A Moving Post

Maybe I'm not getting enough sleep, but this story of redemption and chance really touched me.

Mr. Fantasy Football Organizer Guy

Tonight I conspired with my friend for our annual money-league fantasy football team. The Wife thinks we're Real Men of Genius but it's a good time. We're looking forward to another fun and exciting year.

Guess It's Not Too Soon Anymore

Lots of specials on T.V.; movies in the theater; second-release movies on broadcast TV. 9/11 is now an acceptable source of material for both fiction and documentary. Appropriately serious, of course, but all the same, we're seeing airplanes hitting towers. For the longest time -- since about a week after the attacks -- there were very few images of the damage; only rarely would you see the film of the planes hitting the towers. I guess five years is a sufficiently long time for us, as a people, to be shown those images again.

Not that any of us have ever forgotten. I've got no photograph here, much less video, but you've got the image seared into your brain and can replay it again and again. You may not care to. But perhaps it's not entirely a bad thing that you be confronted with that image if you've been avoiding it.

Dogs and Tables

Our table is done. It didn't turn out quite like we planned; the map cinched up during the last phases and we had to trim it a bit. We will need to get some glass cut for the top, but we'd planned on that all along. It still looks like we planned and we're very pleased and proud. Pictures to follow.

Of less pleasure and satisfaction has been finding not one, not two, but three "accidents" in the house. I don't know if it's the results of Karma's Big Adventure yesterday; surely she ate a lot of people food. Hopefully this trend comes to an end soon.

Houdini

Hi there! I'm really cute. I'm also clever and naughty. My name is Karma but I have the mad escape skillz of Harry Houdini.

See, what happened was that my Mommy and Daddy were busy for much of the day building some coffee table thing. They got tired and took a break right around my dinnertime. (And my sisters' dinnertime, too, but that's not important right now). So then they let us out after dinner like they always do so my big sister Sassafras and I could do our business.

They thought the back yard was a secure place to leave us unattended. It is to laugh -- and I did laugh, ha ha! The side door has a full twelve inches of clearance on the bottom, which is more than enough for me to get out. Which is exactly what I did.

Sassafras barked at me, but she's too big to get under the gate like I can. She thinks she can boss me around and be top dog just because she's bigger. But I can get out and be free, and she's too big and clumsy to do that. So I laughed again, ha ha! I was free!

So then I walked up and down the street like where mommy and daddy walk me from sometimes. There were lots of people in different houses and they all had their own smells. Some of them were nice and if they gave me people food and loving, I'm not telling.

I don't even know how long I was gone before my mommy noticed I wasn't in the back yard. But I know that mommy and daddy went looking for me. Daddy walked around on the hot asphalt in his bare feet calling my name, and Mommy drove around in the car. But she couldn't avoid other things on the road and still look for me, so they got back together, and Daddy drove around, and Mommy and Sassafras went looking for me all over town. They said later that they were worried about me not having my tags on my collar because Sassafras keeps trying to tear it off my neck -- so I think that means I have to get a Los Angeles County dog license and tags soon. At least that's what Daddy said to me tonight when he let me write on his blog.

So they found me wandering around a construction site near home. I was only five houses away; I don't know what they were so worried about. They seemed friendly and happy to see me when they called me into the car; and after all, why would I leave a place that gives me so much food and so many treats? I was gonna come back, assuming I could remember which house it was.

And it gets worse. Daddy set up a bunch of ceramic tiles on my escape route and he says that they're going to buy some "river rocks" to replace them soon. Now I can't get under the gate anymore. I'm gonna have to find a new way out. I haven't figured it out yet, but I'll do it. Daddy isn't nearly as clever or determined as me.

There's Always Something To Do

It's been an extraordinarily busy week. My friend, who recruited me to back come out to California, enjoyed an expansion of his family last weekend. Like the other lawyers in the office, I have been helping cover his work while he is at home with his wife and newborn son. Causing further demands on my time have been trial preparation, my class, video games, and home life with The Wife and the critters.

The Wife ordered us a DVR from our cable company, and now, there is always something good to watch on TV. I programmed a ton of educational shows to watch, and The Wife has some interest in some of them; the hour-long photo essay about national parks in Utah does not interest her but the histories of Catherine the Great and the decline of the Roman Empire do. That's in addition to our usual fare of "Raptor Island" and "Manticore" on Sci-Fi.

And now, The Wife's idea of a good time on Labor Day weekend is to build a coffee table. I was reluctant to go along with this at first, but I must admit that now that we're moving along in the project, I'm enjoying it. We spent about $160 at Home Depot buying materials and we stained everything tonight. Tomorrow it should all be dry and we'll assemble the pieces. When it's done, we hope, we'll have an ottoman-level table for use in our living room with a detailed top featuring a map of the world, with extra storage space built in to it. It's going to look quite nice, I think. I'm glad The Wife kicked my butt into doing something productive instead of just sitting around playing with the critters.

