That's about how cool this is.

Have at it.

Via Wondermark, I discovered this delightful mix-up of art and TV geekery: artist Brandon Bird posts the work of numerous artists addressing a single theme. The theme? Each work is an artist's interpretation of the DirecTV program guide's one-sentence summary of an episode of Law & Order or one of its spin-offs. I like "The Wife of a Once-Popular Singer (Gary Busey) is Found Dead."

The notion reminds me of the dear-departed spamusement.

Back in the 1990s, when I was a federal prosecutor, there were several television dramas that tried, and badly failed, to capture life as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. Actual AUSAs viewed them with a mix of disgust and hilarity. The most ridiculous of the lot was the failed David Caruso vehicle Michael Hayes, in which Caruso (who had not yet mastered the trick of capturing viewers' attention by donning and removing his sunglasses repeatedly) played an AUSA who liked to borrow guns from federal agents and tag along with them on search warrants. The very notion was ridiculous, of course, because real federal agents would never let an AUSA tag along on a search warrant. An AUSA might get in the way by suggesting that agents seize things actually listed in the search warrant approved upon probable cause by a federal magistrate, and interfere with the agents' natural inclination to haul away a mostly random array of unexamined boxes of documents and shiny objects.

There were many entertaining moments. I remember one in which the fictional U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who had immersed herself personally in a penny-ante Mann Act case, decided she needed to go see a witness out of state and snapped "GET MY GULFSTREAM WARMED UP!" This caused the actual U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, a notably refined lady, to laugh so hard that soda came out her nose. But the popular pick for best moment of the series came when Caruso, wearing the perpetually morose expression that naturally results from taking career advice from McLean Stevenson, tagged along with FBI agents to make the episode's climactic arrest, dashed in front of them to reach the bad guy first, and gravely intoned "You're under arrest for violation of TITLE 18!"

Title 18 is, of course, that portion of the federal law addressing federal crimes and federal criminal procedure. It's roughly the equivalent of a state cop saying "you're under arrest for violation of Penal Code!" We laughed at the ridiculousness of it. It became a catchphrase in the office. ("OK, next case. What's the charge on this one?" "TITLE 18!!") We all knew some pretty thick federal law enforcement, but nobody with a badge, lawyer or cop, is actually that much of a buffoon.

Right?

Wrong.

Via Radley Balko, who along with Carlos Miller is at the forefront of documenting and criticizing lawless and ignorant law enforcement hostility towards public photography, I ran across this story about the prevalence of law enforcement hostility towards photography:

Local photographers are also testing trouble spots, especially outside federal buildings, many of which are guarded by the Federal Protective Service, an agency in the Department of Homeland Security that has 1,225 officers and 15,000 contract guards to secure more than 9,000 buildings nationwide.

Erin McCann of the District elicited laughter at a congressional hearing last fall when she described an encounter with an FPS officer at the Transportation Department headquarters in Southeast. The officer told her it was illegal to photograph federal buildings. When McCann asked what law stated that, the officer cited Title 18 of the U.S. Code. Title 18 is the name of the entire body of U.S. criminal law.

Life imitates art. And not, unfortunately, just great art.

Law enforcement would have you believe that cameras are dangerous and justify their intervention. Either it's because a camera could be a high-tech weapon, or because they get folks all het up:

Police officials say officers who seek to stop photography are driven by safety concerns and the fact that the presence of a camera can spike emotions.

"When people see a camera, they get more into it," said Marcello Muzzatti, president of D.C. Lodge No. 1 of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents 11,000 officers in more than 100 D.C. and federal agencies. "Some people will figure, 'I have a right to take pictures,' and we are not arguing with that. An officer also has a right to his or her safety and to control the situation."

In fact, it's rather clear what the true law enforcement objection is. Tape recorders, video cameras, and camera-phones infringe upon a cherished and long-held law enforcement right, one that is essential to good order: the right to lie about their encounters with the populace with impunity and without contradiction.

How else to explain Sergeant Jonathan Burke, of the Delaware County, Ohio Sheriff's Department, who arrested Melissa Greenfield for the crime of possessing a deadly "cell-phone gun."

Sgt. Jonathan Burke wrote that he repeatedly ordered Greenfield to place the "unknown" object in her pocket and keep her hands free. When Greenfield refused, she was arrested and charged with obstructing official business and resisting arrest.

Burke wrote in his report that he feared that Greenfield could have been holding a dangerous object such as a "cell-phone gun."

