The Blog with No Name

Even though Katrina didn’t directly hit New Orleans, the damage is extensive:

Veteran staff members from the Federal Emergency Management Agency who have surveyed the destruction said the flood damage is the worst they have ever seen, the head of the agency said.

“This is truly a catastrophic event,” Michael Brown told CNN.

FEMA is preparing to house “at least tens of thousands of victims … for literally months on end,” he said.

I heard on the news some are estimating it will take upwards of 5 years to repair all the damage. I guess the upside to this is that when things are rebuilt they will be better and stronger.

The Christian Science Monitor writes about the aide relief coming in:

Even before hurricane Katrina made landfall Monday, a massive relief brigade - one that officials hoped would be an equal match for a huge Category 4 storm - was being deployed to help residents along Louisiana’s low-lying coast.

Among them: The Red Cross called upon some 5,000 volunteers, including some who drove in from Washington State. Members of Fark.com, an online discussion board, offered to host fellow forum participants who were fleeing Katrina. And FEMA, the federal disaster-response agency, moved its search-and-rescue teams - as well as stockpiles of ice, water, and food - as close as safety would permit.

The outpouring of aid, possibly the largest the US has ever seen to cope with a domestic natural disaster, stems from Katrina’s imposing size as well as its destination so near the major population center of New Orleans.

It’s good to see Farkers out there and helping people, and even big business is jumping in to help:

Other private and public aid - as well as volunteers - have been pouring into Louisiana over the past 48 hours. Office Depot says it will donate $1 million to the Red Cross, while Anheuser-Busch shipped 300,000 cans of drinking water to relief agencies in Louisiana and Mississippi. Wayne Elsey, president of Kodiak-Terra, a footwear company that donated thousands of pairs of shoes to South Asia after last year’s tsunami, is setting up a “Katrina Relief Effort” fund.

I’m not sure why Anheuser-Busch didn’t send beer, I’m sure that would be greatly appreciated too. . .though not that Bud Lite swill.

Here’s an interesting article on gas prices in Europe. Overall, it seems the Europeans got a good system going — except for the taxes. A few interesting tidbits:

• Europe has the highest gas prices in the world. In Amsterdam, it’s $7.13 a gallon.
• Europe’s cars get much better gas mileage. Average mpg is the US is 21.6 and in Paris it’s 32.1.
• 40% of cars sold in Europe are diesel. Only 4% of cars sold in the US are diesel.
• On average 60% of gas prices are due to taxes in Europe. In London, the government takes 75% in taxes.

I’m unphased by high gas prices, though I’ll admit paying $50 to fill up my Ranger is no fun. I don’t drive that much, so I fill up about once a month. My hope is that gas prices will push alternative fuels technology farther along, and hopefully loosen up our dependency on oil. For example, it’d be nice to see nuclear reactors and biodiesel take on a greater role in meeting our energy needs. The only thing that I’m afraid of that might happen is the feds might feel compelled to do something rather than rely on the market forces to sort this out.

New Orleans is about to get creamed by Katrina. It’s going to be bad.

The New Orleans weather radar is here. It doesn’t look good.

Point ofLaw.com has an interesting post about the overwhelming number of liberals on the faculty of the top law schools in the US. Quoting from a NYT article:

The study, to be published this fall in The Georgetown Law Journal, analyzes 11 years of records reflecting federal campaign contributions by professors at the top 21 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Almost a third of these law professors contribute to campaigns, but of them, the study finds, 81 percent who contributed $200 or more gave wholly or mostly to Democrats; 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans.

The percentages of professors contributing to Democrats were even more lopsided at some of the most prestigious schools: 91 percent at Harvard, 92 at Yale, 94 at Stanford. At the University of Virginia, on the other hand, contributions were about evenly divided between the parties.

I can’t say this surprises me. I suppose I’m a little impressed by the numbers though. I would have guessed the percentage of Democratic contributions would have been around 70-80%. The article points out, this favoritism towards Democrats is inbred into the institution of law school:

“Academics tend to be more to the left side of the continuum,” said David E. Van Zandt, dean of Northwestern’s law school, where the contribution rate to Democrats was 71 percent. “It’s a little worse in law school. In other disciplines, there are more objective standards for quality of work. Law schools are sort of organized in a club structure, where current members of the club pick future members of the club.”

It’s a shame the world of legal education runs this way. It’s also a shame when candidates for a law professorship or tenure have to hide their opinions or identities so as to not cut their own throats. One of the writers at The Volokh Conspiracy has adopted a nom de plume precisely for this reason. Jim Lindgren, who also writes for Volokh, weighs in on the study as well and offers an interesting thought experiment:

The Times article raises the question whether it matters if there is political diversity on law faculties.