So apologies for the lack of posts, but sometimes you've gotta live your life for a while before you can write about it.

Weary

Milwaukee, Wisconsin -- The Wife and I have spent two and a half days visiting with family. We're both happy to have been able to spend time with some people close to us. But we're also both exhausted and ready to go home tomorrow. We miss our critters, we want to return to our regular lives. We're staying at a cruddy hotel near the airport, but it has an internet connection and a shuttle to the airport that leaves at 0-dark-hundred tomorrow morning. So it's good enough for one night.

What You Ask For

Johnson Creek, Wisconsin -- Our flight to Milwaukee was as good as a flight can be. The Wife and I were sat next to each other, and the flight took off on time. We flew over most of the interesting sights in California, Nevada, and Utah before cloud cover took the views away from us -- the lakes and reservoirs in Southern California's mountains, our new home in the Antelope Valley, the massive urban sprawl that is Las Vegas, Zion Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Lake Powell, the Canyonlands, and the mesas of the painted desert. The food on the flight was good, too -- yes, we had to pay for it, but it was good. I had a turkey, cranberry sauce, and brie cheese sandwich on freshly-baked wheat bread with a fresh romaine salad; The Wife got a "fun box" with various kinds of cheeses, bread sticks, chips and salsa, and chocolate treats. Personnel on the flight were friendly and did not make frequent interruptions to our conversations and activities. The flight landed early and our bags arrived along with us. Midwest Express even served fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. This is basically everything you could ask for in modern air travel. Hopefully our flight back Monday is as good.

I've fewer nice things to say about today's family reunion. My in-laws worked very hard to make it happen; they put in a lot of effort and care into it. They enlisted The Wife and I to cook and we cleaned and put stuff away. They got a whole pig roast taken in, and made many, many trips to get everything they needed to throw the party. And many of the relatives who showed up were quite nice and pleasant -- some drove from as far away as Iowa to be at the event. Others seemed to take the event less seriously and the less I say about them, the better.

Wisconsin is very humid, very green, and very different from California. I'm too mentally worn out from today's -- festivities is as good a word for it as anything else -- to comment further about that. Anyway, it was a big day, draining for a lot of us. Tomorrow, we'll go back to Milwaukee for my aunt's birthday party and to visit with my grandmother before our return flight early Monday morning.

And You Thought History Was Boring

Lots of people think history is boring. That's probably because they had boring history teachers who tried to get them memorize mind-numbing lists of dates and battles without ever trying to make anyone understand why they are important. But if you made a movie about an invasion, a conflict of radically different cultures, questions about moral right and wrong, and best of all, cannibalism, you'd have yourself the makings of a pretty good story.

Such, we now know, was part of the Spanish invasion of the Aztec Empire in the early sixteenth century. A scant twenty years after Columbus reported the existence of the New World to Europe, armed Spanish expeditions came and set up camp on their own. Legend has it that because the Spaniards had white skin, the Aztecs worshipped them as gods, and that they put up only a platry resistance to the Spanish invasion.

We know better now. First of all, we know it is likely that the Aztecs had, about one generation beforehand, made contact with other colonists and traders from beyond the sea -- the Chinese. Artifacts strongly suggesting trade between the Aztecs and the Chinese have been found in sites all along the Pacific coast of Mexico. So too is there evidence of pre-Columbian incorporation of chickens into the Aztec diet -- chickens not being indigenous to the Americas, they had to have come from somewhere. Then there is the issue of the source of the legends about fair-skinned "gods" from beyond the seas. Where would the Aztecs have come in contact with fair-skinned people before the Europeans came? It is easy for us to forget that to the eyes of a fifteenth-century Aztec, a person from China would appear to be very fair-skinned. And finally, there are reports of Spanish explorers in the Americas finding descendents of the Chinese, describing them as uncharacteristically fair-skinned, speaking a language unlike any of the other "natives," and (here's the clincher) wearing silk clothes. The descendents of Chinese colonists were found in areas known today as Wisconsin and Colorado; to this day, there is a village in Peru where all the inhabitants speak a pigdin form of Mandarin Chinese. Compelling, but admittedly not conclusive, evidence that the Chinese treasure fleets visited the Pacific coast of the Americas in the 1450's.

