Argh.

I think I screwed up something when I tried to update my WordPress software. I don’t have time to fix it right now.

And a Merry @$%#ing Christmas to You, Too

To the jerks at Peoples Church in Fresno:

When you are driving out of your Christmas Eve service all pumped up on your precious baby Jesus, you really ought to keep your eyes open for the people who are (no thanks to you) actually living and breathing around you. One of your oblivious jackass worshipers almost ran over me a while ago while I was out for a run. This would be at the driveway where you all spill out onto Alluvial Avenue like a bunch of drunks who just imbibed too much Holy Spirit. Thanks.

Funny thing, I’m guessing you have similar problems in the driveway at Cedar and Spruce because you recently installed signs there directing pedestrians to cross the street to avoid walking in front of your cars. I notice there’s also a sign for exiting vehicles reminding you to look both ways before you exit. Really? Really?

Are you people so stupid and oblivious when you’re leaving your church you can’t even automatically follow the rules of the road that you need an extra sign to tell you what to do and you need to make the pedestrians walk somewhere else? You can’t just, like, do what you’re supposed to do and give pedestrians the right of way? Pay attention?

Or is it, you know, because watching out for pedestrians is “man’s law” and not “God’s law”?

Or are you just oblivious jerks?

Maybe I’m just extra pissed off because one of your people almost ran over me just now, but seriously, I couldn’t ask for a better object lesson demonstrating what is exactly wrong with religious people, particularly you white bread evangelical Christians. You are so preoccupied with your God that you fail to note other people who, unlike your God, are visible. Except, apparently, when they are in front of your car after a church service.

And while I’m lambasting you for being bad neighbors and unfriendly to pedestrians, I should also point out how annoying it is that you apparently can’t manage to get a sidewalk installed along Cedar Avenue, so pedestrians like myself have to contend with a slippery, muddy path in the middle of an otherwise delightful neighborhood where everybody else has these newfangled things called “sidewalks” (they’re made of concrete and they’re great for walking on). But wait, there’s more! Not only do you not have a sidewalk there, but you stick that big ugly triangular sign right in the middle of the dirt so pedestrians have to maneuver around it. Funny thing, there’s a huge empty grass area immediately adjacent that I have never seen being used where your sign would fit just perfectly.

Oh well. We’ve established that you clearly don’t give a rat’s ass about the people who live in your neighborhood. (Although I’m sure you’d welcome me with open arms if I was interested getting myself infected with your ridiculous religion.)

Yeah. So merry @$%#ing Christmas to you, too, Peoples Church. Try not to run me over anymore. Or maybe imagine there’s no heaven, no religion, too—and the rest of us are right here in front of your blind eyes.

Checking In

Although I am technically on a “winter break” from school (my last one ever, most likely, since I will graduate in May with the terminal degree in my field), I am apparently too busy to post anything interesting here. (Thank you very much, Law Review and Traynor Moot Court Competition.) The best I can manage is to do some occasional time-wasting with StumbleUpon or Google Reader. You can see the sites I mark on both of those in the sidebar. You can also find things that I have posted to Facebook.

One of these days I might find time again to write something interesting or inflammatory here. Until then, if you haven’t already checked it out, you might want to read one of my recent posts, “Freedom of Speech Means Freedom to Offend,” including the comments.

Meanwhile, after three hours of arduous editing for the Law Review, I am off to read H.L.A. Hart’s The Concept of Law. Because, you know, I need to understand everything, so I read nerdy books like that. Except paradoxically, as anyone who really tries to understand everything can tell you, the harder I work to understand things, the less I feel I really understand.

Yes, this is pretty much a completely narcissistic post. Jorn Barger can complain all he wants.

Another Reason to Use Wikipedia

Are you one of those people who thinks Wikipedia is inaccurate because anybody can edit it? What would you prefer? Something written by real academics with real university jobs? Do you think those people are immune from inaccuracy or distortion?

What if I told you, first, that not just anybody can edit Wikipedia, that it’s possible to get banned for repeated vandalism or misuse of the site? And what if I told you that even respected academics with published articles in peer-reviewed journals might misuse Wikipedia by contributing inaccurate or inappropriate content? For instance, like MIT professor Carl Hewitt.

See, people at the top of the knowledge-creating hierarchy in our society are still just people, too. They are no more or less trustworthy than anyone else. They lie, cheat, misrepresent—all that fun stuff. They can be astonishingly petty.

But Wikipedia works. Inaccurate and inappropriate material is discovered and deleted. People can be banned or blocked from editing. And they are.

It only gets better when more eyes are on the information. If you see something wrong, you too can go into editorial mode.

Robo Concert Master

Check out this video of a robot playing a violin.

