Goddess of Liberty

Today, President Bush dedicated a statue in Washington as a monument to the estimated hundred million people killed by communist regimes in the past century. While somber, it is an important event. We tend to forget these days that there were real communists and they did some really bad things. Maybe “true” communism is a noble ideal, but the utter inhumanity of the brutal dictatorships resulting from pursuit of that ideology should not be forgotten. It was in no small part when I learned about and was horrified by the horrors that these governments and leaders perpetrated on their people that I became interested in politics and government and law, and while adulthood has brought a wider understanding of the world, I’ve never stepped away from seeing communist governments as evil. Not so much for the Cold War rivalry we Americans had with the Soviet Union, but more for the gulags and the secret police and the torture chambers and the brainwashing and the rooms after rooms of nearly-stacked, dirty human skulls, each one a victim of a communist dictator’s demand for political orthodoxy. Communism has claimed at least as many victims than the Nazi’s Holocaust, in terms of the sheer number of lives lost and human misery inflicted. Whatever moral failures, failure to live up to our ideals, or even outright acts of evil perpetrated by the United States or its western allies one might care to point out, nothing compares to the sheer weight of terror and blood that communism wreaked upon the world.

Today, only China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba have communist governments, and while these are hardly the only brutal dictatorships to plague their own people, they are the ideological holdouts. Neither China nor Vietnam seem particularly fanatical about their communism, and while these are not what we would call good governments, they are (slowly) getting better. The day these regimes are replaced with more liberal forms of government and communism is truly swept into the dustbin of history will be a great day indeed for humanity and an argument for the existence of progress.

Roma Instaurata

This is as cool as it gets for Roman history junkies. The Beeb reports that a multidisciplinary team has created a virtual Rome. Hopefully the bulk of the work will be made available to the public soon, and there is discussion of converting the model to a form usable in Second Life. (That would be a reason for me to sign up for Second Life. I've recently found a different way to burn hours on the computer.)

You can go take a look at UVA's model of Rome in 320 AD here. And here is UCLA's, which compares the contemporary ruins with the virtual reconstruction. I, perspicio!

Focus, People!

Well, you're a bunch of multitaskers, according to last week's poll. I guess that's just how work is these days.

Me, I try to focus on one thing at a time, but that's often impossible. I don't multitask very well; I tend to lose efficiency and focus when I'm distracted and having multiple things to do at once, as opposed to in sequence, bums me out. I need to learn to use the "Do Not Disturb" button on my phone more often, but of course I won't do that. Particularly after the incident where I got a knock on my door with the comment, "TL, your phone was on 'Do Not Disturb' and the door to your office was shut, but we have a phone call for you!"

Anniversary

At breakfast this morning, The Wife pointed out that we've been back in California for a year and a day. And that means that we've been in this gigantic house for an entire year now. I've been so busy recently I would certainly have not noticed this anniversary had The Wife not pointed it out to me. Once I swore I'd never come back here. Now, I'm glad that I did; while it's not Santa Barbara, unless we win the lottery we can't afford somewhere like that anyway, and California simply suits us better than Tennessee ever did.

Certainly we're comfortable here (how could we not be, with three times more space in the house than we need?) and our circumstances today feel much improved from where they were in Tennessee. We can contemplate the possibility of buying a (smaller) house in the reasonably near future, even in hyperinflated California, due to a confluence of good employment and a favorable local housing market. I'm quite grateful that things have worked out so well.

Last year at this time we had to save all our money and could not even afford a few extra dollars to go to the U-pick cherry orchard. But things are different, today. Later on, we're going to Leona Valley, and we'll get as many as we can eat before we get sick to our stomachs tonight. It'll be hot out and I'll wear my floppy wide-brimmed hat. The cherries will be fresh and tart. It'll be a good time.

DARPA's Finest Moment: The Gay Bomb

Someone please tell me that this "Gay Bomb" story is an elaborate hoax. Please. Seriously, it sounds like something out of an early-eighties parody movie.

GIS for "Gay Bomb:"

More Boring Things

There are more boring things for a lawyer to do with his Saturday than indexing exhibits for trial. Not many, but they do exist. These include: a) watching archived city council meeting for a place that you don't live, b) wetting shish-kabob skewers with an eye dropper, c) collecting all fifty state quarters, d) looking at photographs of people you don't know, and e) driving from Oklahoma City to Lubbock.

However, none of these things win trials. Indexing exhibits and getting to know what's in them does.