So, it is entirely possible that the Aztecs were not so impressed with the Europeans as we have been taught -- because they came from a different ocean than the previous visitors. It is also quite likely that the Aztecs figured out right away what the Spaniards' armor and guns were and understood quite well who they were intended to be used against. These were not stupid people. What they did not know was that the Spaniards' best weapon against them was one they could neither see nor comprehend; the Spaniards defeated the Aztecs not by force of arms but through biological warfare. 200 conquistadores on horseback with steel swords, armor, and muskets could certainly mow through large numbers of soldiers armed with stone, wood, and bronze weapons -- but they would still not be able to overwhelm a determined army of tens of thousands of strong soldiers. But they didn't have to, because those soliders were weakened and killed by bubonic plague, smallpox, and a host of other bacterial and viral pathogens not previously known by the Aztec people. (This begs the question of whether the Chinese traders of the 1450's communicated Asian pathogens to the Aztecs, and in all likelihood they would have done exactly that.)

So imagine you're an Aztec in the early 1500's when Cortez lands. Your grandparents told you stories about the mighty ships that came from the west when they were young, bearing gifts of great luxury to trade, wearing shiny fabrics of stunning beauty, and new foods to eat. The fair-skinned sailors never came back. In the meantime, you've been at war with your neighbors to expand the Empire, and participated in the religion you've been raised to honor all your life. You're pretty proud of yourself for being part of the most technologically advanced, richest, and most powerful nation on earth.

Suddenly, from the east, more ships come. They are big, but not overwhelmingly huge; perhaps three to four times the size of the outriggers you are used to seeing ply the coasts of your homeland. On the ships are men who are fair-skinned -- but they do not wear colorful fabrics and instead wear shiny metal plates. They offer little food and are uninterested in trade. Soon, they begin demanding gold and that you forsake your gods in favor of theirs. They carry what are obviously weapons -- strange weapons, but clearly powerful ones. You would have realized almost right away that these were not the traders from the west you heard stories of. These are clearly warriors -- enemies -- come to conquer your lands. It wouldn't have taken you very long to realize that war had come to visit you in your own back yard.

Shortly after they arrived, a great pestilence would have begun working its way through your peoples. You likely wouldn't have known that it was not doing something similar to the invaders, because after enough of your countrymen had been enslaved and stripped of their gold, you would have started to fight to defend yourself, your nation, your family. You likely would have questioned your earlier hubris about your wealth, power, and technological sophistication, but it doesn't matter if the alien invaders had weapons different than yours -- the need to defend yourself would have been overriding. Perhaps you would have tried to have learned how to use their weapons; you would certainly have wanted to have taken their strength to use against them and thus neutralize their advantage. (Thus the cannibalism, a teaching of the prevailing religion of the way to take strength from one's enemies.) You would certainly have seen that these were mortal men who could die in combat. If you had ever entertained the thought that these were gods on earth, you would have quickly disabused yourself of that notion.

Perhaps this is not as comforting as the thought that the primitive natives were awed and overwhelmed by the mighty European settlers. But I'd rather know the truth than a pleasant legend. And the original legend wasn't even particularly pleasant. I'll leave whatever parallels to modern events you care to draw to yourself; what intrigued me about this story was not so much the lurid evidence of ritualized cannibalism but rather the fact that it demonstrates that a fierce, and for a while successful, resistance to the invasion was mounted, poking a hole in the traditional history we learned as children in grade school.

Follow Up

Yesterday afternoon, my computer arrived at my office. Last night, I transferred all my files from the backup computer to the laptop. But at least it's working. And the screen is delightfully free of glitches and errors. Why Gateway's CSRs were operating with information 24 to 48 hours old is beyond me.

Los Angeles Has No Country

At least, not on the airwaves anymore. Apparently, New York doesn't, either. Los Angeles' last country music station switched to playing soul-pop last week with little fanfare and little publicity.

I suppose that lots of people from professional sociologists to armchair pop culture analysts will try and read a lot into this. But actually I don't think it's all that significant. It's not like people don't listen to country music in Los Angeles. Far from it -- there are hundreds of thousands of country music fans here. I'm not one of them, but I suppose that if people like a particular kind of music, they're going to find a way to listen to it. I've lots of friends all over America who like country music; it's popular with a lot of folks from all walks of life and that's as true in Southern California as it is anywhere else.

When I grew up here in the Antelope Valley, we couldn't get any of the cool radio stations from Los Angeles. But somehow the cool kids found a way to listen to the cool music. I wasn't a cool kid, so I listened to whatever did come on the radio stations we could get, and as a result I have a taste for music closer to that of people half a generation or more older than me. That's not to say that when I did get out into the larger world and found other kinds of music, I didn't like it. But I never really figured out where kids here got exposed to groups like Depeche Mode or Duran Duran. But they did find this music, and they did listen to it, and while I might have been a bit slower than my peers to get on board, I did too.

The point is that the kids who wanted to listen to modern music found a way to do it, even though there was no radio outlet for those genres which they could tap into easily. There was MTV, there were trips to the big city (for some reason, the richer kids who could afford to go to L.A. more frequently seemed to find new music faster), there were magazines and newspapers and television shows that reported on the music scene, and there was good old-fashioned word of mouth. And there were some artists so big that they even penetrated into a podunk area like the Antelope Valley, like U2, Prince, and Madonna. Even we knew who they were.

