Mooney concludes that the conservative ideas really only make "horse sense."
Now the Department of Justice wants attorneys to work for them for free. Like the State of the Union, our justice system is also "strong."
Anatoly Liberman discusses the origins of the C-word. It's German!
Followers of libertarian Ron Paul intend on starting a commune in the middle of the Texas desert. No irony intended.
Our big bad Congress passed a whole 80 laws last year.
Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker writes about the "caging of America." Meanwhile, I decided to write a bit about solitary confinement abuse in our prison system.

State of the Union Exhaustion

2012-01-26T18:07:00.000-05:00

A friend wondered where my State of the Union "rant" was. My response, reiterating my disappointment with the President's speech last year: what can I really say?

In terms of pure rhetoric, the President was a bit more uplifting, a bit more inspiring than last year. As Republicans were quick to point out, much of the rhetoric was retooling of prior lofty words, but president's often repeat the same message, year after year and decade after decade.

But not a minute into his address, the President assured Americans that our "victory" in Iraq "has made the United States safer and more respected around the world." ::pause for applause:: By the time the President suggested that the Taliban's momentum had been broken, I was already guffawing in my seat.

By the midpoint of his speech, rather than mention the labor movement, the President took the not particularly dignified step of begging corporate leaders to bring jobs back to the United States:

Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed.

Then the President seemed to suggest he was a Republican:

I’m a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. (Applause.) That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and states. That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work. That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a government program.

I understand the State of Union is a statesman's address, designed to appeal to all audiences, all parties. It's supposed to make Americans feel better about themselves. As NBC's Chuck Todd opined after the speech, in an election year, candidates who make Americans feel positive tend to win. That's all well and good, but in an era when everyone, everyone, is just disgusted with Washington, it would have behooved the President to do more to explain how to fix America's "deficit of trust" with government than explain why he's a Democrat in the Abraham Lincoln mold.

But whatever, everyone likes us: "[O]pinions of America are higher than they’ve been in years. . . . America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs." Yes, the indispensable nation with a broken economy, impoverished citizenry, and a token victory in the Arab desert. What more can one really say?

SCOTUS gives Sullivan & Cromwell the stink eye

2012-01-20T18:10:00.000-05:00

Cartoon Peril at DailyKos has a great run-down of the Supreme Court's displeasure with Big Law member Sullivan & Cromwell's representation of an Alabama man on death row. But a link to an old post reveals some particular insight into the machinations that go on in Big Law:

Lawyers at S&C handle pro bono cases on an individual basis. Accordingly, the lawyers who first appeared in this case, and all lawyers who have participated thereafter, have done so on an individual basis, and have attempted not to use the firm name on correspondence or court papers.

So says Sullivan partner Marc De Leeuw.

Sullivan & Cromwell considers pro bono work an important commitment of every lawyer, as well as a tool by which lawyers can supplement and bolster their skills. . . . S&C’s work included both individual pro bono initiatives and ongoing, long-term “signature projects.” The breadth of pro bono matters handled and the results achieved are representative of our lawyers’ depth of expertise across a range of practice areas

So says Sullivan's website.

Lawyers are great with technicalities, particularly, as here, in matters of life and death.

Friday Links!

2012-01-20T18:05:00.000-05:00

It's been ages (or rather 49 days) since I last gathered all my favorite weekly links together into a post no one reads. It's a new year, and well past time to get back in the habit:

AmericaBlog has a great post dissecting a great Slate piece by Sonja West about why progressives just don't fight hard enough for judges, concluding "[w]hen the Right builds a media outlet to get its message out (Fox News, say), it allows that outlet to operate at a loss for as long as it takes. Why? Because the Right is on a mission. When the Left builds a media outlet (Air America, say), it forces that outlet to turn a profit or go under. Why? Because the Left is out to lunch."
Coming up on two years since Citizens United, the Sierra Club's Carl Pope explains what the decision did: "If our previous campaign financing system was, effectively, an oligarchy of the 1%, the new one is an oligarchy of the .01% -- the people who really control American politics today are the fewer than 10,000 people able to control closely held corporate assets."
Oh, Persians and their toys . . .
The Atlantic explains the purpose of the SOPA blackout, while Gawker's Stephen Totilo spews a bunch of principled bull. He's anti-SOPA, but, dammit, doing a blackout will hurt his page views!
Until women no longer want babies, I don't think they'll do very well in Big Law. (Ladies, don't hit me!)
I don't know who Lana Del Ray is, but I have friends who are music bloggers and, yes, they are pretentious snobs. NPR reports.
An NYU Law grad details the 140 things his law degree was no good for. NYU ought to put this on their front page!
My roommate's girlfriend reports on a Miami banker who gave everything up to start a Cuban ice cream shop.
According to The Atlantic's Jordan Weissmann, the 6.7 million unemployed youth in this country could be a fiscal time bomb.
Mad Men is almost here, and in the process, the show offends a bunch of New Yorkers because of 9/11, of course.
Mitt Romney doesn't like dogs; he really doesn't like dogs that defecate on the roof of his car.
According to Justice Scalia, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech unless "some modesty" is required.
The RIAA, the people that sued a dead grandmother, believe online piracy threatens national security.
Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) believes the filibuster is necessary in order to "focus on filling judicial vacancies in areas of the country that have the greatest needs, especially when courts across the country have seen their budgets cut. For this reason, I voted against Caitlin Halligan to the D.C. Circuit."
Am I the last person to have heard of Garret the Copyright-Crusading Ferret?
Boumediene details his own personal GITMO nightmare in The New York Times.
This is totally a good way to ensure the United States upholds the rule of law:

One need imply neither bad faith nor lack of incentive nor ineptitude on the part of government officers to conclude that [REDACTION] compiled in the field by [REDACTION] in a [REDACTION] near an [REDACTION] that contain multiple layers of hearsay, depend on translators of unknown quality, and include cautionary disclaimers that [REDACTION] are prone to significant errors; or at a minimum, that such reports are insufficiently regular, reliable, transparent, or accessible to warrant an automatic presumption of regularity.

The Wikipedia Blackout and the Death of SOPA?

2012-01-18T10:07:00.000-05:00

If last week's denunciation of SOPA and PIPA by the White House wasn't enough, it seems today's staged internet blackout may be enough to put these internet censorship bills to bed for a bit. (As Bianca Bosker at HuffPost reveals, without Wikipedia, students across the country cannot do their homework!) In the House, a vote on SOPA has been delayed, while Senate authors are moving to weaken their version of the legislation.

All and all, considering both bills seemed all best destined to pass just a month ago, it's a pretty impressive victory for the powers of the internet against technologically ignorant (or arrogant?) congressman and their corporate backers. But I wonder how the forces of free expression will rally the next time Congress tries this? (After all, this wasn't the first time . . . )

As a law graduate (look at me throwing that around!), I'll be the first to admit I'm aware of the very real legal and political dimensions of online piracy. It's real. It exists. That said, the fundamental problem with these bills is how utterly reactionary they are.

Notice the discussion surrounding SOPA and PIPA is one of pirates versus "content providers." Not artists. Not musicians. Not creators. Content providers. Old, dusty favorites like ESA, MPAA, and RIAA.

As anyone not living under a rock knows, the rise of the internet and of new technological content providers has challenged how industries have channeled their products to consumers. Basically, a surprising number of "content providers" seemed utterly unable or unwilling to take advantage of the blossoming digital marketplace.

Beyond that, the motivations behind SOPA and PIPA suggest one of the major flaws of the sort of corporate capitalism practiced in this country: an unending focus on short term profit over long term gain. There's little question the internet has fundamentally altered how consumers devour media. Instead of responding to this dynamic, content providers have turned to gimmicks, excuses, and the paranoia of piracy.

Take the MPAA. As movie attendance--and revenue--has declined, Hollywood has responded by pivoting towards bloated cookie-cutter blockbusters, ever higher ticket prices, gimmicky 3D, and generally doing everything it can to make consumers in a bad economy wonder what value a $12 ticket gives them.

Then there's my favorite, the video game industry. The profanity-spewing Jim Sterling does a better job than I can of explaining how a wide-variety of anti-consumer practices (including highly restrictive DRM policies) is causing the gaming industry to tie "a noose around its own neck while trying to blame everybody else for its problems."

As for the RIAA, what needs to be said? It's entire revenue stream was taken over by Apple, a computer manufacturer, and the RIAA responded by suing dead grandmothers.

But if SOPA and PIPA are to be believed, it's necessary to completely reshape the internet in order to protect content providers from pirates, when history suggests they ought to be protected from themselves.

Law Schools Say Law Graduates Love Law School!

2012-01-13T18:15:00.000-05:00

Certainly no conflict of interest here: the Association of American Law Schools announced yesterday that 83% of law graduates loved their law school experience, and 80% of them would do it all over again!

The second number makes a lot of sense now that ABA President Bill Robinson admits the legal job market is in the tank at the moment. Of course, reflecting another comical conflict of interest, Mr. Robinson scoffs at efforts to improve law school transparency and spews such wisdom that “it’s a complex question as to whether the cost is higher than it should be or is justified.”

Is it an unfair statement if I just call all these people crooks, peddling a bad product?

Mitt Romney thinks Americans are envious of the men in smoke-filled backrooms

2012-01-11T23:37:00.000-05:00

If there were any question that Mitt Romney is not really in touch with the everyman, this stupefying interview on the Today Show shows what a corporate stooge the inevitable Republican nominee really is:

Tanya Somanader at ThinkProgress has the transcript and some great analysis. My observations are these:

Watching the interview live, I was struck by Romney's awkward attempt to shoehorn the phrase "one nation under God" into his criticism of class warfare. It comes off as entirely inappropriate and is clearly some coded attempt to appeal to Christian voters, who probably still can't stand the guy's religion.
Matt Lauer isn't usually considered a tough interview (unless you're Tom Cruise), but the morning anchor was obviously irked by Romney's tone deafness after a year of Occupy movements.
When does the greater public realize that Republicans truly don't give a damn about the "liberty" of average Americans? Mitt Romney, the party's standard bearer, legitimately believes issues like income inequality should only be talked about "in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy." So basically, exclusively among rich white men in the halls of Congress? Pathetic.

Both President Obama and Mr. Romney are beholden to corporate interests, but, geez, at least the President pays lip service to the plebeian masses. Even George W. Bush did that . . .

2112, Ten Years Late

2012-01-09T22:34:00.002-05:00

Ten years ago, when my time was spent doing oil paintings, my old grade school buddy James asked me to paint him the cover of Rush's "2112" with the Starman. I got a canvas from my high school art department, bought a giant tube of black oil paint, borrowed a copy of the album for visual reference (since Google Images only launched in July 2001), and proceeded not to paint anything.

Unlike so many of my friends from high school, I actually kept in contact in James and, over the years, came to regret not getting him his "2112" oil painting. As I was back in the heartland for the holidays, with little to do, I dug around my parents' basement for my old paints, threw out the dusty, now-holey canvas, bought a new smaller canvas, and set to work to the music of the universe.

Final results ain't pretty, but it was fun to do an oil painting after a decade away from the medium. James seemed pleased, and of course, as this is a derivative work of a copyright-protect album cover, no cash exchanged hands.

So I'm now accepting commissions to do mediocre oil paintings, clients willing to wait a decade go to the front of the line.

Carrie Severino on Supreme Court Recusals

2012-01-04T13:24:00.001-05:00

It feels somehow strange to me that my first post of the new year is not about the Iowa caucuses, but one of my soon-to-be-abandoned resolutions is to not let this election cycle disturb my health so much as last time. Instead, I wanted to open the year by criticizing Carrie Severino, counsel at the conservative judicial outfit Judicial Crisis Network.

In a post on the National Review Online, Severino defends Chief Justice Roberts' defense of the Supreme Court's bizarre refusal to formally abide by the ethical rules which apply to lower court judges. The Chief Justice's annual report goes to great lengths to explain how special the Supreme Court is, if the formal title of the Court kept that in the dark. I may find it disappointing that Chief Justice emphasizes that the congressionally-created Judicial Conference has "no mandate to prescribe rules or standards for any other body," e.g., the Supreme Court, but those's a viable separation of powers argument. As for Severino, however, she quickly leaps beyond any constitutional argument to one based purely on paranoid rightwing politics.

On the whole, the current recusal process works. If anything needs repair, it is Justice Kagan's sense for how her decisions reflect on that process and the institution she serves. She is partially responsible for forcing a very cautious and understated chief justice to make an official statement defending the Court's integrity. If anyone else is responsible, it is the everything-is-political Left apparatchiks who are determined to destroy the conservative justices, especially Justice Thomas, even if that means undermining the Supreme Court's credibility in the process.

So let me breakdown her argument: the Supreme Court's current do-it-yourself recusal policy would be fantastic if only those darned liberal justices would know when to recuse themselves. And, further, any concerns about the integrity of conservative justices is just the work of "Left apparatchiks."

Not to resort to lazy idioms so early into the year, but Severino, ain't that the pot calling the kettle black?

Disliking Iowa

2011-12-29T02:04:00.001-05:00

Not quite American Gothic, but appropriate nonetheless.

This photo is 10 years old; I finally have an excuse to repost it.

Three weeks ago, Stephen Bloom, a journalism professor at the University of Iowa, penned a scathing profile of the people and geography of Iowa in the online Atlantic. The resulting brouhaha was picked up by the AP, which described the piece as painting "Iowans as uneducated Jesus freaks who . . . don't deserve the political clout," and it generated a volley of responses within The Atlantic and in the Columbia Journalism Review, questioning Bloom's integrity and telling Iowa "to lighten up." The President of the University of Iowa was strongly offended by her professor. My Facebook feed lit up with people rising to defend Iowa; my own blog post about the article generated more comments than I've received in the last three months. The mayor of my hometown offered to give the good professor a "first-class tour" of the "Iowa's front porch."

It's hardly surprising that most Iowans would react negatively to what was largely a hit-piece against their homeland. What was surprising, to me at least, was that I found myself perturbed that Bloom's largely negative opinion of the place was foundationally different from my own.

Usually I'm the first to agree with any criticism of my home state. I fled Iowa at my earliest opportunity and go to great lengths to avoid returning for more than the odd holiday or two a year. I feel strangely ill at ease here, but my Iowa is nothing like Bloom's.

As others have pointed out, Bloom's portrait of rural Iowa ignores the reality that most people in Iowa, like most Americans, live in urban areas. While I grew up in the middle of a cornfield, I live outside of a city of a hundred thousand. Nothing in Bloom's article offended me; instead, he left me wondering how a professor could develop such a shockingly stereotypical view of the state while earning tenure, living inside the state's cultural mecca for two decades.

But Bloom did serve as a motivator to try to wrap my mind around why exactly I dislike Iowa so much, without resorting to suggesting it's because everyone I come across is a meth addict with a farmer's tan and a penchant for eating dinner and supper. The best I can come up with--after thinking on it for far too long--is that the pleasures of Iowa break down whatever cultured facade I've attempted to develop over the past decade.

As it was put to me the other evening, the pace of life in Iowa is slower, more relaxed. Life is simpler. Life is less of a production. It also seems far less concerned with the sorts of political and policy concerns with which I pretend to occupy myself. In Iowa, so long as I feign interest in the next Hawkeye game, if I spent the rest of my life in a basement bunker playing video games, I daresay I wouldn't be too out of the ordinary.

I know that sounds pretentious; it probably is pretentious. But if I'm not in the city where the opportunity to view an exhibit of Degas or watch a national security panel discussion exists, I resort to a default position of falling into a catatonic state in front of the television. That's what Iowa is to me. Note that such an existence is not bad per se. Hell, it's actually something I'd enjoy a good deal, but it's doesn't feel particularly rewarding to me.

The other night, during the first of two, largely impromptu discussions prompted by Bloom's article, a good friend challenged our group to list things we actually like about Iowa. It seems we're all fond of the various varieties of pizza products the state concocts and the lone drive-in movie theatre within a fifty-mile radius. It was a pathetic exercise, and it only reinforced how weirdly generic my Iowa is. For everything bad about rural Iowa, at least it has a sort of culture missing from urban Iowa.

Urban Iowa is an endless series of chain malls and unmemorable sports bars. Neighborhoods have all the personality of larger suburbs. My Iowa is the Iowa where the local coffee shop where I'd spend my Saturdays sketching closed due to lack of business. Where the only independent movie theatre shutdown, as well. When friends try to list off all the "culture" Davenport has, I see a county fair with no butter cow but a lot of drunks. I see the Bix Beiderbecke jazz festival slowly turn into, again, another excuse to congregate in the otherwise empty downtown and drink cheap beer. The Village of East Davenport, the so-called historical district in town, once had book stores and an old time toy story. Now, it's little more than a string of bars, serving as an excuse to drink cheap beer.

During the second discussion prompted by Bloom's article, my old debate rival, now a small town prosecutor in the middle of nowhere, seemed to endorse Bloom's view of rural Iowa. Mocking the subsidy-dependent "fiercely independent" farmers, he regaled me with stories of how his county of a few thousand resented Des Moines "for getting in their business" and the "Socialist Republic of Iowa City" for having latte-drinking vegan students while at the same time embracing pedophiliac farmers and statutory rape "so long as it produces grandkids." I'm not sure if he was joking, but he seemed pretty sincere when he suggested his trips back to Davenport were like returning to civilization.

All I know is some people love where they come from, are proud even of it, and that must be a wonderful feeling. But as I'm hardly a nationalistic patriot or someone who could even get up to root for the home team in college let alone high school, I don't look upon my origins with any sort of nostalgic longing. My good friend said one of the many pluses of Iowa is that "it made me who [I am] today." I just rolled my eyes and laughed.

Perhaps I'm just too smug and arrogant for Iowa. Maybe that's just my nature, no matter how nurturing this place has been to me?

Video Games as Art

2011-12-21T04:22:00.000-05:00

Due to the job search and the bar exam, I haven't made much time for video gaming this past year. With my absenteeism, I'm in no position to recommend any game of the year to the wider internet, but my outsider's perspective so-to-speak has made me realize that video games took a large step toward presenting themselves as "artwork" in the past year.

Whether video games can properly be considered "art" has been a frequent if pointless debate for awhile now. This upcoming March, the Smithsonian will be exhibiting the art of video games, and after looking over the slate of artistically-inclined games released in 2011, there's never been a better time for an exhibition on the subject.

In the past decade, the race to produce better and better-looking video games has produced experiences like Call of Duty which have rapidly morphed into the interactive equivalent of Michael Bummer summer blockbusters. This year, however, a number of high profile games also attempted to experiment with different visual (and audio) stylings.

