This Is How I Maintain A Facade Of Diplomacy

From a room full of adjunct teachers, in a two-and-a-half-hour-long meeting to brief them on how to fill out a five-column form now required by the school, my intelligible notes read as follows:

• University identifies list of 8-12 "learning objectives" for class.
• Me: ID objectives by number for each assignment -- prove class meets objvs.
• Me: itemize whether each student meets objective or not for each assignment.
• E-mail form to dean and local campus when semester is done along with grades.
• Guy in back outraged. Arbitrary rules part of life dude.
• Must conform syllabus to school template from now on.
• Tedious. Is it even worth my time anymore?
• Look, dude, it's arbitrary and stupid and time-consuming and you have to do it anyway.
• Everybody's busy.
• If they'd wanted your opinion, they'd have told you what it was before this meeting.
• If you don't like it, quit. No one's forcing you to do this.
• Can I go home yet?

The rest of the page is doodles, growing increasingly pointy and agitated as the one adjunct teacher in back droned on and on about how the school didn't trust him or care about his academic freedom. It's a frickin' career college, dude, there's no academic freedom here. You want academic freedom? Go get on the tenure track at a four-year public school. What you want here is a paycheck.

I let no one see what I wrote. Instead, I seemed to be an attentive, patient attendee. Some people wear their hearts on their sleeve -- mine gets scrawled on a legal pad.

Bad Attorney Advertising, Part 1

Yesterday, I was musing about a lack of blogworthy subjects. After all, what can I say about the Nevada Senate race that hasn't been said elsewhere a million times already? No good options available there, but that ought to be obvious to the casual observer. But I should have simply had a bit more patience, because today, under the windshield wiper of my car out in the parking lot at court, the subject for not only a new post but a whole series of posts was literally given to me, for free.

I speak, of course, of bad attorney advertisements.

I found the flyer to the left on the windshield of my car this morning. Unless I've missed my guess, you should be able to click on the picture and see it at a much higher resolution. The flyer itself was on an 8½" by 11" sheet of glossy paper, printed on only one side.

I've altered the attorney's name and telephone number. I found a font that is sort of like the one used in the ad but I frankly didn't dedicate a lot of effort to that part of this project, so my two alterations are a little darker than the scan, the font isn't exactly right, and is just a little bit smaller. This should be obvious to the casual observer, once you find the alterations I made.

Which is my very first problem with the advertisement.  You've really got to hunt to find the attorney's name and telephone number. There is no doubt that the advertisement is for a divorce lawyer.  What is that lawyer's name?  Assuming that I'm favorably impressed by the advertisement and want to hire this lawyer to handle my divorce, how do I get a hold of that lawyer?  The lawyer's name appears in the smallest size font used in the entire advertisement, at the very bottom of the page.  The lawyer's telephone number is nearly buried underneath stacks of visually oppressive block text.

Which is the second problem.  There are upper- and lower-case letters for a reason.  USING ALL CAPITAL BOLDFACED LETTERS IS LIKE SHOUTING and when you emphasize everything, the result is that nothing is emphasized.  The use of all-capital letters, and the clunky, blocky font gets in the way of the message, which ought to be "Hey, I'm a lawyer who can help you with your divorce." Instead, the ad says "I'M A LAWYER WHO CAN HELP YOU WITH YOUR DIVORCE!" and that suggests some rather disagreeable things about the lawyer's personality. This is only underlined by the central picture (more about that below).

My scan of the flyer is maybe a little blockier than the print, but not much.  The spacing of the fonts is badly-proportioned, and in the central, most important word ("DIVORCE") the spacing is so obviously over-wide that it is distracting.  Since my suspicion is that "Arthur Dent" designed the advertisement himself, I would suggest that he take some time to learn about why typography is important for lawyers and how to use typography advantageously so as to make documents with at least a modicum of care for the visual effect of the end product. A similar typographical disaster is the fact that every word of text on the advertisement is centered.  Some use of centering is good, too much and it looks like you don't understand how to use the "left-align" button on your word processor in addition to being indifferent about how you use your CAPS LOCK key.

The graphic elements of the ad have five parts -- the two pink trapezoids, the two blue trapezoids, and the photograph in the middle.  I like the photograph in the middle.  It is emotionally compelling, accurately describes the need for the service being offered, and it attracts the eye.  It's a shame that this nice photograph is surrounded by such primitive and ineffective graphic elements as the trapezoids.  They are at once so bright on the glossy paper as to hurt the viewer's retinas but also so dark as to create a low contrast with the black text of the advertisement.

On glossy paper, and viewed in the sun (as I first saw the flyer) the low contrast is much more dramatic than it looks in the scan (or the shade). Probably the glossy paper was the only format available that could transmit the clarity of the photograph -- I like the detail of the muscles straining on the man's neck especially -- so maybe "Arthur Dent" was stuck with that kind of medium instead of one that was both more affordable and easier to read.

Now, I've already spilt a lot of words about the flyer but I haven't yet said anything about its content.

My response to the content is not completely negative, however.  I'll say this for "Arthur Dent" -- he has created a properly-focused advertisement. "Arthur Dent" is probably not above taking a personal injury case, an eviction, or a criminal matter.  But this advertisement is going for one kind of business and one kind of business only -- family law.  If you need to get divorced, Arthur Dent does that.  Too many lawyer advertisements -- I'll share another one soon -- contain laundry lists of different sorts of things the attorney either has done, is willing to do, or is at least willing to take your money in exchange for promising to do.  The result is confusion, at best.  "Arthur Dent" does not suffer that problem here -- there is no confusion at all about what "Arthur Dent" does for his clients.

