Neighbors to 26th District: help! 26th District to neighbors: help yourselves!

Captain Mike Cram, Philly P.D. 26th District, showed up late to speak to a town meeting in Port Richmond last week. When residents expressed their concerns that 26th District officers are slacking at addressing both violent crime and nuisance problems in Greater Port Fishington, Cram and A.J. Thompson of the District Attorney's office told them to forget the police and simply engage in self-help. They

suggested neighbors round up 50 or 150 friends to sit out at Conrail or outside known drug houses "to get it into people's heads that somebody's watching." Cram said a shortage of manpower means neighbors must take things into their own hands.

Wild. I'm not sure how the 26th District and the District Attorney's office expects residents to fix blight, end illegal house parties, and eliminate murderous armed robbery by "watching," but evidently that's the solution they're offering.

But for what it's worth, for the past several weeks Leo M. Mulvihill, Jr., the lawyer who lives and works in Fishtown quoted in City Paper's story there, has been doing just that. He's tweeted with @PhillyPolice name-checks when he sees cops driving while talking on cell phones, and regularly posts photos of cops napping in their patrol cars or just generally disrespecting the neighborhood. Here's hoping the cops in the 26th District don't start giving him a hard time for documenting them.

Rita's Water Ice sold to private equity firm again: what it means

Quietly reported yesterday, though not announced on either company's website, a private equity company called Falconhead Capital, LLC, has bought Rita's Water Ice. Rita's had been owned by a private equity group since 2005. So though this was merely paperwork (and the exchange of an undisclosed but likely eight-figure amount of money) it's still a good opportunity to talk about what it means when a business changes from operating as an independent company to being owned by a private equity firm.

It means the business is no longer a company of its own, but is merely an asset in the equity firm's diverse portfolio of brands. And as soon as it starts underperforming, the firm's portfolio managers will treat it as any asset that produces income for members of of the firm, not as a company employing and serving people: the asset will be sold off or terminated. The business will enter into bankruptcy or will wind down; workers will be laid off, shops will be closed, and money that would have moved around the local community from customers to workers and managers, and from employees to the places where they spend their paychecks, will no longer move around.

Companies are managed for their stakeholders. In our capitalist system and under our state and federal laws, it's the legal and ethical duty of the company's directors to do what they have to for the stakeholders. When any company's income is down, the company has to respond for the benefit of its stakeholders. The stakeholders of a private equity company are the investors in the company's portfolio. The stakeholders of an independent company are employees, customers, management, and stockholders. So compare. When a company is just a company, when it underperforms the directors choose from options like shaking up management, cutting some jobs, closing a few storefronts, or choosing some strategic planning option, like enduring a few quarters of decreased income while anticipating increased future income through investment in their plant, on the assumption that in the long run it's best to keep the company itself a going concern. But when a company is a line item in a portfolio of assets, when it underperforms it gets taken out of the portfolio. That's the only legal and ethical option, once a company has been sold, as Rita's has, and is nothing but an asset of a private equity firm.

It's what happened to Harry & David, the mail-order fruit gift box people. And there's a good possibility that sooner or later it'll happen to Rita's, too.

The end result of selling a business to a private equity firm so that it's just one brand out of many is uncertainty -- among the business's employees and local suppliers who lose their income. In the local communities that see an eventual loss of the money that the business had kept moving around. And among the customers who are disadvantaged economically with a lack of competition and with quality of life issues that enter in when the only choices at the strip mall are remotely-owned mega-chain restaurants and stores.

Daycare is awful

Daycares are horrible things.

I imagine I am projecting my own abandonment issues.

And I recognize my luck and privilege that my household was financially able to opt out of the American welfare-to-work system that President Clinton signed into law.

Occupy attrition

Occupy Philly appears to be going out not with a bang but a whimper. What was accomplished in other cities by tear gas, pepper spray, and mass arrests will be accomplished in Philadelphia by rain, cold weather, and political out-maneuvering.

Friday jukebox: Nina Simone

Let me tell you what I got
That nobody's gonna take away
From this woman

Friday jukebox: Pink Martini

you looked into my bloodshot eyes and said

is it too soon if I call you

Sunday

MSNBC sees conspiracies in a mayors' teleconference

MSNBC reports breathlessly that a dozen-odd American mayors participated in a conference call last week, but that the mayors "deny colluding on 'Occupy' crackdowns." The call was part of near-weekly verbal communications that members of the United States Conference of Mayors regularly hold, and the conversation apparently naturally turned to the various Occupy actions happening in everyone's cities. And coincidentally, there were clear-outs and crackdowns in multiple cities between the teleconference and MSNBC's investigation for this report.

But investigation into what? Collusion about what? MSNBC begs a huge question here: that's it's improper or illegal for the mayors to talk about a challenge common to all of them and discuss solutions. And so what if they coordinated clearing out the encampments? So what if they "colluded"? What does colluded even mean here? Is there an accusation that mayors from different cities shared funds or police forces or matériel?

Perhaps the conversation went in the direction of, "I'll clear out my city's Occupy if you clear out yours," or "We'll use our pepper spray and riot police if you do, so nobody looks worse than anybody else." But even if it did, how is this "collusion"? And even if it is "collusion," how is this a problem? What laws would have been broken (outside of opening themselves up to §1983 liability for various police excess issues -- does MSNBC mean conspiracy to deprive Occupiers of their civil rights under §1983? Something tells me the article's premise is not that deep)?

And here I thought it was only radically politicized people and the insane who saw conspiracies everywhere.

Occupy Philly: control yourselves

Channel 6 answered my not-so-rhetorical question from yesterday, "[I]f the Occupy movement is truly so anarchist and leader-less, why doesn't a contingent separate itself out, splinter away, and offer to negotiate separately, away from the bad-faith consensus-blockers?"

One group of Occupy Philly protesters spent the day preparing for confrontation, another faction was meeting with city officials trying to defuse the situation and work on relocating the encampment.

A group calling itself Reasonable Solutions has distanced itself from the bizarro hardliners who are gearing up for a pepperspray 'n' bulldozer showdown with police by retrenching, defacing the transit concourse with graffiti, and "[leaving] a trail of human waste" on the lower levels of Dilworth Plaza.

You know what separates humans from animals? Choosing not to defecate where we sleep. You know what separates adults from children? Choosing not to protest perceived injustice by inappropriately dealing with our bowel functions.

If Occupy Philly can't get this nonsense under control, then public sentiment, which is at best ambivalent about Occupy groups -- for god's sake, don't read the comments on that news article -- will seriously go south. And by "public sentiment," I mean the sentiment of even hard-core radical feminist commies like myself.

I walked through Dilworth Plaza this morning about 8:00. Maybe one tent out of ten is correctly pitched, tied down tightly, and kept neat. I dig that it's a challenge to properly maintain a campsite over weeks or months, and not everybody spent time with the Girl and Boy Scouts or Guides when they were kids -- but damn, read the instructions that came with the tent, take away your trash, and keep your site neat and clean.

Late last night, I got e-mail asking if I would kindly volunteer to serve as a Legal Observer if (when) the police start clearing out the camp. Someone justify to me why I should help out the bad-faith operators who've decided to piss and shit all over my city. I'm not going to be a tool to help those Occupiers avoid jail time or even a police beat-down.

Now, the Reasonable Solutions people, that contingent I'll be happy to help out.

Dilworth Plaza renovation supporters: tools, fascists, or the 1%?

If I'm a person who lives and works in Center City Philadelphia, and I support the proposed renovations to Dilworth Plaza, does that make me a tool, a fascist, or a member of the 1%?

The proposed renovations seek to address some real problems with the current space. Right now, it's a paved wasteland with pedestrian barriers, blocked views, and multiple elevations that break up the space into many unattractive, unmaintained areas. The plan is to transform it into an open greenspace with a lawn area, water features, and improved access to the underground hub where the Broad Street Line, the Market-Frankford El, and the subway-surface trolleys intersect (67-page PDF). The suggested glass-enclosed stairways will bring to mind transit entrances in such cities as London, Tokyo, and Paris, and the concourse below will see sunlight for the first time since it was created and capped, making it more inviting and probably increasing its perceived safety. The proposed changes will make the space a workers' lunch oasis in the very noisy traffic junction around City Hall, and a more likely weekend destination for residents and tourists. For crying out loud, they want to put in rain gardens!