Today, it's even easier than it was in the eighties to find the music you want to listen to without the assistance of radio. The internet has made it possible to listen to radio stations, watch videos, spread word-of-mouth, and generally disseminate music all over the world, for cheap. Kids aren't just listening to the radios; they listen to iPods and watch streaming videos over the net; cell phone manufacturers seem to think we'll want to listen to music on our phones so that's in the future; under pressure from competitors, MTV is even playing music videos again. The technology has become so easy to use and so widely-disseminated that even folks who are technophobic can use it easily.

So country music fans in Los Angeles (and New York) need not fear very much. If they want to keep up with the developments in their favorite genre of music, it won't be hard for them to get information, news, music, and everything else they want. Country music has its own cable television station that plays nothing but country videos and has country music news. Music stores and Wal-Mart aren't about to stop carrying such big movers. The entertainment media is not going to stop reporting on his genre of music, and there's always the internet.

So I don't think this is particularly significant, nor does it indicate some sort of cultural rejection of middle America by coastal cities. Before she died, Patsy Cline said something like, "Country music is never going to go away. The things it is about are a part of us -- loving, cheating, feeling bad, and feeling good later -- and that's what the music is all about."

My Gateway Customer Service Story

August 1: I call Gateway and ask for a warranty repair. CSR at Gateway's center says that he will send out a box for me to return the computer in the mail.

August 2: FedEx calls, unable to deliver my package. Two digits in the middle of my street address have been transposed. I advise of the correct address and the package is dropped off.

August 3: I pack up the computer in the box and ship it back to Gateway's repair facility in Houston.

August 4: Package is received at Houston. Repair made the same day.

August 5: Package shipped back to me. Again, the same two digits in the middle of my street address are transposed and FedEx is unable to deliver my package. Unlike August 2, no one calls me. The package sits in FedEx's delivery facility unattended.

August 10: I call Gateway, asking for an update on my computer. The CSR tells me that the computer is still being tested in the lab and that the process will take three to seven business days to complete. (This, the attentive reader will notice, is not true. See entry for August 4.). I ask if the return address on the order can be changed, because my initial delivery address was faulty and I wanted to make sure that the return address was fine. I am told that unfortunately, the order is already in the system and it cannot be changed, but I can call once the shipment is made and make arrangements with FedEx to pick up the address. Length of call: 39 minutes.

August 15: The package is shipped back to Gateway's facility in Houston. Attentive readers will notice the absence of any entries between August 8 and 15 indicating any attempt on the part of FedEx or Gateway to contact me with any problems.

August 16: I call Gateway, asking for an update. I am told that there was a delivery problem, and the product is available at my FedEx facility for pickup. I get a tracking number and log on to FedEx's website and find out that the product is on a truck on its way to Houston. I ask what can be done to get the computer back to me (since I need it to teach my classes while I am on my trip to Wisconsin for my wife's family reunion, not to mention that I am fed up with the slow, slow pace of my backup computer). I am told that there is nothing they can do while the package is en route and I will need to wait for the package to arrive. It is scheduled to arrive August 18. But, I am assured that the CSR will see to it that the issue is "escalated." Length of call: 42 minutes.

August 18: I check FedEx's website and note that the computer has been delivered to the shipping facility in Houston. I call again, and the CSR tells me that the package is ready for pickup at my local FedEx facility. I reply that no, it is not, it is in fact at Gateway's facility two time zones away. The CSR says no, there is the tracking number showing that it's been at my facility since August 15. I ask the CSR to go to FedEx's website and actually track the package. There is a lengthy pause and when I am taken off hold, I am assured that the matter will be "escalated." I ask what that means since the last time didn't seem to do much good, and I'm told that means that a supervisor will handle the problem from here on out. Reassured, I vow to call back. Total time on phone: 52 minutes.

August 19: I call again, trying to find out what's going on. I am told that the warehouse is closed on Saturday and I should call back on Monday. I express anxiety about getting the computer back in time and offer to pay extra for overnight shipping. I am told that it simply is not possible, they have only the one rate and it's the bulk shipping rate, but things usually get resolved in two to three business days. I explain that I don't have two to three business days any more. In response, the CSR assures me that the matter will be "escalated." Like my blood pressure. I express my displeasure and my burning desire to tell everyone I know about my experience. I am told that the CSR is disappointed that I am having a bad experience. Yeah, right. I'm a statistic to this mouth-breather. Total time on phone: 52 minutes.

