Mistake.

This was all a very big mistake. A terrible terrible mistake.

Stupid stupid stupid (and sore)

Today was my first real exam of the year. A 3.5 hour exam on my open book international trade law that I was not fully prepared for, as I have spent the last 2 weeks of my life just trying to cobble together some semblance of understanding for my Corporations class.

And it began like any other day.

I woke up at 8 am, after going to bed at 11, well-rested, with plenty of time before my 10:30 exam. I lounged around, making a cup of coffee, lightly reading over my outline to see if I could build any more connections between widely differing economic theories, WTO policies, and the minutiae of statutory construction that the WTO's dispute resolution bodies seem to relish. Considering that I had no food in my apartment, I decided to stop by CVS on the way to school to pick up my faithful enormo-bottle of caffeinated and sugary exam-sustaining green or yellow colored beverage (too many adjectives?), and to pick up some sort of cake or snack to serve as my breakfast for the day. (I chose an enormous coffee cake. Good stuff.)

Anyhow, considering that I had an hour and a half before the exam, I decided that I would walk to the exam instead of taking my bike so I could read over my outline during the 30 minute walk, and so I could go to CVS without the hassling of crossing through a thoroughly nasty intersection on my bike. This was the first time in about a month that I haven't ridden my bike to campus.

While walking to CVS I underwent a mild panic. Did I forget anything? Digital media to save my exam? (Checked twice) My student ID? (Checked 3 times) My power cable for my computer, which I had left behind for an exam last year resulting in a panicky, terrified drive home? (Checked twice) Water bottle? (It was bouncing up against my leg, so it was there.) Music, so I wouldn't be distracted by other people before the exam? (Check.) My outlines for the exam? (In my hands.) Satisfied, I went into CVS, spent 5 or 10 minutes leisurely strolling through the aisles looking for breakfast and caffeine.

I arrived in the cavernous exam room at 9:30, with an hour to spare. I was the only one there, and I picked the very front-most seat in the room, as usual, because I hate watching other people take their exams (it freaks me out to see people typing huge bodies of text while I'm trying to figure out what the hell is going on.) I prefer to pretend that no one else exists for those 3-4 hours. Around 9:45, I decided to go buy a bucket of Starbucks, to fill my water bottle to the brim, and to leisurely smoke a cigarette outside. Around 10, other students started trickling in and unpacking their things...so I just looked over my outline in boredom.

At 10:08, I decided to unpack my bag. Upon opening my bag, I noticed a thin red book next to my WTO Statutory supplement. A Thin red book...

...my corporations book.

Panic and confusion filled me...I considered 10,000 things in the next minute as I furiously dug around my things. Could I make it home on time? Do I need my book? Am I really going to fuck up an entire year of work because I forgot to pack the right fucking book? How long does it take to run home? Could I take the T? WHY DIDN'T I RIDE MY FUCKING BIKE TODAY!? If I make it home, could I drive back in Cambridge traffic? Every option was no option.

At 10:09 I made my decision. I asked the proctors if there was any reason they would be starting before 10:30...and I was told "We will start at exactly 10:30. Run fast!"

And I did. I ran. Like an idiot...in a blazer, dress shirt, jeans, and flat shoes. I ran, panted, stopped, ran some more. I ran past upscale Harvard types, past bums at the T station, past goth hippies on the corner, past the assorted people at the bus stops, past 10,000 cars on their way to work, past old people who got in my way (and I apparently frightened)...like an idiot who hasn't run in 2 years -- not the gallop of a confident horse, but the scampering of a frightened donkey. I arrived home at 10:22, completely destroyed. I couldn't breathe, I was wheezing, my legs burned...I was pouring sweat...I saw my book on the ground, grabbed it, stuffed it into a bookbag, literally threw my bike out of my apartment so I wouldn't have to carefully try and squeeze it through the door, and took back off for my exam on bike.

The bike ride, as expected, was atrocious. My thighs burned and refused to push harder, the sweat was starting to soak through my shirt...But I finally pulled into the school, ran it straight into the bike rack, locked my bike and checked the time. 10:29. And so I ran again, the last 200 yards...