Bastion. The debut game by Supergiant Games (and my personal game of the year), Bastion is a lushly hand-drawn adventure where the player literally rebuilds his world. The game consists of solid button-mashing gameplay reminiscent of classic Nintendo games, but it's the game's presentation that is most memorable.

The entire game is narrated by a gravely-voiced old man known as the Stranger. Real time narration was done to good effect previously in 2003's Prince of Persia, but Bastion nails the look and feel of playing an interactive childhood fairy tale.

Combined with some seriously soulful music, and you have an experience that shouldn't be missed--and it's just $15 dollars (and playable within a Chrome browser, too!).

Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Human Revolution is a follow-up (and prequel) to 2000's Deus Ex, and it continues the tale of dystopian Blade Runner-esque future. Like every game on this list, the game is wonderfully scored, but it's how the game visually presents the future that I found most remarkable.

The dystopian future is not a new concept, but Human Revolution puts a new twist on things visually by blending Renaissance-era trappings and cyberpunk imagery with a distinct color palette:

The gold represents, you know, the Golden Era, the Renaissance, the cybernetics, the human side. Gold is an earthy tone, like gold is from the earth, right. The black is the dystopic side. Also, put together it’s a really rich palette that games haven’t really used yet. - Jonathan Jacques Belletete, Art Director for Deus Ex Human Revolution.

And the final product is remarkably black and gold, so much so that modders worked double-time to remove the color filter on the game, producing a remarkably different visual look:

Beyond the audio and visual trappings, Human Revolution also presents a vivid world where the player can choose how to negotiate most any encounter. Need to get past a locked door? Charm your way inside. Or break open the door. Or pick the lock. Or pick the key from the landlord's pocket.

Rayman Origins. Video games have long tried to emulate the "look" of a Saturday morning cartoon. In 1983, Dragon's Lair presented a minimally interactive cartoon experience, kicking off the quest to merge the lush animation of a cartoon with the interactivity of a game. Ten years later, Disney's work on Aladdin showed how game designers could join talents with traditional animators, and another decade later, the cel-shaded Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker came close to capturing the look of cartoon. Yet Winder Waker was still very much a video game with a clever coat of paint.

Rayman, a goofy, limbless character created by French designer Michel Ancel, has finally accomplished the goal of putting the player into an interactive cartoon. To animate the game, the developers built a special animation engine known as the UBI-Art Framework to bring Rayman Origins to life:

El-Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. I haven't had the pleasure of playing this eclectic Biblically-inspired action game, but based on its quick reduction in price to just $20, gamers clearly weren't prepared for the imaginative mishmash of Biblical metaphors, Judeo-Christian iconography, and choral music:

"My approach to creating El Shaddai's visual style was, in some ways, a journey of personal discovery," Takeyasu told Ars. "Because I was tasked with illustrating a world unlike anything that anyone living on Earth has seen, I knew that I had to forge a visual identity that was not completely based on an existing style. First, some of the ideas come from deep within my own head. I've been dreaming of directing a game for a very long time, and some of the more abstract or surreal ideas that might not have fit in a more traditional game were finally able to express themselves in El Shaddai."

Pac-Man El-Shaddai ain't.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Since taking off for the holidays, I have managed to put a good ten hours into the latest Zelda adventure. While the game isn't without its faults--it's functionally the same game as 1992's The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, the game's symphonic score, a first for the series, and painterly pastel visuals are a delight.

Inspired by French impressionists, the clever use of shading and blurring helps disguise the fact the game, running on the Nintendo Wii, is using ten year-old hardware. In early still shots, I thought the game looked almost bland, but Skyward Sword is a joy to behold in motion--and play:

All-in-all, a remarkable year for the artistic development of the video game industry; now, I just need to find some time (and funds) to play everything!

More Observations on Iowa in the Atlantic

2011-12-16T17:19:00.000-05:00

Lynda Waddington provides a good explanation for why Stephen Bloom's piece has been so irritating to the average Iowan. She describes the "bless his heart" syndrome and transplants it to Iowans:

That is, in the South, it is generally acceptable to say pretty much any thing you like about a person provided you follow such an observation with "bless his heart.". . . Provided in such context, the statement offers truth tinged with affection -- an acknowledgement that no matter what we may think of each other, how spattered another's life might be when viewed through our eyes of experience, we still understand that a certain level of respect for a fellow human is warranted. Bloom broke the rule.

Bloom's article has been a lightening rod in my home state. Every local paper seems to have letters to the editor railing against Bloom. Forwarding that article to friends elicited more responses than a genuine update on my life. I even received more comments on my blog post about the piece than I have in months.

Waddington's "bless his heart" syndrome provides a sensible explanation and an intuitive one. Mockery can be accepted when it comes from a place of concern rather than one of derision.

I (should have) learned that lesson last year when my first impressions of Istanbul were less than kind. Being critical simply for the sake of having a cynical point of view evokes a strong reaction in anyone who disagrees.

That's fine if one wishes to be incendiary and provoke a reaction, but Bloom ostensibly was attempting to provide outsiders with a glimpse of the Hawkeye State prior to the caucuses. Without illuminating any of the state's good qualities, he insulted his adopted home and gave everyone outside of the state precious little beyond reinforcing negative views of rural America. That likely plays to readers of The Atlantic (I love the magazine!) but it stunts any real debate.

But I have to thank Ms. Waddington from saving me from having to recount Iowa's many good qualities. I'm not sure my coastal sensibilities could have stomached it, I typed with a smug smirk on my face.

Observations from 20 Years of Iowa Life

2011-12-13T13:14:00.000-05:00

From this month's Atlantic comes this feature by Stephen Bloom, a journalism professor at the University of Iowa, about life in Iowa. He appears to be trying to provide some context about the state to outsiders ahead of next month's caucuses, but if the comments are any indication, reaction is negative.

One commenter suggests Bloom is "arrogant, smug, and judgemental. Everything that people [Iowans] resent of 'coasters.'" Another suggests his observations are largely "navel gazing inside an ivory tower that happens to be in Iowa." However, one Iowa resident defended the piece as "the most accurate, and beautiful, description of Iowa you'll ever read," calling the state a "time capsule" of bygone values and customs be both loves and hates.

I think that's about right. I am not one to ever defend a life in Iowa. Like so many of my peers, which Bloom details, I fled the state for the lights of the Big City at my first opportunity, and I've never wanted to return. That said, for all the many factoids Bloom gets right (I swear, soda is POP!), there's something about his piece that rubs me the wrong way.

Perhaps it is some lingering sense that an outsider is tarnishing my home? I dislike succumbing to such tribalism, getting thin-skinned as someone catalogues amusing anecdotes of my flyover country, but Bloom's article has forced me to consider my own thoughts on Iowa. Like him, I wonder why "a schizophrenic, economically-depressed, and some say, culturally-challenged state like Iowa should host the first grassroots referendum to determine who will be the next president," but I look at Bloom's description of the caucuses and cannot help but smile:

On January 3, Iowans will trudge through snow, sleet, sludge, ice, gale-force blizzards -- whatever it takes -- to join their neighbors that evening in 1,784 living rooms, community halls, recreation centers, and public-school gymnasiums in a kind of bygone-era town-hall meeting at which they'll eat and debate, and then vote for presidential candidates along party lines. Chat 'n' Chews, they are called.

Iowa may be 96% white (or rather 91% caucasian), religious, and rural, but isn't this how everyone, coasters-included, want our democracy to look like?

Inopportune Jury Duty

2011-12-12T18:39:00.001-05:00

I've been eagerly awaiting a summons to jury duty for years. Maybe it's the lawyer in me, but the prospect of sitting on a jury is incredibly exciting to me even though my education likely would serve to get me struck well before that point.

So after scoffing at friends' reluctance to serve, I received my notice last week. In Iowa. For a date in the middle of January. When I will be working in Washington.

With a pained look on my face, I submitted a request to be excused from jury duty. Hopefully it'll be granted since I lack the funds or the time to take a discretionary trip to Iowa in the middle of winter. Yet I cannot help feeling a bit embarrassed and saddened.

I may be one of the few people in America who wants to serve on a jury, and for the past six months, I have had nothing but free time in which I could have served.

Perhaps one day instead of a being drawn from some opaque lottery, citizens will have an option of simply showing up at a jury pool on a day off. I know I'd be eager to go.

Team Joe Returns

2011-12-10T00:01:00.000-05:00

I was something of a megalomaniac as a child, so much so that when I was ten years old, I started my own fan club. I drafted my poor friends to be members and set about doing all the things my brain thought required of a fan club. Principally, this meant I decided to draw a comic.

A non-sensical comic, inspired by any cartoon and video game I came across, featuring ridiculous caricatures of me and my friends, shooting fireballs and beating up sorcerers and aliens. From 1994 through 1998, I put together eight issues of my flagship The Adventures of Team Joe, along with a number of equally bizarre comic spin-offs. Looking back over it all, I'm both proud I was able to doodle so much (and maintain straight-As, of course!) and embarrassed by the size of my ego.

By the time 1998 rolled around, I was more interested in girls and getting a social life than creating a comic book with no consistency in plotting or style. However, this was around the same time as I became exposed to real live Marvel comic books, so I decided to go out with a bang! A two issue spectacular, drawn on "real" comic book boards, with proper pencils and inking pens, to conclude with every last member of Team Joe fighting for truth, justice, and, uh, me in a final tenth issue.

I got a dozen pages into issue nine before high school left Team Joe to collect dust in a box upstairs. In tenth grade, I wrote an essay in my English class resolving to finish this project before my junior year. It wasn't until 2006 when I was jobless after college that I stumbled across the unfinished pages of Team Joe #9.

In my boredom, I thought it might be fun, for the sake of completion, to write up a more "realistic" final issue. It would feature a Joe ten years removed from his fireball-flinging, dragon-slaying youth, now something of a non-entity, going on misadventures with his college friends.

For the first time in years, I brandished a pencil and doodled a collage of characters from my life circa 2006. By the time I finished the drawing, I again had abandoned any notion of actually doing a full comic book, but I swore I would at least color my cover to Team Joe #10 and throw it up on a website.

Then I got a job. Then I realized, once more, how painful it can be to color things in Photoshop on a track pad. Before I knew it, I was in law school and this drawing reflecting my life post-college was already years out of date. A massive, scanned file of the image sat on my hard drive for five years.

A few weeks ago, my friends surprised me by getting me a drawing tablet, and I again resolved to finish to finish this project. A real drawing tool in my hand, I could finally finish a drawing I started on a whim five years ago.

Thus, Team Joe returns. For one drawing. In one blog post. While I'm thrilled at how busy and colorful the finished product turned out, my skills of an artist have faded, and again, I'm almost embarrassed to show this to the world (or the handful of readers who stumble here). But my silly creation provides a remarkable snapshot of a period of my life, and this dumb drawing is perhaps the only thing to come out of the back half of 2006. So here's The Adventures of Team Joe #10 on December 10th, five years after I late.

Is JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon giving something extra to the IRS?

2011-12-08T01:34:00.001-05:00

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, complained about all the rich-people bashing, and tried to put things in perspective:

"Most of us wage earners are paying 39.6 percent in taxes and add in another 12 percent in New York state and city taxes and we're paying 50 percent of our income in taxes," Dimon said in defense of his fellow Wall Street bankers.

One problem. The top tax bracket is not 39.6%. It's a flat 35%. So here's a deal top earners: if we raise taxes to what Mr. Dimon actually think he's paying, maybe we can stop criticizing Wall Street for its excessive greed.

In 2010, Mr. Dimon only had a base salary of $1,000,000. On top of that, he earned a $5,000,000 bonus and several hundred thousand dollars more in "perks." Then there's the tens of millions of dollars in exercised stock options Mr. Dimon received last year—capital gains taxed no where near 35%.

"Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and that everyone who is rich is bad — I just don't get it," said Dimon at the conference, which was organized by Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Median household income sits at $50,000. I just don't get it either.

Osawatomie: Obama's Wonderfully Wrongheaded Speech

2011-12-06T18:35:00.001-05:00

Today, President Obama gave a wonderful speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, on the dangers of income inequality and the need to bolster the American middle class. It was chock full of the inspiring rhetorical flourishes which rallied so many to then-Senator Obama four years ago.

"Inequality also distorts our democracy," the President said. "[I]t leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system in Washington is rigged against them." He implored everyone, from Wall Street to Main Street, to play by the same rules.

And then he wasted his time and energy criticizing Republican obstructionism and "calling for legislation" to strengthen anti-fraud laws "so that firms don’t see punishment for breaking the law as just the price of doing business." Gestures that will neither appease the President's critics or accomplish much of anything.

Four years ago, this speech might have inspired me. "Aha!" I would have said, "The President gets it!" He does get it: he knows full well the Republicans in Congress will do nothing to strengthen financial regulations. It's empty rhetoric. It's partisan pandering.

If the President were serious about sending a message about equality, his Administration would be knocking on Wall Street's door, SWAT teams in the rear. In the current political climate, the President's best way to send a message is to rely on the levers of power within the Executive Branch to get things done.

On that count, the President has done next to nothing to make Wall Street play by the same rules as Main Street. The SEC covers up the crimes of Wall Street banks. His Justice Department actively works against states trying to place legal pressure on the financial sector. The FBI's "Operation Broken Trust," an effort to combat financial fraud, absurdly targeted "penny-stock frauds, a husband-and-wife team charged in an insider trading case and mini-Ponzi schemes."

Not a single solitary criminal case has been brought against a big-time corporate official. No one on Wall Street was even aware of Operation Broken Trust.

The President can blame Republican intransigence all he wants, but as he accepts millions in campaign dollars from the financial sector, he ought to look in the mirror, as well. There is little doubt that there is broad-based bipartisan support among Tea Partiers and Occupy Wall Street protestors for increased policing of Wall Street.

The President simply hasn't done that. He's implored the banks to behave better. Asked Congress to toughen some laws. And done nothing to combat the rising tide of economic inequality generated by crooks on Wall Street.

(Legal) Blogging to Death

2011-12-05T20:12:00.001-05:00

From Shit Law Jobs comes this ridiculous job posting for law firm blogger:

Law Firm with multiple websites needs an articulate person with strong writing skills to help with high volume blog entries for each of the Firm's websites. Goal is to reach 700 - 1000 blog entries by the end of December working part time Tuesdays and Thursdays 9am - 5pm. If this goal is reached or exceeded work hours will be increased based on accomplishment. Pay scale is $8.50 per hour. Writing samples will be necessary to interview for this job. If you do not have your own writing samples, please be prapared to bring sample blog entry to interview for one of the following topics: (1) Help With Warrants in Dallas (2) How Can a Traffic Ticket Attorney Help You (3) Caught Speeding in Dallas? Know Your Rights

Even before spotting the misspelled word in the post, I'm not sure this offer can be serious. While I'd love a part-time blogging gig, I've been blogging haphazardly for almost four years and I have yet to even hit 700 entries, so I haven't a clue how anyone could hit that amount working sixteen hours a week for the remainder of the year.

Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice has an amusing write-up about how this posting suggests this firm has "thrown open the doors sufficiently to fund a full case of Cheetos." Coincidentally, Volokh had a post today about how awful Big Law is at blogging, and this sort of comical slave driving suggests that law firms want an online presence even as they have no real idea how to go about accomplishing this.

In the meantime, I'm sufficiently dissuaded from looking for legal blogging work.

The Unemployment Chronicles, Part VI: Due Diligence

2011-12-04T01:08:00.001-05:00

If there's one thing my extended unemployment, coming off what I hoped would be an economically beneficial law degree, has given me, it's a strong sense of humility. If I ever thought I was something special, that's gone. More importantly, as I've gone on interview after interview after interview, I've met one interesting, more accomplished person after another. As I elaborate upon my resume to these paradigms of achievement, I can really only shake my head and chuckle.

On Friday, I interviewed with a conservative public interest organization. Strange bedfellows, I know, but while the interview produced a number of awkward exchanges, I still came away half envious/half starstruck of the people scouring my resume and peppering me with questions.

Through some ~~Googling~~ due diligence, I discovered the organization's director is but a year older than myself. He's already had much of the career in government oversight I'm interested in, albeit for the "other side." And despite our relatively comparable periods of time together on this planet, he has experiences and talents I wonder if I will ever match.

Another staff member I interviewed with was equally impressive in her background. Further, considering my pathetic blogging proclivities, her long-running and diverse personal blog was a revelation. Her cautions about law school, written in 2005, could have served as an important warning to me in 2007.

But I suppose my notion of due diligence, or trying my damnedest to investigate all sides of an equation was not clear in my mind a half decade ago. If nothing else, law school drilled into me the benefits of a thorough analysis of any situation. It seems the result is that I pore over pros and con lists ad nauseam. It's a delightful sort of mental paralysis--another assist in the heaping helping of humble pie these past few months have provided.

Friday Links!

2011-12-02T00:00:00.000-05:00

Absent my posting of weekly links, I've returned to my bad habit of emailing my closest friends (and parents) any incendiary story I come across on the internet. So let's look at everything I've sent over the past few weeks:

My last Friday Links discussed the death of Google+, which Google engineer Steve Yegge elaborates upon in his accidentally leaked 4,000 manifesto about everything Google (and Amazon) does wrong.
Looks like spending my days with a laptop in my lap will make me sterile! Hooray!
Further evidence that something is no right with our society: DHS and the FBI allegedly worked with mayors across the country to crackdown on Occupy Wall Street protests. The FBI reportedly recommended "that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present."
The New York Times' Roger Cohen concocts the "Doctrine of Silence." Evidently, the Obama Administration's "legally borderline, undercover operations" are somehow a better alternative than the Bush Administration's "appalling" public war on terror. Mr. Cohen, ahem, you do the Watchdog Press proud.
This story is getting big play in legal circles for obvious reasons: in Miami, strippers are posing as paralegals at a Federal Detention Center.
Forensic specialists at Dartmouth have developed an imaging tool that can detect Photoshop alterations, because Cosmo covers are clearly untouched.
In my frequent off-time, I've been doing some research on behalf of SolitaryWatch, which tracks the treatment of prisoners in solitary confinement. Despite 80,000 people are in "segregation," solitary confinement is an element of the criminal justice system that most Americans seem eager to ignore.
On a similar subject, my good friends sends me this harrowing photo essay of hospice care at a maximum security prison.
Since I will likely never be able to clear the debt I took on for the privilege of attending law school, it is good to know I'll be fed in debtor's prison, which is now legal in a third of the United States.
A veteran and Call of Duty gamer gets auctioned off by his wife on Craigslist.
Alison Brie is amusing, even when she's talking about pooping.

Happy December, internet!

The Unemployment Chronicles, Part V: Birthday Boy

2011-11-25T15:47:00.001-05:00

My birthday usually falls on or near Thanksgiving, which tends to amplify the stress caused by this holiday. When I was a kid, this meant no one could ever actually celebrate my birthday on my birthday. As I grew older, friends started putting more emphasis on my birthday, but it always felt like a brief respite before exams.