However.  "Arthur" also seems to suffer from low self-esteem.  Despite "13 years experience" our man "Arthur" describes himself as "cheap" twice, "cut-rate" once, and "competent" once.  I would hope that with thirteen years of experience, "Arthur" is not just "competent" at the core segment of his practice.  By now, he should be pretty good.  And he should also be good enough to command a healthy fee.  When I showed this ad to The Wife, her first reaction was, "This guy must not be very good if he has to cut his fees like that."  When I began doing real estate law, I was quickly corrected the first time I referred to a piece of property as "cheap." Real estate isn't "cheap," it's "inexpensive." Similarly, legal services aren't "cheap," they're "affordable" or "reasonable."

So given that his assurances about his "cheap" rates also convey the impression that the quality of the services offered in exchange are not high, what does "Arthur Dent" say about the quality of work he does?  Well, in his left-hand trapezoid, he asks if the reader wants "excellent" representation.  Then in the bottom trapezoid, he promises to deliver "competent" representation.  You might say I'm selling "Arthur Dent" short here, but he's the one who's doing that. I'm just pointing out what he says about himself.

"Arthur" uses the word "representation" four times, and twice in a single sentence.  I suspect most people know what that word means, but it is a long word, and in graphic terms, it eats up acres of space on the flyer.  So do words like "experience," "understanding," "procedures," and "competent."  The"Want-Have-Get" triptych is also a parody of what people cynically think of the legal system in general, and divorces in particular.  The overuse of dollar signs and question marks also does not add luster.

And finally, "Arthur" chose to advertise in the form of a large-format glossy-paper flyer placed on peoples' cars outside a courthouse.  Now, if you want to create a favorable impression for your product or service with me, leaving a flyer for it on my car while I'm not there to monitor you tampering with it is a really counterproductive way to go about doing that. But maybe other people are less bothered by that sort of thing than I.

The medium and venue for the advertisement also suggests that Arthur Dent" is targeting people who are already in the middle of divorce proceedings and find themselves overwhelmed by the legal system without a lawyer.  That's certainly filling a need, but it doesn't seem like a particularly profitable market.  These are people who didn't get a lawyer when they first ventured in to court -- most likely because they didn't have enough money to hire one so they went on their own to do the best they could.  This dovetails with the ad's emphasis on "cheap" fees.  "Arthur Dent" is making a significant mistake here that has been underlined to me by experienced lawyers, marketing consultants, colleagues, and bitter experience -- any attorney can get all the work they want to do, and more, from clients who can't pay.

It's a hard enough time for family lawyers as it is.  Typically, attorney's fees in a middle-class divorce are paid for out of the liquidation of the former family house.  With so many homes upside-down these days, a lot of people who would otherwise get divorced are not doing so, because they can't afford the transaction cost.  One colleague at court tells of a situation where he has a would-be client who can't afford his fee so he and his wife both continue to live together in the house they jointly own within their still-extant marital estate -- he with his girlfriend, she with her boyfriend, all under the same roof.  A ticking time bomb of a situation, if you ask me.

Within that sort of economic environment, "Arthur Dent" is spending money, probably a lot of it, to have these flyers printed up and distributed, so that he can attract clients who will have difficulty compensating him for his services.  My verdict is that the only thing that will save "Arthur Dent" from the ruinous consequences of a successful marketing campaign will be the singular ineffectiveness of the advertisement deployed in pursuit of that strategy.

Well It's Not Just Me

I've not really spent much time Thinking Big Thoughts or Making Astute Observations or even coming up with Incisive Takes On News lately. Frankly, I've been too busy working, too busy with my local atheist group, too busy coaching my high school mock trial team, too busy gearing up to teach a class, too busy playing Civilization V and re-reading the Baroque Cycle. I cut my index finger badly with my new ceramic santoku knife, so typing is a bit awkward, but that's not anything I can't work around. No, it's stuff like my poor dog won't stop scratching despite a trip to the groomers and a dose of anti-flea medication; I'm mourning a disastrous Packer game yesterday; the weather has been glorious, and the Freud movie analysis club did Basic Instinct. All told, living my life has felt consuming enough that I've not had the desire to write in a serious way for a little while.

And you know what, this is okay.  We can't all be Thinking Big Thoughts, Getting Our Collective Danders Up all the time, or even Writing The Great American Blog every day.  It's okay to drop it down into second gear, pretty much coast for a while, and not worry about kicking it up again until the need arises.

At least I know it's not me. My right-wing friend seems to have found no better pop culture target to go after than John Cusack, my favorite writers at my favorite Big Thoughts blog find the most notable intellectual event of the day being the ten-year anniversary of Andrew Sullivan's blog, and even fivethirtyeight has found itself reduced to musing about the Senate race in West Virginia.  For a month before a significant mid-term election, there sure doesn't seem to be a ton of exciting stuff happening.  Parodies of Christine O'Donnell's "I'm Not A Witch" advertisement are about the best thing going.  Memeorandum's lead story is the "controversial" and dark but quite funny Bansky opening sequence for The Simpsons, for crying out loud.


When the biggest thing to write about is The Simpsons and my dog's mysterious non-flea-related itchiness, it can't really be all that bad.