It seems kind of silly, like when robots in Star Wars speak to each other in English, via holograms, when they could just as easily communicate via some kind of wireless signal that’s far more efficient (but much less theatrical). Why would you make a robot that can play a violin, when it would probably be much easier to make software that accurately simulates the sound of a violin?

Still, it’s pretty cool even though the robot is getting a flat and boring tone out of the instrument.

How to be a Jerk

If you live in a gated apartment complex where there are no visitor parking spaces inside the gates, tell your visitors to go ahead and park in any empty space anyway. Nobody will care. Nobody else is paying money every month to live in your complex and have a parking space. Nobody matters but you. The whole universe revolves around you. Did you know that?

Wrapped in the Flag, Carrying the Cross

So Mitt Romney may be a Mormon, but he talks just like an Evangelical:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.

Um, no. Freedom requires religion? What, so unless I practice a religion, I am only an enslaved automaton? That’s funny because it’s the people mired in the practice of their religion who look like enslaved automatons to me. This is the kind of ridiculous doublespeak that is absolutely terrifying for anybody who does not want this nation to fall into the kind of thing Sinclair Lewis is alleged to have predicted (he probably didn’t, but it’s still a good point): fascism wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross. Or, if you prefer an Orwellian tinge, Freedom is (religious) slavery!

We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

No, that’s just stupid, or ignorant, or a willful misrepresentation of the state of affairs, or something. Nobody with any consequential power “seek[s] to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God.” However, religion is a private affair. That means anyone speaking on behalf of the government, as the mouthpiece of a government agency, or in a position of government authority, such as that granted by government employment, should not be speaking in a religious way, so as to create the impression that the religious views he or she articulates are sanctioned by the government.

How many times does this need to be explained to all the hard-headed idiots like Romney and his ilk who keep going around spouting this ridiculous misrepresentation? Here’s an example: If you are a school teacher who believes in God, then you can go into public and talk about it. You can even try to convert me. But while you are in the classroom, carrying out your function as a state-employed educator in a compulsory educational system, where the only free schools are state schools, and you are discussing religion in such a way as to give the impression that your beliefs are “normal” or “correct,” while other beliefs are not, then you have overstepped the boundaries. You can take the same example and shift the facts to fit any other government position.

Don’t be a fool. Don’t buy this stuff that Romney is shoveling. He’s just plain wrong. He’s trying to mobilize a group of voters who want to see the ideological administration of this nation carried even further than the current administration has carried it. These are the people who will bring us fascism wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross and Romney is trying to get their votes. Watch out.

I Hear Those Sleigh Bells Jingling

Ring-ting-ting-a-ling, too.Here’s a fun bit of holiday trivia:

[M]ore than half a century ago, on Christmas Eve in 1955, . . . a Sears Roebuck & Co. store in Colorado Springs advertised a special hotline number for kids to call Santa. What the company didn’t know at the time was that they had inadvertently misprinted the telephone number. Instead of Santa’s workshop, the phone number put kids through to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the bi-national U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for the aerospace defense of the U. S. and Canada.

Thankfully, the children on the telephone were not declared alien unlawful enemy combatants and shipped off to Gitmo or rendered to some foreign land for waterboarding until they admitted that they were terrorists and “Santa” was code for “Launch the attack!” or “All your base are belong to us!” Instead, the nice people at NORAD shared their tracking data with the children to let them know just whose airspace Santa Claus and his eight tiny reindeer were invading at any given moment.

Again, thankfully, none of those children used this information to launch surface-to-air missiles or fire anti-aircraft rounds at Jolly Old Saint Nick, so the presents will keep on coming, so long as the North Pole manages to avoid any economic downturn that might affect elf productivity. Maybe the Department of Labor should start up its own tracking system to keep us informed as to any labor negotiations between Santa and his elves. Wouldn’t it be terribly jolly and informative if you could tell children on Christmas morning that there will be no presents this year because Santa Clause, unlike even Ebenezer Scrooge, was unable to come to an agreement with his employees regarding compensation?

“Sorry, kids. No collective bargaining agreement this year. You’ll just have to be satisfied with God blessing us, every one.”

“But why, daddy?”

“Well, you see, with global warming and all, and the polar ice caps melting, the elves are looking at some pretty steep increases to their cost of living. Meanwhile, Santa has to worry about bringing his operation into compliance with stricter air quality control standards, so he’s feeling the pinch, too, and can’t afford to pay the elves a living wage. As it turns out, some of the elves working for Santa can’t afford to feed their children and have actually left Santa’s Workshop and started their own business at the North Pole—a technical support call center. So there’s not enough elves left to make presents for everyone and you don’t get anything this year.”

“How do you know all that, daddy?”

“Oh, this handy-dandy Department of Labor website kept me updated!”

