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DC Law Student Disorientation—Today!
D.C. law students: The D.C. chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild is holding a disorientation today, from 2-6 p.m., at UDC law school. Here's a PDF with the details, and I'm told there's going to be a good ol' fashioned keg party following the event. I'm going to try to make some or all of it. Hope to see you there!
Posted 09:28 AM | TrackBack | 3L ai action alerts
Reality Testing Yubbledew: Election '04 to Katrina
Recent polls show that a majority of Americans are not satisfied with the Bush administration's response to hurricane Katrina. Some are saying that the response was so bad it's caused some sort of crisis of confidence in the ability of our government to do the right thing and protect American values and interests in times of great stress.
Of course, I'm thrilled that my fellow Americans are finally waking up to the fact that this administration is not only incompetent but nearly pathologically focused on its own agenda and interests at the expense of what's best for the American people and the rest of the world. Thank goodness people are finally waking up!
But, um, how is it that an administration can start a war based on lies, send thousands of American soldiers to their deaths, be responsible for killing thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens, and increase hostility against the U.S. all around the world because of all this aggression—how is it that this administration could do all this and still win the 2004 election!? And why now, after the tragic lack of response to hurricane Katrina, are Americans finally saying “enough!”?
I think I understand this apparent mystery, but I'm not sure. First, a little psychoanalysis for you:
When people of normal intelligence behave in a way that rejects what they experience as real, it requires some explanation. Psychoanalytic theory assumes that inadequacy in reality-testing fulfills a psychological function, usually the preservation of an attitude basic to the individual's makeup. If inadequate reality-testing threatens to undermine such [a] functionally significant attitude, it is avoided.
Charles R. Lawrence III, The Id, the Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning With Unconscious Racism, 39 Stan. L. Rev. 317, 332 (Jan. 1987).
This is basically what I said after the 2004 presidential election—the horror of what the Bush administration had done in its first term was so great it created a sort of paralysis on the part of those who could sort of see what was going on. If there's a silver lining in the federal government's completely inept response to hurricane Katrina, it's that a majority of Americans finally became—at least for a few days—so shocked, so appalled, so horrified that the defensive mechanism that had previously forced them to deny how awful this administration is turned around and urged them to demand some accountability.
Bush's approval rating is now at an all-time low. How long will it be before our overly-developed psychological coping mechanisms overcome our critical faculties once more? Bush has now promised to spend “unprecedented amounts” of federal money to help rebuild the region affected by the hurricane. Can he buy his way out of this? And do we really want that, knowing that this administration has demonstrated that its number one spending priority seems to be to transfer as much federal money as possible into the hands of private corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel? In addition, it has already said that workers hired in the rebuilding effort will have to work for substandard wages. From where I sit, Bush's speech last night can do nothing to change the fact that this administration doesn't care about the average American; it cares about the corporate American, the only “person” it will ever love.
Be that as it may, the question remains: Why did Katrina wake a majority of Americans up when the Iraq war didn't? Does it have anything to do w/coping and repression? Was the horror of the lack of response to Katrina somehow greater than the horror of waging a war of aggression based on lies? If so, what would that say about our country? Or is it simply that the horror of the lack of response to Katrina was so immediate and obvious and unambiguous, whereas people were able to construct some sort of plausible rationale for accepting Bush's war?
Posted 09:10 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack | election 2004 general politics
Kurt Vonnegut is my hero.
For the past week or so life around the imbroglio has been almost completely tv-free because, for various reasons, we temporarily had no cable. The cable has now been fixed, which allowed me to watch a recent episode of The Daily Show which featured an interview with Kurt Vonnegut. One Good Move has the interview available here, and it's totally worth your five minutes to watch. As others have noted, Vonnegut is still very much on his game, dishing out the dark irony better than just about anyone else does. A couple of choice quotes:
I think our planet's immune system is trying to get rid of us and should!
And:
Posted 06:59 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | general politics tv land
Subpoena Cell Phone Records?
Hey all you google sleuths and communications law peeps: Help!
1) If you have a cell phone number and the name of its owner, how can you find out who the cell service provider is so that you can subpoena the call records for that number?
2) When you send such a subpoena, what kinds of records can/should you ask for? What are you entitled to get? What's free, and what costs money?
Any help would be very appreciated! My client thanks you in advance for your help!
Posted 10:07 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack | 3L
You Need More Coffee
I've been so busy running around like a chicken with my head cut off third-year law student without a job that I missed the opening of the Will Work For Favorable Dicta CafePress Store! My mug is already in the mail and winging its way to me—what about yours?
Now you know what I really need is a bunch of stickers I can put on my job applications, whenever I get around to actually doing any of those things, that is....
Blawg Review #23: The Dynamic Sortable Table Edition
Holy cow. Check out the coolness that is Blawg Review #23 at Preaching to the Perverted! It's brilliantly organized using a dynamic table that lets you sort its content by post title, content descritption, post author, and topic of post. So instead of reading through the links in the order Dave! decided to present them, you can read through the links in whatever order your heart desires. Pretty snazzy, Dave!
In addition to being technically super-spiffy, this edition of Blawg Review also contains—surprise!—some terrific links, including:
Robert Ambrogi: "Lawyers including Ted Frank, Glenn Reynolds and David Kopel are calling for the shooting of looters. I am appalled that members of the legal profession would call for unbridled, vigilante street justice. This is contrary to every fundamental principle we should stand for as lawyers." I couldn't agree more.
White Collar Crime Prof Blog: "Richard Hatch, the first Survivor winner, has now been indicted on ten counts of tax fraud and using funds intended for a charity for personal expenses." Greedy greedy.
But wait a minute. If I tell what all the great links are, you won't read the Review. So go there, ok? I'm apparently supposed to do another of these things in about two weeks and there's really no way I'll be able to top this so enjoy it while you can....
Posted 09:35 PM | TrackBack | meta-blogging
Request for Wisdom: A variation on that pesky GPA question
Blawg Wisdom has just been updated with a request for wisdom on whether an English PhD should go to law school. Oh, wait, that's not the question, even though it's a more interesting one to me. The real question is: Does undergrad GPA really matter in the law school admissions process for an accomplished non-traditional applicant? If you have any thoughts on this question, please get on over to Blawg Wisdom and share!
Oh, there is also a recent post about bar review flashcards over there. If you're taking the MPRE in November, you might want to use the instructions for making some flashcards for that, too. Maybe.
Posted 09:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | advice
21 Miles? Yeah, baby!
How long does it take me to run 21 miles at my “training” pace? That would be five hours. Yes, I ran yesterday for five hours straight. Am I sore today? Yes. Do I feel good anyway and glad that I did it? Absolutely. I'd feel better if some generous soul would donate a bunch of money or if thousands of people would [nevermind. This has been edited to comply with commercial restrictions], but well, I do understand I can't have everything and I feel pretty lucky just to be able to do this at all.
So here's the funny thing about this marathon business: I'm able to “run” 21 miles, albeit very slowly, yet I don't really feel like I'm in any better shape than I was before I started this little adventure. How can that be? Well, I think it's because I've worked pretty hard to remain in pretty poor shape (more cookies, please!). Sadly, the simple truth remains that even if you're running 15-25 miles/week (and that's actually pretty low mileage for most marathoners, I believe), you can still gain weight if you take in more calories than you burn. When you're burning so many calories, you might think it would be hard to consume more than you burn, but it's actually surprisingly easy. ;-)
Posted 07:12 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack | marathon