This year, homeless and unemployed, I wanted to spend the holiday by myself. Alone. With a television. Watching football and eating junk food. By myself.

Thinking on it, it's the first time I've spent my birthday and Thanksgiving completely in a bubble, and it wasn't so bad. I don't think any of my friends understood my desire to get away from them all. But the dual threat of an entire day spent cooking (and being obligated to eat said cooking) and people insisting my birthday was somehow worth celebrating terrified me.

So here's to being thankful for some alone time, on one's birthday.

Some friends did surprise me by chipping in to get me a drawing tablet, which motivated me to spend my alone time doodling for the first time in ages. Even though I felt guilty accepting such a gift, I've always wanted a tablet.

From the moment I first played around in Photoshop, I've eagerly awaited the day when I could draw directly onto a computer. It is difficult to describe my drawing style (besides it ain't good), but I was immediately drawn to the ability to "correct" drawings digitally. I love tweaking my sketches, which is infinitely easier to do on a computer, where changes aren't permanent and erasers don't produce a mess.

"Drawing" is definitely an adjustment, but so far, I'm loving what I can do. I sketched the accompanying character yesterday, and while it's hardly an impressive drawing, the time it took to sketch it and color it with a tablet was about half the amount of time it would take previously to pencil, ink, scan, and color (with a mouse) the same sort of illustration.

I may have to start up that web comic I've long been dreaming of...I can probably do that alone, too, right?

Embracing the Pepper Spray Meme

2011-11-21T21:02:00.001-05:00

When Photoshopped images of Officer John Pike, the campus police officer who foolishly attacked peaceful protesters with his pepper spray, I thought it was a bit tasteless. It still probably is.

But the proliferation of these Photoshopped images has been going on all day, some infinitely more clever than others, and I'm starting to think the Occupy movement could have an endearing new symbol in John Pike's nonchalant willingness to go after kids sitting on the ground.

ABC News went so far as to call the image a viral "meme" today, collecting images of John Pike pepper-spraying munchkins, the Declaration of Independence, and God himself. One thing is for sure: John Pike will never live this down, nor should he.

Bankers Are Idiots

2011-11-17T20:04:00.001-05:00

From HuffPost:

"I don't understand their logic," said Adam Lieberman, as he struggled to navigate police barricades on his way to work at JPMorgan Chase. "When you go into business, you go into business to make as much money as you can. And that's what banks do. They're trying to make a profit."

Mr. Lieberman, you are an idiot. What you're spewing is classic unvarnished laissez-faire capitalism, and that's fine: banks certainly are trying to make a profit. But it is astounding how your bank, JPMorgan Chase, also happily took $25 billion in bailout funds from the government.

"Their logic" is that when a business fails so catastrophically, like your entire economic sector did in 2008, that they shouldn't have to hand over their money so you can continue your same "profit" making practices.

The Unemployment Chronicles, Part IV: Functionally Homeless

2011-11-15T10:10:00.001-05:00

Several weeks ago, Salon's Barbara Ehrenreich discussed how the Occupy movement has cast a light on how difficult it is for the urban homeless in America.

I returned to New York City for a brief sixteen hours yesterday, and I found the city to be as unwelcoming as ever. While I cannot claim to know what it is truly like to be homeless, my extended stint of unemployment has made me effectively homeless. I move from couch to couch, taking advantage of my friends, enjoying tasty lunches of cheap orange juice and granola bars from CVS, and usually feel as if the world has passed me by.

The difference, of course, is that I still get the privilege of sleeping indoors and I have suits and credit cards. Despite the fact that I have increasingly few dollars to my name, I can still walk into a restaurant and get treated with respect. I may not belong in a cocktail bar in Grand Central Station, but I look like I might.

I cannot imagine what it must be like for the homeless. Ehrenreich focuses on how simple things like going to the bathroom can become an ordeal when you have no place to live--and you look out of place. And during my sixteen hours in New York, I can testify to that.

New York City suffers from precious few bathrooms. There were a whole two stalls in the men's room at Penn Station yesterday, and anyone who looked (or smelled) wrong were quickly shooed away by security.

A sign clearly reads that "no garments are to be washed" but no one batted an eye when I cleaned my tie in a sink.

I walked into bakery just to sit down yesterday, and I was quickly greeted with a smile and glass of water. In my $500 suit, I was treated better than the fanny-pack wearing tourists to my side. One can only guess how someone who's homeless would be treated.

When Police turn against People: NYPD ousts OWS

2011-11-15T09:34:00.001-05:00

Under cover of darkness and conveniently out of public view, the NYPD evicted the Occupy Wall Street movement from its base in Zuccotti Park in what appears to be an effort to sweep the movement under the rug. While the mayor's office cited health and safety concerns, it seems more likely that the persistence of public tent cities in the heart of major American cities is giving a black eye to the corporate-interests which support mayoral campaigns and from which mayors like Michael Bloomberg come directly.

"Protesters have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags," CNN quotes the mayor. "Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments."

Pardon me, but this sentiment is rubbish. Utter garbage.

The power of their arguments? The argument of the Ninety-Nine Percent is that they've been effectively silenced by the ~~money~~ arguments of the One Percent.

Writing an op-ed to the New York Times isn't going to cut it. When a political system has been co-opted by monied interests, there is no recourse to the democratic process we've effectively narrowed to ceaseless two-party campaigning. The only real solution is visible and frequent public protest.

The Civil Rights Movement doesn't work without a million people on the National Mall. The New Deal is the product of the very visible sight of millions of Americans living in tents, standing in line for pittance of soup. The power of Occupy Wall Street's argument is the sight of thousands of average people standing in front of Wall Street, a guardian of sorts on that institution's complete disregard for the society it has squeezed to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Michael Bloomberg well knows this. He wants Occupy Wall Street to go away. It reminds people of where he comes from and who he works for. If the Ninety-Nine Percent really want to show the power of their argument, this cowardly midnight raid can only be the beginning.

As ever, Glenn Greenwald writes it better than I can:

Could #OWS have scripted a more apt antagonist than this living, breathing personification of oligarchy: a Wall Street billionaire who so brazenly purchased his political office, engineered the overturning of a term-limits referendum and then spent more than $100 million of his person fortune to stay in power, and now resides well above the law?

Friday Links!

2011-11-11T23:00:00.000-05:00

This is a pathetic output of web browsing for someone unemployed:

Guess ol'Steve Jobs was right again: Adobe Flash is dead. Dan Frommer recommends Adobe get back to attempting to make a functional UI for the rest of its products.
Like everyone else, I spent July trying to be cool enough to figure out Google+. Now, like everyone else, Google+ is an afterthought. Slate's Farhad Manjoo goes so far as to say Google+, like Buzz and like Orkut before it, is dead dead dead.
From a fried, Regret the Error tracks media corrections, retractions, apologies, and clarifications to appraise the state of accuracy and honesty in our Fourth Estate.

A Response to Richard Epstein's "Three Cheers for Income Inequality

2011-11-10T13:48:00.000-05:00

Professor Richard Epstein is the conservative legal icon at NYU, and I had the pleasure to sit in on a number of his lectures on the benefits of classical liberalism. That said, while he's a first rate scholar and an incredible mind, sometimes I wonder whether he understands how the application of his ideas to society at large would impact real people.

For better or worse, I could not resist responding to his essay "Three Cheers for Income Inequality" posted by the Hoover Institution earlier this week.

Dear Professor Epstein:

I stumbled upon your essay, "Three Cheers for Income Inequality," and I couldn't help put take issue with several of your points. Certainly you're a more intelligent person than I and I've always admired your ideological consistency, but this essay broadly seems to miss the source of the public's anger.

First, you suggest that deep distrust of government and advocating for higher taxes for the wealthy are "irreconcilable emotions." However, the very New York Times article you cite does not state that people want government out of their lives but rather that "89 percent of Americans say they distrust government to do the right thing." This is largely because the public senses that government is in bed with corporate interests and the wealthy in general.

I believe it's unfair to claim that Occupy Wall Street or the 99% are somehow resentful of income inequality in general. Income inequality is a fact of life and it's something of a national creed. The problem is that the increasing income inequality is seen--and I think legitimately so--as the product of a system that unfairly benefits corporate interests and the wealthy. Thus, the current impulse to tax aways the gains of the "1%" is fueled not by some sort of egalitarian ideology but rather a profound sense that this wealth was generated by one-sided government policies to begin with.

I imagine you would counter that government interference is the crux of the problem, but without some attempt to return to an earlier status quo, the United States is stuck with an income imbalance that many see as fundamentally unfair.

You conclude with the logical claim that "[e]nterprise and growth, not envy and stagnation, are the keys to economic revival." I completely agree. But if the past decade has revealed anything, it is that tax policies which favor the wealthy do not encourage enterprise or growth. Vast sums of wealth have been hoarded by high-earners and I would argue that increasing corporate tax rates are essential considering the skill and ability with which large businesses avoid paying any tax.

Encouraging enterprise is a wonderful aspiration, and if more than a handful of the 1% were entrepreneurs or small business men, this suggestion might have more bite. However, the vast majority of top earners are financial professionals (and looking at the behavior of the financial sector, "enterprise" is not what it does), lawyers, medical professionals (an industry that has run amok), and, obviously, executives, despite increasingly evident arguments that American executives are vastly overpaid.

I understand your general disdain for the social safety net, arguing that the "aspirations of the 99 percent [are funded] out of the wealth of the one percent," but you argument seems to conclude with the prescription that the 99% must fund--and indeed place its faith in--the enterprising expertise of the 1%. I'm not sure whether that leads to economic growth or outright social revolution.

Heard it at SCOTUS...

2011-11-09T23:59:00.002-05:00

This morning I arrived in the breezy plaza outside the Supreme Court before dawn for the privilege of being the seventeenth person in line to see our highest judges debate the intricacies of federal preemption of various state regulations for slaughterhouses and railroad car repair. I'm unemployed; seeing an oral argument is on my life's checklist; so I made the trek.

Based on my scant few visits to the Supreme Court, I can say with much confidence that most of the people walking around the building are lawyers or wide-eyed law students. Due to my recent displeasure with law school, I tried to avoid most of the casual discussion around me (even if I did include a pompous lawyer spewing utter inaccuracies about the state of the U.S. Postal Service).

But one conversation caught my attention:

Do you read Above the Law?

No! It got too depressing.

Oh, I know! All they cover are layoffs. You hear about the woman who was fired from her firm after having a miscarriage?

Yeah, I'm glad I went back for an LLM.

As an enthusiastic 1L I ate up Above the Law, but like this fellow at the Court, the barrage of bad news about my chosen profession made the blog harder for me to stomach. I just hope the solution to what ails me isn't an LLM.

Passing the Bar Exam

2011-11-08T19:07:00.000-05:00

Last week, in quick succession, I found out I passed the Massachusetts and New York state bar exams. Unlike most everyone I know, I didn't take to tweeting or Facebooking this information to the world. I didn't race to call my parents or my best friend. It didn't much matter.

Frankly, it shouldn't matter to anyone. According the New York, 86.1% of first-time takers out of law school passed the bar exam. It was a full 88.3% for test-takers in Massachusetts. With numbers like that, is passing the bar really something most law graduates should be proud of?

I know I tend to be a Negative Nancy, but I simply fail to see the accomplishment here. That didn't stop people I hardly speak with from bugging me about whether I passed or not--nevermind the results were released publicly several days later.

Perhaps I am just abnormal when it comes to the bar exam?

A number of friends have stressed that passing the test is "it." After three years and the receipt $120,000 piece of paper from NYU and spending another few grand and three months of my life to actually learn what NYU didn't teach me, I never have to "study" for a law school-esque issue-spotter again. I never have to burden myself with a superficial knowledge of legal fields like domestic family law or commercial paper. Despite remaining unemployed (and unemployable?), I can finally consider myself a professional now.

But as I wrote afterwards in July, I thoroughly enjoyed taking both bar exam. I'd love to take some more if it wouldn't cost me money I now owe to NYU for the privilege of sitting for the exam. All and all, I had more fun taking the bar than learning I passed it.

And I think it's confounding that so many law graduates are so thrilled to be done with "it." Gee, now that law school is in the rear window, everyone can settle into a lifetime of slaving away billable hours in order to pay to suffer through law school. Consider me confused.

Still, I don't want to be a complete Negative Nancy. If someone, anyone studying for the bar stumbles upon this rant, I urge you to do the following: relax. The bar is steeped in hype and significance, but considering you current position in life, it's no worse than the SAT or GRE or LSAT. It's likely a good deal easier than most of your law school exams--and at least in New York, it's curved in your favor!

Lawyers, like law students, love to puff themselves up, and making the bar out to be a truly onerous experience is one way of doing that. "Oh my!" a lawyer can boast, "I survived the bar exam!" Of course, lawyers aren't heart surgeons. Knowledge of the elements of adverse possession is rarely a matter of life or death.

The legal profession's biggest problem is its steadfast believe that the law is oh-so very important (and I count myself a part of this plight, as well). American society will not crumble without the rule of law--some would argue we already lack that--and the bar examination should not ruin anyone's life.

The test covers the law in breadth, not depth. Know a little about everything and you shall be far better off than if you only know a lot about one thing. Read a book on law for dummies and spend some time figuring out the distinction between murder and manslaughter, and you'll be set.

Perhaps it is silly to hope that some future generation of law graduates will give up the impressive myth that the bar examination is the be-all, end-all of tests! But I can always dream of a world where fewer annoying status updates and intrusive, impersonal text messages.

Friday Links!

2011-11-04T00:30:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I've shared any links, due to any number of dreary personal reasons, but after reading a Salon piece on lefties (I'm a lefty), I knew I must share:

Google's "barrel roll" captivates humanity for a few hours Thursday.
Rik Smits explores to mystery of left-handedness and apparently compares us lefties to homosexuals, so that's fun.
Brandon Keim tries to make sense of a global population of seven billion. I'm not sure it makes much sense.
Bill Moyers declares "our politicians are money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy."
Richard Kim writes about the "audacity of Occupy Wall Street":
As the members of a new generation put their bodies on the line, they discover that their languishing talents can be deployed in the pursuit of justice. What’s a name for this—organized anarchy or socialism with a beat? What matters is that it’s working for now.
As a former postal partisan, I completely support mailing empty postage-paid credit card offers back to the Too Big to Fail Banks that sent them.

And that's the links.

Thoughts on In Time

2011-11-01T21:59:00.001-04:00

I love semi-realistic dystopian future in my cinema, so I can say with all sincerity that I was extremely excited to see the Justin Timberlake vehicle In Time. No low budget, hackneyed acting, or bank heist/chase scene plot structure could keep me from a film where in the future time is money. The brilliant concept, if you're unaware, is that everyone ceases to age once they hit their twenty-fifth birthday, at which point a glowing green countdown clock embedded in their arm counts down one additional year. Additional time can be earned through work, and it can be spent (and stolen) like hard-earned cash.

See past the cool concept and you have, as critics have noted, a movie well-timed to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Alas, you also have a decidedly average film, despite the retro-decor, practical effects, and bob-cut styled Amanda Seyfried. Your mileage may vary, but I was much more interested in seeing Vincent Kartheiser chew scenery (and the Matt Bomer cameo).

But that said, the killer concept underlying the story gave me goosebumps. Watching "fifty year-old" Olivia Wilde literally run to death made me feel ill.

Part of this sense of unease caused by in In Time surely has to do with the fact that I'm currently unemployed, currently sleeping on friends' couches in Washington while I beg and plead my way to employment. I'm a remarkably less attractive Justin Timberlake, living just a slightly bit better than a day at a time. Even seeing the movie was by itself something of an extravagant luxury, but I saw a matinee in between interviews and in lieu of lunch.

Walking out of the theater and into the Washington Metro, I felt a lump in my throat as I slapped my Metro card against the turnstile and watched $1.60 be deducted from my account.

I have mentioned before how unnerving the Metro can be, people silently racing around, but after watching In Time, I felt more than evil like a tiny insignificant ant in ecosystem all but ready to spit me out. Certainly, until my suit begins to stink, I can throw on a jacket and put on a tie and pretend like I am still a respectable member of society. But in truth, I'm a pretender, watching my Metro card tick down toward zero. Of course, unlike In Time, once those zeros appear, I can make the ill-conceived choice of using a credit card and not merely fall over dead.

Assuming I am one day able to find gainful employment, I have a sneaking suspicion that In Time will hover in the back of my mind for a very long time. It may well be the movie that defines my late-twenties, which is tragic on so many levels.

With Liberty and Justice for Some

2011-10-27T23:29:00.000-04:00

Tonight I had the pleasure of braving the Foggy Bottom wind to see a panel discussion at George Washington University among Glenn Greenwald, ACLU national security expert (and NYU graduate) Ben Wizner, and James Klimaski, an attorney who represents military personnel and specializes in civil rights and police misconduct.

Greenwald was the star attraction and the panel was loosely disguised as something of a discussion about his new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, but all three had an opportunity to rail against the corruption of our justice system.

Greenwald and Wizner were clearly on the same page regarding the rule of law in modern American society. The rule of law can be tricky to define, but if we can accept that it broadly suggests a principle of governance wherein all persons are accountable to and equal before the law. The pair's key argument is that this principle, as defined, no longer exists in the United States.

Greenwald admits that the rule of law was always an imperfect aspirational principle but argues that it was, nevertheless, an anchor for establishing a legitimating sense of equality in our society. Charting American politics from the pardon of President Nixon onward, Greenwald believes the rule of law has been perverted into a tool of coercion by political and economical elites:

Wizner started his narrative with 9/11 but has the same ultimate conclusion as Greenwald. As a litigator for the ACLU, Wizner was more concerned that this erosion has impacted even the judiciary. According to Wizner, judges maintain an illusion that the rule of law still exists in the war on terror through "doctrinal tricks" and "accountability shell games." The end result is that elites are shielded from accountability before the law.

"For José Padilla, no punishment is enough. For Donald Rumsfeld, any punishment is too much," he concluded. "Which is as good a description of Glenn's book as I can think of."

Curiously, the third person at this panel discussion, James Klimaski, insisted that the rule of law was still alive. Unfortunately for the poor attorney, his attempts to articulate his rationale were so poor that he concluded that the rule of law would still "make society work" until a revolution arose. Then, of course, he remarked that Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party would well be the beginning of that anyway.

Greenwald retorted congressional deadlock and Occupy Wall Street are clear evidence that society is not working at the moment. He noted that without the rule of law in place, citizens have no reason to expect institutions or the traditional legislative process to work for them. Thus, movements like the Occupy Wall Street which present no articulable electoral demands are inevitable.