Truly Objectionable Flag Worship

This is not news -- the Pledge of Allegiance is optional. Always. You are not required, never required, to recite it -- and if you do, feel free to omit the late-addition "under God" clause. Requiring someone to recite it is trampling on their First Amendment rights. West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) 319 U.S. 624.

Citing an attorney for contempt of court -- resulting in his same-day incarceration -- for refusing to recite the Pledge before proceedings begin is an abuse of judicial power and a violation of the Constitution judges are sworn to uphold. But that's exactly what Chancellor Talmadge Littlejohn of Tupelo, Mississippi did to attorney Danny Lampley yesterday. (Hat tip.) Lampley need offer no explanation, excuse, or apology for remaining silent while others recited the Pledge of Allegiance -- he is an American citizen and an American citizen need not explain or apologize for their exercise of their rights, particularly before a court and a judge who ought to know better.

Judge Littlejohn, however, owes Lampley an expungement of the contempt citation, and an apology. Whatever other politics, ongoing disputes, or feuds these two men might have, when he puts on that robe, sits on that bench, and issues a contempt citation, Littlejohn stops being an individual and becomes an embodiment of the state. As such, he owes everyone a duty to discharge the powers of the state with integrity, fairness, and in accordance with his oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution. I rather suspect that he will receive a letter with some unkind words from the Mississippi Supreme Court in fairly short order.

This strikes me as at least harmonious with a bizarre cult of flag-worship floating around in our culture, one that seems to have considerable overlap with people who overtly display a mawkish and superficial love of all things military and patriotic -- and which also seems to overlap with spuriously-reasoned tax protests and other claims about the limits of governmental power, from which comes my favorite piece of judicial language addressing the Cult of the Flag:

Nor are the fringe or the eagle of any legal significance. Even were Mr. McCann to prove that yellow fringe or a flagpole eagle converted the state court's United States flag to a maritime flag of war, the Court cannot fathom how the display of a maritime war flag could limit the state court's jurisdiction to take his child away from him. Jurisdiction is a matter of law, statute, and constitution, not a child's game wherein one's power is magnified or diminished by the display of some magic talisman.

 McCann v. Greenway (W.D. Mo. 1997) 952 F.Supp. 647.

I have no problem with respect for the military or patriotism; I personally respect the military and consider myself a patriot. I have no problem with people advancing credible arguments in court about why they need not comply with governmental orders. But the flag is not a holy idol or a wizard's amulet. It is a symbol. What deserves reverence, respect, deference, and veneration is what the flag is a symbol of. America is not a piece of cloth.

The Jehovah's Witnesses in the Barnette case had a social point as well as a legal one -- there are people who do not merely venerate the flag, they worship it.* To confuse the symbol for that which the symbol represents is the very essence of magical thinking. And there is no place for magical thinking on a court's bench.


* ...and then a great many of those people call themselves "Christians" after worshiping that symbol, one which the Gospels would equate with Caesar rather than Jehovah, but this isn't a post about religion.

Silly Anti-Hapsburg Laws

I guess maybe to some people in Europe, it's not so silly to have laws that exclude the descendents of the former royal and noble families from becoming heads of state, but it seems rather silly to me that someone who can run for a country's Parliament and therefore theoretically become its Prime Minister and actual head of government cannot also run for President and become the country's honorary public figurehead:

A descendant of the Habsburgs is taking Austria to the European Court for Human Rights for not allowing him to run for president, his lawyer said Tuesday.
Ulrich Habsburg-Lothringen could not become a candidate in April 25 elections because he lacked the required number of signatures and Austrian law bars members of all ruling or former ruling families from running for the largely ceremonial post.
The Habsburg dynasty was once Europe's most influential royal house and held power from the 13th to the early 20th centuries.
The ban - which only applies to the presidency and is enshrined in the constitution - dates back to 1919 when Austria became a republic after centuries of monarchic rule. It was meant to quash any aspirations to reclaim the throne by members of the former royal family.
The complaint filed with the Strasbourg-based court argues that the ban violates Habsburg-Lothringen's human right to participate in democratic elections, said his lawyer, Rudolf Vouk.

Dr. Habsburg-Lothringen seems like a decent enough fellow on his own website; while there is plenty of blue blood in his veins it seems as though such money as he has is the result of what in America we would call a "small business" as a tree farmer, supplemented with work as a civil engineer and a raw materials purchasing agent for a paper plant.  His politics look to be well within the spectrum of socially-acceptable opinions of his nation, and he even has a blog! It's no more or less crankier than anyone else's; he's annoyed that the accident of his parentage excludes him from running for a particular office.

In America, we have both a ban on hereditary titles or grants of nobility, and a ban on laws that work a corruption of blood. These both seem like eminently fair and reasonable policies for all countries in this modern era of self-government. It's not Dr. Habsburg's fault that his ancestors were nobility. He is a citizen of his nation, he pays his taxes, he seems to have broken no laws. Maybe it's none of my business because I'm not Austrian, but if I were, I'd say, if he is otherwise eligible to run for President of his country, let him stand along with with his peers and solicit the approval of his fellow-citizens.

Since he can't even gather 6,000 signatures to be otherwise eligible to run, I don't think there's much danger that a Habsburg will actually be President of Austria anyway.

Hat tip to Robert Farley.