Equal Justice Before Law

Hooray for Judge Michael Sauer; it’s not quite springtime for Paris yet. Fan mail for enforcing the law equally as to all defendants, despite the best efforts of the Los Angeles County Sheriff to obstruct justice, may be sent to the Superior Court of California in and for the County of Los Angeles, Metropolitan Division, Department 60, 1945 South Hill Street, Los Angeles, CA 90007.

Oh, and don't cry for her, Los Angeles. With good behavior, Paris will be free in just over two weeks.

Tort Reform: Good For Thee, But Not For Me

Noted tort reformer Robert Bork has sued the Yale Club of New York for a routine trip-and-fall negligence case. He’s asked for over $1,000,000 in compensatory damages, punitive damages, attorney’s fees and prejudgment interest. California and Tennessee, which I know about, are apparently no different from New York in not permitting those remedies for routine negligence claims like this one. The previous link also contains an interesting analysis indicating that Bork’s attorneys are a little bit too high-powered to be good choices for a soft-tissue personal injury claim like this. (Proof that BIGLAW “attorneys and professionals” don’t necessarily know what they’re doing any better than so-called “street lawyers.”) So perhaps we can understand why the national law firm of Arrogant, Expensive & Condescending, LLP screwed that one up, thinking that those sorts of remedies might be available as they would be in the securities cases they’re used to handling. But their client – more than just a lawyer, he was only a few votes away from being on the U.S. Supreme Court – should have known better himself before authorizing the complaint. And it’s as graphic a demonstration as I can think of that tort reform is a great idea as long as it doesn’t affect the tort reformer’s remedies when he gets hurt himself.

Fred, You're Getting Us All In Trouble

It all started with a throwaway joke by Joe Scarborough on his punditry show on MSNBC about Jeri Kehn, “Right Said” Fred Thompson’s smokin’ hot wife.

Suddenly, it seems the whole blogosphere is aware of the fact that not only is Thompson married to a woman fourteen years younger than himself, but that the Tennessee Stud himself seems to enjoy looking at her body because he finds her attractive. Apparently this is a bad thing, and so is commenting on it.

Commenting about how you're not supposed to comment on that, though, is fair game: Helen Reynolds warns men to protect their “right to leer” and Ann Althouse invites self-aware men to (politely) leer away, at least at their own smokin’ hot wives.

Now, there would be plenty of other things to commend the lovely Ms. Kehn for. And we can acquit her of Wonkette’s accusation that she is merely a trophy wife. She’s an attorney and a media consultant who has worked for the Republican National Committee and the Senate Republican Conference. She’s clearly no dummy. She and “Right Said” Fred have had two children together and they met at a church in Illinois, which all seems very proper and "family values" Republican to me (yes, I know that Senator Thompson divorced his first wife).

But no one – not the feminists upset with Thompson leering at her and not the conservatives stampeding to defend him – seems to care that this woman has a career and an identity of her own separate from her husband. They’re all worried about her ample breasts and whether “Right Said” Fred should be enjoying looking at them publicly (or privately, or at all).

Well, damn. Now I’m in trouble, too and I guess I’ll just have to add this to the long list of reasons why I’ll never be President. I think my wife is smokin’ hot, I check her out when we’re doing stuff around the house, and I tell her that I think he’s attractive often. I guess maybe I’m supposed to think she’s attractive but keep that opinion to myself? (Seems to me that she'd like hearing that her husband finds her attractive.) Or I’m not supposed to consider her attractiveness, ever, and instead I should love her for her other merits as a person? (Which I do, but why should that exclude me from finding her attractive, too?) Or I’m not supposed to think she’s attractive at all? Come on, a husband is supposed to be attracted to his wife! Why should "Right Said" Fred be any different than me?

In truth, it seems that there are actually very few left-wing sites that I can find that are commenting about this. There are, however, a ton of right-wing sites that are dogpiling on the idea that the left is critical of Thompson having a sexy, younger wife. By the way, in the picture, I don’t think Fred Thompson is really leering at his wife. It looks to me like they’re sharing a joke at some social function.

This is what it looks like when a man leers at Fred Thompson’s wife. Back off, Wolfowitz, you're in enough trouble already.

Romney on Gay Parenting

A lesbian woman confronted Mitt Romney on his disapproval of same-sex marriage. In response, Romney congratulated the woman on having created a family of her own, and said that the prospect of gay couples raising children together was “fine.” This has upset religious conservatives, even though it seems to me Romney did not say anything to contradict his position that there should not be same-sex marriages.