Here in present time, the cell-phone gun hasn't yet been invented. Our primitive technology has barely reached the cell-phone camera, which is what Greenfield insists she was pointing at Sergeant Burke. As he questioned her boyfriend, who was not arrested, for some reason.

Insidious time traveling woman!  Go directly to Time Prison!

It's good to know that brave officers like Sergeant Burke are on the scene to protect us from not-yet-invented weapons of mass destruction like the cell-phone gun. Of course some, foolish skeptics who probably also believe that the flat earth was created 6,000 years ago, might say that Sergeant Jonathan Burke is a liar who should be fired from his job, prosecuted for obstruction of justice, and sued for false arrest and malicious prosecution.

But I'm glad he's out there, protecting us all from wormhole loops, chrono-vortices, causal paradox anomalies, time meddlers who want to kill baby Hitler, and Daleks.

We love flash games around here, and it's been awhile since we had a good time waster, so how about some road hijinks. Take the perspective of Spy Hunter, add in some very dubious driving and carjacking and you have Freeway Fury. You drive along jumping out of cars and on to other cars. It's a fun little game with pretty good physics (for a 2d top down game..) My high score is 46K. Why not spend a little time this afternoon easily beating it?

Popehat – intermittently wasting your Fridays whenever we remember or can be bothered.

A classical vocal instructor, who knows virtually nothing about rock, is asked to evaluate the stylings of various heavy metal singers.

I have nothing but admiration for this singer. Listen how he starts off with a soft growl, then moves seamlessly into a well-supported, sustained high full-voice sound that then evolves into an effortless long scream! His diction is easily intelligible, regardless of the range he’s singing in or the effect he’s going for. He achieves an intensely rhythmic delivery of the lyrics without losing legato and musical momentum, something a lot of classical singers struggle with, especially when interpreting the many staccato and accent markings that crowd scores by Bellini, Donizetti, etc.

She wasn't actually asked to evaluate the works of Lemmy Kilmister.  More's the pity.

I think Eric Turkewitz' exhortation for bloggers to name and shame law firms that engage in comment spam is a worthy crusade. I agree with Eric that lawyers are responsible for the acts of their agents, including crooked SEO firms. I've argued before that reckless failure to supervise "marketing professionals" reflects badly on lawyers and should be commented upon. We've called out scummy marketers and the lawyers who use them, although I have occasionally later removed their names later if they apologized convincingly. I stand by those efforts.

But for a change of pace, I decided to take a "nice" approach for once. So when we got a flurry of eight comment spams from a Florida firm, I contacted the lawyer, told him (not in so many words) that someone was taking a dump on his reputation online, sent him a sample comment spam, gave him links to some of my posts on this topic, and asked for his comment — all without posting or naming him first. He responded this morning with a cordial and non-threatening email saying he doesn't know how those spam comments got there, and that he's not aware of hiring any marketing firm. I sent back some suggestions for Googling the spam comment text to view how widespread it has become, and suggested he look harder into the activities of his web designer and anyone else he might have hired. We'll see how he responds. Then I'll evaluate whether the "nice" approach is effective and appropriate, or whether calling people out is the only way to get action and deter this behavior. (I'd be moved, for instance, if the lawyer identifies whoever did this on behalf and throws the person/entity under the bus so we can write about them.)

I'm not taking the nice approach because it's legally, ethically, or morally required. It's an experiment, to see if the nice approach has utility in the war on scummy SEO "professionals."

Be not afraid that I have transformed into a big softie. I just screamed at a paralegal, and I'm putting together some bogus "emergency" projects to hand out to associates at 4:00 today just before the weekend.

If you've ever wondered how tasteless an outfit would have to be for all of Australia to condemn it, wonder no more.

Of course Miss Australia does retain a certain inner beauty, despite the tacky costume.

If you have a Google account, personalize your news settings with a specific search for the term "Greg Packer".

Then wait:

Greg Packer secured the first spot in line by getting to the storefront at 5 a.m. "I love Al. I love soup. And I can't wait for that first bowl of soup," said Packer, who chose chicken vegetable.

Greg Packer couldn't give a shit about Al, or about Al's soup.  Greg Packer is a professional "man on the street" who's appeared in so many media interviews, in which he always "gives good quote" that he's become a running joke among bloggers.  As Patterico wrote:

[N]othing’s impossible. You might have thought it would be impossible for Greg Packer to get himself quoted in Big Media any more, but you’d be wrong about that…

Whenever you read an "event" or "man on the street" or "trend" story from the media, ask yourself whether it was manufactured from the ground up, whether it's just filler.  Google the names.  You might be surprised.

