Just found this website, www.courtinginfluence.net, that features a database of federal judges and nominees with links to their financial disclosure statements and copies of their Senate questionnaires.
The site is run by the Center for Investigative Journalism, which has a decidedly liberal feel to it, but the documents speak for themselves.
This is reason number 8,000,001 I’ll probably never run for public office. Who needs the scrutiny of their every move?
To the left you will see the original doodle done by Francis Crick when he theorized the shape of DNA. Crick, who was one of the two people who discovered DNA, died last year and now the US National Library of Medicine and the Wellcome Trust are digitizing over 11,000 pages of his work. You can freely view and download any of his collection here.
To me this is the greatest part of the Internet. If you had told me when I was in college that I could sit in my living room and easily search through millions of pages of information while sitting on my couch I would have said that you were crazy.
This is a very personal post. Frankly, I’m only writing this because I think it will be therapeutic. I’m doing it here rather than in a private journal, because for some reason this is the only place I can, or do write. I don’t have a journal, and I never have had one. It is what it is.
I have a cousin who is getting a divorce. Last I checked this kind of thing happens to about 50% of married couples in the U.S., so this doesn’t qualify as big news. Still, to me it is very painful to be in the front row watching it happen.
You see I experienced divorce as a kid, back when it was very uncommon to have a single mom. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in my 5th grade class to have divorced parents. Of course by 10th grade (1982) I was far from alone.
Funny thing is, the prevalence of divorce doesn’t diminish its impact on the individual or the family. I still grapple with my parents’ divorce today. I’m 38. They’ve been divorced for 30 years. I can’t imagine them married. It sticks with me because I still have questions:
That last is the million dollar question. Five years ago Celeste (my wife) and I were at the nadir of our marriage. We had lost all respect for each other, had lost sight of the traits that we’d so admired in each other and talked only when it involved household business or the kids. It got so bad that we talked to lawyers and I found an affordable apartment. I was a week away from moving out.
But then Celeste asked the real million dollar questions (she is definitely the smart one in this house). She asked, "Have we really TRIED to fix this? Have we really tried everything we can to save our marriage?" The answer was a resounding "no."
I’m a typical guy. The idea of asking anyone for help makes me want to puke. For years Celeste had asked me to participate in marriage support groups at our church. For years I said that kind of stuff was for New Age crystal-gazers. Now we were looking at marriage counseling and I was ready to run for the hills.
My motivation came when I looked at our kids. At the time they were six, five and three. If I left, even with joint custody, I thought I’d be doing the one thing I swore I’d never do. I would rather gaze at a thousand crystals, wear Birkenstocks and attend seances before I putting myself in the position of being a part-time Dad. I didn’t want to be to my kids who my Dad was to me. Whatever we did, I wanted to have no reason to say "We shoulda.."
Marriage counseling it would be.
And I give myself credit for going. It was a big step for me. The rest of the credit goes to Celeste, to a wonderful counselor and to a very supportive family. Through their efforts I was able to recognize my own flaws and try to fix them; to rediscover all of Celeste’s fantastic traits and to recognize how insignificant her own flaws were in the grand scheme of things. Basically we fell back in love.
Watching my cousin and his wife struggle through this I can’t help but think of my own experiences. My opinion is that they haven’t tried everything yet, and I don’t think they will. I’ve shared my story with my cousin, but I don’t think it matters. He’s moved out. They’re looking for lawyers and talking about how to work out the property distribution. It isn’t too late, but it’s close.
And yes there are kids involved; they aren’t biologically his, but he is the only father they’ve ever really known. I’m pretty certain his wife is keeping the kids top of mind, but I’m not so sure about him. If he were to distance himself, that would be the biggest tragedy, for him and for them.
My instinct is to feel disappointment that he hasn’t tried everything. His wife wants to try counseling, either individually or as a couple. He’ll have none of it. Knowing that he and I are cut from a similar cloth I understand his aversion to therapy, but I pity his lack of courage.
That is until I remember my own cowardice. It’s been at least seven years since I realized how deeply my Dad’s leaving affected me. For all that time I’ve wanted to ask him "Why?" and "How?", but I’ve never had the balls.
For my cousin’s sake and mine I hope we both grow some soon.