(Cross-posted on Oval Office 2008).

It Was New Jersey

I have a confession to make: I'm doing an unbelievably dorky thing and saving state quarters. There's no reason for it or expectation of value, it's just something I'm doing for my own amusement. The Wife humors me and lets me inspect her quarters from time to time.

I know from the U.S. Mint's website that 42 quarters have been released, and I have 37 of them right now. So I took a look at what I had last night and I tried to run down which of the five I don't have. I identified Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Michigan, and Washington as missing but I spent all morning trying to figure out the last one. I had to cheat and look on the website to remember... New Jersey.

Well, hey, anyone could have made that mistake of forgetting New Jersey!

Plinko Will Never Be The Same

A surprisingly poignant article about Bob Barker retiring from The Price is Right. A taste:

Like most good teachers, he made the lesson as painless as possible. Here was this exceptionally bright man, who knew exactly how silly the games could seem and how goofy some of the contestants were. Yet Barker remained ever respectful, never playing for an easy laugh at a contestant's expense, never unsheathing either sarcasm or disbelief at even an egregiously idiotic guess.

I always liked the game where the mountain climber sang that ridiculous yodeling song. And, of course, Bob Barker’s priceless cameo in Happy Gilmore.

Not A Conservative And Not A Good President

Peggy Noonan, who learned a thing or two about modern, Reagan-style conservatives back when conservatives did govern the country, expresses her disgust with the White House's betrayal of conservative principles in today's Wall Street Journal. The critical indictment:

...the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.

I don't particularly agree with Ms. Noonan's opposition to the immigration bill, which is what seems to have inspired her contempt for Bush the Younger. (I think doing something is better than doing nothing and I'm mindful that the bill is a compromise, meaning that it is probably the least bad of the several options available.)

But it's helpful to note that the President and his advisors are really kind of making things up as they go. There is no purpose or focus to this administration, no vision for where the country ought to be, no sense of direction or priority. It's hardly a surprise, then, that even the Republicans seeking to run for President -- including a former advisor to the President himself -- are running as hard as they can away from the White House.

The only unifying theme for the White House is loyalty. Bush and his Bushmen have demanded uncritical loyalty from the country for no better reason than that Bush is the President, and a significant number of Americans have proven willing to give it. But the example of Scooter Libby should serve as a graphic caution that, loyalty flows up but not down in this Administration. And even that loyal 30% who would say that they supported the President even if he slit some guy's throat in the Rose Garden have to be a little irritated about this immigration bill.

UPDATE: Post was reformatted and minor grammatical error corrected.

Lord Stanley Has A New Home

Ducks win! Ducks win!

A 6-2 game, one in which Ottawa was playing catch-up the whole time, just wore the Senators out. Anaheim's depth was simply too much for them. The Ducks could have Selanne, Neidermayer, McDonald, or Pronger, or any combination thereof, on the ice at will. That's just plain too much for anyone, especially not a Ray Emery playing way off his game.

Normally on Wednesday nights, I go out to dinner with some of the lawyers and our newspaperman and Buddhist friends. Some nights after that we go to the zendo and meditate. But tonight is different. Lights-out games in the Stanley Cup playoffs don't happen all that often -- and especially not games where my team wins it all.

The Senators have no one to blame but themselves. The official box score shows the winning goal as an unassisted shot by Travis Moen, but in fact it was an own goal, caused by confusion between an Ottawa player with the puck and the goalie; no Anaheim player touched the puck on that play. With about eight minutes left to play, down 5-2 you could read their faces -- Ottawa had lost its will. They'd been beaten, and they knew it. Beaten by their own penalties. Missing a penalty shot by losing control of their own puck.

In about six weeks, twenty-five Ducks will have their names permanently engraved on the fifth band of the Cup. Between now and then, each player on the team will get to have the Cup to themselves for a day -- to take to the beach, use to dispense punch at a party, do whatever they want with it. How cool is that?

And, of course, the NHL pre-season begins in July.

Pirates! (Real Ones)

It still astonishes me to think that international trade faces a live and real threat from pirates. For instance, pirates operating off the coast of Somalia seized a Danish ship today, possibly killing one or more of the sailors on board. A French warship loitered just outside of Somali territorial waters and did nothing to prevent the attack.

The joke is too easy to make: "Arr! Avast and yield up ye cargo, mateys! An' don't be expectin' no help from yonder cheese-eating surrender monkeys thar!"