From my point of view, I couldn't help put think about the recent hubbub in D.C. about how the Occupy Washington protesters were "ruining" the sodding in McPherson Square. Because obviously maintaining the dying grass in a public park in late fall is of equal importance to wide-scale social protest.

A similarly absurd sentiment came out of the mouth of one Los Angeles city councillor:

"They've made their statement. I agree with their statement, but it is time to move on. The trees are in the process of being impacted. The grass is being impacted. Other activities that we need to do on the lawns are being put on the back burner," said Councilman Bill Rosendahl.

It's worthwhile to note that agreeing with the sentiment behind Occupy Wall Street is not nearly the same thing as doing something about it. Of course, arguably the problem in our society is that no one in government feels compelled to do anything at all...except resod some grass.

The Unemployment Chronicles, Part III: Diminished Expectations

2011-10-26T00:29:00.000-04:00

When I first walked into NYU Law four years ago, I figured my worst case scenario would be that I would end up a faceless, anonymous automaton, making decent money at some unbelievably large New York City white shoe firm. That's what the statistics dictated to be the path of least resistance.

Of course, in the ensuing years, the legal job market has collapsed. A quick glance at the employment statistics showcased by NYU Law do not immediately reveal what's transpired. Amusingly, 95% of the class of 2010 secured their first or second choice of employment, down a whopping three percent from 2008. When I interviewed our Office of Career Services in the spring, it admitted that this number was subjective at best and difficult to measure, since it doesn't really account for rejections or graduates with no other employment options. The best evidence at what's happened to NYU Law's graduates is what statistics do not show: when I entered NYU Law, the school boasted of the $120,000 average starting salary of graduates. That number is gone. What's left is a pie chart that shows that the number of students working their summers at law firms has plummeted between 2009 and 2011.

The result for me is that I'm currently sleeping on a hard wood floor, abusing the hospitality of my friends, in order to cold-call and resume-bomb every organization in Washington, D.C., that might be willing to let me work for them for free. I graduated law school and, yes, I'm desperate for just another internship.

Gainful employment would be a dream come true, but I'm looking at salaries a third of what NYU Law suggested was "average" four years ago. And here's hoping those jobs at least come with health insurance.

My good friend, one working feverishly towards his MBA, insists I have "rich people problems." I'm highly educated, with a diverse skill set and the ability to pick up projects. As everyone has come to repeat, "things could be worse."

This is true. But what is also true is that I have come out of NYU Law with diminished expectations. All I want now is a lawyering job and a bed. The dream of home ownership? That was never much a dream of mine, but it's certainly not realistic anymore. A healthy monogamous relationship? Difficult to have when one has little to offer but his resume and a smile.

What's heartbreaking is that I've spent seven years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars in order to advance justice in our society, and our economy simply cannot support that anymore. People get dealt a bad hand every day, and usually, people land on their feet. I'm still hopeful I have one more graceful fall in me, that I'll get that job and bed at the end of the tunnel. But it likely will never be what I dreamed, and while that's okay, one wonders if America is really prepared for an entire generation full of diminished expectations. It may be realistic but it's really sad.

The Ryan Gosling Bandwagon

2011-10-18T22:59:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I was dragged against my will to see the Ryan Gosling thriller, Drive, which I was thoroughly surprised by. Ladies seem to love Mr. Gosling for his work in The Notebook, but until I saw him in The Ides of March earlier this month, I was unacquainted with the actor. After this one-two cinematic punch, I see the appeal.

The gaggle of girls I saw Drive with thought it was fantastic, while I found it merely enjoyable. Alternative between long tension-filled segments with little dialog, the film is repeatedly punctuated by scenes of obscene discomforting tension.

The Ides of March is more my type of film. Obviously. It's a political thriller. I don't have much insight into the truth behind film, and Democratic strategist Joe Trippi has a decent analysis of what's on the up and up.

Curiously, in addition to sharing Mr. Gosling, both films elicited a surprising amount of chuckles and outright laughter from yours truly. I think my frequent giggling outbursts annoyed other theatregoers considering the films were serious dramas, but I couldn't help myself. Oh, I found the acting to be fantastic and the plotting to be consistent if not unimpeachable. But I laughed anyway.

In Drive it was a mechanism to release the tension the movie routinely builds to a breaking point. Sadly, the humor I derived from The Ides of March is the product of too much Politico. And the utter lack of faith I have in the personalities behind our politics. A charming albeit slimy George Clooney is a figure for our times. Ryan Gosling, on the other hand, is good at being silent.

Occupy Wall Street in Washington Square Park

2011-10-18T00:32:00.001-04:00

Considering Washington Square Park was fenced off and under construction during the vast majority of my time in New York City, it was with some envy that I saw this photo of the Occupy Wall Street protests pouring out around the arch:

Tagged by Ishmael Khalidi

Since leaving New York City, I missed an earthquake, a hurricane, and a legitimate longstanding protest movement. I have no legitimate right to feel jealous, but nothing anywhere near as exciting happened during my tenure there. The Yankees won their twenty-seventh title in 2009 and had a parade. Consider me unimpressed.

Autumn in the Heartland

2011-10-12T15:06:00.000-04:00

Sure, simply walking outside to take pictures forces my nostrils to close shut and my sinuses to tingle, but Iowa, for all it does to make me feel blue, can look pretty in the fall:

Farewell to Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T01:56:00.000-04:00

Considering my station in life, the death of Steve Jobs doesn't affect me. That said, as an Apple convert, he will be missed. From Pixar to iPods, Steve Jobs knew how to make technology cool. Sure, he ran his company like an autocrat and he sold billions in overpriced electronics, but there's a lot to be said for sexy looking consumer electronics that just work.

And clearly society agrees. Tom Pappalardo put up a fantastic post about how Steve Jobs' techno toys have ruined comics. For a simple cartoonist, Steve Jobs turned drawing a simple phone or music player in a nightmare.

He definitely changed the world, and he'll be missed.

Jay Carney's Rhetorical Fail

2011-10-03T21:46:00.000-04:00

First noted by Robert Murphy, this clip of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney being taken to the woodshed by ABC's Jake Trapper is remarkable:

video platform video management video solutions video player

I have plenty of thoughts on the legal and political ramifications of killing American citizens that I've become too wary of posting on-line, but this back and forth is a colossal rhetorical fail by the White House's master of spin.

Effective public speaking often encompasses a good deal of BS and self-contradiction. It's all about the rhetorical flourish and overwhelming your audience. Watching this, it's obvious Mr. Carney was sent out to defend a talking point which doesn't stand up upon any real scrutiny: basically, Al Awlaki was a bad guy because of all this obvious evidence we won't share. What's truly tragic about this performance is that Mr. Carney manages to fumble that mess of a talking point in single sentences rather than the exchange as a whole.

Regardless, the Obama Administration should have given Mr. Carney more than a talking point. He desperately needed some debate prep.

The Unemployment Chronicles, Part II: The Facebook Exile

2011-10-03T21:18:00.003-04:00

As someone who came of age while Facebook creeped across the country, there's a strange expectation that I'm supposed to "get" social media, to feel at home "liking" things across the internet. The problem, of course, is social media thrives upon sharing every little thing, and when one's unemployed, best friends with a whiny dog, and otherwise stuck, there's nothing really worth sharing.

Subjecting myself to the wonders of social media in my state only reminds me how little I have going on. Especially as I compare myself to all those wonderful "friends" I'm tracking, distant acquaintances who are busy having kids, getting engaged, and lining up not one, but two federal clerkships.

So it was with some dismay that I read about Facebook's next evolution in its quest to conquer the internet. Mark Zuckerberg has made no secret of his desire to have everyone share everything all the time:

All your stories, all your life . . . No activity is too big or too small to share.

As Gizmodo's Mat Honan points out, that's all well and good when users are choosing to share everything. The excessive sharing may be totally unnecessary, tasteless even, but it remains the user's choice. Thus, since my unemployment, I've abandoned Facebook. I keep getting tagged in things, sent messages and notices, and largely ignore all of it.

But Open Graph, Facebook's next initiative, aims to force everyone and everything across the internet to open up and share itself, using Facebook of course.

Facebook's creep across the internet has been relentless, "like" buttons proliferate, but as the web--and the services it offers--become tied ever more closely to Facebook, the more I want to just shut everything down. Just this week my favorite online magazine, Salon, decided to offer the "feature" of tying it's commenting system to one's Facebook account.

To Zuckerberg, this is all a great feature of social:

I think they’ll be signing up pretty clearly because they want their friends to be able to see this stuff. . . . our belief is that people own their data and they should be able to share it or put it wherever they want.

Using Facebook, of course, where all of the data I supposedly own gets saved and processed (and shared with Facebook's partners) until the internet gets turned off.

The thing is, I don't want to be an open book. Mark Zuckerberg has convinced himself that the future is more and more personal transparency, openness and honesty. I don't exactly want to be an open book, let alone open to all my friends and the internet about my book reading habits during my shameful unemployment.

Bill Maher and the Republican "Job Creator" Meme

2011-09-25T15:16:00.001-04:00

On Friday, Bill Maher took a sledgehammer to the oft-repeated Republican mantra that the wealthy are, in fact, merely "job creators." Discussing how infamous Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino made $5 million last year, Maher argued that if he has to pay higher taxes, it won't somehow create fewer jobs:

It will mean a tiny fraction of money will go to pay for the government that actually keeps him alive. The EPA that contains he oil runoff, the Postal Service that delivers his body wax, the Bureau of Weights and Measures that weighs his dumbbells, The Centers for Disease Control that provides a steady supply of penicillin, and the military who keep the Taliban away, because if a single human proves that America is asking for it, you’re looking at him.

But somewhere it became Republican orthodoxy that the wealthy are the only ones who can save our economy, if only they weren't being strangled, as House Speaker John Boehner puts it, "by uncertainty from the constant threat of new taxes, out-of-control spending, and unnecessary regulation from a government that is always micromanaging, meddling, and manipulating."

How anyone can believe that taxes, government spending, and regulation are to blame is lost on me, and it should be lost on anyone if he or she stops to think about it for a moment. I'm hardly an expert on economics, but the real problem is clearly one of demand--or rather, a lack thereof. It isn't the wealthy "job creators" that are facing uncertainty, it's everyone else:

As Nicole Belle so-succinctly writes, average people do not know "if they'll be employed next year. People are living with upside down mortgages. Their real wages have remained stagnant, unlike these CEOs and hedge fund managers. In short, consumers are nervous and unwilling to spend money they think they might need for the rainy days ahead."

John Boehner does not live in this world. His jobs plan reflects this. An epidemic of foreclosures, consumer debt, and non-existent demand combined with a precarious international economic climate has no place in the formulation of a political response. The Republican mantra never changes: taxes and regulation are to blame for everything.

Of course, this omits the simple fact that the economy has been hammering average, non-job creators for years. Ezra Klein notes that the Republican jobs plan is not a response to a cyclical downtown but rather doubling down on traditional Republican talking points:

But it’s not just that you could read this jobs plan without knowing the financial crisis ever happened. You could read it without knowing the past decade ever happened... [I]f lower taxes and less regulation was such good policy, then George W. Bush’s economy would have been a lot better. But under Bush, Republicans cut taxes on business and on investors and high-income people and they didn’t add many regulations and that business cycle was the first one in the post-war period where the income for a typical working class family was lower at the end than at the beginning.

And helping out the wealthy yet again isn't going to solve anything, but it may make the Situation better off.

Inspirational Elizabeth Warren

2011-09-23T14:12:00.002-04:00

It may be old news now, but I feel it my civic duty to share Elizabeth Warren's spot-on statement about "class warfare." In this age of Teakonomics and astoundingly irresponsible financial overlords, Elizabeth Warren has been one of the few loud, articulate, and passionate voices for social contract. Politicians not named Bernie Frank simply don't say these sorts of things anymore:

You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

I'd love to see a sensible "libertarian" response, because I'm not sure one exists anymore.

Friday Links!

2011-09-23T14:05:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure what it says about my dwindling internet reading habits or general apathy towards life, but Friday Links has devolved into a twice monthly event it appears:

So after allowing hackers to steal its members' credit card data, shutting down its network for a month, Sony has decided to change the Playstation Network's terms of service abrogating members' rights to file a class-action suit because, golly gee, it "benefit[s] both the consumer and the company by ensuring that there is adequate time and procedures to resolve disputes." Right.
Meanwhile, my lefty tendencies are encouraged by several well-written posts by the Populista.
The new "Charlie's Angels" is a pretty awful television show, but NPR's Linda Holmes explains why it is so much worse than awful.
I like Richard Epstein; I wish I had his academic success.
Last weekend's abrupt reveal that Netflix was ~~abandoning~~ spinning-off its dominant DVD-mailing service was widely panned. IP attorney Kenan Farrell details how the Qwikster rebranding presents a number of trademark concerns.

Detroit International Bridge Company co-opts Tea Party for one man's gain

2011-09-18T16:52:00.000-04:00

A curious commercial by the Detroit International Bridge Company keeps popping up on local television. The spot claims that dastardly Michigan politicians are trying to waste $2 billion in taxpayer money to build another "bridge to nowhere."

While the commercial would have viewers believe it is the effort by a concerned group of citizens to stop a government boondoggle, it turns out the "Detroit International Bridge Company" is just a front for billionaire Manuel Moroun. Mr. Moroun owns and operates that Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. As it turns out, Mr. Moroun's private ownership of the bridge grants him a de facto monopoly over one of the country's busiest commercial traffic routes.

So when his commercial proclaims "we don't need [another bridge]," no one should take that statement as face value since we do need Mr. Moroun's bridge. And Mr. Moroun's ownership of the crossing has proven quite lucrative for him.

Currently, the eighty year-old bridge is clogged with traffic. Mr. Moroun insists that traffic is down by half since 2000 and construction of a new bridge would leave him unable to pay his bills. Of course, much of the decline in traffic was due to the collapse of the Detroit auto industry and has rebounded since. Further, the decline hasn't stopped Mr. Moroun from planning how own brand-new bridge...right next to his current one.

If anyone wants an example of how the Tea Party mentality laid waste to effective public policy, Mr. Moroun's campaign to keep his bridge monopoly is it. With assistance from the Koch brothers, Mr. Moroun has effectively "co-opted some of the Tea Party movement" and made his bridge a case of "free enterprise versus big government," making governing Republicans terrified of opposing him.

Indeed, watching Mr. Moroun's commercial, the appeal to the Tea Party mentality is obvious. Viewers would believe any new bridge would merely be another case of excessive government waste. The truth, however, is that this appears to be the case of one man's "free enterprise" standing in the way of everyone's economic progress.

The new bridge's biggest advocates are the state's Republican executive and a coalition of local businesses and the Big Three automakers. As Michigan's lieutenant governor puts it: "Everyone wants a private bridge. The question is, do they want a private bridge for one politically active family with exclusive access to a monopoly?"

There's a question that goes utterly unaddressed by the Detroit International Bridge Company.

Friday Links!

2011-09-09T23:59:00.001-04:00

Like most things as of late, I haven't been keeping up with posting my favorite Friday links. Hasn't helped that aside from job postings, I haven't really been reading much of anything not on a printed page. But, hey, I stumbled onto some fun Tumblrs this week, and I'm too lazy to add them to my blogroll:

Eyegasms: profanely titled, beautifully presented.
P.O.O.P.T.: photographs of commuters, passed out on public transportation. I miss New York.
Weather Boner of the Day: combines my love of photographing clouds with really great photographs of storm clouds.
Here's an amazing panorama of one of said storm cloud images: lightning and fireworks in one shot!
A Tumblr of terrible Rob Liefeld artwork. Rob Liefeld was a huge comic book artist in the early Nineties, known for drawing big guns and bigger boobs. As a tween, I thought his art was the bomb--or whatever euphemism meant "totally cool" back in the day--but time and basic knowledge of anatomy has not been kind to that assessment.
Also, I had hoped to comment on the end result of the DC Comics' relaunch, but Matt Seneca at Death to the Universe does a better job. And talks other important things, as well.
Finally, J.M. Henderson moves home with Mom and Dad, and it seems to be working out better for her than me.

The Unemployment Chronicles, Part I

2011-09-09T01:02:00.000-04:00

Tonight was the President's "job speech" before Congress, a momentous address that is somehow supposed to bring the people hope and to promise change. Twiddling my unemployed thumbs, waiting for the President to get off the screen so my Green Bay Packers might play, I wasn't much impressed. Infrastructure improvements and job training don't much help the unemployed law school graduate.

I haven't been writing much at all since I finished the bar exam, despite having more than enough time on my hands and having more than a few interesting things to share my insignificant thoughts about. It is an interesting phenomenon that merely "being busy" gives one the energy to take on ever more pursuits, while the opposite, a life spent ~~begging~~ applying for jobs and walking a little dog, keeps a man silent and subdued. When someone isn't valuable enough to take on at a firm for free, one has a hard time finding the enthusiasm to share his ideas about the world.

I'd be lying if I said any of this was part of the plan. To be in my late twenties? Out of law school, with sadly limited employment prospects?

The situation is humbling, humiliating even. It has changed how I comprehend the future, what's possible, what's probable. Maybe that's a good thing? One of my oldest and dearest professors wrote me the following:

The only help I can offer is to point out that your enormous concern with yourself, that solipsism, stands between you and the world. The games, the pop icons, even the attitude towards others, suggest a refusal to get outside yourself, and there are times when you sound like a trapped onanist. Some of that springs from the fact that you have been sailing along on an assured income, an indulgent family. Maybe you need to get to work and change your milieu entirely; then your journal, or weekly musings, would become a register of the Other. Were you in the UK, I'd set you onto being a 'duty solicitor', one of the poor bastards that have to contend with stuffy, incenses magistrates bent on sending the local rioters to the hoosegow for as long as possible. Then you'd stop swanning around and you'd have no time to spend on your own concerns; you'd be forced to look at the awful conditions some people (mainly young and deprived) have to cope with. For surely the law is about Justice, and people like you are needed to ensure that Justice is not made ridiculous.

Alas, if the entire experience of law school has taught me anything, it is that Justice is perhaps very much ridiculous. Oddly, however, as humiliated and valueless as I feel these days, I still somehow feel better than I did in law school. Go figure.

For once, I do not mean to complain. As they say, things could be worse. Aside from my admittedly indulgent parents, the silence of the cornfield can be a refreshing change of pace from the streets of Manhattan, that's for sure. There are so many so much worse off than I, but I cannot help but think that a real kick in the ass is what I actually need.

Leaving Acting for Law School?