But Occupy Philly characterizes the plan thus:

The renovation, in its most general significance, is a privatization of public space, an enclosure of the commons in favor of a falsely sterilized, for-profit, private park of amusements for the privileged.

Really? Because what I see in the proposal is a re-imagining of the Plaza that benefits transit users, serves city residents and workers, and brings in tourists who spend money and support jobs in places around Philly that aren't only the historic district around Independence Hall. Also, "in its most general significance" (whatever that means), the plan keeps the Plaza open to the public; it doesn't make it private at all.

Why does Occupy Philly characterize the plan so inaccurately? And why take the stupid ad hominem pot-shot at the people who will use the Plaza when it's turned into more of a welcoming, green public park?

Occupy Philly could have found the proposal and read it easily -- the document I found is dated 2009 but I figure it's close to the final proposal, and it turned up when I simply googled "dilworth plaza proposal." And if they were really supporting the non-1% of Philadelphians who walk in and around the Plaza every day as they go to work or school, or do business in City Hall, or use the concourse to access SEPTA, Occupy Philly would cooperate and move across the street to the space at the Municipal Services Building.

But they aren't, and that's a big reason why I think that they are infiltrated, and that they've been infiltrated for weeks. And I'll quit thinking that as soon as they quit calling me the 1% for being a person who's really looking forward to having Dilworth Plaza brought into the 21st century.

Or back to the 17th, as the space where City Hall sits right now was one of the city's 5 original public squares:

Let every house be placed, if the person pleases, in the middle of its plat, as to the breadthway of it, so that there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards, or fields, that it may be a greene country towne, which will never be burnt & always wholesome.

William Penn's Instructions to his Commissioners, William Crispin, John Bezar, & Nathaniel Allen, 1681

This is what a textbook case of infiltration looks like

So Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park encampment is being bulldozed away, and any reasonable voices that would have conceded leaving Dilworth Plaza here in Philly have been blocked by individuals who are either stubborn-headed or acting in bad faith or both, and I imagine it will compel a Zuccotti-like showdown at City Hall any day now.

And of course Mayor Nutter is taking the opportunity the bad-faith operators have handed him to have a legal basis for bulldozing Occupy Philly as well: people are relieving themselves on the plaza instead of in the porta-potties; there's been an alleged sexual assault; there's respiratory illness going around because people aren't washing their hands and they're sleeping in the cold and damp; and, well, Dilworth Plaza is smelling pretty damn ripe lately. And when the group comes to "consensus" that it won't leave City Hall and move across the street, the mayor can say with very good plausible deniability that the group is being unreasonable, that it has changed and is different from the original rabble-rousers, and that something will have to be done soon.

I say there are "bad faith" actors in the Occupy consensus process because that's what the nonsense in Seattle the other day looked like: a few individuals deliberately blocking reality-based consensus for unclear reasons, but for reasons that will result in the disintegration of the protestors' united front. COINTELPRO is long gone, of course, but this is what happens when there's been some textbook undercover operatives work and coordinated infiltration.

But if the Occupy movement is truly so anarchist and leader-less, why doesn't a contingent separate itself out, splinter away, and offer to negotiate separately, away from the bad-faith consensus-blockers?

Another thought, I saw on the Twitter (and repeated without clear verification) that the NYPD had declared a no-fly zone over Zuccotti park for the duration of the clearing out, pepper spraying, and bulldozing. Attention, news media attorneys and Occupy Wall Street's lawyers: subpoena the security cam videos!

When fertilizations are "persons," miscarriages are homicides

Photo: a human blastocyst, formed about 5 days after a spermatazoon has fertilized an egg cell. Or, in Mississippi, an American citizen with a full complement of civil rights.

So both the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor in Mississippi have gone on record supporting passage of the fetal personhood initiative in that state. The state attorney general says he'll enforce it, too; and Mitt Romney has said in the past that he "absolutely" supports fetal personhood ballot measures. But I wonder if they're all fully on board with the very realistic consequences of such a law if it goes into effect.

Mississippi's Initiative Measure No. 26, if successful, will amend the state's constitution to "define[ the word person] to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the equivalent thereof[.]" So it would attach the full legal rights of a "person" to not just a fetus at the point of extra-uterine viability, and not just pre-viability, but to pre-fetus stage. Pre-embryo stage, pre-blastocyst stage, pre-morula stage, pre-zygote stage. It attaches full legal "person" rights to the instant that fertilization happens and there is a conceptus.

I don't see how this law can be uniformly enforced without monthly pregnancy tests of all fertile women in the state of Mississippi. I'm not being facetious here. (If I were being facetious, I'd ask if the rabbit industry lobby were behind Measure 26.) It's a serious question, because not every fertilization results in a successful pregnancy -- likely some 50% of all fertilizations result in early pregnancy loss, perhaps even 75%.

Early periods happen. Late periods happen. They happen to women whose cycles are otherwise regular like clockwork; they are business as usual to women whose cycles never grooved into predictable regularity. They happen whether or not a woman has gotten up to shenanigans that would put her at some risk of pregnancy. But one of the best indicators that fertilization has happened is a late period. Does Mississippi's definition of personhood mean that a woman would now have a legal duty to motor on over to the drugstore every time she's a day late?

And what about those miscarriages again? Most early miscarriages, more than three-fourths of them, occur in the first trimester because of a health or age issue beyond the woman's control, or because of "cytogenetically abnormal" embryos -- pregnancies that perish because the result would have been unviable for genetically horrific reasons.

And in Mississippi, every early miscarriage, because it happens to a "person" with the full complement of civil rights, would be a homicide of some kind. Every homicide has to be investigated to determine whether it was intentional and what charges should be pursued. But you can never really tell, with any one menstrual period, whether there was a fertilization; a period simply means that an implantation failed to occur, not that there was no fertilization. And never mind the "morning-after pill," which prevents pregnancy by kick-starting uterine sloughing so that a fertilization, if it happened, cannot implant: what about the women in Mississippi who are currently using non-hormonal IUDs? Every month, there may have been a fertilization that did not result in implantation -- thus, there was a miscarriage. And thus, there was a death of a "person," and thus, there was a homicide. When miscarriage is a homicide, then every menstrual period is a crime scene.

Do the leaders and other citizens of Mississippi understand that? And if not, why are the proponents of Measure 26 not explaining it that way? And how do they propose to handle infertility treatments that result in the creation of surplus human embryos? If an IVF-created embryo doesn't survive implantation, what kind of homicide is it? Does Measure 26 ban the operation of IVF clinics in Mississippi?

Still underemployed

Still stumbling along, seriously underemployed. Not making my overhead this month, and believe me, my overhead is pretty low already. Spending time when I can in free seminars and panels covering my preferred areas of practice.

Interviewed for a professional position at a prestigious local university back in August. Never heard back, and only learned that they selected another candidate when I logged into the school's job search site. Really? I expect that from a law firm or legal recruiter or fast-food restaurant chain, but chrissakes, not for this level of work.

You know how you look at a short document or a page of a newspaper for so long that you no longer really see what you're reading, the words become meaningless, and you start seeing the complementary colors of the text? I'm like that with my resumé at this point.

Chickenhawk Romney wants the Iraq war to last forever

Mitt Romney, born in 1947 but who did not serve in Vietnam, doesn't want the Iraq war to end (MSNBC). How many of his 5 sons, born between 1971 and 1981, have served or are currently serving in the armed forces?

Survey says: zero. Remember? While other men of my generation served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm[1], Mitt Romney's sons were serving their country by serving their dad's political campaigns (CBS, 2007).

Shame on Romney. He couldn't care less how long we pour lives and treasure into Iraq because his horse in the race is interest in the private equity firms that own the brands that the Pentagon contracts with to operate the war. His bank account, not his family, is affected; and less war means less money to him. Unlike the 99%, to whom more war means more personal loss. You want war, you go risk your own sons. It's really pretty simple.

---

[1] Not to mention a high-school and college friend of mine who served in Desert Storm to pay for his university degree, spent the rest of the 1990s marrying and starting a family and serving his community as a police officer, and then got sent back to Iraq for the current war. One could say that he served twice so that one of Romney's sons wouldn't have to; but I wouldn't say that to the toddlers he left behind for his second tour in the desert.

