Condoleeza
Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify. I would really like to do that. But there’s an important principle involved here. We have separate branches of government — the legislative branch and the executive branch. This commission, it takes its authority, derives its authority from the Congress, and it is a long-standing principle that sitting National Security Advisors do not testify before the Congress.
I can think of quite a few long-standing principles which have been compromised since September 11, the principle that western democracies don’t detain people indefinitely without trial being perhaps the most prominent. When those contrary civil libertarians make their mischievous complaints heard, they’re always told that we can’t afford to be too precious in a post-9/11 world. We have to do whatever it takes to keep ourselves safe, and if we have to trample the occasional freedom in the process, then that’s only reasonable.
Can someone describe to me what critical damage would be done to the US separation of powers if Condi was to testify publically to the 9/11 Commission?
Wordy
I’ve added a wordcount (using this MT plugin) to my list of recent entries, and to my monthly archive indexes. The idea was to waste a few minutes before I have to go to uni. The justification is that you can now look to see which posts are longest, either a) to avoid committing yourself to reading the long ones when you might decide that it’s all wank after one paragraph, or b) to avoid wasting time reading short little administrative posts (like this one) and cut to the chase (bearing in mind that on this blog lately, one might be forgiven for wondering whether there was in fact a chase to cut to).
Jen’s Back
Miss JenJen has emerged from her employer-mandated hiatus. She now goes by the title Clumsy Gambol. Go and see what’s happening, and while you’re at it, trawl the archives and find out what kind of blogging is dooceworthy!
Snap Crappy
I’m not a great fan of those technology articles which are directed at “average consumers” (read, “morons”), which say things like “If you want faster internet access, you’ll need to pay more money”, or “If your printer’s not working, try jiggling the cable”. But at least their simplifications, while redundant to anyone with even a modicum of common sense, are usually right. Unlike this gem of an insight directed towards a novice digital photographer:
Typically an expert using old technology might run through four or more rolls of film just to capture a single image. By taking lots of pictures they know there’s a reasonable chance a handful will come out really well. More importantly, there’s a much better chance of something stunning turning up in the pile.
Digital cameras are great, but they don’t readily lend themselves to this needle-in-a-haystack approach. That’s because camera manufacturers generally skimp on the amount of memory they provide so you can rarely take more than a handful of shots at a time.
Excuse me? Digital cameras don’t lend themselves to taking heaps of images in order to get one good one? And analogue cameras do? This is so self-evidently ridiculous that I don’t know what to say. Sure, if you’ve only got 16MB of memory to play with, you might need to be a little conservative, but what does a 64MB flash memory card cost these days? I was looking at 256MB cards for about $120 the other day, so my guess is, not much. And having shelled out a two-figure sum for the extra memory, you can then blaze away with impunity, knowing that you’re not paying a cent to develop, much less print, all the excess images that are necessary to produce the single good one. I don’t think I ever take an image with my digital camera without taking at least three or four shots, and it’s more often eight or ten. Consequently, my hard disk is full of almost identical images, but it’s worth it for the one image that turns out slightly better, particularly considering that IT DOESN’T COST ANYTHING. How can someone presuming to offer advice on digital cameras ignore this, perhaps the most important of facts about digital photography? Has he actually used a digital camera?
Legal Ostrich
Via Crooked TImber comes this post by Dahlia Lithwick about law school and the reasons for being there:
The best thing about law school is that it really will blow open a thousand career doors for you. But you need to see them. You need to tap your way along the dark tunnel — feeling for soft spots, and listening for folks on the other side to tap back. You need to be true to your heart; true to why you went in the first place. And you need to do whatever it takes to fight the fear and the sucking noise that will otherwise pull you into a life you may not want. That means being proactive: find mentors who are doing weird things with the law. Work for a professor who isn’t doing ordinary research. Volunteer someplace that needs lawyers. Cold-call lawyers you read about and find out how they got their jobs. Keep doing the stuff you found interesting before law school.
I’ve been thinking lately that, with only another three years to go before I graduate, maybe it would be worthwhile for me to begin thinking about life after the law degree. Consider this post an attempt to do so (to begin, that is).