August 21: I call again. Twice in one day. My first call (just after lunch) results in a half-hour hold resulting in the CSR identifying the tracking number for the original shipment and a chirpy advisement that I can pick up my computer at the FedEx facility. Once again, I explain the history of this sorry affair and express my frustration with Gateway's inability to properly interface with its own vendor. The CSR then says, "Oh, I see this has been escalated." (No shit.) I explain that Gateway and its vendors have had this computer for three weeks and the guys in the lab only used one day to fix the damn thing so I would really like it back. The CSR says that she is unable to locate the computer but that these things usually ship out in two to three days, and they ought to have it going out tonight. Skeptical, I ask for a tracking number. She tells me to call back later in the evening. Total time on the phone: 48 minutes, I'm ashamed to say. The office manager scolded me because she saw my door closed and didn't know where I was. (Why didn't she knock?)

My second call, at 7:40 tonight, results in another 37 minutes, most of which is spent on hold listening to Randy Travis and Bette Midler songs, while a CSR tries to locate my computer and fails. The CSR then spends another 11 minutes finding a "Customer Satisfaction Supervisor," who tells me that he will send a message to the warehouse, but they usually take 24 hours to get back to him, and delivery is usually done within three to four business days after that. I explain that I don't have three to four business days, and again offer to pay myself for overnight delivery. I am told, again, that this is simply impossible and I should call back again in about 24 hours. Total time on the phone: 57 minutes.

So far, I've spent a total of 260 minutes -- more than four precious, irreplaceable hours of my life -- dealing with a company that obviously doesn't know how to keep track of its packages. So now, I'm giving vent to my desire to tell of the quality of my customer serivce experience. And I'm concluding with some advice:

Dude, get a Dell.

Lebanese Tea Party

Both Hezbollah's TV network and Israeli TV news have aired, and the rest of the world has picked up, video of a Lebanese general and his staff serving glasses of tea to invading Israeli soldiers after they surrendered their station near the border without a shot during the recent war. Hezbollah has done this because it discredits the regular Lebanese army with its Shi'ite supporters in southern Lebanon.

The general did the right thing by surrendering to the Israelis, from what I can gather. He had a skeleton crew of troops at his disposal, and the Israelis were pounding the hell out of anyone who shot back at them. He had been sent to this post by the government to dispense and coordinate humanitarian aid to displaced civilians, and his soldiers were minimally armed. Resistance would have been futile, would have hampered his fulfillment of his mission, and resulted in escalating the military conflict to positioning the government of Lebanon against Israel after the government had carefully tried to isolate Hezbollah as the real target of the fire, and the Israelis obliged them by concentrating their attacks only on Hezbollah-controlled sites.

Perhaps what Hezbollah is upset about was the Lebanese general's refusal to escalate the war and bring the government around by necessity to Hezbollah's side of things. That, however, is not what is inciting all the anger. No, the real treason, Hezbollah implies, was treating the Israelis like human beings and showing them hospitality at all. I suppose the Lebanese soldiers could have surrendered in a more contemptuous way, and officially the government of Lebanon forbids its citizens contact with Israelis.

The Lebanese are not a homogenous people. There are Shi'ite Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Christians, and Druze in that country, and there are more Christians in the south of Lebanon than Muslims. There are ethnic Arabs, Turks, and Persians; many people have English and French blood flowing through their veins as well. If Israel is likely to ever have a good Arabic neighbor, the likeliest candidate for that good neighbor would have been Lebanon rather than Egypt or even Jordan.

I think this general should be praised by his countrymen. Not because he surrendered, but because he saw the situation for what it was and acted appropriately. He saved the lives of his men and the civilians in the area; he did not create an obstacle to the tenuous cease-fire that even then was in the works; he kept himself in a position to fulfill his mission of dispensing humanitarian aid. He also made Hezbollah look bad along the way, and showed his countrymen that they can co-exist with their Jewish neighbors to the south. And that's another reason why I say that he's the hero of the Lebanese Tea Party.

I also note that, despite many claims that Israel indiscriminately bombed out Lebanese infrastructure like Beruit's international airport, that airport is now open for business again; flights from Syria, Turkey, and Iran landed today; British Airways and Air France will resume flights there on Sunday. No war can achieve surgical precision, but Israel has tried using strong language and diplomatic scolding before, and it just didn't work. So could it be that Israel really did only try to knock out enough easily-repairable facilities to prevent Hezbollah from being re-armed by its Syrian and Iranian sponsors, and that it tried to leave as many innocent civilians alone as it could?

There are still good guys and bad guys in this fight, and while there's a truce going on right now, don't be fooled -- this war is not over; it's been going on since 1948 with various pauses in the action. This is just another chapter, and I'm not even sure this chapter is over yet.

Meanwhile, the top headline on nearly every news page for nearly every U.S. news outlet is that apparently, the creepy guy who might or might not have killed that creepy girl nine years ago might or might not have been telling the truth when he confessed and his story might or might not make sense in light of the other facts of the case. Stay tuned for more details, plus weather and a special report on the hidden killer in your medicine cabinet!