I just read this article, How to Silence a Racket: The Justice Department’s tobacco lawsuit threatens freedom of speech , in Reason about how the recent DC circuit court’s decision against the government in its racketeering case against the tobacco companies was also about freedom of speech.
As you can imagine the decision was big news here in Winston-Salem, home of Reynolds America the purveyor of such brands as Winston, Salem, Kool and Camel cigarettes. Still, I never saw anything that looked beyond the decision’s immediate impact on the tobacco companies.
The author, Jacob Sullum, explains it best here:
The "racketeering acts" listed
by the Justice Department consist largely of advertisements, press
releases, and televised statements, which it considers instances
of mail or wire fraud. The fraudulent aspect of this speech is often
obscure. One "racketeering act," for instance, involved placing a
magazine ad that "depicted
Joe Camel wearing sunglasses, a tee shirt, and blue jeans, with a pack
of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve and a lit cigarette hanging from
his mouth, and casually
leaning against a convertible automobile."Even the messages closer to the heart of the Justice Department’s
case are not clear-cut examples of fraud. When the cigarette
manufacturers criticized early
studies linking smoking to lung cancer, for example, were they
deliberately misleading the public, or were they doing what any company
does when its product is
impugned—i.e., pointing out weaknesses in the evidence against it?
The question is of more than historical interest. Given the logic of
the Justice Department’s case, oil companies that question global
warming projections,
automakers that defend the safety of their SUVs, fast food chains that
say they’re not responsible for increases in obesity, pharmaceutical
companies that criticize
research indicating possible side effects from their drugs, and any
other business that stands up for itself in the face of attack could be
the target of a future RICO
lawsuit.
Here’s a Reuter’s story that I picked up through the first blog that I ever came across years ago, Fark.com.
Honey, Remember to Turn on the Rooster Booster…
BERLIN (Reuters) – Before leaving on vacation, a German couple set up a
loudspeaker and timer with the sound of a crowing cock to blast their
neighbors every morning.After complaints, police in the northern town of Itzehoe obtained a
warrant to enter the house and discovered the gear with the speakers
aimed at the neighbors and rigged to a timer."The apparatus switched on between 2 and 4 o’clock in the
morning and produced a cock crowing at an enormous volume. This would
last for 20 minutes with breaks in between," police said.Police confiscated the gear and charged the vacationers, who
are still away, with bodily harm and disturbing the peace. The
neighbors had no history of antagonism.
I have to say that the headline writers at Reuters are a bit more mature than me. I would have been too tempted to resist this obvious alternative, "Honey, remember to set the cock clock…"
So I’m reading this piece on Gawker and it describes how some of the troops in Iraq flashed their "Shocker" foam fingers during the network’s obligatory "thanks to the troops" Super Bowl coverage.
I knew from the context of the article that the "Shocker" thing was one of those "If the adults only knew what this means" situations, but the real shocker was that I actually qualified as one of the adults. Now I’ll give myself credit; I was able to surmise what the "Shocker" probably represented, but I did have to read the article to make sure.
Depressing.
Looking for a little bedtime reading? Check out this site, which has links to transcripts of all of the State of the Union speeches dating back to 1913.
My, how times have changed…or not.
In her blog Virginia Postrel comments on Andrew Sullivan’s decision to give up his blog. Here’s what she said:
Even the few brilliant scholars (Tyler Cowen, Eugene Volokh, Grant McCracken) who make blogging seem like it should
foster serious thought limit their posting to topics they want to mull
over in public. Current-affairs blogging of the
Sullivan/Instapundit/name your favorite type is inherently quick,
dirty, and disposable. It may add to the public discourse, but it
doesn’t tend to deepen the blogger’s own thinking. That, plus sheer
laziness, is why this blog has never promised more than a few posts a
week, and why I’ve given up my think-magazine-editor instincts to voice
an opinion on everything. For a full-blown argument, I want to write
something for a sizable audience and get paid. And I don’t really want
to post half-baked ones.Right now, I’m researching a couple of long-term projects–one
on variety and one on glamour–and (barely) financing the research,
which involves some travel and reporting, with article assigments.
Blogging will be quite light through February."
She’s quite right. Although I think you can support the point that "instapundit" blogging (er, writing) is very time consuming. That’s because the best "instpundits" seem to be the most well-read, insatiable consumers of comments, fact, fiction, news, rumors, innuendo, etc. They "cut" the pieces they like, "paste" it in their blogs (or columns, or whatever), reference the original and then spice it with their own comments.