I have two answers–one substantive, one speculative. First, in my studies with the General Social Survey, political ideology is the strongest predictor of views across a range of hundreds of issues that I’ve looked at–stronger than race, gender, education, class, occupation, age, region, marital status, etc. Those who say that labels such as “conservative” and “liberal” are meaningless today are frankly uninformed. Most survey researchers know that these labels are quite salient.

Second, a professor at the Harvard Law School told me that in 1988 he asked every member of the Harvard Law School faculty with even a hint of conservative or Republican leanings whether they favored or had voted for Bush in 1988. Only one had (1 out of 60-80 faculty); all others favored Dukakis. He also said that in about 2 or 3 dozen entry-level faculty hires from the mid-1970s through about 3 or 4 years ago (when they hired an entry-level conservative), the Harvard Law School had not hired a single Republican.

Now consider this thought experiment: [Imagine that in 1988 all but one of the Harvard Law faculty had favored Bush1 over Dukakis. And] Imagine that over the same period of a quarter century [mid 1970s through early 2000s], the Harvard Law School had hired at the entry-level only those who leaned Republican. Imagine how different the Harvard Law School would be, how different legal education would be, how different the government (and public policy) would be, populated with lawyers trained by an overwhelmingly Republican Harvard faculty. Somehow I think it would be a different world.

It’s not clear to me how much difference there would be. It seems there would be a vast difference in the American legal world just because those who train the next generation would have a different view of the law, which, persumably, would be passed down to their pupils. However, on the other hand I think there may not have been much. It seemed to me that most students who went to law school already had well-formed political beliefs and were commited to them. The chance of a law professor changing a student’s beliefs seems pretty slim to me. But maybe this is because I’m a right-winger. I think it’s safe to say that any right-of-center individual going into law school knows he or she is walking into a political lion’s den and is steeled against the opposition. Republicans are a rare breed there — though not so much at Willamette thanks to the large Mormon population! — and a breed not always welcomed. Personally, I kept my mouth shut about political issues, and never once revealed my political orientation, praying none of my classmates found my blog. I did this for a variety of reasons, one of which is I am a wuss.

One final thought brought out by the PointofLaw post is this: even if the liberalness of law professors doesn’t have that much influence on the students, they may have significant influence on the public’s perception of the law.

While law school is, for most, a rigorous but expensive trade school, law faculties form opinions in young lawyers and also hold claim to speak to the public on what the academy thinks.

A GC of a public company who criticizes the Ernst v. Merck verdict, for example, is presumed to represent the views of “big corporations” when a newspaper reporter calls, but a law professor who teaches torts is presumed to speak commonly-accepted truths that are free from personal bias.

The public’s inability to see the flaw in this thinking is, to an extent, a shortcoming in the public’s understanding of the law and legal education. I don’t know how many times non-lawyer friends and relatives have referred to a public case only to ask “can they really do that?”. They look amazed when I explain that “anybody can sue anyone else for anything — the only question is how much the parties are willing to pay in legal fees to see it through.”

Much of the public seems to think that the law is a static, well-defined set of rules to be navigatived by lawyers who know what those rules are. Most lawyers, however, know better that the law is fluid and dynamic, capable of suprising reversals, and more susceptible to guesswork than to definitive answers. Legal rules — some in harmony and some in conflict — represent potential points of leverage in disputes between parties, rather than fixed points of universal understanding.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the stupidest things about law school. A school that rolls its eyes in amusement at “Truth” and teaches its students how to bend rules into leveraging tools is a joke.

Willamette starts classes again this week. I won’t be there, and I’m damn glad.

Well, it’s pleasant to find that by and large there is a positive sense of anticipation about my very first podcast. I do notice that one jerk said it would nauseate him/her. Clearly, this individual has never heard the sweet, mellow sound of my baritone voice. I’m sure I could soothe a rutting bull moose with it if I tried (and maybe I will someday). Anyway, somebody is clearly off his or her rocker.

The podcast is progressing nicely but slowly. I have most of my audio clips picked out and about half are edited. Then I just need to record my commentary, but I want to do that when my brother is out of the apartment so there is less noise and I can let all of my creative juices rage and foam without fear of instant critique. I have some stuff planned that already makes me chuckle, but I’m not so sure others will find it as funny. It would be nice to finish the podcast this weekend when I’m more rested. These 10 hour work days and subsequent lack of sleep has me a little drained, so when I come home from work usually the last thing I want to do is think and be creative. I’d rather just veg and think about how nice my voice is.