Friday jukebox: Amos Lee

Feel that wind rushin' by

Brooklyn needs a new Rosa Parks

The B110 bus, which runs between [New York City neighborhoods] Williamsburg and Borough Park, has been run by Private Transportation Corporation since 1973, under a franchise with the city. [...] Even though a private operator runs the bus, it was awarded the route through a public and competitive bidding process.

But women sit in the back while men sit in the front. The only females allowed in the front are very young girls who happen to be traveling with a male caregiver. And not because the rule is merely an unspoken tradition:

Guidelines, posted in the front and the back, said that "when boarding a crowded bus with standing passengers in the front, women should board the back door after paying the driver in the front" and that "when the bus is crowded, passengers should stand in their designated areas."

Because this bus is part of the public transit system (it is run under some kind of franchise arrangement with MTA), this gender segregation is a civil rights problem.[1] Kudos to Mayor Bloomberg for calling the operators out on it:

[T]he mayor said that segregating men and women was "obviously not permitted" on public buses. "Private people: you can have a private bus," he added. "Go rent a bus, and do what you want on it" (NYT via MSNBC).

To paraphrase a departed Philadelphia local who was no hero of mine, this is America. When riding the bus, you can sit wherever you damn well please.

It's a slippery slope. One day it's a community saying that it offends their religion for women and men to sit together on the bus because it's immodest, and the next day it's a community calling little girls "sluts" for going to school and vandalizing the facility.

It's also a constitutional problem for this bus to operate with its MTA-looking number. If your god requires your congregation to gender-segregate itself in public, that's fine. Who am I to challenge what your god has told you? Just don't look to the government for financial help or recourse though the courts to facilitate and enforce that segregation. This informal -- and really, it's not very informal -- gender segregation on quasi-private buses should be nipped in the bud.

---

[1] Though at least nobody's being denied service or having their fares confiscated because the bus operator doesn't think they conform to the gender sticker on their transit pass.

I am not surprised these two links came across my desk at about the same time this morning

Within 5 minutes of each other, these 2 links came across my screen this morning:

A very large (no pun intended) majority of American workers are overweight or obese or have a chronic health problem (WSJ).

"Ranch Dressing And Other Delights," a podcast episode discussing a few of the most horrifying entries at Allrecipes.com, includes links to American culinary masterpieces like Taco in a Bag, mayo-and-ketchup-based Pink Dippin' Sauce, and an E-Z casserole made with two types of canned corn, macaroni, a half-cup of butter, and a half-pound of processed cheese (The F Plus).

Correlation is not causation, but I think I'm going to have celery for lunch today anyway.

Back to work and bills after a weekend conference

Plowing through my to-do list after a 3-day conference, including following up with a potential client I should have naggedfollowed up with last week to see if they'll hire me (maybe they don't want to since I'm in only my second year of practice), signing up a client interview for later this week, and sending some free-information-but-not-legal-advice to an art student with a couple of copyright and invasion of privacy queries.

I met a bunch of art students at a meeting recently. One of the student's classmates came up to me after the meeting and told me that he planned to go to law school so that he could finance his art projects on his attorney's salary. I asked him to think about how he would create his art when he's starting from a position of $150,000 in law school loan debt but no job (i.e., plenty of time but no money to make his art with), or $150,000 in law school loans and a job where he's billing 2,000 hours per year (i.e., plenty of money if he keeps his lifestyle reasonable, but no time to make his art in).

And then I told him, simply, not to go to law school.

Anyway, speaking of scratch, I'm about halfway to making my overhead costs this month. But, hey, everybody! How's that new iPhone working for you?

Tnx to readers far and not-so-far afield

Quick note to say thanks to Cup O' Joel, Pine View Farm, and Delaware Liberal for their kind links to my "uncertainty" post last week: "uncertainty" means different things to different people, and declining to hire more staff because of "uncertainty" about future economic and legal conditions is nonsense when your company makes a billion dollars in profits every quarter.

So that's why my mobile device has been flaky lately

Looks like one for the RISKS Digest, to me:

Sporadic outages of BlackBerry messaging and email service spread to the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, as problems stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. [...] Unlike other cellphone makers, [Research in Motion] handles email and messaging traffic to and from its phones. When it encounters a problem, millions of subscribers are affected at once. There are about 70 million BlackBerry users around the world.

(MSNBC.) I heard about the overseas outages the other day and was kinda hoping against hope that it wouldn't reach North America.

Regulatory uncertainty versus food insecurity

The trope is that big businesses aren't creating jobs because of "uncertainty." Would someone please explain to me the nature of this uncertainty? GE paid no federal taxes in 2010 and its profits have regularly exceeded $1 billion per quarter. Private equity wizards, Tea Party financiers, and terror profiteers Charles and David Koch are (each or both, but at this level it hardly makes a difference) worth $25 billion -- which sounds like a number you'd make up to exaggerate for comedic effect, you know?

What is the uncertainty here? You hire someone and pay them $28,000 a year, or $120,000 a year? That will have an almost literally negligible effect on GE's profits. What am I missing in the math? GE makes over $1 billion extra every quarter; they'd pay the hypothetical new hire some $7,000 or $30,000 out of that. The Kochs add some new, highly capitalized business or a family of brands to their equity portfolio, and they've spent, what, a few hundred million dollars out of their $25 billion.

I guess "regulatory uncertainty" is the phrase spoken trippingly on the tongue as well. But really? The argument is that businesses won't hire now because they don't know if the rules will change in the future, making their permanent employees more expensive. But OSHA is notoriously understaffed and underfunded and has been for years and multiple administrations. It's not as if some new rules or increased enforcement will happen any time soon to wreck your factory's productivity. As for the energy sector (oil drilling, fracking, and so on), how many actual jobs are we talking here, versus, for example, Exxon's $10 billion in quarterly profits?

Why do people repeat the "uncertainty" line without making the people who claim uncertainty explain it?

I'll tell you what uncertainty is. It's not knowing whether you can pay the rent or put food on the table next month. And states are cutting TANF left and right. TANF -- thank you, President Clinton -- is difficult to get in the first place, offers no childcare to moms while requiring them to go to work, and discriminates against non-married, non-nuclear families.

I said it yesterday and I'll say it again. It's no wonder that there's a tent city at City Hall, and I don't see why anybody there would hurry up to leave. There's nothing left to lose, and the critics are free to hire them so that they move into a higher tax bracket.

Philly's new tent city

Quite the tent city has sprung up in Dilworth Plaza. There's even a family-size tent for nursing mothers and their babies and toddlers. I feel a little regret that I'm not in a position to take part in Occupy Philly and that I can't yank my daughter from school and go on a camping trip to City Hall. But I need to keep hustling for work; and if I want to be available to help any participants who need legal representation, I should try to stay away from the protests. The occupation is on a different scale from taking my daughter to a march or demonstration for a few hours, too.

Though I did walk her through a few days ago, to let her see what the big deal was. And on Friday morning I checked in with one of my contacts from the anti-Iraq War protests in 2003.

Interesting to see how the protestors are taking care of themselves. They have a food tent, a "FAQ" table, and other areas where people can gather and share news and help. They are clearly there for the long haul, incoming rain this week and forthcoming winter weather be damned.

But what else are they going to do? It's not as if they're facing the end of their 2-week vacations and have to go back to work -- if they have work, they're cashiers, baristas, or crafting artists, or they're doing something else irregular and seriously underpaid despite having obtained the bachelor's degree that should have put them into a middle-class lifestyle, or at least kept them in a reasonable working-class lifestyle. They have nothing better to do and nothing to lose, because they were replaceable cogs at their jobs anyway.

Of course, the critics who want them to pack up and go get a job are perfectly free to hire them.

But actually, what I'm hearing when I walk by is a lot of supportive honking from the traffic passing them at 15th and Market Streets.

Friday Jukebox: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss

It's crazy how it all turned out
We needed so much more

Philadelphia Film Festival's 20th Anniversary Film Festival

One of the city's innumerable film festivals is coming up soon. Convince me that I should make it the same full-contact sport that I used to. Or at least convince me which dozen films I should go see.