In the movies, pirates are often portrayed as lovable scoundrels, handsome and brave. But in real life, pirates are no joke and hardly worthy of admiration. They are robbers, criminals, and possibly even lending support to terrorists who provide manpower, support, and weapons for these guys to ply their criminal trade, just as they do drug dealers.

It is in the interests of every civilized nation to stamp out piracy -- this is true now just as it was true in the 1700's when the British got serious about this issue and took it upon themselves to take the lead in eradicating this menace. No one gets mad at the British for being the world's policeman against piracy and slavery back in the age of sail; indeed, whatever other flaws may have been present in the British empire, the efforts of the Brits to eliminate piracy and slavery stand out as some of the greatest moral achievements of western civilization. It's a shame that this particular weed keeps coming back again and again.

Clean and Fuzzy

I took the dogs to a self-service pet cleaning business today while The Wife was meeting for some Toastmasters meeting.

The last time the dogs had been bathed, they lived in Knoxville. For these two big wimpburgers, being wet is a form of torture. Sadly, dogs need to be bathed periodically.

Each of them lost huge amounts of dirt and appreciable amounts of hair, so hopefully they won't shed for a few days. They were very unhappy but they're clean, smell better, and are fuzzy right now. I feel bad for putting the dogs through something they disliked, but it has to be done.

The self-service station was probably a fair price for the setup -- $27 for the two dogs, and I got a full bottle of shampoo solution, use of a people-height bathtub with nice warm water, undercoat and topcoat grooming brushes, doggie cologne, and best of all I didn't have to pull all the wet dog hair out from my own drain -- but I'm thinking I'll just have them groomed professionally. Besides, I'm not about to go squeezing out their anal glands, which they'll be due for in a few months.

Roman Fast Food

The headline to this article is annoyingly deceptive. The actual find in a study of middle-sized homes in the ruins of Pompeii was of "an abundance of small grilling vessels (like barbecues) found in the residences studied, indicating that people were eating-and-running on the go". That's a little different than "fast food" as we might have imagined it.

But there were a lot of restaurants and vendors of prepared food, in the typical Roman marketplace. People on the go or working all day would stop at a stand in the forum and get some bread, cooked meats, and some heavily-watered wine or maybe fruit juice for a meal. Taverns and pubs were popular businesses then, as now, and for all the same reasons.

Pictured to the right are the remains of a thermopoilum in Pompeii. The proprietor would served cooked food would be served in those little insets in his counter; there would have been a brazier or something similar to keep the food warm. The customer would have sat on a stool or a tall chair, and probably chatted with the proprietor and other customers while eating or waiting for their food, while they drank wine. These thermopoliae are found all over the forae of Roman towns across Europe and Africa.

What did the citizens of Rome get for their money at places like these? Wheat baked into bread was the big staple; rice was unknown and of course potatoes and corn were not yet discovered. It seems odd to me that there are no records of noodles; one can make noodles or pasta from wheat flour just as easily as bread, but the idea seems to have never occurred to them. Local fruits and vegetables, of course; but only in season -- it would not have been possible to keep a steady diet because transportation was not fast enough to keep perishables fresh and edible. I seem to recall reading somewhere that some vegetables were dried and stored for year-round consumption, like peas.

The meats eaten were a little different from ours -- fish, pork and chicken, but plenty of things we would consider luxury foods today, like duck and snails, and things we just wouldn't eat at all, like mice, peacocks, and flamingoes. The Romans did not care for beef, as far as I know; while they recognized it was edible, they thought cows were strictly for making milk and thought of eating cows like Americans would think of eating dog or cat meat.

All of this would have been flavored with a wide variety of spices and herbs; the Romans were then, as they are now, fond of intense and varied flavors in their food. And nearly everything had some quantity of a salty red sauce called garum, which we would think today was very much like Thai fish sauce -- a sauce which surely came in a variety of sub-flavors, some spicy, some sweet, and some mild.

But the idea of people wanting or needing to get a meal in a short amount of time seems like an inevitability of life in any sort of urban environment. Fast-service food vendors couldn't have been an innovation for the Romans; surely the Greeks had them, and the Babylonians and Egyptians before them. Somebody working all day in, say, a blacksmith shop or a cloth dyer does not have the time to step away from work to go fix himself some food, and not everyone would have had the benefit of a family network to support them during the day. And currency can buy so much! So I have to imagine that in this respect as in so many others, the Romans did not innovate this idea; rather, they did it a lot more, and better, than their predecessors.