A few weeks ago I met a saxophone player who is a barrister. I haven’t run into all that many musician/lawyers before, so I made a point of having a chat to him about mixing music and law. To my surprise, he said that it wasn’t really all that difficult working full time in legal practice while doing four or five gigs a week. Which is good, I guess. Things got a bit hairy, though, when we started talking about job opportunities. Apparently (according to him), when it comes to assessing applications for articles, the big law firms don’t bother looking at anyone who’s not a Melbourne or Monash graduate, and if I want to find some way into the profession, I’d best start focussing on something like intellectual property and copyright law, where my music background might give me something of an advantage. Does it matter, I wondered silently to myself as I nodded appreciatively, that I couldn’t really give a fuck about intellectual property law?
There was a certain resonance, then, when I read Dahlia talk about “the fear and the sucking noise that will otherwise pull you into a life you may not want.” Fear that I will have spent five years of my life accumulating a couple of degrees that will leave me just as unemployable as I was before (or moreso, because I’ll be 35-and-never-had-a-job-outside-of-music, instead of 30-and-). The sucking noise, of course, is related to the fear. If the line of least resistance is going to lead to a paying gig, and the road less travelled is going to lead to uncertainty and further impoverishment, I can see the temptation to allow oneself to drift along the former and away from the latter.
Another example of this dilemma occurred when the Law Student’s Association rep got up in a lecture the other day to advertise the “Career Cocktails” night. You pay fifteen bucks for the privilege of gathering in a city bar (do you have to put on a suit? I wondered) with a bunch of other law students to meet HR reps from all the top law firms. “It’s a great opportunity for you to … how can I say? … suck up? … no … network … with future employers” was how the LSA rep put it. “They’re HR people, they’re young and cool, and they like drinking too, so you should go along and get some cheap booze if nothing else”. Coincidentally, a few weeks prior I’d played for a wine tasting evening where MBA students were doing much the same thing with their prospective employers. I know what these functions are like, because I’ve often been standing in the corner trying to make my bass heard over the deafening chorus of drunken sycophants. I’m pretty unenthusiastic about them even when I’m a paid participant, so suffice it to say that I didn’t rush to the LSA office to get me a ticket to this one. There was a little nagging voice that said “Maybe you’re just being lazy and complacent, maybe you should be out there trying to rustle up some work at some stage.” But what sort of work? The kind that requires cocktail sipping and flattery? Nah.
So you could say that I’m finding it pretty easy to work out what I don’t want to do with my law degree. What do I want to do with it?
I seem to have in my mind two quite contrasting scenarios in which I think I could be happy. The first is for me to sit in an office somewhere and have people come to me with problems which I can help them sort out. The qualifier on that is that I’m only really interested in dealing with real people with real problems, preferably problems that I have some hope of helping them deal with. I’m not really interested in quarrels between rich people over who should have the right to become richer. So this suggests a job in a community legal centre or somewhere like that. I’m sure the money’s not great by lawyers’ standards, but having lived on a subsistence income for the last twelve years, I think I’d cope.
The other thing that interests me is finding and addressing the structural roots of injustice. That suggests a job in a law reform commission, or perhaps working in activist litigation or something like that.
Trouble is, I don’t really know anything about any of those vaguely possible careers. I don’t know how to get into them, and I don’t know what they’re like once you’re in them. Law isn’t something that I’ve grown up around. I’ve had years to get to know the music business, and I’m pretty familiar with all the unwritten assumptions and processes that can aid or stymie an attempt to convert an interest into a career. I’m certain that the legal business has a much larger and more complex set of undocumented rules, and I’d like to get to know some of them. What is it that a 32-year old law/arts undergraduate can do to aid his chances of eventually finding a rewarding job in one of those two areas?
Compounding my uncertainty is the fact that I don’t even really know about basic things. Like articles. Do you have to be a graduate to do them? People keep talking about applying for them, but should I bother, when I’ve still got years to go to finish my degree? Do I have to do them in order to practice? Are there alternatives? Are they better or worse? What are seasonals? Are these sort of internships things that you do with big law firms, or can you do them in small practices? Are there advantages to doing one over the other, considering the areas that I’m interested in getting into?
Maybe there’s a clueless law student FAQ somewhere online that will answer all those questions and more. But writing them down is, it seems to me, a start.