The Supreme Court Lexicon Expands

Looking over the transcript of today's oral argument in Snyder v. Phelps, the big free speech case argued today in the Supreme Court, I find this passage argued by Margie Phelps, counsel for her relative Fred Phelps, the mastermind (if such a word can be used) behind the excerable Westboro Baptist Church's protests of soldiers' funerals:

JUSTICE ALITO: So let me -- let me give you this example. Suppose someone believes that African Americans are inferior, they are inherently inferior, and they are really a bad influence on this country. And so a person comes up to an African-American and starts berating that person with racial hatred.
Now is that in -- this is just any old person on -- any old African-American on the street. That's a matter of public concern?
MS. PHELPS: I think the issue of race is a matter of public concern. I think approaching an individual up close and in their grille to berate them gets you out of the zone of protection, and we would never do that.

Tr., 39:23-40:11.

Unless I'm mistaken, Ms. Phelps has made the first ever use of the phrase "up in your grill" in U.S. Supreme Court history. Thus doth the law expandeth; we've come a long way since Blackstone.

By the way, Justice Kennedy eviscerates Phelps' argument at a stroke -- not every attribute about someone is a matter of public concern simply because someone doesn't like that thing -- but that isn't the observation I'm making here. Not that Kennedy's point about public issue versus private figure is dispositive. I don't see how the ruling in this case can be anything other than that the Maryland law in question authorizing a tort cause of action against funeral protestors can possibly be Constitutional. Unless the Court is willing to break new ground, this ought to get at least eight votes.

While it's very easy to be outraged at Fred Phelps and the rest of his scummy family for what they do, I for one am not willing to sacrifice the Constitution simply because of scum of this nature hate homosexuals so much that they lack the common decency to allow mourning families to bury their veteran children with dignity. They should be ridiculed and held up to public obloquy and shame, not made subject to custom-crafted tort claims whose goals are overt censorship.

Fundamental Questions

While we in the USA take our democracy-within-a-republic very much for granted, we should not. It only takes a look across the Atlantic to our allies, trading partners, and friends in Europe to see people who look and act very much like us, but who nevertheless periodically confront much more fundamental questions about what good government is than we do. Here, we argue about marginal tax rates, marginal differences in expansion of government involvement in the health care system, and make noises about our debt but never really do much about it. Many of the social issues we confront and clash about are, in the grand scheme of things, really only so much noise. We aren't confronting basic issues like whether the government should nationalize every industry with 50 or more employers. We don't address questions like whether the military should provide police services. We have a very broad, very deep consensus in favor of our federalized republican form of government. In Europe and elsewhere, these kinds of issues are still in play.

I was reminded of this after reading a Portuguese blogbuddy celebrate the centennial of the proclamation of the Republic of Portugal today. One hundred years ago today, the purportedly constitutional monarchy fell and democratic rule became the government of Portugal. I say "purportedly" because an earlier King had imposed what was effectively a dictatorship within the framework of that Constitutional scheme, which resulted in his assassination.  The Portuguese have the good taste to not celebrate the anniversary of the assassination but rather of the subsequent proclamation of a republican form of government as the worthwhile date to commemorate.*  Now, because the author of this blog is a lawyer, he celebrated the holiday with a question -- was it worth it?

In response to the post, I took the time to educate myself about the events of the last century in his nation -- this is the sort of thing I think Wikipedia is good for -- and found an erratic history, one of republican government displacing monarchy, then collapsing into a quasi-fascism, then being usurped by military governments, and only within my lifetime returning to a parliamentary democracy in line with the bulk of Europe.  Looking at Portugal's economic history, it appears that its degree of economic prosperity has roughly coincided with the degree of freedom afforded its people during the last century. The Portuguese were always industrialized and compared with global nations never impoverished, but they've done much better for themselves under republican forms of government than the authoritarian alternatives that were tried. This hardly strikes me as a coincidence but I'm prejudiced in that regard.

On my counterpart's blog, I argued (with the aid of a translation tool since I have no Portuguese myself) that in broad terms, a form of government founded upon the rule of law will necessarily trend towards a republican form of government and away from an authoritarian model. I also argued that a government founded upon popular rule will eventually reach a republican level (which I did not define there as meaning "representative democracy" but that's what I meant) because anarcho-capitalism and direct democracy are simply too inefficient to provide for effective government and therefore even autonomous individuals who find themselves in such an environment will eventually come around to the idea that they need a government with teeth.  I'm borrowing heavily from both Nozick and Rawls here, but that brings me to my question for the morning, one which all you political theory junkies out there will enjoy. And I mean both of you.

My premise asks that you assume a large body of self-governing people who are dedicated to the idea of the rule of law. Is it inevitable that such people will choose a form of government that incorporates a substantial amount of representative democracy?  Or could they rationally, and consistent with their dedication to the rule of law, adopt an authoritarian form of government?  I know that democratic means have resulted in fascist military governments in multiple places during the 20th century (Portugal among them), so what lesson can we take from that -- did those elections represent a real choice by the voters or was there some sort of departure from the peoples' commitment to the rule of law?

It might also be the case that we do not have enough data points in history to plot a curve here -- meaningful self-government is a relatively new phenomenon in human history, after all.

Ultimately, it seems to me not, although I wonder if I must resort to special pleading when considering the cases of Germany and Italy in the 1930's, or if those can be written off as extreme points in the inevitable cycle of right-versus-left power shifts that will take place within a democratic system in response to fluctuating internal economic and external diplomatic conditions. I certainly hope that the rule of law leads to meaningful self-government, and I can't think of a way it wouldn't (eventually), but I've not poured enough brainpower into the issue to be satisfied that this is necessarily the case -- and the example of the rise of fascism in the 20th century suggests to me that I might be wrong.


