Exceeding Expectations is Good, Right?

Good news from the New Job front. Boss attorney came in this morning and asked whether the firm is meeting my expectations. After telling him that I have had a great time so far and that the more work they give me the more fun it gets, he said that I have thus far exceeded their expectations. Score! Better yet, tomorrow I should get my first paycheck.

Fun with Homicide

Last year, I thought the tort cases were entertaining. This year, I have criminal cases to read. Here are some gems:

Defendant, a Pasadena insurance broker, aged 45, met deceased, referred to throughout the testimony as “Dotty,” aged 29, at a zoo on May 13, 1956. With Dotty was Tony, an illegitimate child of four whom dotty had cared for since 16 days after his birth. Defendant was attracted by the “warmth,” “kindness,” and “sweetness” with which Dotty spoke to the child. Defendant spoke to the boy and thus became acquainted with Dotty. They had dinner together that night and thereafter, according to defendant’s testimony, “went together steadily from then on” until he killed her on October 9, 1956.

That’s from People v. Borchers (1958) 50 Cal.2d 321. Does anybody really believe the firty-five year old defendant was attracted by the warmth, kindness, and sweetness with which the twenty-nine year old Dotty spoke to the child? What that sentence really means to say is something more like, “Defendant thought Dotty had a sweet little body and was ready to do just about anything to get under her skirt, even if he had to feign interest in her juvenile companion and pretend he actually cared about anything other than those aspects of her physiology that were distinct from his own.”

I also like the way the paragraph was written, spending a long time setting up what looks to be a rather juicy liaison only to hit a brick wall with that “until he killed her” bit. Clearly, authorial decisions were made so the judges could indicate that the defendant was a total slimeball without actually saying so.

Here’s another bit o’ brilliance, this time from State v. Guebara (1985) 236 Kan. 791, in which the author of the opinion recounts the facts from State v. Stafford (1973) 213 Kan. 152:

In State v. Stafford, the defendant was convicted of [murdering] her husband. She and her husband got into an argument because of his remarks about her son-in-law and a friend. As she was standing in the kitchen preparing to make coffee he struck her behind the left ear, knocking her glasses off. The blow did not bruise or hurt her. She then squirted him in the face with a paralyzer spray from a pressurized can. This dazed him and, as he was trying to rub the spray out of his eyes, she wrapped the cord from the electric tea kettle around his neck and choked him with it. She grabbed him by what little hair he had on his bald head and threw him against the wall. She then threw him down on the floor and got astraddle of him with her knees on his arms. She picked up a hammer and hit him with it three or four times. The husband’s death was caused by strangulation. This court held that, although there was some evidence of prior quarreling or even a blow on occasions, insufficient provocation existed to reduce the charge to voluntary manslaughter. [emphasis added]

That’s right. He knocked off her glasses so she sprayed paraylzer spray in his face, strangled him, and beat him with a hammer, then tried to argue in court that there was sufficient provocation to mitigate the charge from murder to manslaughter. Right. But my favorite part is the part that I emphasized, which as a factual matter has little if any bearing on the court’s holding, but is certainly worthwhile in its narrative value: “She grabbed him by what little hair he had on his bald head.”

So there’s a story about a slimeball man killing a woman (who, if you read the rest of the case, turns out not to be so nice herself — apparently she was just taking the old guy’s money and handing it over to a pimp, and not because she feared the pimp, according to a private investigator) and a story about a slimeball woman killing a man. Equal time for equal stupidity, that’s my philosophy.

God Sucks at Communication

Here is another good article. Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith) reviews The Language of God by Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project.

Collins, despite being a big-time scientist, still manages to have the critical-thinking skills of a middle schooler. In his book, he describes his conversion to Christianity, which apparently was caused by his discovery of a frozen waterfall in the Cascades. Since the waterfall was frozen in three streams, Collins thought of the Trinity and ba-boom, he found himself on his knees.