2011-08-29T01:15:00.000-04:00

Actress Courtnee Draper announced at PAX Prime this weekend that she quit acting to go to law school. Whether you know who Ms. Draper is or not, you have to wonder how someone can have a semi-successful decade-long acting career, become so disillusioned, and determine that law school is the better option.

Perhaps the mass migration of actors into the halls of our hallowed law schools is for the best. I'm unsure Ms. Draper is interested in the pursuit of justice or merely contributing to effective corporate governance, but I can support outing law school for the theatrical farce it really is. Moot court competitions aside, the melodramatic misery of a law student is the role of a lifetime.

Concrete Jungle Shots

2011-08-22T19:23:00.000-04:00

Studying for the bar largely ruined my dreams of getting a lot of time this summer to photograph New York, but I did get to take a few snapshots before packing up my camera:

Manhattan

After the Storm

Who ya gonna call?

Broadway Morning

Tickets!

West Side Sunset

Midtown Afternoon

Midtown Sunset

Movin' on Out

"Adam" (or a typical afternoon in Union Square)

Coney Island Lights

Flat Iron Building

Pruning on the Highline

How the West Was Lost

2011-08-22T19:08:00.000-04:00

Unemployment is a great way to lose one's motivation to do much of anything, but I thought Felix Salmon's post on institutional legitimacy was worth sharing. If I understand him, Salmon's point is that citizens of the western world are rapidly losing faith in their governments and, as a result, the glue holding western society together is coming undone:

It looks increasingly as though we’re entering Phase 2 of the global crisis, with 2008-9 merely acting as the appetizer. In Phase 1, national and super-national treasuries and central banks managed to come to the rescue and stave off catastrophe. But in doing so, they weakened themselves to the point at which they’re unable to rise to the occasion this time round. Our hearts want government to come through and save the economy. But our heads know that it’s not going to happen. And that failure, in turn, is only going to further weaken institutional legitimacy across the US and the world. It’s a vicious cycle, and I can’t see how we’re going to break out of it.

Whenever someone asks me how I could rebel against my conservative upbringing and become ::gasps:: a liberal, my response ultimately rests on the notion that in the current political climate a liberal outlook is the only one that admits each of us is but one small member of a larger society. Republican rhetoric thrives on the idea that Americans are a self-reliant people, taming the frontier, and thus, government or "elites" are nothing but an impediment to these idealized frontiersmen.

Just listen to Governor Perry's solution to what ails us:

"The answer is we're going to cut the taxes, we're going lower the regulations, we're going to get the lawyers out of our business and we're going to get America back working again," Perry said.

That sounds wonderful, but as Salmon might put it, anyone really believe in their head that lower taxes, deregulation, and closing courtroom doors will really make everything alright? I sure don't.

Whitewashing Personal History

2011-08-12T17:36:00.000-04:00

I used to treasure notes. The sorts you'd pass in class. Post-its. More often cards or hand-written letters from friends and family. Even once AOL became the primary outlet by which one got mail, I was always thrilled to get a postcard--or have someone leave me a post-it on a yearbook computer when an email would suffice. Guys with their chicken-scratch penmanship; girls with the bulbous letters and dots.

So it shouldn't surprise anyone that I kept most of these things. In my parents' attic sits many letters, with envelopes, from old birthdays, weddings, and the whole "going away to college" event. The thought of maintaining a tangible memory, something to physical hold, was comforting even if the last time I read any of these notes, I only really noted that someone substituted an "it's" for and "its."

Obviously, how we communicate with each other has dramatically, traumatically changed in the past decade. It's the whole Shortification of Content situation. Birthday cards have regressed into meaningless Facebook messages. That said, a number of my friends seem to be as remarkably attached to the written word as I am. Or, I should say, I was.

As I have been cleaning out my apartment, I have once more come face-to-face with the many many postcards, letters, and cards sent to me these past three years. My initial impulse was to sort them, stack them, and gingerly stuff them into a corner in preparation of conserving them in the parents' attic for who knows how long.

Then I opened a few letters. Predictably, most of the written words in this current collection are all of the "good luck with law school" variety. Reading a random card attempting to serve as a pick-me-up during the doldrums of 1L year, I pondered over whether I really needed to keep this. Moreover, I wondered if I even wanted to keep it.

Several weeks ago, I took a visit to the Morgan Library, which has a wonderful collection of old correspondence and an exhibit even on "lists." These sorts of things fascinate me and perhaps are part of the reason I've tended to chronicle so much of my personal history. I doubt any of my lists or correspondence will ever be worthy of display in a glass case, but how else will I compile my memoirs? (I cannot suppress a chuckle at the audacity of that statement.)

But I very much didn't enjoy law school. Frankly, I don't wish to remember it and I don't think I need to. I've emerged from these past three years as a man without a home. Aside from my parents' attic again, I have no place to maintain this ever-growing mass of tangible memory. So I threw out my birthday cards. I threw out the post cards. I reread the more intimate letters and lit them on fire.

I wonder if this means I've gotten over my love of the written word. Looking over some of these once-treasured documents, I couldn't help but think a text message with a picture might have sufficed. This mere thought was greatly troubling to me, however, so instead, like so many other things, I'll chalk this episode to my general disdain for law school. Of course, I often imagine that the sudden deletion of all 7,500 of my emails might also be liberating. After the shock of losing six years of correspondence and contact information, at least I'd be a new man. Plus, all those law-related messages would vanish into cyberspace as well...

Friday Links!

2011-08-05T00:01:00.000-04:00

Much easier to browse the internets than to pack. Oy! I keep forgetting how remarkably unfun packing up all one's worldly possessions can be.

Matt Bailey uses analytics to explore how Star Trek red shirts can best survive trips to alien worlds and finds some interesting results.
Kazakhstan is taking a page from the Dubai-book of building for its newest shopping mall.
Keith Olbermann may be susceptible to hyperbole but his Special Comments tend to make powerful points, e.g., his take on the debt deal hypocrisies.
Nate Silver illustrates how pointless it is for politicians to crow about the Great Recession being over.
Superheroes, supervillains, and the law: how did it take me so long to discover Law and the Multiverse?
My dalliance with the literary world revealed on somebody's random blog post.

Executive Power in America

2011-08-01T03:14:00.000-04:00

If the Obama presidency, following on the heels of the Bush Administration, has shown us anything, it is that in the realm of foreign affairs, the power of the presidency is apparently limitless. Congress has shown absolutely no stomach for reining in the presidency. For any classical liberal, it's terrifying how much the Executive is able to get away with anymore.

The bigger problem, of course, is that the Executive's domestic leadership over the past decade has been strangely lacking. George Bush had a number of remarkable legislative defeats and arguably, the major turning point in his presidency was his Administration's callous attitude in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Similarly, President Obama emerges with a "victory" in the debt ceiling fight that is nothing more than a political catastrophe, as Paul Krugman puts it. "The president got rolled," The Washington Post reports.

Three months ago, President Obama was able to command the national attention by announcing that he had brought the people the head of Osama bin Laden. Last week, he gave an address so timid and ill-considered that Jon Stewart pondered whether the Commander-in-Chief had officially quit.

These domestic failures make for poor campaign talking points, so like the presidents before him, President Obama will likely seek more "victories" abroad. Alas where President Clinton did that via trade deals and multilateral accords, America is in a much more unilateral state of mind these days.

Either way, America very much needs its Executive to reorient its priorities: more domestic leadership and fewer endeavors in the name of national security.

An Ode to the Bar Examination

2011-07-29T22:48:00.000-04:00

Tuesday morning, a mass of anxious human existence seven thousand strong filled the Javits Center for the honor, the privilege of sitting for the New York bar exam. I have been hesitant to write about preparation for the bar exam for fear that my negative tendencies would make every post some predictable complaint after another.

But here's the thing: putting aside the chaos and supposed magnitude of sitting for a bar exam, I had fun taking the bar. Like the LSAT and like most of law school, the bar has no real relationship to the practice of law. Still, take away the high stakes, and it's really just problem solving and opportunity to actually learn (and write) black letter law for once.

Certainly, it isn't all fun. The preparation can be mind-numbing, but even that was in many ways more rewarding than some of my basic law school courses--which I hope to discuss once I have recovered some sleep. The actual bar examination is an exercise is combatting anxiety, incompetent proctors, and strangely inconsistent rules and regulations. Further, my inability to keep down food while test-taking left me utterly starving during the three days in which I took the New York and Massachusetts bar examinations. (Why two? Why not!)

Everyone I've spoken with since the exam is over has congratulated me on this "feat," asked whether I'm "relieved" it's over with. All my buddies' status updates reference drinking all the legal knowledge of them. Me? Like the drama of law school, I feel like miseries of the bar exam is much more hype than substance.

From one perspective, a bar examination can be a colossal amount of fun. Any exam is, at a basic level, an opportunity to show off one's capacity to work out puzzles. Most exams have a rigid curve, a rigid benchmark for excellence. This is where the high stakes of an exam come from. But the bar is a very different beast. It is, I've been constantly reminded, a minimum proficiency exam. There are none of my once-beloved "A"s to be found. The ability of everyone else in the room is irrelevant--there is no curve to be set.

The high stakes surrounding the bar examination come from the ostensible desire to formally enter into the practice of law, the two months of non-stop prior preparation, and certainly, the tens of thousands of dollars worth of education and hundreds in fees spent simply to sit for the exam. However, if one in any way enjoyed learning law, the bar exam is really just a big game.

Each new question brought a smile to my face, as my mind raced to figure out if it was a property question I might comprehend or some contracts question wherein there was no hope. Facing an obviously important issue I knew no legal rule for, I made up my own rule based upon my personal sense of justice, chuckling to myself as I imagined a poor grader sifting through my ideas of what good faith in a contract meant.

By the time the Massachusetts bar exam was over, I was raring for more. Hopped up on caffeine, pounding back Tylenol and generic Tums like candy, I would have happily flown even to California for more! Bring on every jurisdictions, I say!

I imagine most people would find this attitude perplexing. More bar? More legal regurgitation? The way I see it, I will never, ever again possess so much legal knowledge as I do right this moment. For the past few weeks, everywhere I look I see contracts and crimes. I dream of secured transactions and strict liability. A day later, my outlines gone, I can already feel it slipping away. Soon most of it will go to rest in the part of my brain that remembers logic games, calculus, and complex chemistry.

Obviously, should the painful boom hammer fall on me this November and I pass neither bar, I will be singing a different tune.

Everyone assures me that if I will always be able to look up or relearn everything once more, but the reacquisition (and in this case re-reacquisition) of knowledge is seldom as enjoyable as learning it the first go around. So I am sad that my bars are done, not relieved. There is nothing to congratulate me on either: I completed two minimum proficiency examinations.

And, as I imagined, any satisfaction I may have at being "done" with my legal education is dwarfed by the sense that my station in life is utterly precarious at the moment. For one, I need to rid myself of my increasingly bulbous gelatinous shape. After the bar, I found myself picking at roasted corn and lettuce leaves with a surprising amount of relish.

Friday Links!

2011-07-29T22:30:00.002-04:00

Just a few links. Been busy this week.

Audrey Watters wonders whether students should use pseudonyms online, especially since Google+ requires real names. And my real name is Overdressed Anarchist, you know.
Also, according to the ABA, big law firms still have a general aversion toward blogging. Hey, hire me and I can change that!
This Tumblr blog capturing the many highs and many many lows of the Maury Povich Show is simultaneously tragic and mind-bendingly hilarious. I have no idea what these sorts of programs say about American society. None at all.
PerSquareMile is a fascinating read about how humans use the earth's space. A clever old post from January shows the size of a hypothetical cities which hold the entire global population based on the population density of New York and other metropolitan hot spots.
A tragicomic illustration of the Post-Graduate Degree Flowchart.

Throwing away my bar knowledge...

2011-07-26T17:45:00.000-04:00

So much evidently important legal information, staring at me while I sleep, now consigned forever to the bottom of a trashcan.

Testing Procedures

2011-07-25T16:17:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow the vaunted bar exam begins, and all day I have been running into and talking with people at various stages of pre-test anxiety. One guy couldn't comprehend how he'd survive being without his phone for six hours (what has become of our society?). Another was concerned with how he was going to grab lunch.

Me? I tend not to get nerves until I commence the long march to where ever the test is being held. I tend not to sleep well before exams, but I tend not to sleep well period. But I have developed a few tics in the lead-up to an exam.

First, I cannot eat a damn thing. Some people need to have breakfast. Lunch. A snack. If I so much as a have a bite of cereal, I get indigestion. I have no clue when my body started reacting to test-taking stress like this, but no matter the stomach-rumbling or desire for food I might think I have, eating any type of food on test day is a recipe for disaster.

Second, I like to buy a brand new mechanical pencil. This started when I realized I lacked a pencil fifteen minutes before a German exam I was unprepared for. I bought the most expensive mechanical pencil I could find at the convenience store, nailed the test, and have somehow felt compelled to buy new for every pencil-requiring test since.

Third--and this is pretty common I'm sure--I don't talk about tests with anyone on the day of the test. I realize people like to vent their frustrations by spewing forth their confusions about essay this or question that, but not me. These days I have a hard time even reviewing my mock tests. I take it, realize I am right or wrong, and forget it. It's not as if any exam I've taken in the past...decade has really been about "learning" from the test. They ain't iterative like grade school spelling tests. It's all about the result.

And when it comes to the bar, I get my results in November. So the way I see it, this week is all about not eating until Thursday, buying an expensive new pencil, and never speaking about this experience ever again.

Best of luck to the billions upon billions of foolhardy law graduates across the country joining me on this quest.

Farewell to LexisNexis...and the white MacBook

2011-07-23T17:34:00.000-04:00

During the first week of law school, all eager 1Ls are introduced to LexisNexis and Westlaw, the two preeminent online legal research databases. They're simultaneously both essential to success and utterly horrible to use. The two companies compete eagerly to get students hooked onto their respective platforms and, thus, offer a rewards program for every search and tutorial a student might do.

Me? While any number of friends swear by Westlaw, I got hooked on LexisNexis for lack of a better term. During my three years of law school, I slowly collected a meager amount of points, never all that eager to cash them in considering the rewards program's miserly exchange rate. But all my points expire at the end of this month--combined with rapidly approaching bar exam, the end of my free use of LexisNexis makes me feel like the sun has utterly set on my law school career.

After a few moments perusing the Lexis gift catalog, it quickly became obvious that Amazon gift cards were the best possible value. Everybody loves Amazon, so I don't feel too bad about having my reading needs covered for the next few months just for the pleasure of conducting three years of online research.

But for a brief moment, I did a price comparison. For 16,120 points, one can get a $250 Amazon gift card. For 21,350 points, one can swing a brand new 8GB Apple iPod Touch. Of course, that model of a Touch currently costs $230 from Apple (only $210 from Amazon!), so somehow LexisNexis is pocketing a lil'extra for your pleasure--the exchange rate on rewards programs is never good.

Anyway, this brief diversion both from studying or being productive, led me to the Apple Store to look at all the fun new electronics I cannot afford, gift card or no. There I quickly noticed the ol'white $1000 MacBook was no where to be found.

It turns out with the recent price-cut to the MacBook Airs that Apple has discontinued its classic white notebook just this week.

Considering I got my white MacBook a week before the start of law school, the death of the MacBook sans Pro, sans Air is sort of sad. No more law school. No more LexisNexis. No more white MacBook. It's the end of an era.

Friday Links!

2011-07-22T00:01:00.011-04:00

In case you're one of the half-dozen people who live for my collection of weekly links, this will be the last set of links until at least after the bar examination.

Please stop telling me I'm going to pass the Bar. The sense of panic in this essay is palpable, so I can identify.
ComicCon starts this week. Peter Smith is not a fan.
But ComicCon does feature an energetic cosplaying, comic-book collecting, graphic designing gamer girl. I think I'm in love.
While I'm objectifying women, quite a few of my Community-loving friends passed along this risque GQ photoshoot of Alison Brie and Gillian Jacobs.
Comedies are rarely poignant or tragic, particularly if they're animated or aimed at children. I have always considered the fate of Fry's dog on Futurama to be the saddest thing I have ever seen I've seen in a laugher, but the final episode of Jim Henson's classic Dinosaurs may be more significant.
Taking time-lapse photography to the next level: manipulating images to make Los Angeles freeways appear empty.
Only 19% of Republicans believe President Obama would be Raptured. Though this poll doesn't show what percentage of Republicans believe in the Rapture, what exactly has President Obama done by Republican standards not to get Raptured anyway?
In China, if Apple won't build you an Apple Store, you just build it yourself.
NYU communication and marketing grad Hermon Raju's ranting declaration that she was "well-educated" predictably got a lot of play around school. Of course, subsequently, she's managed to erase all mentions of her from the internet except for her tirade and she's sought PR crisis-management. Video phones and Youtube: ruining the reputations of twenty-somethings everywhere!
And Jennifer Preston shares in The New York Times what everyone already knows: the internet is becoming a big hurdle to getting a job. I type this even as I am haplessly unemployed.

Friday Links!

2011-07-15T11:27:00.000-04:00

The stress is starting to get to me, but there's still time for Friday Links!

Heavily circulated this week: top twenty reasons you know you're studying for the bar.
According to one random study, NYU Law graduates have the worst standard of living. Joke's on me!
Gothamist has a set of photos from this year's second Manhattanhenge. Much more impressive examples than the first go-around, me thinks.
Dan Abramson's map of America as seen by a New Yorker: "New Yorkers have no sense of geography, which is fair, considering the world revolves around their city. As a New Yorker myself, I attempted to draw the map of the United States. As far as I know, it's 100% accurate."
Christina Trapolino says to stop treating Google+ like Facebook.
I am not sure it is fair to blame corporatism and corn subsidies for America's declining diets during the recession, but considering my general disdain for Iowa, I'll go along David Sirota's thesis for now.
The AVClub's Scott Tobias writes about how great Conan O'Brien is. Conan poses the very important question: who does order fish filets from fast food restaurants?
Kaley Cuoco provides a public service announcement regarding Slave Leia cosplaying. (By the by, isn't the new Youtube neato?)

500th Post Spectacular: U.S. v. Clemens Evidence Blunder

2011-07-14T17:00:00.001-04:00

This is evidently my five hundredth post since starting the blog a little over three years ago, and my mind is so addled by reviewing for the bar that I find stuff like this funny:

"I think a first year law student would know that you can't bolster the credibility of a witness with clearly inadmissible evidence."

So said U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton today while declaring a mistrial in the government's perjury case against infamous pitcher Roger Clemens.

The thing is that the average 1L might not know this. Evidence is rarely a required course and can almost never be in the average first year curriculum. As far as my mind can comprehend, I only sorta kinda learned this a month ago during a single day of monotonous lecturing. Still, the average AUSA probably should know this...