Oh, and I already am planning some material for podcast #2 which will either be interactive or a short video.

This happened fairly close to where I used to live in Queen Anne:

Several blocks on Queen Anne were evacuated Thursday evening after what appeared to be a pipe bomb was discovered near a Safeway store.

An off duty Seattle police officer was at the store when he found a suspicious package and called 911, said Seattle Police Officer Rich Pruitt. When other officers arrived, they determined it looked like a homemade pipe bomb and called in the bomb squad.

A member of that team put the device into an explosive proof container, and then it was taken to what appeared to be an armored vehicle.

In the meantime, two blocks north and south of First Avenue West near Republican Street were evacuated.

No injuries were reported.

It’s not too clear whether or not the device was actually a bomb, but it is still a little scary.

Google Talk has launched. It’s not like I need another IM protocol to use, but I’m available on that now as well. Only Windoze users can use the VoIP (voice chat) function, but that’s okay. I use Skype without any problems when I need to use it. The only way I see Google Talk being anything special is if they really expand the voice chat capabilities (getting it on other platforms for starters) and make it easy to use.

I want this drug.

In an article in the research journal PLoS Biology, Dr. Sam A. Deadwyler and his associates propose that CX717 would particularly benefit individuals affected by extended work hours or night shifts.

To test this possibility, they taught monkeys to perform a “delayed-match-to-sample task,” in which they were presented with a single image on a computer screen, then would use a cursor to identify that image in a group of several different images.

During normal alert conditions, performance accuracy of the animals was improved from an average of 75 percent to 90 percent after an injection of CX717. The drug also shortened response times, suggesting that “CX717 also facilitated attentional processes related to speed of responding on successful trials.”

When the monkeys were subjected 30-36 hours of sleep deprivation, average performance accuracy dropped to 63 percent, which was restored to 84 percent after CX717 treatment.

Man, I could have used some of that before . . .

I meant to get this one posted sometime last week, but, well, it didn’t happen. Better late than never! About a week ago, after reading some Wodehouse, I flipped through the latest Seattle Weekly, and read this book review of Divided by God by Noah Feldman. The beginning of the review sold me on the book, which I intend to read sometime soon, but the end of the review, where the critic responds to the book, was almost appalling. I’ll quote it in full:

Feldman’s plan would be perfect—except for the fact that the Bush Evangetaliban is all about coercion and money. Its goal, as Esther Kaplan documents in With God on Their Side, “is not to engage your opponents in the public square, but to kneecap them, or send them into exile.” The imams of the right won’t stop with symbolic victories. They want gays in re-education concentration camps, teenagers in madrasas preaching Values Evangelism and Intelligent Design, All Things Considered (it could be renamed One Thing Considered) replaced by religious hate radio. They aren’t kidding, and they are winning. Feldman’s mistake is to think that Values Evangelicals value anything but brute power.

I have a different compromise to propose. Why try to be united? Americans, red and blue, have no common national vision and never will again. Feldman’s own insightful quickie history proves our belief groups have fissioned steadily for centuries. Instead, on “values” issues, permit each municipality to declare itself red or blue, on the model of dry and booze-permitting towns. If all Florida rots into an ignorant, befouled backwater run by corrupt judges and Bush oil theocrats and overrun with pregnant teenagers who remain coke-addicted drunks until discovering Jesus at 40, like George, let them have their place for that. Red America, send us your gays, your morning-after-pill doctors, your science teachers yearning to breathe free! This country’s big enough for both of us—as long as we stay divided. Meanwhile, one suspects only the blue half of America will read Feldman’s book. The red half will probably burn it.

The reviewer’s frenzied disgust for the other half of the population is palpable. His take on the American right is so far out there I think it’s a safe bet he has never really met a member of the religious right and takes his cues from moonbat left. A couple of days later I got an email from the guys who run Spirit of America containing an email forward that offered a highly informative juxtaposition with teh above passage about the identity of America. The forward claims to be written by an Australian dentist and ends like this:

An American is English, or French, or Italian, Irish, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian or Greek.

An American may also be Canadian, Mexican, African, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Australian, Iranian, Asian, or Arab, or Pakistani, or Afghan.

An American may also be a Cherokee, Osage, Blackfoot, Navaho, Apache, Seminole or one of the many other tribes known as native Americans.

An American is Christian, or he could be Jewish, or Buddhist, or Muslim.