Oooh, wait -- a new Coriolanus with The Tree of Life's Jessica Chastain and a lot of explosions, starring and directed by Voldemort? Holy cow, I'm not sure how you can go wrong with that, except by not going to see it.

And something called Sleeping Beauty from Australia that bears some suspicious resemblance to Story of O, at least from the trailer. . . . Oh, and from the official website's synopsis, as well.

OK, so tell me which ten other films I should go see. But please don't suggest Barton Fink; I prefer Miller's Crossing.

(3/3) Hurricane season is (nearly) dead; long live snowstorm season

The previous two posts discussed some preliminary thoughts about how to prepare for the zombie apocalypseregular, if infrequent, services outages that happen in the mid-Atlantic due to weather. I've been promising to talk about how to start preparing if you're dirt poor. Here's how.

First, decide what kind of preparation level you want your household to be at. Pick a number of days, which is mostly personal preference. My magic number is 14; maybe yours is 30 or 60, or over 700. (Maybe your state National Guard will order you to evacuate after a certain number of weeks anyway.) Or maybe your number is zero -- in which case you want cash and your important documents, on paper or scanned into a flash drive, in a ziploc bag ready to go. Consider including a map in the bag, and some important phone numbers and addresses, so you're not dependent on your phone or mobile device after the battery goes and there's no way to re-charge it.

Second, figure out how much food, water, and toiletries you need per day. There are so many guides and websites available to help with this aspect of emergency preparedness that I hesitate to link to anything. The U.S. National Hurricane Center offers a printer-friendly checklist; FEMA's instructions include suggestions for storage and maintenance. Googling "disaster supply kit" will yield all kinds of solutions, from free information to pre-packed "deluxe" backpacks.

You can always compile your own kit for less money, and with a more complete kit, than what you'll pay for a pre-packed kit.

Third, decide what you'll stock up on: extra prescription medicines, toiletries, water, and food for [insert chosen time period here]; plus a flashlight or two, a radio, and batteries to power them if they're not shake- or crank-powered. (Most of the lists emphasize first aid kits, but don't you have one already? Make it your household storage rule to replenish the band-aids, bactine, and antihistamines all the time, and you're set.) If you are uptight like me, the current supply of toiletries that you have on hand right now would already last you for several days, if not weeks or even months. Bar soap, for instance, is cheapest when I buy it in large packs that happen to last for six months in my household; and a single tube of toothpaste lasts longer than my "chosen time period" of two weeks. But I don't have my spare toiletries packed together in a kit; I keep them where they belong, in my bathroom drawers and linen closet -- because why bother? Why pack all this stuff into a bin that I have to dig through just because the power went out?

Storing an earthquake kit and stocking a storm cellar are different. But my emergency preparedness scenario -- regular, if infrequent, utilities and services outages, and the exceedingly low risk of a situation where I need to abandon my home -- don't contemplate severe or complete destruction of my dwelling.

As for food, you can spend a lot of money or you can spend only a little. You can stock up two weeks' worth of nutritious food for just a few dollars; you'll simply have to tolerate eating very simple food. We're not talking elegant meals here. We're talking filling your stomach cheaply. To spend a lot of money, buy military MREs. You can find them online for about $80 per dozen, and two of them will give you enough calories and nutrients for a sedentary day in clement weather. To spend only a little money, stock up on canned food (for carbohydrates and protein) and dried fruit (for vitamins and fiber). Ask at your supermarket if you can get a bulk discount for buying a case of pork and beans or canned pasta. Get some dried beans for sprouting if you like, for extra Vitamin C. I keep on hand some instant lunch products, the type of factory-made near-food in a one-use, disposable container that I don't otherwise eat, for variety, but I buy them only when they're on sale.

Dig your budget. Prioritize building up your pantry, saving up for a crank radio, and finding cheap candles (N.B., holiday candles are really cheap the day after the holiday). Add a single emergency preparedness item to your grocery list every week. Then can by can, package by package, and bottle by bottle, you'll eventually have an emergency supply of food. And when the emergency comes -- remembering that we get a good week's notice of incoming hurricanes here -- you won't have to run around the city looking for batteries.

What did I leave out? Is my privilege showing? Why isn't basic emergency preparedness realistic for some people, and are you one of those people? Please comment. Thanks!

(2/3) Hurricane season is (nearly) dead; long live snowstorm season

So there are a few issues that need unpacking from yesterday's post. The big question is how to put together your magical one week's worth of emergency supplies if you're dirt poor. But before I answer that, I have to unpack another question: what kind of emergency are we talking about here?

There are weather emergencies, there are civil unrest emergencies, and there are "PGW blew up my gas main" emergencies, all of which result in problems ranging from short-term loss of utilities, to the urgent need to leave and abandon your home. Civil unrest, while very popular on Wall Street these days, is still really unlikely in this country. Protests, demonstrations, and parades happen all the time, but they don't generally result in catastrophic situations that compel people to evacuate their homes. And when they do, really there's very little risk that the incident will happen in your neighborhood, on your block. Cities are big; a lot of people live in them; individual risk is low. So myself, I don't have a bug-out bag sitting by the front door. You need a big bag to carry the standard 72 hours' worth of food and stuff, and I have a small home. But to keep my peace of mind, I have all my important documents sealed up in a big ziploc bag in a very convenient place in case I need to skedaddle. I don't live in the wilderness, so I don't see how I would benefit myself by packing a tent and survival supplies. And anyway, if the situation is so far gone that I can't walk out of the city with a sack lunch, my documents, and cash to take care of my needs, then I think a 72-hour pack won't be sufficient -- we're talking bunker, not bug-out. Takeaway: Can you prepare for it? Yes. What should you do? Plan an escape route by foot and have cash and important documents ready to go.

"PGW blew up my house" situations are similarly really unlikely. Worse, though, unlike civil unrest problems, you may not get any warning at all. And if you're not home when it happens, then oops! All those important documents you have stashed in one safe place for quick retrieval when you have to skedaddle? Confetti. So this is where a safe deposit box comes in. However! I'm not saying you should put your original documents in the box. Nope, put copies in the box. Because what if your bank is closed when the shit hits the fan and you need to motor? Keep the originals handy, then use the copies from the box if you need to replace them because your home blew up. Takeaway: Can you prepare for it? Yes. What should you do? Keep your title and insurance documents organized, and keep up-to-date copies in a safe, offsite location.

So finally, how to deal with weather emergencies. First step is to consider the likely scenario. In town, a very short-term utilities outage. In the sticks, maybe a seriously long outage. I live in town, and to be extreme I plan for a week's outage. I don't have much space, so I'm not interested in turning my house into a pantry. And services to the city are restored quickly, so the supermarkets will be re-stocked in pretty short order, even if they're cleared as if they've been attacked by a plague of hurricane-panicked locusts.

In the sticks, you have some possibilities to keep in mind. If you have space, maybe you should plan for a month or even two without power. But consider: if your neighborhood is so far gone that they can't restore your utilities after a few days or a week (slow link), maybe you'd prefer to evacuate after a period of time and live temporarily with relatives or friends. So consider keeping a supply of what you'd need for whatever that period of time is for your household. A week? Two? A month or six months? Up to you.

Which is basically what I do in the city anyway. I keep enough on hand for one easy week or two rougher weeks. If the situation is so dire that, after two weeks, my utilities aren't restored and my supermarkets and city services aren't back on line, I've got more to worry about than whether I'm running out of candles.

Next: Wait! I never answered the question about how to prepare if I'm dirt poor!

What's in your bug-out bag? How many weeks -- or days -- can you comfortably stay at home? How will you survive the zombie apocalypse? Please comment. Thanks!

Concludes Wednesday.

The "problem" of multiple, simultaneous incarnations

An MSNBC article covers a weekend conference where theologians discussed how to reconcile the concept of a god with the probable existence of intelligent, alien life. If there are some "125 billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each," then it seems much more likely than not that there are other civilizations out there with creatures who have free will and thus need some kind of intervention. So did the Christian god incarnate to all of them?

[B]ased on the best guesses of how many civilizations we might expect to exist in the universe, and how long planets and civilizations are expected to survive, God's incarnations would have had to be in about 250 places simultaneously at any given time, assuming each incarnation took about 30 years, [Protestant theologian Dr. Christian] Weidemann [of Ruhr-Universität Bochum] calculated.