Tim Pawlenty loves his record

2011-07-11T03:15:00.001-04:00

I was able to catch yesterday's Meet the Press, featuring Tim Pawlenty playing second fiddle to Tim Geithner, and I am not sure his appearance was exactly what the political class is looking for. He has a sort of inherent blandness, which could be a strength considering the toxic political environment, but what strikes me is how utterly lacking in substance the man is--even as his big criticism of President Obama on MtP was his "soaring rhetoric."

By the midpoint of the interview, it became apparent to me that Governor Pawlenty wanted to emphasis his record for viewers. Astoundingly, aside from saying how great his record was a half dozen times, he whiffed anytime David Gregory asked him to elaborate:

MR. GREGORY: Where do you--can you name one area where you break from the Republican Party?
GOV. PAWLENTY: Being a successful leader. Again, I'm not running for comedian in chief, I'm not running for entertainer in chief. If people would like that, they should go to a Broadway show or Las Vegas.
MR. GREGORY: But honestly, Governor, to say I'm a successful leader does not distinguish you. Everybody claims that. That's argument, that's not fact. I'm asking you, bottom line, where would you--one area where you would break with the Republican Party?
GOV. PAWLENTY: Well, David, for example, over my time as governor, I got a lot of flak from the--all sides in the debate. One area would be I supported the minimum wage when I was governor. Some Republicans didn't like that. There are times where I differed with my party in other respects. But bottom line is, I've got a record, when you look at this, of accomplishment.

And what is this record of accomplishment?

GOV. PAWLENTY: David, I've got the record of toughness better than anybody else in this race. My goodness, I was the first governor in Minnesota's history to shut down the government. I set a record for vetoes. I took more money out of the budget using an executive authority than all the other governors combined in my state.

That's hardly substance and it is most certainly the opposite of soaring rhetoric.

Friday Links!

2011-07-08T00:01:00.001-04:00

The bar creeps ever closer. I am trying to cover up my increasing nerves by getting depressed over never experiencing tan M&Ms. Friday link time:

From a friend, a complete dossier on U.S. state mottos. I will admit to being generally surprised at the diversity and creativity of the various state slogans, though Texas' "Friendship" and Florida's national rip-off "In God We Trust" struck me as a bit silly.
Another friend sends me economist Kenneth Rogoff's commentary on how technology may solve income inequality. Of course, I suggested in response that by "equality" Rogoff must really mean "poorer."
TIME has a slideshow on the top ten things today's kids will never experience. I never got to experience tan M&Ms anyway, so clearly my childhood was wanting.
Kenan Malik writes about the failure of multiculturalism in Europe and finds absolutely no solution to the program.
Man tries to cash a cashier's check from his own bank and promptly gets thrown in jail for a weekend.
The once popular Deval Patrick penned a great Wash Post op-ed last week that was bold enough to suggest that "[taxes] are the price we pay for civilization." He explained how Grover Norquist suggested that one day he would make it impossible for "a Democrat [to] govern as a Democrat."
And Nate Silver suggests that day has arrived.
A conservative group in Iowa has put forth the "Marriage Vow" which manages to go after not merely gays but also Islam and Big Government. Because everyone knows the Koran and Social Security are as corrupting to heterosexual monogamy as multicolored flags.
Akihiko Yoshida's stunning artwork for Final Fantasy Tactics almost single-handedly encouraged me to buy a Playstation back in 1998. His artwork (and their corresponding games) have been favorites of mine ever since, and this awesome Tumblr is dedicated to showcasing the man's artwork.
Speaking of artistic inspiration, I stumbled onto this extensive list of artwork reviews. If you're an artistic type or simply looking for a classy Wall-E coffee-table display, I highly suggest perusing these reviews.

Google+ Impressions

2011-07-06T18:59:00.000-04:00

Considering the demand, I was lucky enough to snag a Google+ invite yesterday, and after looking around for a bit, I'm unsure what to make of the newest social networking darling. I think my thoughts are largely in line with Ben Parr's on Mashabe: the UI is gorgeous, the drag-and-drop circles is fun if potentially tedious, the video and chat options are intriguing, and the overall Google integration is impressive.

But with Facebook around, I'm not sure what the point of it is.

The allure of Facebook at this point is that everyone is on it: your friends, your enemies, your parents, and your favorite friendly neighborhood corporate entity. Certainly, Facebook is something of a gigantic popularity contest. One builds up a friends list and proceeds to share the ins-and-outs of his or her life for the assembled friends to "like" and comment upon. I didn't much enjoy this process the first time, and I'm hesitant to do it all over again on Google+.

Additionally, my initial impression of Google+ is that it wants to serve as something of a mass RSS feed, e.g., the "Sparks" feature, with a bigger emphasis on sharing and commenting on content from across the internet. This makes sense considering Google is a search entity while Facebook is more concerned with getting members to upload photos from their latest day in the beach.

Sharing is swell, but it almost feels like Google+ wants everyone to be de facto bloggers. Google+ wants its members to use it as an internet hub of sorts. For as open as it has become from its more exclusive origins, Facebook is still a separate entity from the greater internet.

The thing is: I have this blog. Somewhere (if you search hard enough) you can find my personal non-anonymized website. Maybe shifting all my content on Google+ is inevitable, but for now?

All my friends are on Facebook and all my thoughts will remain here. I'll keep playing with circles though...

Macy's Fourth of July Fireworks

2011-07-05T03:20:00.002-04:00

Ever since I arrived in New York, watching the Macy's Fourth of July Fireworks was on my list of things to do. Since most of this summer has been given over to self-loathing and bar preparation, I figured if nothing else I'd carve away time on the Fourth for the fireworks.

I am generally not the biggest fan of the Fourth of July. A day revolving around patriotic displays and outdoor activities? Hardly me. But since I had no social engagements to attend, I decided it was worth my while to seek out an optimum view for the fireworks. In New Jersey.

So once I steeled myself for a day long sojourn beyond the confines of New York City, I settled on the Hamilton-Burr Dueling Grounds as a place to set up camp.

Camp being a tripod, crappy folding chair, food stuffs (a bottle of Gatorade and a can of Pringles), and enough bar review materials to last eight hours in the sun.

And, of course, the happy couples:

Protecting People or Protecting Constitution?

2011-07-05T02:13:00.000-04:00

To note the United States' birthday yesterday, I wanted to share Steven Aftergood's post last week on the Federation of American Scientists' secrecy blog about Executive power:

As chief executive and commander in chief of the armed forces, the President obviously has responsibility for national security. But to claim that he has no greater responsibility than “protecting the American people” is a paternalistic invention that is historically unfounded and potentially damaging to the political heritage of the nation . . . . It is the constitutional order that the President is sworn to protect, even if doing so entails risks to the safety and security of the American people.

I am about to dive headfirst into a rapid constitutional law review for the bar examination, and my potent liberal tendencies enjoyed the sentiment.

Friday Links!

2011-07-01T17:58:00.000-04:00

Somehow I wasted a good deal of time on the internets this week, and aside from discovering the horrific depths of 4chan, nothing I read interested me (as opposed to pushed me toward giving up hope for the future). So the links are a bit light this week.

A married pair of Iowan photographers visited New York City last year, making me jealous with both their better quality 9/11 photos but also the fact they look like they had more fun than I did trekking out to Jersey to get lost in an industrial complex.
Gorgeous and horrifying photos of the eruption of the Puyehue volcano in Chile.
Russia's answer to Fox News and MSNBC actually sounds like entertaining television, and may well be more entertaining and more newsworthy to boot!
My friend's friend is an unemployed WASP in Georgetown. Like anyone facing prolonged employment, ala me circa 2006, he has started a blog.

The lack of links leads me to wonder why no one sends me links with the frequency I send them? Clearly my urge to share banal news items is higher than the national norm.

A High Level of Political Discourse in Media?

2011-06-30T14:31:00.000-04:00

When it comes to critical reporting anymore, Jay Rosen tweets that "the sweet spot is a mistake that allows the press to prosecute the error without sounding too political."

And then this morning I awake to news that TIME editor Mark Halperin got suspended from MSNBC (and slapped on the wrist) for calling the President a "dick." MSNBC promptly issued the following statement: "We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air."

Throwing around dicks on morning television may be crude, but any casual viewer of Morning Joe would question the high level of discourse with or without such language. The entire program is political inside-baseball, which is fine (and often entertaining), but it presents a problem for "journalism."

Greg Sargent writes it best:

Suspending Halperin only reinforces a phony definition of “civility” in our discourse, in which it’s unacceptable to use foul language and be “uncivil,” but it’s perfectly acceptable for reporters and commentators to allow outright falsehoods to pass unrebutted; to traffic endlessly in false equivalences in the name of some bogus notion of objectivity; and to make confident assertions about public opinion without referring to polls which show them to be completely wrong.

Indeed, watching Morning Joe is like being privy to the polite conversation at a wine-and-cheese party of our social betters. Coffee replacing wine, obviously. The back and forth is little more than fact-sprinkled small talk, and as a result, the actual analysis of the news is about as good as expected.

Originalism and Protecting Children (from Violent Video Games)

2011-06-27T19:02:00.000-04:00

Today's big albeit totally unsurprising news out of the Supreme Court is that the high court struck down California's law against violent video games. Kotaku's Stephen Totilo has a great summary of highlights from Justice Scalia's majority opinion, Justice Alito's concurrence, and the two dissents by Justices Breyer and Thomas.

Justice Thomas' dissent is remarkable for just how radical it reads to the modern mind:

In my view, the “practices and beliefs held by the Founders” reveal another category of excluded speech: speech to minor children bypassing their parents . . . . It would be absurd to suggest that such a society understood “the freedom of speech” to include a right to speak to minors (or a corresponding right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents.

If nothing else, Justice Thomas is ideologically consistent, moreso than any other justice. That said, as even Justice Scalia points out in the majority, this would allow the state to prevent children from hearing or saying anything absent parental consent. The result "could [make it] criminal to admit persons under 18 to a political rally without their parents’ prior written consent—even a political rally in support of laws against corporal punishment of children, or laws in favor of greater rights for minors."

This sort of bizarre result is the product of Justice Thomas' strict originalism and suggests all the more that a slavish reading of the Constitution according to the mindset and worldview of 18th Century WASPs is problematic for the governance of our modern pluralistic society.

(As a personal aside, I have to wonder why Justice Thomas also didn't dig deep to find out what was a considered a minor by the Founders. Certainly seventeen year olds were not minors two hundred years ago, so it seems strange to be restricting any speech to them now under an originalist theory anyway...)

Bang for the Ethanol Buck

2011-06-27T00:31:00.000-04:00

Busy inside with bar studying, this summer's blogging efforts have devolved mostly into posting some links each week. But I wanted to spend a moment on Forrest Jehlik's "energy-neutral" analysis of ethanol on Wired last week. A researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory, Jehlik seems to come down in favor of ethanol production, which is surprising in this day and age.

My grasp of the silence could be better, but I found myself highly invested in the ethanol controversy toward the tail end of college. My physics professor was convinced that ethanol was energy snake oil, and I became skeptical, as well.

Jehlik's piece has not remove my skepticism either. I had hoped to find some relevant criticism in the comments, but as usual, the internet let me down and most of the comments just argue about fuel mileage.

One thing Jehlik puts forth is that ethanol "delivers a positive energy balance of 8.8 megajoules per liter." If I had the time, I would like to find out exactly what this means. According to the great Wikipedia, conventional gasoline produces 35 megajoules per liter while ethanol produces 21.2 MJ/L. Numbers are misleading, and I have no general idea where everything comes together.

When I was reading up on ethanol back in 2006, the important number was the energy return on investment (EROI). As it stood then, the EROI from petroleum was approximately 17:1, i.e., one barrel of oil contained enough energy to produce an additional seventeen barrels. For modern society to run, we require an energy source that produces an EROI much greater than 1:1. Jehlik's number needs more context.

At the time I was informed on the matter, the EROI from petroleum was considerably less. According to one study last fall, this is still the case:

The EROI of corn ethanol that we calculated is lower than the 3:1 threshold, indicating that corn ethanol requires large subsidies from the general fossil fuel economy, and as a result, drains energy from the US transportation system.

I have a limited understanding of all the different metrics being proposed in this field, but for every study opposed to ethanol, one can find someone who supports the product. For example, Michigan State's Bruce Dale has been an opponent of the "net energy" argument against ethanol.

"In the real world," he argues, "the different 'qualities' of different energy carriers must be considered." Thus, he concludes that a single barrel of petroleum produces .85 barrels of gasoline when refined, while "in contrast, one barrel of petroleum 'invested' to produce corn ethanol will give us about 20 barrels of liquid fuel on an equivalent energy basis—greatly extending supplies of petroleum."

Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I am unsure our blind faith in energy technology to find the way will ultimately keep us from a second dark age. But that may just be my crazy physics teacher talking...

Friday Links!

2011-06-24T00:01:00.000-04:00

I may finally be getting a handle on the whole work/life balance this week, actually learning some stuff for the bar and exploring parts of the city not once, not twice, but thrice! Links ahead!

The problem with the belief that Manhattan is somehow the center of the universe is that when Manhattanites are exiled to anyplace with sunlight all they can do is complain about everything under the sun.
Google Translate is destroying the internet it seems.
A police crackdown on drugs and violence in Union Square is causing all the regular troublemakers to migrate south to Washington Square, which will do wonders for my leisurely evening strolls in the park.
Photographer Jeremy Nicholl explains why last week's Stanley Cup riot kiss photo ain't all it's cracked up to be.
Kim Brooks criticizes liberal arts degrees. Questioning the value of an English degree is not new, but Brooks does it a particularly zippy manner, getting a dig in at law schools in the meantime. Second-guessing my liberal arts education goes hand-in-hand with evidence that turning twenty-eight seems to cause increased debt loads to diminish one's self-esteem. Go figure.
PolitiFact annotates Jon Stewart's PolitiFact segment. General conclusion: cable news lies a lot.
"Twenty things a slow day on the internet feels like." I am unsure the title really explains that this is basically only a collection of semi-disturbing animated GIFs, including a Sally Draper faceplant.
Microsoft is working on voice and gesture-based Kinect advertising. No one begrudges seeking new outlets for reaching advertising eyeballs, but I remain unconvinced anyone was really learning to learn more about Coca-Cola by waving and yelling at his television.

Molly Crabapple's Week in Hell

2011-06-19T03:29:00.001-04:00

As I review flashcards keyed to information on New York practice rules, I am having one of my regular desires to throw it all away and get back to some sort of creative pursuit. I have been feeling that artistic itch all evening, which only amplified upon reading about Molly Crabapple's Week in Hell.

The basic concept: Ms. Crabapple intends to celebrate her twenty-eighth birthday by locking herself in a room for a few days, drawing on the walls, and livestreaming the results to the world. As I am rapidly running toward my twenty-eighth birthday, I can only dream of having such a unique birthday. (I fully expect to spend my upcoming birthday, working at Target and wondering what's become of me.)

But back to Ms. Crabapple! This woman strikes me as the type of personality I wish I were. Abandoning art school one day to start her own doodling empire, she has developed a captivating sense of style that I can only describe as burlesque steampunk (with a healthy dose of tentacles). Anyway, I am flat broke, but I may dig deep to plunk down some money to watch her Week of Hell (during my Post-bar Year of Fail) and get an original piece of art.

Her sense of creative entrepreneurial spirit would inspire me, if I were inspirable at this point. More importantly, it is her business sense I wish I could emulate:

~ UPDATE ~

She even designs poster for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I think I am in love.

Friday Links!

2011-06-17T00:01:00.003-04:00

Life is much more exciting outside the walls of my bar-studying prison:

I've always dreamed of working in Washington, D.C. However, this Vanity Fair expose circa 2001, dredged up in light of the Weiner scandal, which details the pervasive twenty-something networking scene that seems to be the real "business" of the place suggests I might not do very well in the Imperium.
A friend tips me off to photographic journalist Steve McCurry's excellent photography blog.
How educated are our state legislators? Evidently, more educated than I thought. Smarter still, only 17.2% of our elected state representatives have law degrees.
Daniel Ellsberg suggests all the crimes engaged in by Richard Nixon to get back at the man for leaking the Pentagon Papers are now totally legal in our ever-growing security state. Meanwhile, Stephen Kohn laments our society's war on whistleblowers.
Meredith Small posits that young children should milk cows rather than attend kindergarden. Her idealistic sense of the economic value of farm life comes close to my nightmares of childhood in Iowa, but considering all my futile schooling, I cannot much argue against her thesis that "Western children are trained . . . to think about things as the entree to adulthood, and few contribute anything to the household economy."
Gothamist has a wonderful set of photos from the World War II "dimouts" in New York City. No Doolittle-esque raids on us, thank you very much!
ABC's Jack Tapper suggests the DNC's "highlight reel" of Monday's Republican debate is misleading. He may be technically accurate in the use of the term misleading, but Tapper's attempt to list off all the topics that considered made the debate more substantive does not really reflect what happened either:

I am usually wary of posting pure political propaganda, but since this attack ad actually features a number of the quotations I noted from the debate, what the hey?

Teaching American History in the Face of American Exceptionalism

2011-06-16T23:27:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week, the National Assessment of Education Progress released a report suggesting that only 12% of American high school seniors demonstrated proficient knowledge of U.S. history. As history was my very favorite subject as a child, this report has weighed heavily on me. Yes, I am a nerd per se, but why-oh-why do American students seem to care so little about our history?

The early takeaway was simply to blame No Child Left Behind or certification-happy teachers. Kevin Drum at MotherJones later concluded that the whole report was much ado about nothing, arguing that "something smells wrong here on a variety of counts." He chastised the arbitrariness of the report's standards and suggested the sample questions were more difficult than believed. (That said, I successfully answered all the sample questions for the 12th grade age bracket, and I am confident that result would have been the same a long ten years ago.)

My suggestion is that we simply provide no real reason for students to engage with American history. We largely delegate the teaching of our history to big, boring textbooks. Of all the many friends I have had that have moved into teaching, only one did it out of any love for passing on history. No, instead, science and math are the glamour subjects.

Once again, I feel like lauding James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, which really helped contextualize the sense of boredom I believe most American students get from our history. Distilling our history into bits of largely pro-American soundbites for students to learn through rote memorization will do nothing but ensure widespread historical ignorance--and factual mish-mashes like Sarah Palin's recent Paul Revere history lesson.

Maybe that means real history is largely immune from successfully transformation into a standardized test subject? I would put forth the notion that while high school students can be taught to avoid split infinitives and to solve for x, it is very difficult to make students care about a historical record that invariably ends with announcement of how exceptional America was, is, and always will be. There's no glamour in that.