I arrived in the classroom at 10:30, on the dot. And the elderly proctors smiled at me, gestured in my direction to the entire classroom, obviously having explained what I was doing...and told me I made it right on time.

Of course, the actual anxiety of the situation ended here...but there are no happy endings. For the next 45 minutes, I began to pour sweat. You know when you run really hard for a few minutes and don't sweat at all until you stop to catch your breath? That was me for the first 45 minutes of the exam. I disgustingly used my blazer as a sweat rag...and just took the damned test, panting like a dog. And don't forget the coughing and wheezing and throat clearing as my body retaliated for the workout. Three and a half hours later, I was done with my first full Harvard exam for my first real grade in this place.

...I used my book once.

The moral of the story? If you want it bad enough, you can cover 3 miles, round-trip, in 20 minutes if you have a bike for half of it.


...But it fucking sucks, so remember your fucking book.

White People.

This is why I think white people are ridiculous. Not because I get offended, but because this is the kind've crap that I absolutely guarantee every single Chinese kid in America has had random White People they didn't know do something exactly like this, except to their face without the slightest bit of context. And it's inexplicable. Why do white people take the time out of their day to make kung-fu noises at Chinese kids taking a piss in the bathroom? What possesses a paleface to put his hands together in front if his chest, bow, and speak in a Chinese accent to a complete stranger? And no, I do not know kung fu. And no, I did not pee pee in your coke, strange kid on the sidewalk.

If I slept with your wife, if I stole your pudding cup, if I did better on my math test, or if I even made eye contact with you...ok maybe that's understandable. But I didn't. I'm just near you.

And I guarantee this will happen to me again.

And I don't dislike white people...you just got a disproportionate share of dumb.



...And yes, Virginia, it's always the White ones.

Uh...did I just become a hippie?

"If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian."
--Paul and Linda McCartney, 1996



(Just for starters, that's a picture of live and dead baby male chicks who were thrown out from the chicken processing plant.)

I randomly followed one of Andrew Sullivan's links today to some award-winning cartoon movie called the "Meatrix" which laid out the framework for agri-business and the meat processing industry. As usual, I sort of rolled my eyes and immediately shut down any and all receptors as soon as the phrase "Greedy Agriculture Corporations" was uttered. (I have the same reaction to people using the words revolution, abortionist, sodomite, fascist, Islamofascist, stay the course, Rush Limbaugh, Moby, the "system", PETA, Greenpeace, John Kerry, neo-con, Che Guevara, Lenin, Marx, Federalist, Rawjer Sakker (that's for your mother), vegan, corporate profits, Lindsay Lohan, Steve Forbes, queer, unamerican, AZN, the WTO, no blood for oil...shall I continue?) But I kept on it because...hey, it was a cartoon...and the Morpheus figure was a cow named Moo-pheus. Yes. This is Moopheus.

Anyhow, after having my interest in factory farms piqued, I decided to just go trolling on the internet for gruesome images of factory farms. We're so oversaturated hearing irritating environmental activists trumpeting animal rights and moral equivalence between animals and humans and the evil corporate regime that we associate their idiocy and annoying behavior with their cause...thereby ignoring everything they say because they have curly, unwashed hair, a dirty bandana, and reek of marijuana and B.O. That's not fair guys!

Ok. So she's not quite a dirty hippie. And uh. Yes, she is hot and naked. (and as it turns out, it seems like every single PETA protest involves nudity.) I'm totally not kidding.

Anyway, the real point of this post is that I wanted to actually see some of the corporate agriculture and meat plants for myself without the hippie intermediary. The "Factory Farms" as they're called. And so...International Trade Law went out the window, and in came socially conscious time-wasting.