[ ... ]

If God truly became corporeal and took human form when Jesus Christ was born, this wouldn't have been possible, Weidemann said.

Eh? I thought the Christian god was omnipotent and omnipresent. What would stop him from incarnating simultaneously in multiple locations?

Am I missing something? Granted, I've been out of the church for a long time and was never a student of theology. When Jesus walked the earth, was god no longer anywhere at all but 100% housed in the body of Jesus? That has never been my understanding of the story. But then, I was raised Catholic; so I don't have the foundational problem of being required to accept the bible as the literal telling of god's revealed truth. (That is, I can look at both the Genesis story and the objective truth that the round planet we live on is billions of years old, and reconcile them by saying, "Oh, now that was a nice symbolic way for god to explain to us our relationship with him," without my brain being blown by a fundamentalist's need to stick to a young-earth creationist timeline.) Seriously, though, if god was not also outside of Jesus's body while Jesus was out and about, then who was Jesus talking to when he prayed to his father? When he taught his followers how to pray, it began, "Our Father, who art in heaven," not, "Our Father, who art usually in heaven, but who art not in heaven at the moment because thou art totally, completely, and universally standing before us."

Clearly, I quit my C.C.D. classes too young. What did I miss? Why can't god incarnate on 250 separate planets at the same time? Please comment. Thanks!

(1/3) Hurricane season is (nearly) dead; long live snowstorm season

One thing that just floored me during the Hurricane Irene scare -- for "scare" it was here in Philadelphia, an inland port city at the confluence of two rivers, not truly a coastal city -- I say, one thing that floored me was the fear, if not complete panic, and lack of preparedness I saw among some of my friends and neighbors. Here in the mid-Atlantic, we get a blizzard or a severe snowstorm at least once every winter. We get a hurricane or a severe rainstorm every summer. (And evidently we get earthquakes every once in a blue moon, as well.) Trees topple; creeks flood; transformers short out; houses blow up. In a word, your utilities are going to go out on a regular, if infrequent, basis. If you're in the city, you're likely to get your gas, water, and electric service back pretty quickly; the time you wait probably increases at a rate that correlates directly to how far out in the sticks you live. But since we live in the future, where severe weather events can be predicted with some amazing certainty even a week in advance; and since we have FEMA, mostly predictably; and since just about everybody has friends or family who can help them out in a pinch, you probably don't have to keep a year's supply of emergency rations, toiletries, and fuel in your dwelling.

But you should probably keep a week's worth of supplies on hand, and rotate the supplies so they don't get stale, infested with bugs, or depleted. Because, in the mid-Atlantic, your power will go out from time to time.

That said, why did so many of my friends and family go nuts in the last days leading up to Hurricane Irene, driving all over the Delaware Valley looking for batteries? Why did they not have fresh batteries -- or a hand-crank radio, even better -- on hand and ready to go? Candles, matches, blammo. Remember, in the summer the nights are short. Eat dinner early while it's still light out; keep a flashlight by the bed so you can find the toilet at 2:00 a.m. You're set, because even if your power does go out, it'll likely be back by the time you wake up.

Note that I'm not criticizing people in New England who were devastated, seriously unexpectedly, by the post-Irene flooding. I'm addressing pre-Irene, chicken-with-its-head-cut-off behavior in the mid-Atlantic.

Next time: the answer to the obvious retort, "Because I'm poor, that's why."

What's in your emergency supply kit? Do you have a bug-out bag, an evacuation plan, and so on? Do you buy the argument that climate change, anthropogenic or not, will likely lead to more frequent events of extreme weather? Please comment. Thanks!

Continues Tuesday.

Bloomberg Businessweek: Small businesses are killing America

This week's Bloomberg Businessweek, page 10-11:

[T]he notion that small business is the force behind prosperity is not true. [...] So let's revisit the home-office tax deduction, which costs the IRS $9 billion in [annual] revenue.

And on 66-67:

U.S. multinationals like Pfizer, Cisco, and Apple have parked more than $1.3 trillion in profit overseas, avoiding federal income taxes.

You can't have it both ways, Bloomberg. Either small businesses are killing America, or transnational megacorps evading taxes by offshoring all their capital are starving the Treasury. I think I know which scenario is more plausible.

Friday jukebox: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

Welcoming 2012 inductees into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame:



Such a sweet thing
I wanna do everything
What a beautiful feeling

(0/3) Hurricane season is (nearly) dead; long live snowstorm season

Just one month left in this year's hurricane season -- how are you doing for emergency preparedness?

I've had a few ideas percolating since Hurricane Irene hit Philadelphia in late August. On Monday I'll start with the first of three entries discussing issues around getting ready for inevitables.

Thoughts? What kinds of topics should I cover? Are you expecting the big one any day now, or are you blasé about disasters, or are you somewhere in between? Please comment.

Mobile readers? Feed readers?

Are you reading this blog on a mobile device or a feed of some kind? Are there formatting issues? I am a ludditecheapskate and use an older BlackBerry, so I don't know what makes this blog look awesomehorrible on an Android or iPhone or other device. Sidekicks or whatever it is the young kids are using these days. And I have it set to give only a few "teaser" lines on my Google reader, but I don't know if (1) people hate that; or (2) if anybody else uses Google reader anyway.

How do you read this blog? If you're on a device, which one is it? Do you use some kind of feed aggregator? Please comment. Thanks!

Girls need sports. It's really not that hard a concept to grasp

Gah, my custody schedule changed, my daughter's school year and fall sports schedule began, and now I don't know where I'm going or what time I need to leave to get there. Thank christ for my desk calendar and my watch. Who needs Outlook and google calendars? Not this underemployed yet over-obligated lawyer. And don't get me started about this horrible kludgey third-party solution for my daughter's online school sports calendar.

And, no, she's not a cheerleader. But ooh, look, there's been some movement on the Title IX issue at Quinnipiac University. I'd given the school the benefit of the doubt when I wrote about the problem in July, 2010, but a trial court decided that I shouldn't have: the finding was that they really were trying to weasel out of Title IX requirements when they ditched their volleyball team in favor of a cheerleading squad.

Have you been following the case better than I have? Do you have a daughter (or niece or whatever) who plays a school sport? Public or private school? Please comment. Thanks!

The NYPD can take down a plane if it wants to

The NYPD's commissioner, Ray Kelly, told 60 Minutes that his counter-terrorism unit has the capability to take down an airplane if the issue ever comes up again (video 14:21, start at 5:30).

What?

Now I'm imagining the NYPD with all kinds of small-scale but highly advanced military technology. Pigeon-guided missiles launched from jet-powered, monkey-navigated, remote-controlled suicide helicopters. Laser guns mounted atop the Empire State Building. In the East River, sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads. New York City apparently has its own private army of 50,000 men and women protecting Gotham, with "the equipment and the training" to bring down an airplane.

What does make sense, even though it sounds silly at first, is the idea of starting up a cricket league for city kids. Cricket? I mean, what do I, a red-blooded American, know about cricket? But it's huge in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- the India-Pakistan rivalry is pretty epic -- so I guess it's crazy like a fox to foster relationships between immigrant kids and the NYPD.

Thoughts? Is New York in 2011 too much like London in Nineteen Eighty-Four? Now that your every move through the city is monitored with video and radiation detectors, have the terrorists won? How credible do you find the claim that the NYPD can shoot down a plane? Please comment. Thanks!

I love the smell of artificial deadlines in the morning

I do a lot of pro bono work, for a lot of reasons. I have to keep myself busy, so I don't leave the office feeling that I've done nothing but dick around on the Internet all day long. I need to continue training myself, so I do what I like to call self-CLE: any work product I generate for a pro bono client goes right into my personal library of forms I can adapt for a paying client later on. And of course it's good for networking, a term I don't like but can't very well ignore.

But to get work done for non-paying clients -- it's all well and good to call them pro bono, but at the end of the month they've done nothing for my bottom line, at best, and taken potential paid hours away from me, at worst -- I have to be disciplined. This week I've given myself until Wednesday to generate the first draft of by-laws for a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization where I serve on the board, which I'll chuck to the other lawyer on the board for revisions and input. In the end, I'll add another document to my library, and we'll both add another item to our resumés. The ABA advises newer lawyers against serving on non-profit boards, but fuck the ABA. They're not on the side of solo practitioners or small firms, anyway, especially those of us who graduated in the "bottom 90%" of our classes at a "bottom 90%" school.