In the first post in this series, I discussed ways in which the space around a single figural sculpture becomes a tacit part of the artwork by virtue of the moving viewer's interpretive act.  In the second post, I considered how the spatial relationships among multiple figures in a more complex figural sculpture can provide interpretive clues and cues that lead to a rich understanding not only of the fiction's virtual space, but also of its mental, social, and emotional spaces.

Now I would like to consider immersion, which I will treat as a set of visual, spatial, and kinetic opportunities afforded the viewer of an artwork by virtue of its scale, situation, and referential complexity.  I will offer two examples, one which invites the interpreter to go around and upon and another which invites the interpreter to go within and beneath.

The first of these is the Great Stupa of Borobudur.  The 9th-century Buddhist worshiper approaching a typical stupa might expect from experience to find a large hemispherical or bell-shaped burial mound decorated with a modest array of symbols– abstract, floral, or figural– that stimulate and reinforce his worship by evoking key precepts.  What the reverent seeker would find instead, here in the hills northwest of Yogyakarta, is a semi-structured adventure in which the visitor selects his own path, undertakes various physical and mental challenges, and works his self-tailored way upward toward the climactic encounter where ascent gives way to transcendence.

Great Stupa of Borobodur (Wikimedia Commons)

Borobudur, aerial (Wikimedia Commons)

This man-made mountain (actually an augmented natural hill) consists of concentric rectilinear or circular terraces.  The lowest tier, three platforms making up a base, symbolizes the world of desires, that earthly and immanent realm through which the pilgrim has traveled to arrive at this destination.  The next five tiers represent the world of forms, an abstract and heady domain where concept and percept unite in art and action to induce the purposive wanderer to ponder.  Finally, the top three tiers– scarcely visible from the ground– introduce the worshiper into the world of formlessness, a cityscape of smaller stupas, each inhabited by a statue of the teaching Buddha.  Here, exploration inculcates the worshiper in the way of transcendence.

Continue Reading »

Tonight Katrina and I watched the movie "Adopted," a documentary that depicted two journeys — a family's adoption of a little girl from China, and an adult Korean adoptee's attempt to confront her feelings about being adopted and to get her parents to understand and acknowledge them. We thought it was great — painful, but great — and highly recommend it to anyone interested in international adoption issues, which I write about here occasionally.

The movie's strength lies in comfort with contrasting views of adoption, and ultimately with its comfort with ambiguity. The adult adoptee is deeply troubled, and growing up in an all-white community without any familial understanding of the impact of her ethnicity has wounded her, perhaps irrevocably. But she's also shown to be utterly devoted to her parents and her patient, supportive brother — her alienation does not prevent her from loving them. The adoption of the little girl is depicted as joyous, and she's clearly immediately well-attached to her parents — and yet her mother is openly tormented with the idea that her joy comes at the inevitable expense of a long-term sense of loss in her daughter. Barb Lee — who I learned is a first-time director, much to my surprise — does not attempt to tell an easy story; she offers neither the popular view that international adoption is an unqualified good, nor the criticism that it is intrinsically bad. She clearly thinks that, like people, it's messy and complicated — which it is.

I also liked how Lee used cinematic techniques to convey feelings and messages with a level of facility I don't often see in documentaries. The scene in which the young couple meets their little girl for the first time in a drab government building in China is brilliant precisely because Lee used such a sparing touch in editing it. Her choice to leave in the chaotic camera movements, the nearly unendurable echoing din of babies crying and new parents anxiously trying to soothe them, and the raw chaos of the moment was uncannily familiar to us and evocative of the dislocation and loss that moment represents.

It's a good movie, but not an easy movie, for adoptive parents to watch. Lee shows powerfully how the adult adoptee's parents lack the language to respond to their daughter's feelings and questions. But she doesn't let the daughter off the hook, either. It's ultimately a very human story, showing fallible people trying with love and the best of intentions to connect, and not always succeeding.

Now, we've never actually accepted donations at Popehat. But I've been thinking of starting. The whole "work" thing isn't really turning out well for me. And I'm pretty sure Patrick was fired 18 months ago and has been blogging from a dumpster outside a Starbucks. So we're all penurious over here.

Anyway, if we're going to be hitting up our readers for cash, we need to find some way to keep track of the money and who gives it. I've been thinking of keeping track on a spreadsheet, broken down by the ethnicity and/or religious preference of the donors.

Because that's how the big kids do it.