* Touchingly, it looks to me like the most significant national holiday of Portugal celebrates the nation's greatest poet, Luís Vaz de Camões. Nothing like that here -- July 4 is a fine day to celebrate for our political history, but we have no holidays dedicated to the arts and our Portuguese friends have set an example that we ought to consider following.

Pay To Spray

When we lived in Tennessee, one of the more jarring cultural differences I found was being presented with a bill for emergency services. Paramedics, firefighters, and the like are certainly not free and if we ever used them I fully expected to be billed for their services. But having to sign up for a subscription to an ambulance and paramedic service was foreign to my existence from California. Here, such things are simply provided to anyone who asks for them, and the bill is presented after the fact.

The system is not perfect. One of my clients is an EMT who works for the largest of the various ambulance companies here. She confirms what I had already been led to believe, which is that there are those people who make emergency calls for ambulances when what they're really looking for is transportation to a routine, maybe necessary but not emergent, medical appointment.

This is quite expensive. Therefore, only the very poorest of people do it, since they won't be paying anything anyway.

If this seems like an abuse of the system, well, it is, but for the most part the rest of us shrug it off because, well, what are you going to do? Everyone knows the high cost of medical services is because of all those damn lawyers filing medical malpractice lawsuits. It has nothing to do with poor people who use emergency ambulance services like taxis.

Getting back to Tennessee. We signed up for and subscribed to the emergency services district, believing that if we ever needed the services (the Gods forbid) we would want to have subscribed and we'd be in a world of hurt without them. The $75 per year or whatever the subscription fee was seemed like peanuts compared to having to drive, wounded or only partially conscious, to a hospital. What was galling, though, was learning that our medical insurance and homeowners' insurance did not pay for this fee and it was an additional expense.

So what is looking like the Outrage Of The Week in development is a Tennessee emergency situation. A homeowner in a rural area did not pay the annual subscription fee to the emergency services district and therefore opted out. Saved himself $75 a year and hey, times are tough, so you skimp on things. Sure enough, his home caught fire. And the firefighters drove out -- not in response to his calls for help but rather those of his rate-paying neighbor, who feared that the fire would spread and harm his insured house -- and watched the house burn down, ignoring the homeowner's offer to pay the entire cost of saving his. So now the homeowner has learned a terrible, expensive, and deeply painful lesson about what insurers call "moral risk."

Now, this looks awful for the libertarian purist. The guy said he offered to pay the firefighters their full expense for saving the property; they were already there and ready to go in case the fire spread out to the insured neighbor's home. So why not go ahead and take his money? While there are a bunch of reasons one might suggest, bear in mind for all of them that the homeowner probably didn't really have the money. After all, this is a guy who chose to not spend $75 or $100 or whatever it was on subscribing to the service in the first place. Desperate people will say pretty much anything to escape the pressure of their desperate circumstances and while I'm not passing moral judgment on that, I do think it's reasonable to not place a lot of trust in a promise made by a person whose house is literally burning down in front of his eyes.

Saving the home would have to have been done as an act of charity by the fire department. One is never obliged to give to charity; that is the definition of "charity," after all. An insurer is not obligated, and in fact would be foolish and doing a disservice to its regular policyholders, to take a premium on a policy at the very time that a loss was occurring.

There is the point that before voluntary subscriptions were available, the fire department simply didn't service this area. A worthwhile point, but none of these economic arguments sweetens the taste of firefighters watching a house burn down.

At some point, we just have to say that a public service has an obligation to serve the public, financial arrangements be damned.

Which is not to say that the homeowner shouldn't pay for the service. Or that the fire department, which is normally paid for by these sorts of subscriptions, should lack an effective remedy for its ability to recoup those costs from a non-subscriber. After all, I'm assuming that despite his (no doubt sincere) promises to pay, he simply won't have the thousands of dollars that this sort of service would cost available.

The real issue is a poverty of remedies in the law. It appears that the way the law was set up, either you paid and got firefighting services, or you didn't and your house burns. I suggest that there should be a third way to go, one that requires and enforces a full-cost payment by the non-subscriber -- enforceable by a priority lien on the property, which is forecloseable within 90 days if mutually-acceptable payment arrangements are not made and confirmed in writing.

The homeowner gets the service and a chance to get back up on his feet, the firefighting company gets paid. Now, if it goes to a foreclosure, the bank gets screwed, a little bit, because the emergency services lien would take priority over the mortgage in disbursements from a foreclosure sale, but this would only be a few thousand dollars and the bank can probably live with that, especially if the house is upside down and the bank is going to wind up taking title on a full credit bid anyway. And the 90-day period allows the homeowner to make new financial arrangements, take a second job if he can, make claims on other insurance if it's available, raise money from charity or family, or as a last-ditch measure, sell and recoup what he can from the sale. If worse comes to worse and the foreclosure has to go through, then yes, that homeowner is now homeless -- which he would have been anyway had his house burned to the ground so while it's cruel to note it, in fact he's not that much worse off than he would have been anyway.

To the rational actor with the ability to pay a subscription fee, advance payment is obviously far preferable to having to deal with a short-period emergency services property lien.