Today's Ruling

(This is kind of more important than JonBenet.)

In today's decision in ACLU v. NSA, the District Court took, head-on, the arguments advanced some months ago by the Attorney General, which were commented upon in January right here in this very blog. The Court, in the person of Judge Anna Hicks Taylor (a Carter appointee) found one of the government's arguments valid, but most of them lacking.

Judge Taylor ruled in favor of the government on the data-mining issue, specifically that the case could not be adjudicated without disclosure of classified information and therefore that portion of the case was simply not justiciable. The data-mining was one of the issues I have had the most concern about because by definition it involves some level of governmental scrutiny over a very broad range of communications, the bulk of which, by necessity, will not even create a reasonable suspicion of untoward activity.

But, after that, the government started taking some hits. In particular, the ACLU Court found that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington is itself harmonizable with prior Congressional activity regulating the President's exercise of powers granted to him by Congress, and also harmonizable with the Constitution. However, the manner of the exercise with respect to the NSA's warrantless wiretaps (tactfully called the "Terrorist Detection Program" for political gloss) was not harmonizable with FISA, the First Amendment or the Fourth Amendment. Judge Taylor also made short work of the "inherent powers" argument that the President is the Commander in Chief and therefore can do what he wants as the head of the military:

In the Youngstown case the same “inherent powers” argument was raised and the Court noted that the President had been created Commander in Chief of only the military, and not of all the people, even in time of war. Indeed, since Ex Parte Milligan, we have been taught that the “Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace. . . .” Ex Parte Milligan, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 2, 120 (1866). Again, in Home Building & Loan Ass’n v. Blaisdell, we were taught that no emergency can create power.

I hadn't given a lot of thought to the First Amendment angle and I'm not sure that it holds up very well. But I've always been a believer in the Fourth Amendment side of things, and the decision made an interesting historical linkage, delving into pre-Revolutionary history to illuminate the Framers' minds regarding His Majesty's use of General Warrants in the early 1770's to seize papers, pamphlets, printing presses, and persons suspected of spreading sedition. (Geez, TL, alliterate much?) So that deserves some thought -- was the President claiming for himself the modern-day equivalent of a General Warrant? Either way, the Court was entirely correct to note:

...the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all “inherent powers” must derive from that Constitution.

Usually, the best parts of an opinion come at the very end. But I was particularly moved by this passage, which is smack-dab in the middle:

It was never the intent of the Framers to give the President such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The three separate branches of government were developed as a check and balance for one another. It is within the court’s duty to ensure that power is never “condense[d] ... into a single branch of government.” Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 536 (2004) (plurality opinion). We must always be mindful that “[w]hen the President takes official action, the Court has the authority to determine whether he has acted within the law.” Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681, 703 (1997). “It remains one of the most vital functions of this Court to police with care the separation of the governing powers . . . . When structure fails, liberty is always in peril.” Public Citizen v. U.S. Dept. of Justice, 491 U.S. 440, 468 (1989) (Kennedy, J., concurring).

One of the reasons why I care so intently about the structural side of the Constitution, things like federalism and the separation of powers, is precisely what the Court is discussing here. Even more important than specific guarantees of individual rights like freedom of speech and privacy are the Constitution's system of distributing power over multiple centers within the framework of government. By requiring different people within government to interact with one another regarding the exercise of their powers and the wisdom of how those powers are exercised, collective wisdom and collective decision-making is built in to the system. The price of this is inefficiency, but the Framers believed, and they were right, that this was a small price to pay for a government dedicated to maintaining rather than diminishing the liberty of its citizens.

Interestingly, where the Court seemed to feel it was on the weakest ground was the exigent circumstances doctrine. This received very little treatment. The Court is right to point out that the President could have sought Congressional assistance with practical difficulties in implementing the various laws like FISA which attempt to balance the government's legitimate need for gathering intelligence and the necessity of preserving individual rights, and that the President had not done so. But I think the Court should have addressed the cases in which exigent circumstances permitted warrantless searches more thoroughly.

Rather than finish with a rhetorical flourish like other opinions I have enjoyed recently, ACLU v. NSA finishes with a quote from Chief Justice Earl Warren:

Implicit in the term ‘national defense’ is the notion of defending those values and ideas which set this Nation apart. . . . It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of . . . those liberties . . . which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile. U.S. v. Robel, 389 U.S. 258, 267 (1967).

Quite so. Certainly we should defend America from her enemies. But we should not cease to be Americans in the process.

The case is from the Eastern District of Michigan. The Attorney General has already filed an appeal. Michigan is in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most deferential of the nine circuits to the government and one of the least friendly to plaintiffs. It's also one of the most geographically odd circuits, in my opinion; it stretches from the border of Canada on Michigan's UP all the way down to Chattanooga, yet it only contains four states: Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan. Well, that's the way Congress drew the maps.