Yeah, that’s the stuff.

Anyway, check out the NORAD Santa-tracking website. It’s pretty sweet. If you go to the cinderblock building on the outskirts of the west side of Santa’s village, the one called “Merry Music Makers,” you can play Jingle Bells on handbells.

Freedom of Speech Includes Freedom to Offend

A high school chemistry teacher allegedly left a comment on a blog. It got him arrested. Now local law enforcement are considering whether to charge him with “disorderly conduct and unlawful use of computerized communication systems.”

What did the comment say?

The comment, left under the name “Observer,” came during a discussion over teacher salaries, after some writers complained teachers were underworked and overpaid.

Buss, a former president of the teacher’s union, allegedly wrote that teacher salaries made him sick because they are lazy and work only five hours a day. He praised the teen gunmen who killed 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide in the April 1999 attack at Columbine High School.

“They knew how to deal with the overpaid teacher union thugs. One shot at a time!” he wrote, adding they should be remembered as heroes.

Seems pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek to me, but another teacher felt threatened enough to call the police. Yes, over a comment. On a blog.

Tell you what, I am a lot more troubled that someone charged with educating children would be so afraid of an anonymous blog comment that he or she would call the police than I am about the blog comment itself. I see shades of “Thought Police” and the kind of totalitarian regime where citizens are so afraid of each other that they rat each other out for minor things. Like writing potentially offensive things on blogs.

Once upon a time, an Irish priest wrote that his countrymen could cure their economic woes by allowing poor people to sell their babies to the rich, who could then eat them. I read that strange document in an English literature textbook when I was in high school. It’s a classic example of satire.

When people are so afraid that they cannot tolerate even the mention of violence, then we, as a society, are in trouble.

There’s an ancillary issue here, too. The only way someone could reasonably be fearful because of such a blog comment is if that person believed a reader or readers of the comment would be inspired to act in accordance with what it appears to say (discounting, for the sake of argument, the possibility that it was only satire). People put too much stock in words as a commanding, determinative power. Even if we assume that the blog comment was seriously suggesting that someone go out and start shooting teachers to take care of educational funding problems, then how exactly do we determine whether it actually causes any violence? Did that teacher who called the police really believe that someone who didn’t already have it in for teachers could read that comment and think, “By golly, I believe I’ll get myself a gun and do my duty as a taxpayer”? Or would the comment only arouse sympathetic passions in a reader who would think, “I’m not the only one! By golly, I believe I’ll get myself a gun and do my duty as a taxpayer”? Or would most readers recognize the comment as clearly ridiculous on its face, but substantially and satirically indicative of the dire nature of the problem for people who actually work as teachers?

That problem is addressed in First Amendment free speech law under the doctrine that such speech must classify as “advocacy of unlawful action” before the government can abridge it easily. Such speech needs to be an incitement to unlawful action, but it also needs to be sufficiently concrete and specific in its exhortation, so that there is a high probability that the unlawful conduct proposed will actually occur. It seems pretty unlikely (to me) that the blog comment here was sufficiently concrete and specific. He didn’t directly say that people should go get guns and shoot teachers; he just made a shocking comparison for rhetorical effect: people who oppose increased funding to schools are not likely to be the same people who want to go shooting teachers. Rather, it seems pretty clear to me that the author of the comment, if it was the arrested teacher, wanted those opponents to recognize the practical effects of their viewpoint for teachers; if you don’t pay them enough, you might as well just be picking them off, because the cost of living will eat them alive.

At any rate, for the teacher who called the police to act as he or she did, in my opinion, only “outs” that person as an irrational fear-monger and someone who should not be a teacher to begin with. Children do not need extra exposure to such people as role models.

Law School Update

I’m in the thick of midterm examinations right now. Remedies was this afternoon, Evidence is on Wednesday evening, Wills & Trusts is on Friday evening, and Community Property is next Tuesday afternoon, so I’m pretty busy, at least mentally

I learned this afternoon that I, along with two of my most excellent classmates, have been chosen to represent SJCL at the Roger J. Traynor California Appellate Moot Court Competition this spring. When I arrived on campus this afternoon for the Remedies midterm, I checked my mailbox and discovered a 363 page document: the “record” upon which our fictional appeal will be based. Looks like fun. Almost like working on a real case. I am excited.

I also learned this afternoon that I received a passing score (by a substantial margin, thank you very much) for California when I took the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE) last month. That was a big relief, since it was the second time I took the test and they are raising the minimum passing score in January. (The first time I took the test, I missed the passing score by one point.)

Anyway, I would love to start digging into that appellate record, but I need to study for Evidence. Got a pile of hearsay exceptions I need to memorize. Doesn’t that sound like a delightful way to spend the evening?