Anyway, my ultimate deadline, if I have one, which I don't because nobody is paying me to do this work, would be the end of my term of service on this board. I guess. That doesn't come around for a few more months. But in the meantime, and while I'm still underemployed for paying work, I'm stuck making busy work for myself. Once I'm done my morning news reading.

What do you do when you've finished your paying work? Or the other side of the coin, do you wish you could do some lawyering work for a non-profit company or public-interest organization? Please comment. Thanks!

Mentorship? From my law office? It's more likely than I think

Number of paid hours worked this week: 0.8

Number of pro bono hours worked this week: 5.0

Number of suits worn this week: 3.0

Gah.

Two of these pro bono hours included an "informational interview" -- right out of What Color is Your Parachute? -- with a couple of 2L's from a local law school. I guess I'm flattered that the career office (I presume) sent them my way, but I didn't have much encouragement for them. My two main points were, one, if you want to open up your own law office, do you have experience running a business? Do you really understand that you have to make enough money to meet your monthly overhead before you can cut yourself a check? Do you know what's included in "overhead"? [1] Do you know that every three months you'll have to drop everything and do your taxes? And two, why are you still in law school? Why haven't you dropped out, cut your losses, and stopped the hemorrhaging by getting some kind of work instead? 'Cause, man, when I think of the opportunity cost of not working for the three years I was in law school, and the underemployment I'm dealing with now, the hit to my personal retirement funds and Social Security is kind of staggering.

---

[1] At the very least, Internet, phone, professional malpractice insurance, business cards, professional clothing, CLEs and licensure, bar membership(s), and some kind of access to LEXIS/Westlaw. (Some of these items are yearly costs. They're still monthly overhead. Divide by 12.) Add rent if you don't want to work at home, CPA fees if you don't want to do your own taxes (and arguably you shouldn't), and the cost of advertising and attending networking opportunities for marketing purposes. Never mind hiring a secretary to push paper for you.

Friday jukebox: Billy Joel

No video; live recording from April, 1972:



There ain't no place to go anyway
Except Philadelph-eye-ay

Markets plunge! And this affects me how, again?

Not having a decent, regular income is exhausting. Every single month I've been running out of money, for so many months I'm not even sure how long it's been since I had a cushion in my checking account. (Never mind that I had to give up the emergency funds in a money market account sometime in 2007 or so, because I couldn't keep the minimum balance the bank required before it would charge fees.) I would contribute to the economy if someone would kindly contribute to my own, first, and hire me to do some work for them.

I believe that's how the system works. Having been out of it, for all intents and purposes, since 2006, I may be a little unclear on the concept.

In other news, scientists in England may have come up with data that throws out the theory that dark matter comprises a fifth of the universe, while researchers at CERN believe they've found neutrinos traveling faster than light.

At least science gets funding in some other countries.

Back from a blogging vacay

So I took off for about a 5-week vacation from blogging. Anything happen while I was gone?

"Helicopter hovering over Abbottabad at 1 AM (is a rare event)"

The New Yorker has just published a blow-by-blow account of the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden. You know what still strikes me about the entire thing? Never mind how well the President has handled the debt-ceiling business over the past several weeks; dig the timeline around the raid:

The next morning [that is, the morning of Friday 29 April], the President met in the Map Room with Tom Donilon, his national-security adviser, Denis McDonough, a deputy adviser, and [counterterrorism adviser John] Brennan. Obama had decided to go with a DEVGRU [Naval Special Warfare Development Group] assault, with [Vice-Admiral and Navy SEAL Bill] McRaven choosing the night. It was too late for a Friday attack, and on Saturday there was excessive cloud cover. On Saturday afternoon, McRaven and Obama spoke on the phone, and McRaven said that the raid would occur on Sunday night. "Godspeed to you and your forces," Obama told him. "Please pass on to them my personal thanks for their service and the message that I personally will be following this mission very closely."

On the morning of Sunday, May 1st, White House officials cancelled scheduled visits, ordered sandwich platters from Costco, and transformed the Situation Room into a war room. At eleven o’clock, Obama’s top advisers began gathering around a large conference table.

See that paragraph break there? It's like a literal depiction that the article omits any mention of what the President was doing between that Saturday afternoon phone call and the Sunday evening (East Coast time) raid. But recall what was actually happening during that paragraph break. The SEALs were finalizing their preparations for the raid and spending the night in Jalabad, while the President was doing this:



And the next morning he put in a half-round of golf before heading to the Situation Room to watch the video feed, likely to blow off steam, and maybe also to keep up the appearance of it being any ordinary weekend morning. President Obama is one cool cat, and it's this kind of thing that makes me more sure than I otherwise would be that the GOP won't be able to pull of the presidential election in 2012.

On a different note, the New Yorker article mentions a participant speaking "chaste Pashto." I'd be interested to learn what that is; googling isn't much help, other than showing me a bunch of duplicates of a comment to the article itself asking what "chaste Pashto" is. Maybe some kind of schoolmarm Pashto? A "High Pashto"? A "received pronunciation" Standard Pashto?

"Are you Lithuanian?"

Caught the theatrical revival of The Man Who Fell to Earth last night.

God bless the 1970s.

A question remains for me, though: whose stillsuits came first, Walter Tevis's or Frank Herbert's? The novel The Man Who Fell to Earth was published and Dune began its Analog serialization in the same year, 1963. I can't possibly be the first person to notice that Newton and his family on the home planet are wearing outfits that are clearly functionally stillsuits. Has there been any conflict, from mere fandom drama to outright litigation, about this? (I'm curious, but not so interested to do more than to try some tricky googling to see what turns up.) I haven't read the Tevis novel, so I don't know if he names the clothing or just describes it and lets it go. I guess I'll put it on my mental list of books to pick up if I ever see it cheap or free.

Self-medicating, self-destructing

Drugs are rough.

I'm more affected by Amy Winehouse's death than I probably should be. I tend not to be bothered by celebrity deaths -- I don't dig mourning someone you never knew personally, even if their art affected you deeply, though I do dig marking the passing of the life of a performer or creator who gave back to the world, like Paul Newman, or whose work formed the development of the medium itself, like Lillian Gish. When a young or mid-career artist self-destructs with drugs (Rainer Werner Fassbinder), alcohol (Margaux Hemingway), food (John Candy), or sex (Eazy-E), it's a shame for art, and it's a tragedy for the families; but it's as much of a concern to me as any one of the other 6,675 complete strangers who die every day in the U.S. (PDF).

It's not a "27 Club" thing, though I confess that was the immediate idea that sprang to mind. On the other hand, the last time we had one (Kurt Cobain in 1994), I was in a very different place in my life and didn't know a lot of people with extreme problems outside of my own family drama. Also, I was closer in age to the celebrity deceased. In 2011, I'm raising my own child, a musical, artistic daughter who's probably a candidate for a performing arts high school. And I'm the veteran of a relationship with an alcoholic who, when I quit the relationship, was clearly on his way to death by drink (Billie Holiday, unless he lasts as long as Richard Burton) or drunk driving (Ryan Dunn).

Coincidentally to Winehouse's death, I learned that an old internet acquaintance is in the hospital, in a coma, suffering from end-stage liver disease after a couple of decades of alcohol use and attempts at rehab that didn't take. The acquaintance is about my age, maybe only a little bit older. So what's striking me is that I'm at the age when the self-medicating, self-destructive members of my cohort are starting to defeat their bodies' best efforts to keep them alive despite all their drugging, alcohol-soaking, gluttony, and ill-considered sex. Yes, we lost a few people here and there unusually early -- a bicycling accident, muscular dystrophy, a suicide following chronic pain -- but now we're entering the years when long-term, intense poor treatment of our bodies will start to take its toll. Not the buckets of drugs and stress, likely paired with mental illness, that take younger people who burn out at around age 27, but fewer drugs, stress, and illness, over a little bit longer.

I should have titled this post, Member of Generation X Approaches 40; Film at 11.

The coming global economic collapse

Busy lately with a personnel shake-up at my law firm. Took a couple of days off to stay away from the office and have spent the past few weekends hanging with friends and family.