See, apparently Mike McMahon, Democratic Congressman from New York, categorizes donors by ethnicity or religion. Or, to be more precise, he categorizes donors to his opponent by ethnicity or religion. Faced with a reasonably well-funded challenge by Republican hopeful Mike Grimm, he sent the media a list of Grimm's Jewish donors in order to argue that Grimm's campaign is funded by voters "outside the district":

The file, labeled "Grimm Jewish Money Q2," for the second quarter fundraising period, shows a list of over 80 names, a half-dozen of which in fact do hail from Staten Island, and a handful of others that list Brooklyn as home.

"Where is Grimm's money coming from," said Jennifer Nelson, McMahon's campaign spokesman. "There is a lot of Jewish money, a lot of money from people in Florida and Manhattan, retirees."

It really helps that the opponent's name is "Grimm" because "Grimm Jewish Money" sounds ominous, helping McMahon drum up the anxiety level. Maybe someday he'll be lucky enough to be challenged by rising young politician Cabal Q. Christkiller.

Anyway, if you're going to generate a scare-list of Jews who donated to your political enemy, you'd want to make it as precise as possible, right? I mean, it would be damned embarrassing if you slipped a Southern Baptist on there or something by accident and ended up undermining your whole they-control-my-opponent schtick. So — how does McMahon and his team know which Grimm donors are Jewish?

Jennifer Nelson said that the list was compiled by the campaign's finance director, Debra Solomon and that she did not know exactly how the finance team knew who was Jewish and who was not.

"She herself is Jewish so she knows a lot of people in that community," Nelson said.

Debra Solomon has Jewdar! Well, that sounds like a perfectly sound basis for compiling an ethnically or religiously segregated list of donors in an odd attempt to discredit your opponent. Of course, Nelson also said:

Nelson stressed that the point of compiling the list was not to show that Grimm had a lot of Jewish support, but that he had little support in the district.

"I don't think ethnicity matters. When people look at who is funding his campaign it's not people who have a direct vested interest [in the district.]"

This necessarily implies that (a) the Jews on the donor list are not local Jews, and that (b) therefore Debra Solomon is familiar with "that community" not just locally, but throughout the United States — throughout the community that the McMahon campaign refers to as "Jewtopia." This is exactly how I was led to understand the Jewish community works by watching Mel Gibson videos on YouTube.

Anyway, the whole story has broken now, and it will play poorly for McMahon, and much more poorly — hopefully lose-your-job-and-never-get-one-again poorly — for Nelson and Solomon. If only they had thought to ask a subject-matter expect, like Oliver Stone, they would have realized that floating a OMG-JEWS-CONTROL-MY-OPPONENT story to the media in hopes of getting a helpful story was kind of a long-shot. They might have also realized that when you get caught sending around files called "Jewish Money," you don't lean into the story by providing quotes like "there's lots of Jewish money."

It's said that politics is Hollywood for ugly people. I have no idea if Mike McMahon, Jennifer Nelson, or Debra Solomon are ugly on the outside. But it does seem that they are in that elite group even more menacing than any ethnic or religious tribe you could name: they are people who are too fucking stupid for politics.

Hat tip: Jonathan Turley.

Update: McMahon, appropriately, fires Nelson and blasts her comments. If Nelson was telling the truth that Solomon compiled a list of Grimm's Jewish donors, knowing it was for such racially tinged propaganda purposes, she needs to get the axe too. And even if we take McMahon at his word that he's not the sort of guy who would have approved this, he's still the sort of guy who hired people with regrettable judgment and contemptible morals.

So it turns out the Bloggess gets spam emails to her blog too.

I think she has a good approach; I need to try that next time.

Via Jonathan Turley, I see that Mike Huckabee, a probable candidate for the 2012 Republican nomination for President, had a discussion on Fox with Moral Majority leader Sean LaHaye about whether whether President Obama is pushing us "closer to the apocalypse." No, not metaphorically. As in the end times.

I've heard a lot of things that President Obama is pushing us to, and I realized that it is long past time to compile a comprehensive list, with the help of you, Gentle Readers.

BARACK OBAMA IS PUSHING US CLOSER TO:

1. The Apocalypse/The End of Days/Rapture
2. Socialism/Communism
3. One World Government
4. Slavery
5. Fascism/Nazism
6. Widespread sexual perversion/mandatory and/or widespread homosexuality (how you doin'?)
7. The Destruction of Israel
8. The Downfall of America
9. Economic ruin (within a quasi-capitalist frame of reference)

C'mon, help me out here.

I've been reading a fine discussion Mark Bennett (found through John Kindley) on Gerry Spence's claim, which I'll accept as true, that he has never lost a trial before a jury.  Both Kindley and Bennett, who are approaching this claim as criminal defense lawyers, have perspectives I'll not repeat here.