Or, of course, you could simply have a public firefighting service, paid for from property or sales or income taxes, and which recoups its costs as best it can from the properties it saves. That seems to work well here in California. But given that firefighting services must be provided on a volunteer rather than tax-supported basis for particular areas (particularly rural ones), then the automatic priority lien seems to be a good third option that avoids both the moral hazard of rewarding free riders, and the moral inequity of making people suffer.

Rich People Behaving Badly In Tulare County

...Or, reason #1,553 why I do not practice family law. The bit about the youngest daughter seeing the babysitter coming out of the shower wearing nothing but a towel and lying down in bed with the father is perhaps the most salacious detail, but hardly the most outrageous part of the case. The most outrageous part of the case is the way the trial court handled things so consistently in favor of the rich husband that the Court of Appeal reassigned the case to a different bench officer, reading between the lines, to a bench officer whose favor the husband had not yet bought. As Prof. Martin (hat tip) points out, the wife isn't exactly a picture-perfect litigant, either, but she smells like a rose by comparison to pretty much anyone else, including the obviously bratty spoiled middle daughter, and the conflicted "counselor." This case left me wanting a lot of soap to clean all the dirt and scum off.

Good Message, Good News

Dexter McCluster, an early prospect for NFL rookie of the year, is to be praised for offering his time and his new-found fame to get the word out in this PSA:

I heartily agree with the message, even if laws trying to enforce the issue seem to be counterproductive. Don't text and drive. Eyes on the road, hands on the wheel. Nothing texted to you can possibly be so important that it's worth the loss of a human life, possibly your own.

It's also good news for the Kansas City Chiefs. Kanye West and Nelly don't have too much competition to worry about here, so McCluster is unlikely to be lured away from the Chiefs by a lucrative record deal any time soon.

Probate to Pangloss

My firm's probate practice requires us to frequently deal with people who are facing death. Sometimes it’s their own, sometimes it’s a loved one’s; sometimes the death is in the future and sometimes it is in the immediate past. One of the ways that I’ve seen survivors of the recently-deceased deal with their grief is to note that the decedent’s “quality of life” was low prior to death, and to take solace in the fact that they are now released from an uncomfortable existence.

Does that have any meaning other than “they were in a lot of pain”? Surely, “quality of life” means more than freedom from pain; a bedridden patient on morphine feels no pain but that is obviously not a desirable existence. At best, it is less bad than one in which one is both bedridden and stricken with pain. From this, we can see that being bedridden is something incompatible with a high-quality life, whether or not pain is a factor.

Put another way, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for that state of existence called “happiness”? This topic came up recently on an e-mail discussion group and a pretty extensive list resulted. I augment, condense, and re-prioritize the list somewhat here to try and put all of the qualitatively similar items together. If you had all of these things, would you consider yourself happy?

• Loving relationships with others, including the formation of a family unit of one’s own choosing.
• The personal liberty to act, speak, and believe as one chooses (provided one does not unreasonably harm others in one’s actions) and sufficient political empowerment so as to meaningfully participate in society, without fear of governmental retribution.
• A functioning, pain-free body, with affordable and readily-available health care in the event that one’s health diminishes, and a painless, dignified end to life.
• Meaningful ability to improve oneself by way of pursuing educational, intellectual, personal, and professional goals.
• A healthy environment, including clean air and water, access to unspoiled and beautiful natural areas, and availability of a variety of nutritious and pleasurable foods.
• Safety and security from violence to one’s person and retention of one’s possessions, and confidence in the same for oneself and others.
• Means sufficient to not impose anxiety about the financial impact of every decision in life, obtained through some form of socially useful, non-abusive employment.
• Access to travel, entertainment, and similar sorts of personal pleasures in reasonable quantity and quality -- perhaps including the giving of good things to others such as one’s family and friends or to charity.
• Revenge against one’s enemies. (That one is a joke, and not an original one, either.)

I have difficulty imagining an existence in which I possessed everything on this list which would be unacceptable to me for some reason. The next step, then, is to take a measure of what’s on that list.

The first thing that strikes me about the list is how much of it is founded upon social interaction. The bulk of these criteria for a high-quality life appear to be predicated upon the ability to communicate and meaningfully interact with other people. Happiness seems inherently tied up with one’s relationship with other human beings. Perhaps I’m just that much of an extrovert, but a solitary life does not seem to be one in which happiness is possible. At most, solitude can be tolerated – but it normally cannot lead to real happiness.

It’s not necessarily easy to quantify these things – do you live in a society that rates “4” or a “9” on the “ten-point liberty-meter”? – and some of these criteria are abstract and ill-defined through my lawyer-like reliance on the concept of “reasonability.” What you think of as a reasonable amount of access to entertainment might seem parsimonious to me. A sufficient amount of money to get all this is obviously (and in my formulation, explicitly) a necessary condition, but there is clearly a point beyond which additional money becomes superfluous. By using a weasel-word like “reasonable,” I know I'm being inexact and imprecise, but please forgive me for that, because this sort of exercise is inevitably and inherently inexact and imprecise.

And, this looks like a generally inter-dependent set of criteria. A “boost up” in one area will probably assist in another; a “drag down” in one area will probably impact another. One can acquire financial means from a good job which results from a good education and a substantial network of social and family contacts, which in turn opens up travel and entertainment possibilities not previously available as well as greater access to health care, personal security, and political empowerment. Without personal security, though, the risk of property loss can be high enough that one’s financial means, even if otherwise good, are imperiled. It doesn’t matter how much money you make if someone else is just going to steal it.