So I would predict that this appeal will be heard by the Sixth Circuit within about a year, and the government will prevail at the intermediate stage. From there, of course, the case will be picked up by the Supreme Court; whether on a circuit split with what we may reasonably anticipate will be an adverse ruling to the government from the Ninth Circuit from the pending appeal of the case of Hepting v. AT & T Corp., 2006 WL 2038464, (E.D. Cal. June 20, 2006) case (which the government won at the District Court level).

It certainly seems as though Judge Taylor, in writing today's opinion, was fishing for friends on the High Court, noting wherever possible when she was quoting from opinions written by sitting Justices (in particular, Justice Kennedy and his former and frequent colleague, Justice O'Connor) and throwing in an extended discussion of original intent clearly aimed directly at Justices Scalia and Thomas (and by extension, Roberts and Alito). Whether this ploy is successful or not is a good question; Eugene Volokh, one of my intellectual heroes, criticizes her for the shrill and partisan tone she strikes, and his colleague Dale Carpenter suggests that she blew the call on standing.

It will be at least 2008, and more likely the summer of 2009, before the Supreme Court makes its ruling on this issue and we have the last word. By then, the personnel on the Court may change; by then, we will have a new President. So the world is very likely to look a little bit different when this ruling reaches its final form than it does today. Hopefully, the Constitution looks the same way then as it does now, too. Because the Constitution is what this is all about.

Michigan Judge Rules NSA Warantless Wiretaps Unconstitutional

U.S. District Court Judge Anna Hicks Taylor of the Eastern District of Michigan issued a ruling about an hour ago finding the NSA warrantless wiretapping program unconstitutional. I've been saying that for months now. More later when I have time to read the opinion.

Annoyed

For a news junkie like me, the "We found JonBenet's killer" story is a huge annoyance. It captures headlines all over the place, obscuring real news. So some creepy middle-aged white guy killed some creepy childhood beauty princess. So what? The JonBenet story is interesting only because it is so very creepy. But this shouldn't have ever been anything more than local news in central Colorado.

Hey, Mainstream Media: Tell me about the war. Tell me about the economy. Tell me about changes in technology and science. Tell me about real crime. Tell me about law and politics. Tell me about natural disasters. But don't bother me with Britney belching. At least, not on the front page of all your websites.

Must Have Been A Tough Call

The story: 16-year-old kid gets Hodgkin's lymphoma, a nasty form of cancer that is often incurable and fatal. He undergoes treatment which includes chemotherapy. He reacts badly to chemo. So he wants to discontinue chemotherapy, and start taking an "alternative" treatment instead. The "alternative" treatment, called the "Hoxsey Method," has not been legal in the United States since 1960 and the herbal components of which must be imported from Mexico, had not survived any kind of scientific testing for efficacy on Hodgkin's lymphoma.

This tears me up inside. Some sixteen-year-olds are likely to be intelligent and mature enough to understand what it means to forego medical treatment that the overwhelming weight of conventional treatment wisdom tells him to take; to understand that not following a doctor's advice while undergoing treatment for cancer is literally risking one's own life; and that such a young person is able to weigh that risk against the alternatives (including doing nothing). I can see someone with maturity and intelligence comparing the trauma of chemotherapy to his curent medical condition and deciding that maybe the pain and weakness isn't worth the marginally improved chances of survival that he would gain.

But a lot of sixteen-year-olds would not be so mature, I think. They would tend to make more impetuous decisions and deal with the issue from the standpoint of a disbelief in personal vulnerability. Death was a hard concept for me to understand as a sixteen-year-old, and I think I was a pretty mature and intelligent sixteen-year-old. Not until some of my relatives and friends died did I start really thinking hard about death and my own mortality. Still, let's give this young man the benefit of the doubt -- he's been sick for a while and has probably pondered these things much more than his peers.

So who are we, as a society, to require a person of sufficient maturity and intelligence to accept medical care that he does not want? Certainly we should satisfy ourselves that he is really making an informed, voluntary choice in not getting this medical care, but once we have satisfied ourselves of that, my basically libertarian principles tell me that society's role in the process is now complete and he can make his own decision and live (or die) with the consequences.

But then I see that he is relying on an effectively disproved treatment method, one which is probably being pushed on him by charlatans espousing the evils of the "traditional medical establishment" with some foggy-headed appeal to hope based on nothing reasonable or provable. If this young man is a person of faith, then by all means, an appeal to the diety of his choice for healing or palliation is in order, and that can be done consistently with getting medical care. But an appeal to quack medicine is just not something I can endorse. Suggesting that this alternative treatment is somehow equivalent to chemotherapy is simply incorrect. The shame of it is if he really thinks this other procedure will help him.