Selling American Journalism

2011-06-13T19:13:00.000-04:00

The New York Times reported yesterday how TIME magazine has lent out its iconic cover for use as a poster for the new Call of Duty, which features the full-scale destruction of Manhattan. Yikes.

I am all for dynamic new methods of invigorating the American news media, but I am unconvinced how mock-posters of TIME in Gamestop stores does anything to convince people to buy the magazine. Indeed, the magazine's sole rationale for the project was to reach the coveted young men demographic. "This is where the boys are," Kim Kelleher, the magazine's publisher, was quoted as saying.

So after "the boys" experience blowing up cities and shooting a few hundred people online, they will be compelled to pick up an issue to read about the American economy? I remain skeptical.

In the process, while TIME is a part of a "cool" promotional campaign, the magazine becomes much harder to be taken seriously, unless it hopes to increase its coverage of video games and young men's activities, e.g., Maxim Magazine.

Friday Links!

2011-06-10T00:01:00.002-04:00

Oh, where'd the week go? Ah yes, studying procedure and partnerships, that's where!

This week marks the annual E3 expo, the video game industry's big information blowout, which I'm slightly ashamed to admit I've followed regularly since it kicked off in 1995. Destructoid has a hilarious look back at some of the more embarrassing moments of the event. My favorite remains Sony's disastrous press conference showcasing the Playstation 3 in 2006.

There were a number of tragically comic moments during the event, but I'm partial to the internet meme created by a demonstration of Genji. Moments after the game's producer extolled how the game was "historically accurate," featuring battles which "actually took place in Ancient Japan", he begins playing the game. "So here is this giant enemy crab," he says, evidently familiar with ancient giant crab land battles, which the player must flip over to "attack its weak point for massive damage."
And of course, E3 is such a big deal that a guy can dress up like Mario and get on the cover of The Wall Street Journal.
Who says video games can't be philosophically sophisticated? A Destructoid blogger explores how Silent Hill: Shattered Memories looks "at what defines a male and shatters those ideas. It’s game about emasculation. It’s a game that I and many men can relate to. It’s a game only men can fully understand." I know it humbled me.
Obeying one's husband and ensuring his sexual satisfaction is the key to marital bliss...so-says the "Obedient Wives Club" in Indonesia.
Not new by any means, but Tom Shone has a good profile of the prestige battle between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Hilarious that Lucas was, at one point, considered Spielberg's better. Oh how Jake Lloyd changed that!
My friend Agnes finds another way to make me detest Flickr. Flickr is just as much a vanity project as any Facebook album albeit with a gloss of professionalism (and perhaps fewer identical girl-digicam party shots).
ThinkProgress muses over what the ten years of Bush tax cuts could have paid for: hiring millions of new teachers and firefighters, sending millions of students to college, and retrofitting millions of homes to use renewable sources of energy. In the fact of this, Republican orthodoxy maintains that THAT guy in the White House is taxing the country to death even as federal tax burden is now less than it was during the reign of Republican saint Ronald Reagan.
It should go without saying that Anthony Weiner is an idiot.
NYU's own Richard Epstein wonders when federal pressure on states turns into ostensibly unconstitutional compulsion. Predictably, he thinks ObamaCare pretty much fits that bill.
John Abell thinks e-readers are still missing that special something. No disrespect to Mr. Abell (or to the value of a good physical book collection), but the piece is large on personal bias and small on legitimate criticism directed toward digital reading. Alas, I have a number of friends who seem to fall in the same boat, but an affinity for the printed word does not dismiss the convenience and space-savings provided by e-readers.

Tim Pawlenty v. U.S. Postal Service

2011-06-08T01:51:00.000-04:00

Supposedly "serious" Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty gave a truly fantastical speech outlying his economic policies yesterday. In the speech, he called for applying a "Google test" to government services, suggesting that if one can google an alternative "then the federal government probably doesn't need to be doing it." Nevermind the outrageousness of this suggestion, or the general voodoo science of his presentation, but his criticism of the U.S. Postal Service was particularly galling.

As a one time Postal Partisan of sorts, I will never comprehend how quick politicians are to target the Postal Service as some paradigm of bad lazy government. First off, as Bill Egnor points out, the Postal Service does not cost the U.S. taxpayer anything. In general, it's one of the most highly regarded – and visible – institutions of the federal bureaucracy, and pound for pound and dollar for dollar, it provides good value for its delivery services.

Pawlenty asserted that the Postal Service was "built for a time in our country when the private sector did not adequately provide those services." I'm not terribly sure by which metric Pawlenty measures adequacy, but private mail couriers were available (if limited) in the colonies. The admirable goal of a national post was, as USPS puts it, to ensure "that every person in the United States – no matter who, no matter where – has the right to equal access to secure, efficient, and affordable mail service."

Absent the Postal Service, many Americans today would not have such access. The sheer volume of business provided by urban areas helps to subsidize the provision of services to the still vast rural stretches of this country, which remain outside the business plan of UPS. For a bleeding heart liberal such as myself, I accept this state of affairs. The Postal Service remains quintessentially an egalitarian institution.

It is in vogue these days to look down upon the mail. Certainly, aside from the occasional care package and postcard, most of my correspondence is via e-mail, and most of my bills and statements come on-line. The Post Offices in New York City are cramped and worn down, the staff impersonal and cranky. Generally I lack any real need for postal services, and for me, while multitasking at ~~Kinko's~~ FedEx Office, FedEx provides the ideal "private" alternative. But my situation, though perhaps reflecting the mindset of a growing number of Americans, does not reflect that of our citizenry as a whole.

Further, as much as people of my ilk may have no need for a public Post Office, I am not the audience Pawlenty desires to court. Ironically, the audience of rural, Bible-thumping Republicans that make up Pawlenty's base are very much big fans of their local Post Offices.

For these people, an adequate private alternative has yet to develop. Further, aside from some public subsidy, there is little motivation for the FedExs and UPSes of the world to deliver the mail to smalltown America. The money lies in urban areas. Even today, a casual comparison of the cost of shipping a box from big ol'New York City to the middle of Iowa reveals that the U.S. Postal Service does it better...

Friday Links!

2011-06-03T00:01:00.001-04:00

People this week keep sending me stuff that's supposedly designed to help keep my bar-studying spirits up. It's not working. My life is a big black hole of law I'd never heard of until this week. The incessant headache and stress has limited this week's links:

MIT researchers have determined that landscape photography, my favorite, is the least memorable type of photography:
[Y]ou may want to cut some of the fluffy clouds [gasp!] and sunsets [double gasp!]. The study suggests that snaps containing humans, followed by things with human-like scale (like your photos of your Slurpee at 7-Eleven) are the photographs recalled by the viewer.
Cloudy sunsets forever, I say. Then again, this fond feedback I got from a good friend on my Manhattanhenge II shot may suggest chaotic human-emphasizing composition really is key:
The composition, the yellow cab, the GREEN light next to the orange sun, the guy in the yellow shirt, the beams of the taxi complimenting the beams of all the traffic signals, a few pedestrians stopping to look at what is, presumably, the sun, one pedestrian gazing at it mid-intersection, I love it.
Speaking of Manhattanhenge, The Atlantic's Wire blog has a photo gallery of Manhattanhenge images. Though I'm not super happy with how mine turned out, nothing they presented is much better, in my humble opinion.
JDOasis compares time in jail with employment as a lawyer. Convicts may be winning this battle.
After four years, numerous travails and delays, Washington Square Park has finally reopened. I never thought I'd be in New York long enough to see the day...
Fictional Libertarian hero Ron F'in Swanson says to grow a beard...to save the environment!

The DC Comics Reboot

2011-06-01T04:02:00.000-04:00

Big news in the comic book world yesterday when DC Comics announced it was "relaunching" its seventy-five year-old comic book universe this fall. As Alan Sepinwall points out, it remains unclear at this point whether this is a numerical reboot—picking up Action Comics number 900 can be a bit imposing— or whether this wipes the slate clean of decades of story continuity. Either way, this entire experiment does little to encourage me to get back into collecting comic books.

Like any teenage artist with geek tendencies, I had a comic book phase. Whether it was girls and a social life or not, I eventually gave up the habit. However, part of this the result of realizing that effectively following a super hero comic book series is an incredibly time-intensive hobby. Character cross-overs! Shared continuity across a universe of comic books. It's exhausting. Furthermore, the notion that the characters I had started following as a child would likely outlive me gave me a real sense of mortality at fifteen.

According to Dan DiDio, DC co-publisher, this initiative is "a chance to start, not at the beginning, but at a point where our characters are younger and the stories are being told for today's audience." Considering the anachronistic backgrounds of many of DC's classic golden age characters, a periodic update is a good idea. That's why the Superman that once fought for "truth, justice, and the American way" is becoming an international citizen of sorts in this month's Action Comics, although ostensibly this update will be wiped away this fall, as well.

It is more than apparent that despite the proliferation of comic book characters on the big screen, that the comic book industry itself is in sorry shape. The likely aim of this initiative is to allow casual readers to pick up a version of Batman that comes closer to the Dark Knight seen in theaters, instead of the mess of multiple Robins, Oracle, Huntress, and mobsters and nutjobs that populate the current comic. However, the problem with rebooting Batman for modern readers it that it effectively discards the investment longtime readers have made with the existing character and his story.

The summer comic hero popcorn flick is roughly analogous to the television procedural: a big bad is presented, a conflict is faced, and everything is wrapped up before the closing credits. However, comic books themselves are a profoundly serialized reading experience. The dilemma is that they present a serialized experience without end.

Wiping the slate clean lets you start over with a few new wrinkles—in Marvel land, Spider-Man went from being bitten from a radioactive spider to a genetically altered one—but the fresh start rarely sticks.

After creating multiple universes worth of Supermans, DC itself tried to simplify fifty years of history in the 1980s in Crisis on Infinite Earths. By 2005, DC had fully rebuilt its multiverse.

The very thing which makes comic books such a compelling (and time-intensive) hobby is the potential complexity of the story-telling. Creators constantly want to reintroduce "dead" characters and brings back parallel universes. To make matters worse (or more fun), comic book creative teams get juggled around, and year-to-year reading of an average series make for a very diverse reading experience.

Unable to keep up with it all, I eventually boxed all my comic books up and relegated them to a closet. I've subsequently picked up a trade paperback here and there, happy to get a reading experience with a beginning, middle, and end. Perhaps periodic reboots of these characters are a necessary evil—the price paid for the continuing relevancy of a character like Superman—but knowing the next reboot is just around the corner isn't much likely to get me to pick up a new issue, whether a paper copy or digital download.

Manhattanhenge II

2011-06-01T00:33:00.000-04:00

Tonight's encore presentation of Manhattanhenge was perhaps more underwhelming than last night's with the sun vanishing into a fog of smog. But hey, an hour some trek up to Union Square is one hour not spent pining over torts.

Sunset, 14th Street at Union Square

Manhattanhenge

2011-05-30T23:32:00.000-04:00

This weekend was my first ever summer in New York City and the first incidence of this year's Manhattanhenge. For those unawares, Manhattanhenge is the biannual period where the city grid aligns with the setting sun, allowing denizens on the island to actually witness a full sunset.

I've always wanted to see the thing, and I figured since Memorial day is an "off-day" for bar prep, I'd head over to the Tudor City Bridge near the UN to shoot down 42nd Street. I got waylaid studying torts, so by the time I climbed atop the bridge around five in the afternoon, it was already packed with serious photographers. Oh, the camera envy was unbearable! Bajillion dollar bodies and lenses! Expensive tripods and filters! The girl in the prime position, however, was packing a Canon Powershot point-n-shoot.

The remaining views down the street blocked by foliage, I decided to try my luck on 34th Street, settling on the intersection with First Avenue. And then I waited. Eventually more photographers showed up and the sun finally creeped into view at 8:08 pm, vanishing beyond the horizon five minutes later. I'd hoped to be bathed in sunlight, but since I was so far east and 34th Street curves down on the eastside, the five minute effect was almost underwhelming.

It was almost comparable to my experience in Constantinople this time last year: for a single photography, I walked miles and miles, in the heat, dripping sweat and without water. At least this adventure didn't stain my shorts or cost any money...

Friday Links!

2011-05-27T00:01:00.001-04:00

Bar review as begun. Friday Links keep away the pain.

Roger Hodge reviews Intern Nation, explaining how unpaid internships have distorted our labor markets: "[O]ffering or being compelled to work for free is a paradigmatic example of an unfair labor practice; it creates a toxic race to the bottom as ever more desperate workers compete with one another to drive wages down. The internship economy demonstrates that wages, like interest rates, are capable of dropping to less than zero."
Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson profiles Fox News' Roger Ailes, and it does not disappoint: "Ailes is certain that he’s a top target of Al Qaeda terrorists . . . . Once, after observing a dark-skinned man in what Ailes perceived to be Muslim garb, he put Fox News on lockdown. 'What the hell!' Ailes shouted. 'This guy could be bombing me!' The suspected terrorist turned out to be a janitor."
The unknown Vivian Maier produced some of the most compelling street photography I have seen.
The CDC provides survival tips for the Zombie Apocalypse.
Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk contributes to the discussion on cloud-computing, with an article that reads like an Apple press release.
"Backyard Modern Art Depiction of the Macho Man's Funeral." 'Nuff said.
I wish I could manage to photograph something as artistic as this sand dune in Namibia. More at National Geographic.
The Guardian compares President Obama's speech before Parliament with prior speeches by Presidents Clinton and Reagan. Meanwhile, Salon evaluates each applause line during Bibi's speech before Congress.
I'm calling it right here: the resurgence of 3D in movie theaters is eventually going to do some serious damage to the film industry. Movies that have no reason to be in 3D are being converted into the format to justify increased ticket prices, and the result is fewer traditional 2D showings and now, dimmer poor quality 2D showings at that.
And finally, for an even ten bullet points, this week's Cougar Town (which I have slowly warmed up to) went super meta. First, it featured Sam Lloyd as the same character he played in Scrubs, suggesting a shared universe. Second, Danny Pudi guest starred as his character Abed from Community, though he appeared as a self-aware extra. So that's two entirely different conceptual crossovers in one hour!

The End of Law School

2011-05-21T04:35:00.000-04:00

Early yesterday morning, I briefly awoke to find dark and rainy skies. I threw my comforter over my head and went back to sleep. When I came to, it was nearly noon and I had happily slept through my law school graduation.

Law school is done, and alas, I really dragged myself across the finish line. Oh how times have changed! Three years ago I could type the following with a straight face:

I thought getting into NYU was a big deal, but I fear avoiding perpetual embarrassment here will be a bigger matter . . . . I have higher expectations than dragging myself across the finish line. I'd like to feel good wasting money on a lacquered wood frame for my juris doctor when the time comes.

I have no idea where the physical piece of paper that represents my degree even is at this moment, and I am not sure I intend to put it in a lacquered wood frame anyway.

A couple friends wondered why I wasn't at graduation, or the concept victory lap at some village pub, and my only answer is I really did not feel much like celebrating. These past few weeks, a number of people have congratulated me on the "accomplishment" of finishing law school. Perhaps it is an accomplishment, but whatever lack of perspective I possess suggests it isn't.

Getting a job is an accomplishment. Graduating law school, for me, is merely a ticket to spend more time studying for the bar examination. Is that worth celebrating?

I still have "higher expectations" for myself, but at the moment, I haven't achieved any of them. So no, I don't feel like celebrating. I don't want to dress up in a purple gown. I don't want to commiserate about bar prep over beer I can't afford.

In some very haphazard respects, this blog was a three year chronicle of my time in law school. I am not sure it was a particularly pleasant one, however. Hopefully I won't find any further occasion to rant about the subject. Of course, I type that right as I'm about to head back to my very own law school to begin studying for the bar...

Who declares war anymore?

2011-05-21T04:16:00.000-04:00

Friday it was reported that President Obama had sent a letter to congressional leadership about our intervention in Libya. While he poignantly made no mention of the War Powers Act, which requires congressional authorization for the use of American forces within sixty days of their use, the President did suggest the importance of Congressional authorization:

Congressional action in support of the mission would underline the U.S. commitment to this remarkable international effort. Such a Resolution is also important in the context of our constitutional framework, as it would demonstrate a unity of purpose among the political branches on this important national security matter. It has always been my view that it is better to take military action, even in limited actions such as this, with Congressional engagement, consultation, and support.

That's nice that the President views Congressional engagement, consultation, and support as a good thing. Of course, the Administration hasn't done any of that with regards to our intervention in Libya.

More importantly, the President's letter says nothing of what should happen absent Congressional engagement, consultation, and, as here, an outright lack of authorization. As a practical matter, no one in this country can legitimately believe American involvement in Libya would stop even if Congress formally condemned that involvement tomorrow.

The shift in responsibility in warmaking from Congress to the Executive has made it entirely too easy to take this country to war. Certainly the Obama Administration can argue Libya is only a "limited engagement," but that really is not the point. Our foreign policy has become so reliant on force projection and an ever-present military role that a traditional conception of war and peace has become irrelevant.

And the only popular legitimacy to the entire enterprise is a choice between one of two people every four years. Hardly democratic!

Friday Links!

2011-05-20T03:25:00.001-04:00

Exams are over, bar prep begins in a week, so I can finally waste time surfing the interwebs once more! Yes, friends, Friday Links are back.

I am a big of Photoshopped television cast mock-ups, usually of the Last Supper variety, and The Office's send-up to Georges Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte" is particularly clever (if obviously Photoshopped). An interview with the photographer is on OfficeTally.
The War Powers Act appears to have died a most quiet death, by no less than "a president who had solemnly pledged, on the campaign trail, to put an end to indiscriminate warmaking."
A couple weeks ago, I gave The Good Wife a watch and quickly got hooked. A legal serial drama? In Chicago (though obviously filmed in New York)? With Alan Cumming? Mr. Big? And a sultry Indian? With Wire cameos left and right? How'd it take me two years to notice this show? (Answer: it's on CBS...after not one, but two NCISs.) This week Todd VanDerWerff suggests The Good Wife is the heir apparent to The Wire and Matt Zoller Seitz lauds the show's artistic sensibilities: "If this show were a 1950s movie, it wouldn't have played any moment of this sequence any differently. Its relaxed, slightly analytical style illustrates why 'The Good Wife' is a hit that crosses generational lines. The sequence is sexy not because it shows sex, but because the whole, complex exchange is shot and acted with delicacy and imagination." High praise indeed.
Speaking of television and tributes to The Wire, all week Vulture has been running a series of interviews with prominent television showrunners, including Wire-loving Parks & Recreation creator ~~Joe Tremendous~~ Michael Schur. Parks & Rec has come off one of the best single seasons of comedy ever, and it's fascinating that The Wire inspired Schur to populate Parks & Rec with more and more layers of characters.
Plucky local news team reports that Portal 2 is offensive to orphans...except it's not really and their entire "news" report takes the game out of context. Yet another asinine local news story about video games.
Interesting point of comparison: during the week I graduated from college five years ago, Boston experienced 9.49 inches of rain. Until some sunshine today, New York City has been pounded by four days of rain totaling upwards of 3.75 inches. I suppose that's an improvement?
Chris Taylor isn't buying cloud-based music yet. Some of my friends still swear by vinyl.
"Mac Defender" malware has been big news this week. I had the malicious offer pop-up when visiting Salon of all places on Tuesday. Who dreams up these computer viruses? And why are they always spamming people with pornography?
From gool ol'Davenport, hooligans are stealing seniors' Hoverounds. I realize I should not laugh at this sort of misfortune, but the local write up is just fantastic:

On Wednesday, Lurlene and her neighbors, who live in downtown Davenport, watched surveillance video of the man who took her motorized scooter out of the lobby and on a joyride.
"If I'd been sitting in a chair and he'd gotten me, oh wee. I'd have jumped out of this chair and I would have *&$% him up."
The Hoveround was found a few days later outside a Davenport bar. It was scuffed up and missing a few key components.
It still rides, but, not exactly straight.