I'd complain about the coming global economic collapse, but the horse I have in that race is inconsequential, to mis-use a metaphor. What I mean to say is that my assets and my stock market holdings are so small that a crash can't really hurt me. Between now and Monday I'll run up my credit cards turning my home into a bunker stocked with 6 or 8 months' worth of food and other supplies, and I guess I'll be set.

Could be worse. I could be sitting for a bar exam right now.

Attack of the summer canvassers

Way too many progressive-cause canvassers on Walnut Street in Center City lately. I encountered no fewer than 3 pairs between work and home yesterday. Bless their hearts, they can't possibly be meeting their quotas and I know they're not paid much. But though I hate to say it I sure do wish they'd move to another street.

Philadelphia: home of the 5th of July hangover

Slogging through a tedious to-do list today. Not helped by the transit situation last night after the Art Museum fireworks. I get that holidays are holidays, and transit shouldn't run a weekday, business rush-hour schedule on a holiday; but I sure do wish SEPTA had put a few more buses on the neighborhood trunk lines last night. The fireworks wrapped up shortly after 11:00, but we didn't roll home until after midnight.

My dentist this morning asked, "Why do we even live in the city?" Of course, she had pointy, scrapy things jammed into my mouth at the time, so I couldn't answer. And a huge part of the issue is that SEPTA's governance is based on a Senate-like system, not like a House of Representatives -- that is, Philadelphia and the surrounding counties of Southeastern Pennsylvania are equally represented on SEPTA's board, one representative per county, even though more Philadelphians than residents of the other counties actually ride SEPTA any given day. End result is that Philadelphia gets short shrift sometimes when it comes to SEPTA improvements or scheduling considerations.

But I live in the city so that I can enjoy 4th of July stuff in the city where they have the country's best party for it, and I can go see a movie or music on very, very short notice, and I can run to the grocery store without having to drive, and I can visit world-class museums and other attractions without having to get a hotel room. The local taxes are formidable, but I like having my trash and recycling picked up and street plowed for "free," and I always tell my pals in the 'burbs to do the math: their taxes are certainly lower, but their cost of living is higher in other ways.

Pennsylvania continuing legal education math

Glomarization's CLE Compliance as of 5 July 2011:

Annual Requirement: 11 Substantive, 1 Ethics
Credits Completed: 6 Substantive, 4 Ethics
Credits Required by December 31, 2011: 2 Substantive, 0 Ethics

The math isn't as goofy as it appears. Any ethics credits over the minimum are applied toward the substantive requirement. So, 4 - 1 = 3; 3 + 6 = 9; and 11 - 9 = 2.

Happy to be in the end-of-year compliance group!

Also, I think I have an outstanding CLE that hasn't yet been applied. I may be totally in the clear and can spend the next 6 months partying instead of fretting about CLE.

When miscarriage is murder

As I've explained a few times, most recently in March, pregnancy makes an American woman a second-class citizen. Pregnancy -- planned or unintentional -- is a life-threatening condition. Ordinarily, a person who takes on a life-threatening condition is never compelled by law to continue with that condition if they don't want to. The sole exception is when the life-threatening condition is pregnancy. Although it is always less risky at any stage of a pregnancy to terminate it rather than to complete it with childbirth, a pregnant woman under most circumstances does not have a full, total, unimpeded right to exit from her life-threatening condition without some state involvement.

This problem has been manifesting itself lately with the scary trend of women who suffer miscarriages but then are charged with murder. Lynn Paltrow restates my point, speaking for the National Advocates for Pregnant Women:

Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws. It's turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights.

Women who have miscarried are being targetted with "chemical endangerment" laws written to address children in meth lab homes (Alabama) or with "fetal homicide" statutes (38 states) written to address domestic violence, not stillbirths (South Carolina).

Miscarriages happen. They happen for no reason, or they happen because a woman suffered some physical trauma, or they happen because a woman took a drug, legal or illegal. They happen before implantation of the conceptus, they happen shortly after implantation, they happen in the first trimester, and they happen later. They are largely unpredictable and accidental, and in fact they're devilishly hard to induce outside of a clinical abortion. They happen in wanted pregnancies and unintentional pregnancies. Sometimes they half-happen; that is, one of two twins miscarries, but the other is successfully carried to term (that was my experience). They are, by definition, not murder.

When abortion is murder, then every stillbirth is a crime scene. When miscarriage is a homicide, then every menstrual period is a crime scene, because every time an ovulation does not result in a pregnancy, it is very possible that conception happened but implantation did not. That is a miscarriage; when these laws are enacted, enforcement of the law will require some kind of monitoring. Proposed language in Georgia carves out an exception from its fetal homicide law for miscarriages where "there is no human involvement whatsoever in the causation" (Ga. General Assembly). But a period starts when a pregnancy fails to occur, and any period may indicate a very early miscarriage. How is this to be policed? When abortion is murder, every pregnant woman is a suspect until she enters the labor and delivery room. When miscarriage is murder, every woman is simply a suspect.

"Dear Cinema Projectionist"

Earlier this month, the San Diego Reader reported that Terence Malick sent an open letter to projectionists where The Tree of Life would screen, asking them to kindly take a few extra steps when they show his newest work. One website has posted a scan of what they say is an original copy of the letter, as well as couple of other examples of "Dear Projectionist" letters from 2001 and 1975. The notes read as friendly, almost deferential requests ("I understand this is an unusual request yet I do need your help"; "[t]hank you for taking the time to consider this request") emphasizing the enormous amount of effort, art, and skill that the highly respected filmmaker put into films in question ("[a]n infinite amount of care was given to the look of [this film]"), and acknowledging the critical role of the projectionist in the audience's consumption of the artwork ("we consider projectionists to be the last remaining artisans of movie exhibition"; "[a] fraternal salute").

Joining the ranks of Malick, Kubrick, and Lynch is now highly successful former TV commercial director Michael Bay. If you think his recent letter to projectionists is anywhere near as classy, humble, or appreciative as the other three examples, you'd be wrong. Instead, he cajoles projectionists with silly but vaguely guilt-tripping team-building language ("[w]e are all in this together. Your theatres invested a lot of money in this equipment") and then warns that he'll put the blame squarely on them if audiences rebel ("your expertise defines the audience's experience"). That's right: if audiences and critics pan Transformers: Dark of Moon, it's because the film was badly projected -- not that it was badly conceived, written, edited, or crafted.

But far be it from me to concern-troll for the projectionists! I'll let them speak for themselves. Because, really, I couldn't have made the Trash Humpers reference any better on my own.

Mental health day

Retail therapy, a matinée of Malick's The Tree of Life, and maybe some music tonight.

Ladies' night at the anarchist bookstore

Off to learn about menstrual extraction. Who knew these kinds of women's consciousness-raising and empowerment meetings were still going on?

Protesting, "meta" protesting, and Vancouver

So the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup and the fans who congregated after the match to congratulate their team on a good run and a fun season were overwhelmed by asshole rioters who trashed an area of town.

Reminds me of the assholes who ruined the World Trade Organization protests in 1999 in Seattle.

There, we had tens of thousands of ordinary people in the streets -- union members and kids on rollerskates, enviro-weenies dressed up like turtles, university students and professors, people who build Boeing planes and Microsoft software -- peacefully marching and basically partying to drums and music. Then the assholes came in and started smashing windows, spraypainting chain restaurant buildings, and lighting fires. The result? National news favorably covered the WTO and the establishment; the progressive message did not get publicized; the assholes got their 15 minutes on national TV; and part of Seattle's downtown was temporarily drawn into a bizarre, unconstitutional "no-protest" zone (PDF by ACLU-WA).

One of the Vancouver assholes, being a nice person since he is, after all, Canadian, apologized after the Stanley Cup riots. But a nurse at a local ER won't accept the apology, and for much the same reason that I wouldn't accept an apology from the Seattle WTO assholes:

To you [...], it's a chance to congregate in the ER waiting room, pounding on the triage window demanding to be seen for teargas exposure and cuts from looting and fighting, while posturing and bragging about how you kicked the crap out of somebody and smashed shit up. To me, it's taking my time away from the little old quiet lady having chest pain or taking time away from the person you "shit-kicked" for trying to stop the looting.

