Broadcast Brian

So, I’ve been building my law practice for a while now, and the experience of providing legal representation to people hasn’t been a demeaning or dissociative one, for me.  However, there have been some clients who seem to cling to an ancient view of an attorney as a mouth-piece: paid to say what the client says.  That’s simply not the case.  To illustrate the difference, I’d like to link to a very funny and in-depth post on gawker by an author who used a tweet for cash app to provide access to his tweet stream to anyone who paid.  Link.  In contrast to that impersonation invitation for cash offer, an attorney-client arrangement doesn’t entail one person substituting their point of view or literally putting words into another person’s mouth, or at least it shouldn’t.  Attorneys represent by embodying the role of the attorney, not by substituting their thinking or word formation processes for those of their client who pays them.  Like it or not, when you hire and attorney you’re dealing with a thinking and feeling individual who will often keep your interests at arms length even as they zealously advocate for the trier of fact to adopt those views as their own.  It’s a necessary technique for a professional advocate, and is far removed from renting out one’s digital footprint for others’ commercial use.  I’ve been in a position that required some flog type behavior online, and I have to say that is quite different than the practice of law, properly understood.  So, for new lawyers, don’t let them tell you you’re a word whore.

KC Mayor Sly James offered a wonderful quote summing up race relations in Kansas City: ‘We’re still stuck in stupid…’  Link.

I just found a wonderful piece on Slate about a question that I’ve asked myself at some point: How many spaces should one leave after a period.  Link.  I’m a classically trained typist and employ two spaces after each period as that is how I’ve been taught and how I’m going to go forth from here.  However, there’s an underlying efficiency and aesthetic argument that goes along with this choice.  Computer assisted typography allows each letter to have just the right amount of space.  Unlike typewriters, which use the same space for an M as they do an I, popular word processor fonts use just the right amount of space.  This hasn’t been true since hand-set printing presses.  According to the linked-to article, hand-setters would use extra space after a period to signify the end of a thought coinciding with the end of a sentence.  I like to honor that tradition and enjoy the aesthetics of a second space.  As this is the internet, of course, there are those who will disagree merely to seem disagreeable for whatever myriad reason the world births trolls.  A man’s choice as to how many spaces there should be after a period is a personal one, and exists within a realm of private autonomy, along with smoking, the choice to exercise or not, and what happens in the voting booth.  If asked to proofread, I will correct if someone doesn’t employ the two-space method, but it’s up to them to make the changes if they want.  In any case, I thought this a coincidence in strand of thought worthy of note.

Scientists have reportedly created three Chimera monkeys using the genetic material from six different ‘parent’ donor monkeys for each one of them.  The Chimera is a mythical beast that had the body parts of different creatures, and the word is used to describe living organisms that are made up of artificially created or naturally occurring mixtures of separate genetic material in one organism.  That doesn’t include the offspring of typical sexual reproduction, though there are rare occasions where humans may exhibit Chimerism, leading to aberrant genetic testing results.  Link.

The Maqaque monkeys are named Roku, Hex and Chimero.  Roku and Hex are Japanese and Greek for six, respectively.  Anti-cloning activists have, understandably, cried foul at this news.  Researchers claim that this experiment will pave the way to greater rewards for genetic and stem cell research.  As someone familiar with BSG, I can’t quite get over the use of the number ‘Six’ as their names.  I’m not saying these are cylon precursors, but wow does this bring bioethics to the fore.

In 1990, Carl Sagan suggested that NASA have Voyager 1 take a photograph of Earth from its vantage point, then 6.4 Billion miles away.  Here’s a link to that picture and to an excerpt, from Sagan, marking the occasion.  Just like the famous EarthRise photo from Apollo, The Pale Blue Dot photo gives any human being pause at how fragile life seems to be when viewed from space.  Earth appears not like the essence of substance and support like it does from our vantage point, but like a jewel hung in darkness.  Quite beautiful regardless of from whence one beholds it.

The WSJ has a great piece on a 13 year old inventor who’s innovating the way solar panel arrays are constructed.  Link.  Aidan Dwyer came up with an elegant way to construct solar panel arrays, taking nature’s solar collectors, trees, as a model and may have identified a way to increase the power output when compared with the more familiar flat panel arrays.  Aidan won a science contest put on by Young Naturalists, and has been invited to speak at an energy production innovation conference in Abu Dhabi.  However, during the course of his rise to internet stardom, his research methods came under question when scientists noted that he had only measured the voltage, and not taken into account the current produced, which undercut his claim of greater power generation efficiency.  An understandable oversight for a 13 year old, but that didn’t stop what he calls the ‘Haters’ from glomming on and questioning everything from his politics (even though he’s 13) to whether he’s really human.  Aidan has since retooled his experiment, and is currently measuring both voltage and current, and getting results in line with his first publication.