Sounds simple but like anything done well it takes time, toil and talent. And anything that takes the three Ts generally leads to burnout. And honestly I think it leads to readers’ grazing as well; we get bored of the same-old, same-old. Our appetite changes and we move on to other writers, covering the same issues, but perhaps in a pithier manner.
Which leads me to think that the blogs, er writers, with legs will actually be those with consistent depth and thoughtfulness, not necessarily those with a focus on rapidity and breadth. That helps keep the reader and writer focused and engaged.
Final point: I’m also beginning to think that we will all begin to feel RSS overload. I know I am. I’m deleting feeds left and right because I just can’t read them all. Which do I keep? Let’s just say that most of the feeds I keep average 3 or fewer posts a day.
Read an article on the W-S Journal’s site about a father in Durham who sued a school over his kid’s grade.
Now, my wife and I have had some problems with how our youngest son’s teacher grades some of his stuff (always with literature and her too-literal interpretation of the stories being reviewed), but if we’ve got a problem with it we take it up with the teacher. If that doesn’t work then we have the "life isn’t fair" talk with our son. If it goes too far I’m sure we’ll have a talk with the teacher’s boss. But sue?
What kind of message is this guy sending his daughter? Granted the school is a highly competitive atmosphere that draws the "best-of-the-best" type crowd, but that doesn’t justify this kind of behavior. After all these kids are bright, and probably as capable as any of understanding the vagaries of life.
On the other hand suing someone or something when you don’t get what you want seems to be becoming the American way, so I guess we can call this a good civics lesson.
Oh, and I got this item off the Journal’s RSS feed. Good job guys!
I just finished reading a great article in Dana Blankenhorn’s newsletter, This Week’s Clue , on the important role of granparents in our society and the "warehousing" treatment that many grandparents experience today. He argues, accurately, that our society needs to realize the positive impact that grandparents have on our families specifically and our society generally, and that we need to come up with a better way to treat them.
Dana, as always, puts it much more eloquently and I encourage you to read the entire article, but I thought I’d excerpt it rather liberally to share what I think are his most important points:
Some 1.5 million Americans today live in nursing homes, most of them
women, many of them over 85, most of them on some sort of government
assistance. They are under increasing risk of physical abuse, and every
effort to prevent that abuse (by law or litigation) is met by an
industry demand for carte blanche. Rising insurance rates, rising costs
of meeting government requirements, means higher costs and less money
for care, they argue, often successfully…People need people. Robots can provide for our physical needs,
computers can assure our safety and comfort, but at the end of the day
it’s the presence of other humans in our lives that makes life worth
living.Most people in nursing homes don’t have that. Families come
rarely. The other residents are lost in their own troubles. The workers
are strangers.
Then Dana goes on to describe a new project he’s working on called Hearthstone:
And that’s where Martin’s Hearthstone idea comes in.
The idea is to treat more of us, as we age, as my siblings treat my
mom. If older people spend their days with little children, the need
for staff on both ends of the age spectrum is reduced. Why the ages are
segregated in day care is beyond me.But beyond that, ways must be found to keep people in homes, real
homes, for much longer. There’s a chef near me who has lived for some
years with an old black lady, unrelated to him. She taught him her
recipes, she taught him how to live, and now he’s giving her dignity as
her memories fade, and as her body withers.Legal ways should be found to enable more of this. When my mom does
pass away, I want my brother to inherit her house, free and clear. When
this old cook dies, the chef should get some of her estate.The benefits are many-fold. The chef is a better cook, and a
better man, for serving this lady who has become his grandma. My
sister-in-law, who lost her own mother when she was young, honors my
mom as she would have liked to have honored her own, and has become
saintly in my eyes as a result.And then there are the kids. We often have no time for our
kids. But our parents have nothing but time for them. And if our kids
grow up with grandparents around them, even someone else’s, perhaps
they will seek their counsel later, as they become teenagers and find
they can’t talk to mom or dad.Perhaps they will serve these grandparents tea, fluff their pillows,
turn off the TV, spill out their hearts, and see smiles coming to older
faces, then listen as the wisdom of decades rains down upon them,
blessing both sides of the conversation and bringing with it the light
of hope and contentment.
I plan on keeping track of the Hearthstone project and hope to post about it regularly.