But I will point out that Gerry Spence is not a criminal defense lawyer.  Most Americans think he is.  He was on CNN pontificating about what a bad job Johnny Cochran was doing in the OJ case.  He defended Randy Weaver!

Now there's no doubt that Spence is a great trial lawyer, by any measure.  I'm sure Spence could carve me up like a turkey in an average case.  And there's no doubt that Spence has defended some important, and famous, criminal cases.

But that isn't how Spence earned his fortune.  There are plenty of criminals in Wyoming.  The state is teeming with them, but very few could afford to buy one pair of shoes from Imelda Marcos's closet, much less the fee that Spence probably charged her.

Spence is a personal injury lawyer.  He earned his fortune suing doctors, truck drivers backed by huge insurance policies, governments, and corporations.  And there it is possible to pass an entire career, never losing a case.

It just depends on what the meaning of "win" is.  And in a personal injury practice, you can win every case.  Just don't pick losers.  Pick rear end auto collisions, claims where negligence is clear, especially from the much lower bar that the "preponderance of the evidence" standard presents in civil cases, as opposed to the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard of criminal cases.  I can "win" a rear-end auto collision case, for the plaintiff, if you hand me the file on Friday and tell me the case is going to trial on Monday.  I can persuade the jury that the defendant shouldn't have hit the plaintiff from behind, and I can persuade them to award a dollar or more in damages.

That's a "win" from some perspective.  Of course my client may be royally pissed off that she only got a dollar (33 cents of which goes to me, thank you very much!), but the jury said "yes," and they did award damages.  We won!

But Spence doesn't take whiplash cases.  He still "loses" cases, as most laypeople would understand the term.  Those cases just don't get to a jury in the first place.

In a typical criminal case, even if it's a dog, the prosecutor, if he's a stubborn enough mule, will get his jury trial.  The defendant may absolutely shred the prosecution witnesses ("You have 20/800 uncorrected vision, Ms. Smith?"  "And you weren't wearing your glasses at midnight on July 29?"), but he has little chance to find out what the prosecution's case is about before trial begins.  Witnesses can't be compelled to testify, or even talk to the defense lawyer, before trial.  Hostile witnesses may be paid by the government (that's what a plea bargain often is) to give incredible testimony, but that can't be brought up until the jury is in the box.

In a civil case, on the other hand, a defense attorney with deep pockets behind him can explore everything.  He can compel witnesses to give depositions.  He can demand far more information about the plaintiff, and the plaintiff's witnesses, through discovery than a criminal court would ever give a defense lawyer.  And he can introduce affidavits, through a motion for summary judgment, proving that the plaintiff's version of the case can't be true, or that even if it is, the law won't allow the plaintiff to recover.  He can tell the plaintiff to put up or shut up.  If the plaintiff doesn't put up evidence then and there, the case is dismissed months before jury summons ever go out.

As I write this, I have a number of cases where the plaintiff's lawyer would love to have the assistance of a Gerry Spence, but Spence couldn't make a damned bit of difference and would never get the case to a jury.  The plaintiff sued Big Grocery of North America, instead of Big Grocery of Small Town, which actually owns the store.  The plaintiff is suing Heartless Insurance Company for a claim which, in plain English, isn't covered under its policy.

As great as he is, I'll bet that sort of "loss" has been handed to Gerry Spence more times than he, or his marketing team, would like to admit.  But he didn't lose the case in front of a jury.  He lost it in front of a judge.

Plaintiff's attorneys sue the wrong corporation and the statute of limitations expires before they can amend the complaint.  They allege that doctors performed the wrong medical procedure when the medical textbook, from which all new doctors are trained, says they did.  All of those cases can be dismissed through discovery and motions, long before trial.

A criminal lawyer generally can't do any of this.  No matter how weak the case, he has to investigate on his own, has limited power to compel people to testify, and can't bring a motion for summary judgment.  Then he has to persuade a jury to do what a judge would ordinarily do in civil court: throw it out.

Imagine what the criminal justice system would look like if defense attorneys had the same tools that their civil brethren have.  All sorts of dubious or even fraudulent criminal cases would be dismissed, sparing the innocent the pain, expense, and embarrassment of a trial.

Of course, criminal attorneys are merely arguing over who goes to jail, and who remains free.  Civil defense attorneys are fighting about what's important. Which is to say, they're fighting about money.

(See also: Norm Pattis, who got this ball rolling.)