I guess if he has faith in it, that's worth something. But faith and prayer simply aren't good tools for healing the sick. At best, they create a kind of placebo effect; one recent study actually had cardiac patients who received intercessory prayer suffering more complications than those who did not. Of course, there are also statistical apologetics for prayer's purported healing effects, and I tend to think that the real value of scientific studies on the medical value of prayer neither confirm nor deny its value but instead strongly confirm the observer-expectancy effect. This comment isn't directly about the medical value of prayer anyway -- and seeking divine aid to recover from his illness is not mentioned in a lot of the reports about this story.

The point is that this young man is consciously choosing to take therapy that has been amply demonstrated to be quackery. He seems to be placing real hope in this course of treatment that lacks substantial scientific support. That suggests that perhaps his decision to forego chemotherapy is not so well-informed after all.

[The previous two paragraphs were edited from a previous version of this post -- TL]

I wouldn't have wanted to have been the judge in this case. That must have been a very difficult decision. But I suppose, on balance, that allowing this young man to get quack medicine instead of chemotherapy was effectively the same thing as allowing him to get no treatment at all if that were his decision. So I guess it was the right call. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

(A footnote, directly appropos of no substantive issue this story raises -- the 16-year-old in question bears the unlikely name "Starchild Abraham Cherrix." If he's sixteen now, that means he was born in 1990. What kind of a parent decides in 1990 to name their son "Starchild"? They can do it if they want, I guess, but that seems like the sort of thing that hippie parents would have named their kids in the late 60's or early 70's. This young man with a lot of more important things on his mind than silly issues like baby-name fashions apparently prefers to be called by his middle name, "Abraham," which seems like a pretty good idea to me, or at least a less flaky one.)

It's Not You, It's Us

This appears to mark the end of at least one genre of "reality TV": dating shows. The last, and greatest, of all TV dating shows, Blind Date, will only be renewed in reruns and syndication. The market appears to have got its fill of really bad dates. A lot of people, myself included, are becoming more frustrated with all the "unscripted" television out there. The future, I think, will be series-scripted dramas, dramatic shows with story arcs plotted out for an entire season (or five seasons, even).

Hey, reality TV, it's been fun. But I can't let myself change my mind about this. I need more. I need writing, you know, some level of thought going in to the programming? And you're really great, you'll find a nice audience somewhere, I'm sure of it. We can still be friends and maybe hang out every once in a while. I just need to, you know, move on to a different stage; I need to focus on me some more than I have been. Aww, don't cry, this is hard enough as it is.

Sideburns

I got a haircut today at one of those discount haircutting places. The haircut is OK, but now my sideburns are shaved off, and the line between hair and no hair is uneven between either side of my face. I look at myself in the mirror and it's like my head is permanently tilted to the right.

Not every man looks good with sideburns. Like this fellow here. But I wish I still had my sideburns. Right now I look like an alien or a child's action figure with a plastic switchable helmet for hair. I hope my sideburns grow back again soon. When they do, I will love and protect and cherish them.

Achieving Goals

The Wife today asked me about goals. She wondered why we hadn't spent a lot of time talking about what our goals were and how to achieve them. It seems to me, though, that we spend quite a bit of time doing both. What she meant, it turned out, is why we haven't written them down on a piece of paper and created logical action plans to realize them. The answer, I thought, was that I didn't think that was necessary.

When she asked what my goals were, I was momentarily at a loss because there is really only one right now -- getting into a position to buy a house in about a year. Other goals I have had in the recent past have actually all been realized.

I wanted to find someone wonderful that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Check that one off the list -- I've got The Wife and I couldn't possibly have done better on this one.

I wanted to get myself into a position where I could earn enough money on a reliable basis that The Wife didn't have to work. Check that one, too -- it took moving to Tennessee and back again and a lot of hard times on the way, but it seems that we are finally in a place where we needn't be anxious about money all the time, and we can make it just on what I earn practicing law and teaching.

I wanted to do something with my life that was more than just lawyering. Check. I'm teaching and writing and those things are helping me grow professionally and personally.

So all that's left is getting back into a position to buy a house and get in the game of home ownership and equity appreciation. That was a primary motive to our move to Tennessee, because the cost of housing there is so low. But finding work to power the payments proved much more difficult than we had thought, so we've come back to California. Here, the money is turning out to be adequate, and the challenge will be saving enough to break in to the market. The cost of entry here is prohibitively high. But if The Wife's business takes off, then we can use the money she makes to save up for that price of admission.

After that goal is realized, I suppose I'll need to devote more attention to my other professional projects, which will be coming along nicely by then. But for now, keeping control of my professional life, helping The Wife get her business off the ground, and saving money to put my family in a better position by next summer is where I'm at.

These are good goals, ambitious but within my grasp. Here's hoping that you, Loyal Readers, are on the path to realizing your goals, too.