Market Cowards
Tim Dunlop’s kids have been caught up in a bomb scare at thier school in Washington DC. Fortunately they, along with all the other kids in Washington DC, seem to be safe. It goes without saying, though, that it was a horrible thing for Tim’s family to have to go through, especially with memories of recent atrocities still no doubt fresh in their minds.
His post also included this report, which got me thinking:
NEW YORK, March 19 (Reuters) - The euro rose against the dollar in early New York trade on Friday on reports of a bomb threat to Washington DC schools, traders said.
My first (rather mischievous) thought was to wonder who would be the first to accuse the currency markets of handing a victory to al-Qaeda. My second (which was much more worrying) concerned the possibility that if markets keep responding nervously to even the suggestion of a terrorist attack, the terrorists might find a way to take advantage. Perhaps someone more financially literate could reassure me as to why this is impossible, but couldn’t a smart and well-resourced terrorist buy a whole lot of Euros before he sets off a bomb in the US, then cash them in for US dollars afterwards? Such a possibility brings to mind the unpleasant notion that a terrorist could utilise the market response to one attack in order to finance his next one. In other words, the markets could hand a victory to al-Qaeda, and in a much more literal sense than I first had in mind.
This Space
If the blogging’s been a bit thin on the ground here, it’s because uni has started in earnest (perhaps my busiest semester so far, doing contracts and torts and a third year honours prerequisite read-a-book-a-week politics course) concurrently with a bit of a surge in gigs which have left me so short of reading time that I’ve been uploading documents to the PDA so that I can fire up Microsoft Reader when I’m on the bog and cram in a few extra paragraphs.
I must say that I’m not too disappointed to have been too busy to get embroiled in the frenzy of commentary that followed the Madrid bombings. I’m as sad as anyone about what happened, but I haven’t felt the urge to respond to it by joining in the festival of barrow-pushing that’s been swallowing bandwidth by the gigabyte.
I’ve got a couple of posts fermenting, which I’ll hopefully have time to decant before they turn. In the meantime, consider this post (and no doubt you already are) as a token space-filler. Back soon.
Risque v Risque
Gizmodo has a new editor (if that’s the right word - it seems to be what he calls himself, but from what I gather it’s pretty much a one-man operation, so I’m not sure what there is to edit). Apparently he’s under instructions from the publisher to spice up the usual stories about cameraphones and mp3 players with some gratuitous sex. I’m not sure whether that’s a good policy, diluting techno-lust with real lust, but it probably goes down well with the teenage boy demographic (for whom lust generally is an inexhaustible resource).
Okay, so I don’t think that shiny little gadgets are in need of any greater fetishisation than they already have built-in. Still, I’m not about to be offended by an image of a model with an iPod down her hotpants. I have to admit, though, that I was a little taken aback to be clicking through my morning dose of wireless mice and TiVo’s and be suddenly confronted with what can only be described as hardcore porn. (If you’re clicking through the links, do what I didn’t do and take the warning seriously). It’s not that I’ve got anything against hardcore porn, of course, it’s just that I generally like to approach it on my own terms. Under Peter Rojas, the former editor, Gizmodo used to be so clean and upstanding. This is a bit like going through the magazine rack in your Grandma’s toilet and finding a copy of Hustler.
Krokodilla
Sophia is blogging up a storm over at Krokodilla. Do check her out for the latest on the sexy garbos of Barcelona, and much more.
Vietnam, Iraq, Heroism
I like Tim Dunlop’s blog. I read it daily. There’s something that I find a bit odd, though, about posts like this one which spruik Senator Kerry as a “war hero”, particularly when viewed in context with the rest of the blog.
Tim’s opposition to the war in Iraq is well documented and well argued, and I’m inclined to agree with most of what he has to say on the subject. My discomfort springs from the fact that, while maintaining this line on Iraq, he’s simultaneously trying to capitalise on the jingoistic value of Kerry’s service in another unjust war (and, for that matter, George Bush’s conspicuous absence from same). I understand the political advantage in highlighting this distinction, but I think that when Tim (among many others) does so, he should keep in mind the kind of sentiment that he’s appealing to. I’m not saying that there’s no room for individual heroism even in such a generally unheroic undertaking as Vietnam, and perhaps Kerry displayed it. But to play the “war hero” card with one hand and the “warmonger” card with the other is, to my mind, a tad hypocritical.