All righty then. Harris responds:

If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus really is the son of God, then anything can mean anything. Let us say that I saw the same waterfall, and its three streams reminded me of Romulus, Remus and the She-wolf, the mythical founders of Rome. How reasonable would it be for me to know, from that moment forward, that Italy would one day win the World Cup? This epiphany, while perfectly psychotic, would actually put me on firmer ground than Collins—because Italy did win the World Cup. Collins’ alpine conversion would be a ludicrous non sequitur even if Jesus does return to Earth trailing clouds of glory.

Indeed. Collins only thought of the Trinity because he was aware of the doctrine before witnessing the frozen waterfall. Why didn’t he think of a three-pronged pitchfork? This idea that people can find explicit doctrinal content in their subjective perceptions of natural phenomena is utterly ludicrous.

From the other direction, I suppose one could argue that even where observers A and B encountering phenomenon P derive different doctrinal conclusions, perhaps X and Y, it is possible that some deity created and situated A, B, and P such that A derived X from P while B derived Y from P, because the deity needed at that time to convey X to A and Y to B. But that bowl of alphabet soup is ridiculous, too. Why would a deity needing to communicate with A and B go to the trouble to create only one phenomenon through which to communicate two messages? Furthermore, why would this deity choose to communicate in such a way that every message is so individually tailored to its recipient that the result, for the purposes of observers, is indistinguishable from pure subjective imagination? Shouldn’t a deity who is serious about making a statement perform its communicative acts in such ways that more than a single recipient recognizes the same message in the same phenomenon? For instance, create and situate A, B, and P such that A and B both independently derive doctrinal conclusion X from P. Better yet, create many individuals and situate them such that every one of them independently derives the same doctrinal conclusion from a single phenomenon.

A deity who was really serious about people understanding what it meant to say would not communicate in frozen waterfalls and ancient literature. If God really wanted people to pay attention to him, his holy scriptures would look a lot more like a complex document designed to convey complex information without loopholes or ambiguity and a lot less like a bunch of conflicting literary works composed by many different authors with clear stylistic differences across a span of centuries. I.e., the Bible should read more like a legal code. Why can committees of legislators or legal scholars create documents with more stylistic unity and less conceptual ambiguity than God himself? (Hint: It may have something to do with the fact that legislators and legal scholars actually exist.)

Christian Nationalists

Here is an informative article about “Christian nationalism.” Give it a read and spread it around. Then go read the book by Michelle Goldberg.

Christian nationalists plan to pressure politicians “to pack the bench with their ideological allies,” and they are “training a new generation of home schooled jurists who will approach the law with a Christian worldview.” Christian nationalists are among the strongest proponents of home schooling, with somewhere between one and two million children now being so educated. One of the handbooks of the Christian nationalists, which Goldberg found at a convention for home-schoolers, was How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary by Edwin Vieira, who has alluded, Goldberg reports, “to Stalin’s purges as a way of dealing with liberal judges.”

In anticipation of the criticism that I know will arise absent a caveat, I would point out that we are talking about “Christian nationalists,” not “Christians.” I leave it to the presumed intelligence of my readers (however few of them there may be) to determine the important difference between the two.

Scottish Sarcasm in Biz Orgs

“We should round up all those haggis eatin’ Scotties and kill ‘em!”

Says my Business Associations professor. In jest. To demonstrate sarcasm. He then dared us to put it on the internet. So I did.

Stupid Actors

This article about Tom Cruise sums it up perfectly. Quoting a “Hollywood insider”:

There are plenty more actors where Tom Cruise comes from — Hollywood is full of them

Yes, exactly. But I’m of the Hitchcock school. (“I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.”) Actors are not artists. They’re a commodity. An actor’s performance is largely a product of how the shots are composed and edited. How can you take something that has been chopped up and rearranged and then give credit for “the performance” to the person who did little more than occupy space and emote?

Anyway, it’s nice to see Tom Cruise and Melvin Gibstein* acting like morons. They’re not out of the ordinary. They’re just celebrities who have managed to break free from their public relations people. Like cattle stampeding.