At the WTO protests in Seattle, I met a little old lady who'd been nearly blinded by a rubber bullet because a bunch of assholes decided to start a riot. No question, the police overreacted -- but they wouldn't have had anything to overreact to if the assholes hadn't started smashing windows in the first place.

To bring it closer to home: A few years ago, my pal Ted lost his car to rioters after the Phils won the World Series. To the rioters, it was a fun show of strength with a lot of great crunchy shattery noises. To Ted, it was immediately financially devastating because he needed the car to get to work, but he couldn't afford to fix or replace the car without being able to get to work. Luckily for Ted, it all came out right in the end. He's a sweet, honest, likeable guy and he got publicity and generous donations. But how many people in Vancouver have been just as "lucky"?

I don't mean to be so "get offa my lawn" and "back in my day" about this stuff. But it also brings to mind an incident when I was doing clinic defense a few weeks ago. An old white guy protestor was there with a crudely constructed hand-made cross. We patient escorts were outnumbered, because the protestors were in force for a religious holiday. A young white guy, dressed like a prototypical hipster in skinny pants, a scraggly beard, and 1980s-inspired sunglasses walked up to the cross-carrying protestor. He laughed at the old man, took a photo on his smartphone, and walked away. This is not helpful. Taking a mocking photo of a protestor and posting it to a social media site is not helpful. To you, it's a harmless old man with a stupid prop for a protest. But to the clinic patients, it's an intimidating physical barrier to getting inside to see the doctor; it's a person spouting religious, woman-hating invective at young women and girls who are going in to the clinic just to get their pills or undergo a pap smear. To the patient escorts, you're another body between the patients and the front door, and we're not exactly sure of your intentions because you haven't addressed us directly. And your taking a photo, laughing, and walking away does nothing to improve the situation, and likely only makes it worse by making the women not feel supported.

Protest or protest not. "Meta" protesting (like the hipster) or taking the opportunity of a gathering to do something violent or crazy anonymously (like Seattle in 1999, Philly in 2008, or Vancouver in 2011) makes life harder for everybody else, who are left to clean up the wreckage afterward.

The job interview I didn't do

I just canceled an interview for a job in Harrisburg. There was more than one reason. One, I would be on the train 20 hours every week. Even if I bought a netbook with my first paycheck or two, I don't think they'd be productive hours, considering how early and late I'd be on the train in order to be physically in Harrisburg during business hours.

Two, the starting salary was so low that I don't even want to admit what it was. The pay was low because it was a paper-pushing job that didn't require a J.D. or law license. The job description listed the types of stultifying tasks you'd expect to see for a job at that level of pay. Fuck the benefits when it's paperwork review and 20 hours a week on the train for a job where the governor has targeted the union to cut its pay anyway.

Three, no option for telecommuting. I specifically asked if I could work from Philly one or two days per week, but no deal. I conclude that the job is quite literally paper-pushing. The job description included management-level tasks, but at that pay rate and with a daily in-person attendance requirement, it can't have been more than a single-digit percentage of the amount of work.

Nothing to do but to keep my chin up and not take this shit personally.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at José Pistola's upstairs bar, where there are drink specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. And the more we tip the bartender, the more frequently he hands out free dishes of chips and dips. I hope to see you there!

José Pistola's is at 263 South 15th Street (15th and Spruce) in Center City, near the Kimmel Center and the Academy of Music. There's a parking garage across the street, but as filthy liberal hippies naturally we suggest public transit; both SEPTA and PATCO will get you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

This week's topic: Memorial Day has come and gone. You are now permitted to wear white clothes, open-toed shoes, and boater hats.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

BBC asks "why get married?" but omits pretty obvious answer

BBC Magazine article discusses the question of why a couple would get married after having kids, without suggesting the most obvious answer: for health insurance or legal or tax purposes. (Granted, marrying for the health insurance is perhaps not so obvious in a nation with socialized medicine.) But my point is that government- or authority-recognized marriage has only ever been an economic contract. The religious trappings and moral imperatives were added for solemnity -- to make the couple take the marriage more seriously, put them in mortal fear of their souls if they change their minds afterward, and provide some predictability in estate planning.

Anecdotally, I know an American couple who got married only for the health insurance. They've kept their marriage open, have had two kids, and are still together some dozen years later. From what I understand of their decision to get married, they flatly wouldn't have done it if one of them hadn't needed healthcare. Another acquaintance of mine has been married twice, and both times it was solely for health insurance because of a chronic condition. The first marriage was kind of predictably a disaster, but the second seems to be going well.

And in the end, that person moved to England for, as they put it, simply to stay alive. No American health insurance company, even the Cadillac insurance they got through the second spouse who worked for a Fortune 500 company, would pay for their preventive and ongoing care in a timely and reasonable manner, so they moved to a country where you just go to a clinic, get treatment, and go home.

As for marrying for legal and tax purposes, for crying out loud, what do you think the fight about gay marriage is all about? It's about hospital visitation rights, intestate inheritance issues, and mortgage interest tax deductions.

Most of the time, follow the money. Marriage qua marriage is an economic and legal question, and that's all it will ever be. Consider how easy it is to get married, compared to how complicated it is to get divorced. And have you noticed that, once you are divorced, you tend to have to identify yourself as "divorced," not "single" again? A marriage that ended years or decades ago follows you forever!

The way to less sodium in your diet is to eat less processed food

An article at MSNBC discusses the problem of too much sodium in American diets, but gets to the next-to-last, below-the-fold paragraph before mentioning a huge way to reduce one's sodium intake: eat less processed food. Quit the TV dinners, quit the junk food, don't eat out so often, get out of the habit of "convenience" foods, and you'll get less sodium in your diet.

A frozen dinner or shelf-stable lunch from a box looks cheaper than a from-scratch dinner or sack lunch until you feel hungry again one hour afterward. Old-fashioned oats cooked in the microwave, topped with raisins or brown sugar, is cheaper and healthier than ready-to-eat box cereal or instant oatmeal from a packet. MSNBC should have offered views from CDC and Center for Science in the Public Interest way, way before talking to flaks from ConAgra, Kraft, Cargill, General Mills, and Campbell's.

In short, there's a reason behind the cliché "an apple a day keeps the doctor away."

Ratko Mladic captured; Serbia into the EU?

The arrest and pending extradition of Ratko Mladic to the Hague for trial on war crimes during the Balkan conflict of the 1990s is being seen as a major step on the pathway to Serbia's admission into the EU. That's great, but what is Serbia's economy like? The EU is currently stuck holding gazillions of euros in Greek debt that nobody in the world will buy. What will adding Serbia to the EU do to help or harm that situation?

This is actually an upfront question. I don't intend any snarkiness or anything. Had Mladic's fugitive status been the only barrier to admitting Serbia to the EU?

Mikey Wild, R.I.P.

The story of the Mayor of South Street, Part I (9:05):



Part II (10:00):



Part III (9:09):



Fuck the American healthcare system that failed to get him the cancer medicine and treatments that he couldn't afford.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at José Pistola's upstairs bar, where there are drink specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. And the more we tip the bartender, the more frequently he hands out free dishes of chips and dips. I hope to see you there!

José Pistola's is at 263 South 15th Street (15th and Spruce) in Center City, near the Kimmel Center and the Academy of Music. There's a parking garage across the street, but as filthy liberal hippies naturally we suggest public transit; both SEPTA and PATCO will get you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

This week's topic: This chapter is looking for a new co-organizer. See our information page at the national website for more information.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Friday jukebox: El Malito

When you live your life, it should be like . . . 



boom

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at José Pistola's upstairs bar, where there are drink specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. And the more we tip the bartender, the more frequently he hands out free dishes of chips and dips. I hope to see you there!

José Pistola's is at 263 South 15th Street (15th and Spruce) in Center City, near the Kimmel Center and the Academy of Music. There's a parking garage across the street, but as filthy liberal hippies naturally we suggest public transit; both SEPTA and PATCO will get you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

This week's topic: Primary Day in Philadelphia is pretty much Election Day. We'll have results on the TV if one of the local stations bothers to show them.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

The paper apologizes, but for what?

Religious zealot newspaper Di Tzeitung published an apology for doctoring the Situation Room photo.

That's what they apologized for: doctoring the photo, against the clear proscription from the White House against manipulating the image.

The statement speaks for itself.