And I was actually a little bothered by what I saw. Not because I wasn't aware of the meat industry or the implications of slaughter (having read Fast Food Nation and worked on a meat farm in Switzerland briefly)...but I felt something a little more visceral and disturbed....I believe it was the machines. It's just very strange to see cows all lined up like this, hanging upside down, having their throats slit as they bleed themselves out.I mean...cows are really big animals. Like mini-dinosaur big. You know how we have this scale of what we're willing to step on? Small ants? No Problem. Bigger ants? No problem. Small cockroaches...a little more wary. Huge cockroaches....a lot more freaked out. And by the time you get to like, something with bones like a baby rat or a baby frog...you're just NOT gonna step on it. So what happens when you get to cow? You close your eyes and let the Mexican do it. And then you have these huge cows up here, and they just slit their throats and rip them to pieces without any real concern for any other considerations.


I think it's just a little difficult for me to deal with the sheer volume and brutality of the whole process. Assuming a large number of the cows don't get properly stunned, as I'm sure they don't...(This is the stunning process below)
We're just talking massive numbers of animals being ripped to pieces while fully conscious in the most brutal ways. (by the way that blood in the picture is messed up) And, of course, I found my way through interviews with workers who have done this so much that they really can't find any "life" left in the animals, so they basically "play" with them by mutilation and pushing the limits of what they can get the animals to do.

In any case, there was no real moral to the story. I don't care if you eat meat, and I'm not entirely sure whether or not this will have any effect on whether I eat meat. The brutality we witness in the slaughterhouses is no less brutal than what people somehow are still doing to each other every single day, so if I get a steak out of it...maybe I'll decide that it's worth it. I dunno. I have no fucking clue. I love my meat. But something is wrong, whether or not I do anything about it. It is hard, though, to match those images up to this wonderful looking steak. Is this what commodification means? When we can no longer recognize muscle and a sliced bone, and instead just see "steak"?


In any case, the real point is just to post a few things that I saw today that were new to me...and hopefully new to you...just to lend some perspective. (and ultimately make like you just like me.) Hopefully I'll share a steak with you soon.


And how did I have the time to do this during exams? I didn't. I'm a moron. I'm fucked.

Pet Peeve

I have a minor pet peeve about the way almost ALL professors answer a similar question students invariably ask, from high school to law school. And it's incredibly boring.

BUT...

When students ask about the level of detail they need to use on the exam, for example, if we need to use citations. The response is always something to the effect of: "Well you don't need to give the name, the citation, the state, the year, the justice, and what page of the reporter it's on, and the name and year of the publisher. Ha ha ha."

Does no one else get annoyed by this response? Well, no shit. Of course we're not going to have to use incredibly irrelevant details that we wouldn't possibly be expected to know, you clod.

This is something that happens all the time. And not even in class. You ask a question about some sort of continuum, and the answer is always some ridiculous illustration of an extreme that is abundantly, and stupidly obvious, that doesn't explain a goddamn thing. And they pretend it does.


And that's my post for today .
I spent precisely 12 hours working all through the day with a single 20 minute break. I don't get much more interesting than this.

And if nothing else, here's a great article/review/take on Jack Black. Something about reading someone analyze and think about Jack Black is just more interesting to me today than reading about Ahmadinejad holding a "Holocaust is a Myth Conference" in Iran. Sigh. The world is certainly getting better.

Guess the Fat Chinese Kid.

In spite of the absolute bust of the last "Guess the Blank" post, which elicited absolutely zero responses...here I go again. Becuase when I stumble across interesting things, I would like to share those moments with you. Whether you care or not, or want me to die in a fire.

In any case, for those like Mr. SJBoy (for those of you unaware, whenever that dude posts as SJ, that's an abbreviation for "Super Jew"), let your prejudices and stereotypes wash over you when you guess who this little porker is. On top of his lineage, he's a real lameass douchebag.



And I do admit, Chinese people do look alike. This guy could easily be the grandson of Bruce Lee, Chiang-Kai Shek, Chow-Yun Fat's son, Jackie Chan's brother, or Confucius' great great great great great great grandson (as are we all...)

In addition, for half of you, I bet I've already exhausted the list of Chinese people's names that you recognize. Except one. Which makes you racist. Whitey. Just try and think of another Chinese person without looking it up...I dare you. Without mispelling the name.

And finally, I'd like to note, it's probable that he has a bigger dick than Gandhi's grandson. It's scientifically proven. AZN!