Finally, it strikes me that a lot of this list is framed, or at least frame-able, in negative terms – we’re talking about the absence of hunger, the absence of crime, the absence of sickness, the absence of solitude, the absence of repression. Only in personal improvement and in the pleasure of giving to others are truly affirmative activities to be found; the rest of it might legitimately be seen as keeping the wolves at bay. But without finding some kind of self-identified and affirmative purpose to one’s life, it doesn’t seem possible to me to be truly happy.

Now, I’ve tried to frame these criteria in a timeless sort of manner, so that they might be a useful index to measure things in historical time. It’s clear that, at least in the industrialized western world, we have longer, faster, more productive, and more pleasure-filled lives now than at any point in the historical past – but are we happier today than our ancestors were? I have to say that looking at the list, yes, we do. We have more and better food than ever before; more and better health care than ever before; more and better education than ever before; we are wealthier as a society than ever before (at least, when averaging out for the ups and downs of economic cycles, which is not always easy to do while we’re still in a “down” phase of that cycle). And there are simply more of us around than ever before, which means we have more opportunities for social interactions than before (including more opportunities to make enemies upon whom we might revenge ourselves).

While it’s not been without significant costs, if my list is correct, then our modern, technologically-advanced society indeed does make us happier than the generations who have preceded us – and we can reasonably anticipate that our descendants will be even happier still.

Seventeen Penalties

Turns out, when you spot the home team 152 yards on seventeen different penalties, it's quite difficult to win a professional football game. Hopefully Green Bay can remember this interesting statistical factoid next week. Chicago, not Green Bay, joins the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Kansas City Cinderellas in the ranks of the as-yet undefeated. Green Bay, however, defeated itself.

Seriously Are Barrels Ever This Long?

I understand the need for a graphic to represent the hot-button issue. But I can't recall ever seeing a barrel of a handgun long enough to do this:

An Analogy

Rolling Stones : INXS :: Beatles : ???

I said "U2." Is there a better answer?

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Rally To Restore Sanity

Allow me to heartily, politely, and respectfully endorse this upcoming rally in Washington D.C.  If I happen to be there for some reason on October 30, 2010, I'll be the one carrying this sign:

Of course, if I've no other particular business in D.C. on October 30, I probably won't go and will just look for coverage on television or the intertubes after the fact. Which is sort of the point.

Artwork handrawn by yours truly.

New And Improved Ought To Mean Something More Than A New Label On An Old Product

The GOP "Pledge to America" released this morning at first glance looks like it has two main parts -- repeal Obamacare, and NOT to do a bunch of other stuff, most of which amounts to promising not to raise a variety of taxes. I'll look at it more after work, but this is far less impressive than 1994's "Contract with America." It's long, complex without being substantive, unlikely to be actually implemented even if it is meaningfully attempted, and looks like more of the same brand of stuff republicans have been selling for a long time. While there is not much in there that is objectionable, there is also not much that is inspiring or even interesting.

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This Is A Pleasant Fiction, Isn't it?

A "myth," as I have tried to consistently use the term, is a story with powerful emotional or social resonance, and for which the objective truth of its content is irrelevant and generally questionable.  President Obama recited a myth the other day addressing the Congressional Hispanic Caucus: "Long before America was even an idea, this land of plenty was home to many peoples. The British and French, the Dutch and Spanish, to Mexicans, to countless Indian tribes. We all shared the same land," the President said.

Well, no, Mr. President, that's not true so much as objectively wrong in every facet of the remark. "America" is an idea that has been around since 1507, when German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller released a painted wall map called Universalis Cosmographia naming the New World "America" after Amerigo Vespucci of Florence. The "countless Indian tribes" included many who are not within the group of indigenous North Americans referred to by the wildly incorrect name "Indians" (their pre-Columbian ancestors were predominantly from east Asia, areas today identified as Siberia and Mongolia) and while some were peaceful, others were warlike and perhaps no better counter-example to the pastoral scene of mutual harmony can be thought of than the Aztecs, who created a sophisticated empire on the backs of bloody, brutal conquest, massive enslavement of their neighbors, and (like many of the nearby cultures they conquered) a state-sponsored religious cult prominently incorporating human sacrifice as a ritual. When European settlers came, they hardly shared the land in peace, either with the indigenous peoples they found here, or with each other. While the concept of "Mexico" as a geographic region came early, politically the U.S.A. declared and won its independence from its European mother country a generation before Mexico did.

The reality of pre-independence New World history includes substantial amounts of violence, intolerance, xenophobia, inadvertent but fatal exchange of pathogens, and fighting about exclusive dominion over land, and rather sparse and insubstantial examples of peaceful sharing of common resources. The idea of a multicultural, pastoral, and pacific existence bears no more resemblance to historical reality than dragons do to actual animal taxonomy. It is a pretty story, a pleasant myth, and perhaps something intended to promote the worthy idea that civilized peoples today should tolerate and get along with one another while using natural resources in a wise and sustainable fashion. But in spreading this myth, even if he were doing it with such worthy goals, the President got his history, well, exactly and completely wrong.

Allow me to submit for your consideration the objection that in a world where substantial numbers of Americans don't realize that Benjamin Franklin was never President and think that the Constitution establishes a "Christian nation," reliance on historical myth as opposed to historical reality is a net disservice to the American people.