In fact, there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan. The only difference is that in America they are free to worship as each of them chooses.

An American is also free to believe in no religion. For that he will answer only to God, not to the government, or to armed thugs claiming to speak for the government and for God.

An American lives in the most prosperous land in the history of the world.

The root of that prosperity can be found in the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the God given right of each person to the pursuit of happiness.

An American is generous. Americans have helped out just about every other nation in the world in their time of need.

When the Soviet army overran Afghanistan 20 years ago, Americans came with arms and supplies to enable the people to win back their country!

As of the morning of September 11, Americans had given more than any other nation to the poor in Afghanistan.

Americans welcome the best, the best products, the best books, the best music, the best food, the best athletes. But they also welcome the least!

The national symbol of America, The Statue of Liberty, welcomes your tired and your poor, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, the homeless, tempest tossed. These in fact are the people who built America.

Some of them were working in the Twin Towers the morning of September 11, 2001, earning a better life for their families. I’ve been told that the World Trade Center victims were from at least 30 other countries, cultures, and first languages, including those that aided and abetted the terrorists.

So you can try to kill an American if you must.

Hitler did.

So did General Tojo, and Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung, and every bloodthirsty tyrant in the history of the world.

But, in doing so you would just be killing yourself. Because Americans are not a particular people from a particular place. They are the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom. Everyone who holds to that spirit, everywhere, is an American.

I know which view I like better.

Walken for President? I can’t tell if this is legit or not. My hunch is that it is a joke, but if he does run it would be cool.

UPDATE: Yeah, Walken’s publicist confirmed this is a hoax. Rats. The debates would have been rad.

So, I have this post I’m slowly working on that is going to have lots of audio clips. I think it’s going to be pretty fun as a normal post. However, I had an epiphany at work the other day: my first podcast! Personally, I’ve always been kinda skeptical of the new hotness that is podcasts. Who really wants to hear a bunch of amateurs with nasally nerd voices talk about boring, esoteric subjects? Not me. However, I checked out some podcasts with the latest version of iTunes, and there seems to be something to them. I listened to the Ebert and Roeper podcast and was pleasantly surprised even though hearing only the audio tracks of movie clips is a little unfulfilling. So the point of this post is to ask if I did a small podcast would anybody be interested? I think I can do a pretty good production with just the simple tools I have (QT, iTunes, and iMovie), so I’m willing to give it a try. I have a poll up.

“You know, the more I see of women, the more I think that there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.” — Bertie Wooster, life-long bachelor, in The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse.

Bertie in ‘08!

Good commericials make me happy. I need to buy some Carlson Draught.

UPDATE: Aw, they took it off. Must have been farked or something. Trust me, it was pretty sweet.

Tom wanted to fix up his sweet mohawk today, but it went a little wrong:

Then he tried to fix it up some more:

He’s a skinhead now.

Oh, and here a few shots of the apartment:

A nice lazy Sunday before starting my first 50-hour work week. Tom and I made it to church where we learned about Joseph testing and forgiving his jerk older brothers. Something modern day brothers need to hear I guess. After church, I was up on Queen Anne for a few hours this afternoon at my favorite Tully’s. I started another P.G. Wodehouse book, The Code of the Woosters, while sipping an iced chai. It was pretty hot, so I bounced from chair to chair in an effort to seek as much shade as possible while remaining outside.

I was reminded again today just how superb Wodehouse’s writing is. I would give a lot to be able to write at half his skill. He makes it all seem effortless, though the introduction of the book makes it clear Wodehouse worked hard, very hard, on each book. When asked how he got his creative juices flowing he responded, “Oh, I don’t know. I just sit down at the typewriter and curse a bit.” In addition to the sedentary swearing, he filled notebooks with notes and slaved over each sentence, for he felt, “In a Jeeves story every line has to have entertainment value.” And, in my opinion, Wodehose succeeds. Here are a couple of examples just from the first two chapaters that made me chuckle out loud. A description of a character named Roderick Spode: “About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.” And a classic quote about aunts: “It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.” To paraphrase the introduction, if this doesn’t make you smile, nothing will, and Wodehouse is not for you. I’m definitely looking forward to spending a couple more sunny afternoons imbibing this fine prose.

After getting my fill, I walked down to the Queen Anne bookstore to see if it had Joy in the Morning, the book that is sort of the sequel to The Code of the Woosters. They didn’t have any Wodehouse, but they had The Best of American Erotica: 2004 right where Wodehouse should have been. Oh well. (I didn’t buy it)