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Recent Blog Posts
Smoke
I'm sitting in my home office with the window open. Some lady just walked by with her daughter, about four years old. After they passed, I-sitting inside, twenty feet back from the sidewalk-smelled a strong odor of burning tobacco.
Yech. If I can smell it, that little girl's lungs (she was between the smoker and me) are full of it.
Just yech.
Liberate the Mallcops!
This is one of those days when there are too many shiny things to write about. Ooo that looks like fun... but wait, so does that! no, that! It's like trying to eat an elephant.
You know how you eat an elephant, right? One bite at a time.
The topic, broadly, is the Transportation Security Agency and the porno scanner / molestation choice it has given those of us who want to fly. If you read nothing else about it, read security expert Bruce Schneier's recap here (H/T Discourse.net).
The themes are many.
A comment on Schneier's post led me to this: TSA Enhanced Pat Downs : The Screeners Point Of View on the Flying with Fish blog. The screeners who responded to FWF's questions don't enjoy groping passengers, you'll be glad to hear. Because doing so is dehumanizing, disrespectful, and an inappropriate and unnecessary invasion of their privacy? Oh, no.
Cooking the Books in Arizona
Maricopa County Sheriff "Crazy" Joe Arpaio's department has been keeping two sets of books (Generally not a sign of upright conduct) to allow it to misspend $34,000,000 (in the department's estimate; county administrators think it might be $80 million) of county money designated (by the voters) for detentions.
The Opposite of Irresponsible
"On the eve of a major national holiday and less than one year after al-Qaida's failed attack last Christmas Day, it is irresponsible for a group to suggest travelers opt out of the very screening that may prevent an attack using non-metallic explosives," said TSA Administrator John Pistole.
Pistole is responding to National Opt-Out Day, a nice little bit of civil disobedience in which people are being encouraged to exercise their right to opt out of intrusive and possibly harmful full-body scans and be groped by TSA mallcops instead. (I'll be opting out by not flying out of any airport with full-body scanners unless I am paid a lot of money to do so.) In the first draft, Pistole probably wrote "irresponsible and dangerous," the standard formulation; leaving out the "dangerous" part was probably smart-invoking Abdulmutallab's attack conveys that message.
Mallcops and Molesters
Follow me here.
Under the Texas Penal Code,
A person commits [the felony of Indecency With a Child] if, with a child younger than 17 years of age, whether the child is of the same or opposite sex, the person:(1) engages in sexual contact with the child or causes the child to engage in sexual contact; or(2) with intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person:...(B) causes the child to expose the child's anus or any part of the child's genitals.
"Sexual contact," for purposes of that statute, means, among other things, "any touching by a person, including touching through clothing, of the anus, breast, or any part of the genitals of a child" with the intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.
There's a reason we have this statute: we don't want our young children to be touched sexually. We think it harms them. So indecent exposure by contact is a second-degree felony, with a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison (unless the actor does it two or more times in 30 days, in which case it might be Continuous Sexual Abuse of Young Child or Children, in which case the punishment is 25 years to life).
Avoid These Airports
Don't like the idea of choosing between a full-body scanner and an "enhanced patdown" by a TSA thug? You don't have to avoid flying; you just have to avoid flying out of the airports that use full-body scanners (list below from Jaunted.com as of 16 September 2010; check back there before you make your reservations-there are more every day).
Americans aren't yet ready to take up arms and start executing TSA mallcops en masse; few of us will even stop flying, even at the cost of being sexually assaulted (h/t Simple Justice); most of us are content, as long as there's no math involved, to be unquestioningly compliant. But if enough of those who still must fly were to take our business elsewhere, eschewing airports with full-body scanners (and the airlines that fly out of those airports) for those without, some of the people who run this country (by which I mean the corporations) might feel enough of a financial sting to put a leash on TSA.
Book Review: Typography for Lawyers
If I were not a lethally generous guy, I would not be writing this. If I thought that what we do was a zero-sum game, in which anything that makes my colleagues better somehow hurts me, I would keep this little gem to myself; I might even quietly put the word out that the book was a waste of time. But that's not the sort of guy I am.
A couple of weeks ago I happened upon Matthew Butterick's Typography for Lawyers website. Butterick is a Harvard-educated typographer and a UCLA-educated lawyer. Here's the premise behind his treatment of typography for lawyers:
Even though the legal profession depends heavily on writing, legal typography is often poor. Some blame lies with the strict typographic constraints that control certain legal documents (e.g. court rules regarding the format of pleadings). But the rest of the blame lies with lawyers. To be fair, I assume this is for lack of information, not lack of will.
Introducing your Secret Name
The government is going to give you a name. This name will be revealed by the government only to you, and you will have to use it in your dealings with the government.
Wrongdoers will, if they know your real name (slave name, strawman name, all-caps gold-fringe UCC admiralty wingnut name, whatever you call it) and learn your secret name, have a measure of power over you-they'll be able to make your life more difficult. Your secret name will be seven letters long.
There will be a pattern to a name : the first four letters will identify when and where the name wasissued, and the last three will be issued in sequence-AAA, AAB, AAC,and so forth. So a malefactor can generate a secret seven-letter name, but it won't match the real name to which the government has attached it.
You should definitely keep your secret name a secret. But other people can make revealing your secret name a condition of your doing business with them. In fact, many people will make it a condition. You will often have to choose between keeping your name secret and dealing conveniently with modern life.
QED
James J. McCarthy, IV, "Senior Account Executive of Business Development" at eLocallisting.com, comments on my Yodle Lawyer Marketing Sucks post:
Although yodle should not have put a picture on their micro site that would put their client at risk, if I am not mistaken, are you not paying for leads from people searching for your services. Who cares where it came from as long as it brings you a new cusotmer/ ROI.
Really; I couldn't make this stuff up (maybe Ken or Patrick at Popehat could, but I couldn't).
This is an excellent demonstration (for which I'd like to thank Mr. McCarthy) of why lawyers need to stop outsourcing their marketing (and therefore their ethics and their reputations) to companies like FindLaw and Yodle; guys like McCarthy, Sparta Townson, and Jenni Buchanan; and other marketers: because to a marketer, "Who cares where it came from as long as it brings you a new customer/ ROI" is a reasonable rhetorical question.
Harris County's First Public Defender
I like the idea of a public defender's office, but the idea of Commissioners' Court, Harris County's executive board, controlling, through the power of the purse, the defense function is little more appealing than the current ad hoc system of appointment of indigent counsel by elected judges. One saving grace of a PD would be that a single lawyer could set policy for a large group of criminal defense lawyers, and could explain that policy and enforce it with Commissioner's Court.
A good Public Defender will be willing to stand up to Commissioners' Court and put the interests of the indigents accused above the political and fiscal cavils of the county executive in a way that 500 diverse court-appointed lawyers, each concerned for the state of his own pocketbook, could not and, even if they could, would not.
A bad Public Defender, however, will be a puppet of the Commissioners' Court, subordinating the rights of the accused to political popularity or the almighty budget. The specter was raised, while we were waiting to hear who the PD would be, of some ex-judge who took the usual career path of the Harris County criminal judiciary from college to law school to the DA's Office to the bench, with no criminal-defense credentials, getting the job. That would have been bad.
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