The Roman forum was, in addition to the center of civic life where the government and courts were found, the primary marketplace for the city -- kind of a big mall and general store as well as city hall. There must have been booths and shops all over the place, selling different kinds of food; people probably had their favorite places then just like now -- "Oh, let's go to Flavius'; he makes the most delicious peacock skewers!" -- and the place must have smelled incredible, with all the restaurants cooking their food to serve to hungry customers, anxious to get back to court or return to their shopping.

And of course, travelers on Rome's famed network of roads needed to eat, too, and there were roadside taverns and inns to cater to their needs. So when you're getting your tacos and fries at the drive-thru this weekend, give a thought to the Romans who were doing exactly what you are now, only two thousand years ago.

The Teddy Bear Master

Sometimes you read things that are so stupefyingly weird that they just leave you agog, as in: "It was literally stuffed animals being manipulated by the boys, walking around going 'yeoowww' and talking in funny voices".

Depressingly, I'll probably have to apologize for this lawsuit to my students, too. Hot coffee, fast food made me fat, and now this.

You'll have to RTFA for more details about the evil teddy bears; I just don't know what else to say.

Surrendering The License

It turns out that I cannot place my Tennessee license on "inactive" status since I am still practicing law in California. So the only way for me to get out of paying this stupid "Professional Privilege Tax" is to surrender my license completely -- that is, to give it up forever.

I'm not thrilled about doing this, but I've no intentions of moving back to Tennessee or of practicing law there again. Never say never, I guess, but this is pretty close. So I'm willing to do it. There's a form I have to fill out, which I expected, in which I have to explain why I'm giving up my license and whether there are any disciplinary or criminal charges pending or threatened against me, which there are not (but which would obviously be of interest if there were).

Turns out I also need to give them back "my license," meaning the original, physical piece of paper that I thought was a certificate commemorating my admittance to the Tennessee bar. According to my paralegal, who has been helping me get this task accomplished, my Tennessee bar card is not considered my "license" by the Supreme Court; they want this sheepskin back. I don't know exactly where that is; I suspect it's with all my other certificates and diplomas that I've never, ever got around to having framed.

And, it will cost me fifty dollars to give up my license. Cheaper to just not pay the dues; if I ever do want the license back I can just pay the back dues and fines and never have lost it in the first place. That's one-eighth the cost of the tax. Still an economically efficient decision, I suppose. But since I couldn't get an effective notice of surrender in as of today, it appears that I will have a valid Tennessee license to practice law on June 1, 2007, and therefore will be liable for the tax. So it certainly doesn't make sense to pay more money for the purpose of avoiding paying even more money that I'd have to pay anyway.

I'll just keep the license for another year. Who knows, I may need it again one day.

Unprofessional Conduct

Today took me back to Stinking Bakersfield for a case involving not a huge amount of money. My big concern on this case has always been to keep my work at a minimum so that my clients actually gain money for their claims. So I've not done a lot of work and basically I've been biding my time until the mediation, which was today.

The mediation went about as well as these sorts of things normally do. The mediator was competent and friendly and we had some issues to work through, but we did it. Everyone got to a number and the numbers added up and I began to prepare releases and agreements.

That was when I found out that an attorney was there without a client or client representative with authority to sign an agreement at all. As soon as it came to be time to sign, he told the mediator, "I've gotta go," and left without being excused. Then, another defendant started to renege on his deal, and the whole thing looked like it was descending into chaos.

I'm pretty sure we've got deals all around now; I've got signatures on two of the three defendants, and the other one is a big company with competent attorneys -- aside from this guy who obviously doesn't know what the deal is. Had I known there was no one there with authority to sign... Well, I'd probably have proceeded, but I'd have insisted on some sort of way of getting a signature. For instance, his adjuster back on the East Coast could have signed something by fax.

I called a couple of lawyer buddies, and they both agreed that the way to play it is to just treat the thing like a done deal, as if we'd informally settled the case on a phone call. My problem is that parties often want to renege on deals shortly after mediation, and insurance adjusters and risk management agents are no different from anyone else in that respect. Right now, I lack any ability to memorialize or enforce my deal -- which is okay, in one respect, in that I haven't promised in writing to give this defendant a release yet, either, but it's not okay in that I wanted to settle the case to get my clients their money. So on the whole, I'm quite peeved about this guy's unprofessional conduct.