Americans are born with the right to be free of detention without due process.  That’s one aspect of liberty, which is amongst our inalienable rights (meaning rights that cannot be removed from us), along with life and pursuit of happiness and all associated freedoms and privileges that are necessary to secure those rights.  According to the Huffington Post, President Obama, reportedly with ’serious reservations’, signed a defense authorization bill that includes some provisions that could ensnare American citizens in indefinite detention on terrorism suspicion. Link.  As there exist in our realm some chaotic individuals and factions that love nothing more than to pun their way into causing other people trouble, I’m skeptical of this whole nonsense, as ‘terrorism’ as a key term leads to all sorts of socially mediated over-reach into the realm of Orwellian thought crime and literature parsing and editing.  I’m not a truther, or anything of that nature, I’m simply pointing out that a word that means one thing today, could, due to the process of time and human endeavor, be twisted into something quite different and alien from original intent.

For example, on December 14th the Huffington post had previously reported that the Obama administration threatened a veto over this very subject, demanding that indefinite detention not include Americans.  Link.  According to that report, Americans would not be subject to unconstitutional detention under the re-written legislation and that the White House wouldn’t be burdened when removing Americans from military detention and placing them, correctly, into the civilian system.  I’m not confused, I’m just more than convinced that these reports are being over-simplified for news consumers whose rights are being removed right before their eyes even as shared reality remains unchanged for those among us who don’t follow the news.  Americans can simply not be detained without due process, it’s a fact.  Should one be detained and due process be denied we have an extensive court system charged with making sure that every single American person who law enforcement or the military pick up is accounted for and afforded a defense (civil and criminal) against whatever charges are lain against them.  It’s the basis of our justice system, and the bedrock of our judiciary.  Totalitarianism is a creeping menace that measures victory in millimeters instead of inches and insists upon submission; to facilitate its creep by misrepresenting to the public what important federal legislation means to the rights of American citizens is a terrible abdication of journalistic responsibility.  The same news outlet publishing two contradictory stories about the same piece of legislation is a failure in media ethics and leaves news consumers, such as myself, more confused than we were before we tried to follow the story via their feeds that are advertised as news, meaning information useful to the public and fit for consumption.  It’s an embarrassment.

Here’s a wonderful story from the high seas:  The Chilean Navy found 84 year old Thomas Louis Corogin alive and well after his mast broke during his 7th trip around the horn of South America.  Link.  Corogin was sailing his 32 foot vessel, embarking from Easter Island late last year, when he activated his distress beacon after wind cracked his mast.  He’s doing well and will likely return to sailing once his boat is repaired.  Corogin runs a marina in Ohio and is a lawyer.  As an attorney, I would also like to spend my retiring years literally sailing the ocean with friends and family.

I’m currently blogcasting from my home state of Missouri.  Missouri is a wonderful state to live in and visit, boasts two world class cities, wonderful university and small towns and acres of natural beauty.  It also gained a reputation at one time as a hotbed of methamphetamine (meth) production.  Due to aggressive law enforcement and drug rehabilitation missionaries, Missouri meth use has declined and cooking the drug here has become a major pain in the butt for dealers.  Link.  During the early 2000’s, there was a strong push in the national media to connect what was perceived to be a growing identity theft problem with a contemporaneous rise in meth use.  Here are a couple articles that touch on the subject: Link, Link.  What’s interesting to note, is that today, according to nationwide identity theft crime statistics, there’s another data point with an even stronger correlation: illegal immigration.  Link.  As those statistics show, the top states for reported identity theft are also on the frontline of combatting illegal immigration and associated Mexican drug gang incursion.  Note that Missouri ranks 32nd on the list, despite its reputation for being a meth hotbed.  Considering the established evidence that many meth users obtain their drugs by bartering stolen mail and personal information directly to their dealers in light of the geographic distribution of such crimes, it is possible that meth dealers are more interested in impersonating American citizens than just dealing them drugs.  Not all people who enter this country illegally are meth dealers; I want no part in that contention.  However, more and more, most of the meth seized in the U.S. has come from Mexico.  Link.  Dealers use American meth addicts like gangs of robot workers, gathering, parsing and filtering stolen private information that is then fed to the dealers in exchange for more meth, which perpetuates the mental state of overwhelming privation and need to work in the addicts.  It now looks like that dealing might just be a means to an end for the drug gangs, as the much less risky and more lucrative market for stolen identity information could eventually provide a greater share of their profits.  Considering the tough new identity laws coming into place along the southern border, the value of clean, assumable identities would likely increase as well.

Krugman’s got quite the fiery column today in the Times.  Link.  In it he notes that U.S. Treasuries are so popular right now that they pay negative interest.  The investors of the world are paying for the privilege of having the United States of America put their money to use.  What does that say about our current news cycle’s focus on negative economic indicators.  A rise in unemployment is a real social story, and deserves to be told through anecdotes, narratives and analytical pieces, but the contemporaneous rise in strength of treasuries is a message that’s essential for people to hear in order for them to make wise and rational economic decisions for themselves and their families.  Obfuscating such information is tantamount to robbing news consumers of their ability to survive and flourish amidst a changing economic landscape.  That sort of economic intelligence, if held back by the ostensible purveyors of economic insight, becomes valuable only to predatory actors in the economy; and softening up the ‘marks’ isn’t part of the Journalist’s Creed, I might add.