The Dangerous Engine of National Security Secrecy

2011-05-17T01:18:00.001-04:00

Though I have a tax exam in eight hours, I find myself preoccupied with Jane Mayer's investigation into whistleblowers and our national security state in this week's New Yorker. I am hardly the first person to note the connection, but with the Supreme Court's refusal today to grant cert to Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., a decision by the Ninth Circuit dismissing a suit involving unlawful abduction, arbitrary detention, and torture based upon the state secrets privilege, the national security apparatus has effectively insulated itself from any broad-based public accountability.

What should be so alarming is that the state secrets privilege has, in effect, been married to the privatization of national security. As Adam Serwer writes, "you can't sue the government, you can't sue the private company that was involved, and frankly you can probably count on the people who helped facilitated it getting good jobs elsewhere in the same field." Thus, we live in an age where extraconstitutional activity is not merely accepted in the name of protecting the homeland, it's downright profitable.

At the same time, the Obama Administration's vigorous prosecution of government leaks threatens to hamper the public's ability not only to judge policy decisions but also to effectively police government behavior. As Mayer reports (via quotations from conservatives Jack Goldsmith and Gabriel Schoenfeld), the problem is how self-serving this war on whistleblowers actually is:

Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served in the Bush Justice Department, laments the lack of consistency in leak prosecutions. He notes that no investigations have been launched into the sourcing of Bob Woodward’s four most recent books, even though “they are filled with classified information that he could only have received from the top of the government.” Gabriel Schoenfeld, of the Hudson Institute, says, “The selectivity of the prosecutions here is nightmarish. It’s a broken system.”

Hilary Bok noted three years ago that when our system for overseeing and reporting government abuse becomes corrupted, the inevitable result will be citizen "freelancing." "No sane person who is motivated by a desire to have his or her concern addressed will work within that system," she writes, and voila! The only rational outlet becomes what the Obama Administration calls the "high-tech terrorism" of WikiLeaks.

It is easy to cast aspersions on WikiLeaks, call the organization irresponsible, but it begs the bigger question of how responsible our national security apparatus is. We have effectively closed our courts to torture victims. Our political branches barely address the reality of our policies. And the net result is a democracy that embraces secrecy or as Blackstone so eloquently put it, "a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government."

Overseeing the National Security State

2011-05-09T10:49:00.001-04:00

Karma is an interesting thing. After spending a semester wrapping (and the past week cramming) my mind around the contours of national security law, my single dominating concern has been my sense that our entire security apparatus lacks a sense of oversight. I was never quite able to define what I exactly meant by oversight; after all, it is not that the courts of even the Congress are utterly absent from the field. There are inspectors general and all manner of mechanical institutional oversight mechanisms.

Then, just a week after I criticized the entirety of The New York Times op-ed columnist line-up, Ross Douthat generates a column discussing the similarities between the Bush and Obama Administrations' foreign policies that gets close to what bothers me most about our national security apparatus. (Even worse: he's The Times' token conservative columnist, the heir to Bill Kristol at the paper of record!)

Douthat suggests that was "creeping fascism" for Democrats under President Bush is right as rain under President Obama, and I think that's right. While Douthat identifies a number of benefits as a result, e.g., that this is evidence that "the Democratic Party is growing up, putting away certain fond illusions, and accepting its share of responsibility for the messy realities of the post-9/11 world," I am given pause.

Through deft use of conciliatory rhetoric and a willingness to court Congress (and the international community), President Obama has perhaps done all the work needed to solidify the dramatic evolution of our national security law that President Bush initiated to at least token Democratic resistance. As Douthat puts it, America's "overseas footprint" keeps expanding, but our national security apparatus has, as well. While I might call for more oversight of this dynamic and suggest whether this is a good thing, the easy rebuttal now is that both parties have acquiesced to this state of affairs, that a vast framework, global and domestic, legal and material, is needed to ensure our continued security.

The problem, which Douthat identifies, is that the "global war on terror isn't a free lunch" and somebody will one day present us with the bill.

Slowly but surely, defense spending is becoming a salient issue again, but the capacity of the Obama Administration to continue two wars and begin another is shocking when one considers the very real economic panic the general public is facing. Disillusioned by stimulus spending, we're now turning to austerity measures, axing social services but still, as yet, paying little mind to the costs of the national security apparatus.

In the end, I suppose what I mean by oversight is a public price tag. And not just the big, abstract numbers that people can hardly comprehend. It is as difficult for me to truly understand the Pentagon's $700 billion budget as it is to understand the Supreme Court's detainee jurisprudence. (See I made a legal reference!)

What exactly did the head of Osama bin Laden cost? Every night, on the national news, the rise and fall of the stock market would be followed by a tally of the money spent on the day's missiles fired in Libya, drones into Yemen, and special forces operations into Pakistan. We would see daily estimates of how much it costs for the NSA to monitor global communications. Then we might have the sort of oversight I think the national security apparatus really needs.

A Less Gilded Future for Lawyers

2011-05-08T20:29:00.001-04:00

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be lawyers. Let them be farmers or loggers and such.

"Sound career advice," writes The Economist, of a billboard slogan. While I have been busy studying for my last round of law school exams ever, one of my close friends felt compelled to remind me that "[a]fter a dozen years of growth, employment in America’s law industry, the world’s biggest, has declined for the past three years."

This ain't exactly news but having this information delivered with a bunch of bar graphs that illustrate my future plight just does wonders for my self-esteem. ::sighs:: Back to the books?

The Day After Bin Laden Died

2011-05-02T23:31:00.001-04:00

Last night, I was busy book-learning when, like so many others, I started getting a flurry of bizarre texts, eventually confirmed that Osama bin Laden was dead. After watching the President speak, I joined a friend at a pub to celebrate his completion of his A-paper and quickly found myself toasting the death of Bin Laden. When I got back to my apartment around two, peer pressure compelled me to grab my cameras, my tripod, forget my keys, and race downtown to Ground Zero to be a part of history. As neat as it was to see so many people, police and firefighters, young and old, black and white, waving American flags and singing patriotic songs, something about the experience felt strangely wrong. The crowd, reeking of booze and weed, largely consisted of NYU undergraduates, kids who may well have no memory or connection to September 11th.

One of my friends wondered whether anyone else saw the irony that Americans took offense to seeing Middle Eastern mobs cheering on September 11th and here we were, ten years later, young Americans cheering on the death of Bin Laden. Perhaps it is impolitic to compare the two situations, but he wasn't the only one. By the end of Monday, I had heard from a number of people that our efforts to turn the death of Bin Laden into a sort of ticker-tape parade to celebrate the end of the war on terror was more silly than anything.

This was crystalized during a lively debate this evening for my final war and security seminar. Our dinner discussion was initially to be on the national security and the Fourth Estate, with guests from several press outlets. Of course, the death of Osama bin Laden interrupted both their ability to participate and the seminar's interest in the topic. Instead, we spent several hours discussing our thoughts on this national security "victory" and what comes next.

A simple answer would be that the global war on terror is over. The narrative that began by suggesting our war in Afghanistan was to smoke out Bin Laden and our intervention in Iraq to bring democracy to the region has run its course with the Arab Spring and now, the death of Bin Laden. The perpetrator of September 11th is now in Davy Jones' locker. After ten years of war and approximately $1.4 trillion spent to bring Bin Laden "to justice," does the American public really have the stomach or the awareness to turn their gaze to Ayman al-Zawahiri?

A simple reading of the AUMF might suggest that with al-Qaeda beheaded, on the verge of extinction, that those responsible for September 11th have been dealt with and, thus, the congressional authorization for the global war on terror has expired.

But does anyone think the death of Osama bin Laden has changed anything? As one cynical friend put it, the net result of our actions since September 11th may well have been to replace radical Sunni Islam in the guise of international terrorism with hostile Shia Islam under the guise of an ascendant Tehran. Displacing the governments in Iraq and Afghanistan and the subsequent instability throughout the region have significantly shifted the balance of power toward Iran and away from American interests. At home, we have erected a massive security apparatus designed to combat terrorism, reorienting our defense institutions in order to bring stability to the Middle East. We have expanded our intelligence operations and cyberwarfare capabilities to fight a threat far greeter than that conceived of in the AUMF. One hates to invoke the standard trope of the military industrial complex, but Bin Laden's death will not be met with calls to rollback the purview of the TSA or reevaluate the legitimacy of "sneak-and-peek" warrants.

Humpty Dumpty cannot be put back together. The past day have seen repeated invocations of how September 11th brought us together as "one American family." The divisions of the past ten years will not be repaired by Bin Laden's death--and haven't. It took less than twenty-four hours for partisan politics to reenter the public discourse. Even as pundits like Chuck Todd declared that Bin Laden's death would be the most significant achievement of the President's first term in office, I have my suspicions whether this episode will really have any impact on the President's reelection. Will he really campaign on killing a terrorist in an economic recession? Nevermind the inevitable Republican reaction that any credit should be shared with first, the troops and second, the Bush Administration anyway.

Of course, President Obama should get some credit. As one of my professors noted, he was the first president to campaign on killing a guy. Even while Senator McCain was dovish on entering Pakistan, then-Senator Obama declared he'd disregard any notion of Pakistani sovereignty if he had actionable intelligence on Bin Laden--which is what ultimately ended up transpiring.

But what was so disconcerting about the President's speech was night was how bloodthirsty it was. I will admit I flat-out laughed in a friend's face when she suggested Bin Laden be captured alive and brought to trial. No matter his value as an intelligence target, I cannot fathom a scenario where Bin Laden is brought in alive rather than dead. What could be done with him? What country would take him? Where could he have a fair trial? If the spectre of indefinite detention and the subsequent legal and political black hole it has produced has taught us nothing else, it is that the legal prosecution of al-Qaeda is fraught with peril.

That said, the President's speech last night invoked the term "justice" five times. But he may have said "vengeance" instead. Much of the speech focused on making amends to the families who lost loved ones on September 11th and how the death of Bin Laden gives them justice. Perhaps it does, but justice on the barrel of a gun is a questionable sort of justice.

Without giving it to cynicism, I was further disturbed how the President seemed to suggest that finding and killing Bin Laden could serve as a reminder "that American can do whatever we set our mind to." Bin Laden was a terrible human being, but to extinguish his existence we invaded two countries, spent trillions of dollars, killing thousands of our fellow citizens, tens of thousands more in other countries, and opened a host of legal and political divisions that threaten our very Constitution. Perhaps I am looking at the situation from the wrong perspective, but my primal happiness at seeing Bin Laden dead was quickly replaced by a sense of doubt of whether the benefit outweighed the cost.

Osama bin Laden is dead

2011-05-02T04:20:00.000-04:00

The Typical New York Times Op-Ed

2011-04-29T17:52:00.001-04:00

Being a New York Times op-ed columnist must be one of the easiest high-profile positions in all of the press. While I will not deny the sheer entertainment value I get out of my daily trip to the op-ed page, I am routinely stunned at how utterly lacking in content and value these bits of editorial wisdom often are.

Let's take David Brooks' column today, What Government Does, as a case study of sorts. In the midst of our national debate on federal spending, Brooks decides to do a little research by spending the week at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

After spending several paragraphs discussing the brutalist architecture of HUD's headquarters and putting in a flippant comment about Democratic resistance to voucher programs generally, he gets to his point: a play-by-play of a meeting regarding assistance to homeless veterans. He spends a few paragraphs lauding Secretary Shaun Donovan's "deep involvement" at HUD and his efforts to drive agency policy. He initially appears supportive of the bureaucracy's statistically successful efforts to move veterans into housing.

But then, as if a light went off in his head, Brooks notes how struck he was "the vast difference between the way a government sees the world — numerically and organizationally — and the gritty and unpredictable way the world sometimes looks to, say, a crime reporter or a homeless veteran himself." While finding his visit to HUD "extremely useful," he ends his piece by pondering "the limitations inherent in government planning."

The Times wants readers to pay for that? David Brooks just realized there are limitations in government planning!

Even as Brooks admires "the talent and commitment of real-life government workers running a successful program," he feels compelled to second-guess their efforts. He proceeds to list the number of messy issues these talented servants are attempting to navigate, but Brooks wonders if HUD really truly utterly understands the "messy reality" on the street — not that Brooks is spending his weeks with public assistance organizations to get a first-hand view of what charities do.

He wonders how HUD is addressing the drinking, drug, and mental issues of homeless veterans. HUD might be making them less homeless, but Brooks asks whether "ill and addicted veterans off their meds [are] menacing apartment buildings?"

Brooks is not answering that question, even while noting that studies "do, indeed, show modest benefits [from] the counterintuitive Housing First approach." What more does Brooks want from HUD at this point? Give the program to the private sector? Let individual charities figure it out? Who knows, but David Brooks learned government has limitations, I suppose.

Friday Links!

2011-04-29T00:01:00.032-04:00

In my last full week of classes ever, friends, acquaintances, and good luck got me reading some fun stuff:

With so many wonderful links, it's always a challenge picking what should come first. Linda Holmes essay, The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going to Miss Almost Everything, seems most appropriate:

If "well-read" means "not missing anything," then nobody has a chance. If "well-read" means "making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully," then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we've seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can't change that.

Terrorists have interesting priorities. Abd al-Rahim Hussein Muhammad Abdah al-Nashiri, a top al-Qaeda lieutenant, received the injections designed to promote impotence “so more time could be spent on jihad – rather than being distracted by women."
Foreign Policy's Francis Fukuyama explores positive urban development in Colombia, noting that even as Americans seem to have lost faith in urban planning and government-run social policies the Colombia city of Medellín benefited from a "city-owned utility company, Empresas Públicas de Medellín, which is well run and profitable, and a high municipal tax rate that is tolerated by a uniquely civic-minded business elite." Socialism and high taxes saved the city? Oh my!
Via GamePolitics, The New York Times reports that al-Qaeda used Sega Genesis game cartridges as remote-controlled firing devices for explosives. Yikes! Not sure what this means for the long-standing debate as to whether Nintendo or Sega "won" the 16-bit gaming wars.
Stumbled upon National Security Archive Director Thomas Blanton's congressional testimony on "Wikimania" while doing some research on whistleblower laws. It's the sort of level-headed discourse about Wikileaks that the national press should try engaging in.
In this month's Vanity Fair (complete with disturbingly random image of a shirtless Rob Lowe on the cover) Christopher Hitchens explores the nation-building history of the King James Bible.
Malcolm Harris at n+1 writes about the looming crisis of confidence in higher education, noting that student loans have surpassed credit cards as the number one source of debt in the country. He adds: "Since the Baby Boomers gave birth, the college degree has seemed a panacea for social ills, a metaphor for a special kind of deserved success. We still tell fairy tales about escapes from the ghetto to the classroom or the short path from graduation to lifelong satisfaction, not to mention America’s collective college success story: The G.I. Bill. But these narratives are not inspiring true-life models, they’re advertising copy, and they come complete with loan forms."
My uncle's friend's photos of Colorado up on Facebook really make me want to grab my camera and get out of the city. Easier to appreciate a gorgeous sunset from a mountaintop than in the midst of the Manhattan urban jungle.
The First Church of Boston takes on the beached white male (of which I am one):

Getting serious when Rome is burning

2011-04-28T00:01:00.000-04:00

I noticed today in the most recent Vanity Fair that 45% of 984 adult surveyed predict a second American revolution is inevitable--over half of identifying independent voters think so.

This is what happens when the richest 400 Americans possess more wealth than the bottom 150 million.
Two-and-a-half wars. A stagnant economy. Before I fly into a ranting hysteria, screaming down Broadway that "Rome is burning," I found some solace today when President Obama, releasing a birth certificate that will assuredly never satisfy everyone, cast aside his "bemusement" and got serious:

We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do. We’ve got big problems to solve. And I’m confident we can solve them, but we’re going to have to focus on them -- not on this.

But we’re not going to be able to do it if we are distracted. We’re not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other. We’re not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.

It's this sort of forceful sensibility that attracted me to the prospect of an Obama presidency. Of course, in the toxic tabloid political environment we exist in, today can really just be framed as the poor lanky kid on the block giving into the gruff bully in the guise of Donald Trump. Would it surprise anyone if the birther issue hangs around, even plays a role in next year's election?

Barack Obama--like any president--is there's a sense of truth to the words underlying lofty rhetoric. I've spent the better part of the past month working on a paper on press freedom, and I am more convinced than ever that honesty, transparency, sunlight is the best solution to what ails us. I know I need to get slapped in the face every once in awhile.

Helps to keep the chaos at bay...

The Legal Jobs Are a Lie

2011-04-25T15:39:00.000-04:00

As a follow up to David Segal's January exposé on how law schools fudge their employment statistics, law professor Paul Campos does some statistics investigation today at The New Republic. His numbers do nothing to support the notion that law school is a particularly valuable exercise:

According to the NALP, 88.2 percent of all law school graduates are “employed” within nine months of graduation. If we exclude people employed in non-legal jobs, and people doing part-time work, the NALP number drops to 62.9 percent...But the bigger problem is that the 62.9 percent figure is still too high.

Then he drops the hammer, revealing what law school has really become:

[S]uch information will make law school look like a far worse investment than it does at present. Still, if we assume that the point of academic work is to reveal the truth, rather than to engage in the defense of a professional cartel from which law professors benefit more than almost anyone else, then this work needs to be done.

Of course, prospective students visit these schools, get fed, meet amazing professors and tour beautiful libraries and the value of law school seems obvious...or maybe that was just me?