Politics Disgusts Me Sometimes

Really? Filibustering the defense appropriations act so that we can "study" (read: delay) repealing "Don't Ask Don't Tell" instead of just repealing it now and accepting the inevitable?

I've not known anyone in the military who didn't know full well who in their unit was gay and not a one of them particularly cared. It's my distinct impression that if the brass tells the rank and file, "Do not discriminate against gays. That is an order." then the bulk of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines will follow that order. The military integrated racially long ago and maybe there are still problems here and there but those are handled on a case by case basis.

Let Americans serve, who are able and willing to serve. It matters not if they are male or female; it matters not if they are black, white, brown, or so on; it matters not if they are Christian or Jewish or Atheist; and it matters not if they are gay or straight. All that matters is that they wish to serve the United States of America. Let them serve with honor and let the rest of us honor their service.

Yes, I think it really is as simple as that.

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Angels And Kiwis: A Little Help Please

I've never seen an angel. I have seen pictures of angels in art, but not an actual entity that matches or even approximates the description of angels in art and myth. I know people who claim to have seen and interacted with angels and according to some polls, a reasonably large number of people express belief that angels actually exist. I do not believe that they are telling me the truth. Most charitably, I believe they have deluded themselves into thinking a prosaic experience involved angels. But even if I were to grant that these people were honestly self-deluded, I would still disbelieve the truth of the matter asserted, which is the existence of angels. A tale of a phenomenon attributed to angelic activity would inspire me to mentally search for any possible alternative explanation that was even remotely more plausible than the one proffered.

Indeed, even if it turns out to be the case angels have an objective reality that I have simply missed out on, and you have had a direct, personal experience with an angel that was not a hallucination, chances are pretty good that you won't condemn me very much for not believing in angels and that you would agree that without more evidence than someone else's say-so, I am within the realm of reasonable behavior to disbelieve in angels.

For some people, angels are every bit as real as New Zealand. I've never been to or seen New Zealand; I have no direct, personal knowledge of New Zealand. I know people who claim to have seen and been in New Zealand and even met people who claim to have been born and lived there for a time. But I have no way of knowing if they are telling me the truth about their experiences. It is not difficult to seek out news from New Zealand on the internet, but it's not hard to find things that aren't true on the internet, either. I have seen pictures of what purports to be New Zealand in movies, photographs, and on maps. But I have no way of knowing if those images were not of some other place and simply part of a massive conspiracy on the part of others to convince me that there is such a place as New Zealand.  Nevertheless, I have not the slightest doubt that other people are telling me the truth and that New Zealand really, objectively exists.

So -- angels are fiction, New Zealand is reality. I have no personal, direct experience with either. This seems to be a very reasonable way of dealing with the world. What is qualitatively different about my experience of angels as opposed to my experience of New Zealand?

If my use of "angels" as an example offends you because you believe in angels, substitute "fire-breathing dragons" in their place. The point is, it is eminently reasonable to disbelieve in angels and eminently reasonable to believe in New Zealand. Why is that the case instead of the converse or some other combination of those two states of belief?

I have an instinctual grasp of the qualitative difference between a belief in angels and a belief in New Zealand. But I find I have trouble articulating that difference. It's not simply that I trust the New Zealand advocates and mistrust the angelic advocates. It can't be my personal experience; I have no more experience, memory, or other direct sense data about New Zealand than I do about angels. Some of it has to do with references to New Zealand that I can find in source material that I deem to be authoritative, but again, this is obviously insufficient to justify reliance on or prefer one kind of reference (an atlas) as opposed to another (the Bible).

It has to do more with an understanding of the diversity and wealth of different source material supporting the proposition that New Zealand exists as opposed to the source material supporting the proposition that angels exist. I read an atlas, and it tells me that both Florida and New Zealand exist. I have had direct, personal experience with Florida; I've been there, lived there, and have memories of direct sense data accumulated with respect to Florida. This correlates strongly with similar claims made by other people about Florida; their stories seem very similar to my own memories and sensations. Because some of these people and some of these references are congruent with experiences I have had, I give them a presumption of veracity which I do not with those whose experiences are deeply incongruent with reality as I know it to be, like claims about angels.

This strikes me as at best a partial explanation. People I otherwise trust and even rely upon believe in angels and make reference to their existence. Women report to me that childbirth is uncomfortable, often to the point of being painful. I believe these women, but not only do I lack experience with which to verify or correlate their claims, as a male, I can never acquire such experience. I could, in theory, travel to New Zealand and experience it for myself, assuming that it exists. Even if I undergo gender reassignment surgery, the accident of my being born biologically male means that I will never have the experience necessary to directly verify a claim that giving birth is painful. But again, there is something about the quality of the claim that would make it unreasonable for me to disbelieve in the pain of childbirth which is different from a claim that there are fire-breathing dragons alive somewhere on Earth right now.

What I have difficulty articulating right now are philosophically robust qualitative differentiations between claims which are reasonable and those which are unreasonable. Something is not reasonable simply because I say it is, it is not reasonable simply because my instincts tell me it is so. There must be some principled way to differentiate between a reasonable and unreasonable claim; I find that I lack the training or language to accurately describe what I'm getting at.

Exurbs Are No Place For Astronomy

Jupiter is making its closest approach to Earth since before I was born and will not be this close again for twelve more years. So I go outside to take a look and there is so much light pollution I can't see a single star. Most discouraging.