Also, after sitting through years and years of females talking about dreamy guys like Cruise and Gibstein are, it’s nice to sit back and say, “What do you want? Unstable morons like those guys, or a stable smartass like me?” (Of course, the answer is still “In any case, I’d rather not have you,” but I’m entitled to my illusions, right?)

*Extra points if you know why I called him “Melvin Gibstein.”

Free Energy?

So this Irish company claims it can produce free energy. Of course, the standard rational, scientific reply should be something like: “That’s theoretically impossible, therefore an extraordinary claim. Show me some proof!” But saying something is theoretically impossible really just means “We’ve never seen anything like this before and we don’t know how it works.”

Meanwhile, these skeptics are just acting like wags. Violating the current and long-established understanding of how the universe works does not make something wrong; it just makes it an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof. Until the results are in, the claim is neither true nor false, and those of us who cannot evaluate it for ourselves by experimentation are unable to make meaningful conclusions based on purely theoretical knowledge.

But one can hope. Clean, stable, and consistent production of energy that also creates no pollution would pretty much mean the end of the world as we know it. In a good way. The possibilities would be limitless.

Anyway, I don’t have much else to say about that. It just sounds pretty cool. But then again, so did cold fusion.

Like a Buttered Hog

Well, as the director of career services said it, “Witness the benefits of being highly qualified.”

Last Friday I decided to look for a new job in earnest. On Monday I revised my resume and wrote a couple cover letters. On Tuesday I took them down to career services to have them evaluated and revised them a few minutes later. Later that day I emailed my cover letter, resume, and a writing sample to a local firm (which had just posted the position opening on Monday). Yesterday they emailed and asked if I was available for an interview. This morning I drove down for the interview, spent about forty minutes talking to one of the partners, headed for the library here at school to work on my reading, and suddenly my phone was ringing.

They offered me a job at double my current pay rate (with ample opportunity for increase), starting Monday. That was fast. The partner who interviewed me seemed to like my style. For instance, one of the first things he said was that while I don’t meet the minimum qualifications, the fact that I played that up in my cover letter and said that I was confident in my ability to overcome that deficiency is qualification enough for him. So I guess chutzpah really does pay off.

Now I just need to show up and produce some good work. Cross your fingers. (And in case you’re wondering, the name of the firm shall not be disclosed here.)

Keep On Keepin’ On

Busy, busy, busy — and it’s not likely to let up any time soon.

There are still about 100 pages left to read (and probably a few pages to re-read at the end of my Constitutional Law assignment, because I was very tired and don’t trust the notes I took), and that’s just for the first week of classes.

My law review comment needs work — I’ve not touched it for several days now, although I did get a rough draft turned in on Monday. My topic is fascinating (to me) but I am still skeptical that the direction I’m taking will be worthwhile. With any luck, the editorial board will start getting some comments back to me pretty soon.

As well, I’m trying to get a job as a law clerk with a local law firm, which means I’ve been working on my resume, writing cover letters, meeting with the career services director, checking my email obsessively, etc.

All of that means I have no time to offend you with scurrilous remarks about all your favorite sacred cows. Let me just go down the list: Christianity is stupid, Islam is evil, and all other religions are equally pointless, if not moreso; Democrats and Republicans are too narrow-minded to admit that their political parties are just religions by another name; the Left wing is blind to its own shortcomings as a viable understanding of the world, the Right wing is blind to the shortcomings of the world; terrorists are killing more people than American soldiers are but American soldiers still manage to behave like shameless pigs; stripping people naked and taking pictures of them is not torture by any reasonable definition; Israelis and Palestinians should all be slapped like little children because that’s what they act like; feminism is only the answer to sexism if you want to keep on fighting; and affirmative action is only the answer to racism if you don’t believe in the American Dream, which means social advancement via hard work and merit.

Speaking of social advancement via hard work and merit, this kid from the wrong side of the tracks has some work to do.

No Bribes

Funny sign. Do not bribe the Indian scientists.