P.S. - I just found this, and I had to put it up...so for those of you less "Racism-Inclined" and more "Puppy-Inclined" and "Kick you in the face" inclined, here's another quality headline from CNN.

Exams...

There's really nothing I want to say right now. I'm in my...9th? hour of studying today and I'm a little drowsy from the big dinner I just made, and I thought I'd just post something to move on from the all-too-repetitive gun post.

I will say though, that I really hate some of my classes this semester. It's like I'm back in college. Instead of learning about law and trying to piece together doctrines with their philosophical underpinnings and trying to construct a coherent framework from the thousands of fragments we get in class, I'm in two classes that are all about history, random facts, and fragments of knowledge that lead nowhere and pretty much stand on their own. It's boring, it's useless, and I hate reading about it. I've come to the conclusion that I actually like the law because it is a lot less dependent on memorization than most disciplines. Of course we have to remember lots of little things in order to integrate them together into a larger whole, but at least once you understand it, you can not worry about the details.

Instead, in my Chinese law class, I have to read through a 7 or 8 inch binder full of law review articles, stupid opinions, historical remnants, and entire bodies of law...and try to figure out what to do with it. (Yes, entire bodies of law. So far we've had to read the Chinese Constitution, and 13 or 14 Chinese Legislative Acts in full. Not commentaries about them. Not explanations of the law. Not cases. But just the statutes. Hundreds of pages.)

Anyway, enough bitching. Best of luck to all you law school students out there as we trudge through yet another hellish few weeks of exams...

Guns without the Lecture

Not gonna go through the whole schpiel, but I figure I'm gonna continue to report random gun violence as it appears. Just to see as it piles up.

Gunman kills three in office building in downtown Chicago before being killed.

Passing the Torch

The Myth of the Chinese, is now forever replaced by the Truth of the Indians.

The Indian Council of Medical Research says Indian penises are too short for standard condoms. Condom failure rates in India range up to 20 percent; to figure out why, the council has "just concluded an extensive two-year study of the penis sizes of Indian men." Council researcher: "As per international standards, most condoms are 150 mm to 180 mm in length and 44 to 56 mm in width. But data collected in Mumbai till 2001 showed that 60% of the participants measured 126 to 156 mm in length and 30% between 100 and 125 mm." Translation: Thirty percent of Indian men are 1 inch short, and another 30 percent are 2 inches short.

I, Triumphant.

That's right. All you motherfuckin' CPAs better watch your ass, because I, Triumphant, have reached a new level of success.

I passed my 1 credit pass/fail "Accounting for Lawyers Exam."


Implications? Harvard is my bitch. My dynasty is in ascendancy. My face will grace the walls of every home in America. Nothing can stop me now. Derick Albers, you better watch your ass because I'm coming for your house, your car, your wife, your CPA certificate, your leather couch, and Omaha. (Ten bucks says Derick hasn't come to the blog in 3 months. And just kidding about the wife.)

For the Law-Nerds...

If you have any interest in constitutional law, or the fundamental debate over originalism, textualism, and the living constitution...apparently there was a debate between Scalia and Breyer this week, and although it's not a briliant, penetrating analysis of the issues, I just thought this was great article, so I'm just recommending you take 5 minutes to take a look. If you like Dahlia Lithwick's pieces in general, this is just another great one.

Apparently the video is available here, which I will watch as soon as this exam hell goes away. And yes, I'm ten days into this exam push with 14 left to go....

Slow News Day? Awesome Headline.

Notwithstanding.

I hate this word. "Notwithstanding." Every single time I read it in a case, or in a text-book, or whenever, my mind simply goes blank and I have no idea what the sentence means anymore. It has the misdirection of a double negative...and all it does is vaporize the sentence out of existence. It just becomes no longer available to me.

And I admit. I'm an idiot. I don't pretend this is a common problem.

I looked it up, and apparently it means "in spite of." Yet I still can't figure it out. Does it make sense if I say "not withstanding" in two pieces or "not with standing" in 3 pieces?

If I try to work this out and say "you're guilty notwithstanding the evidence"...to me it sounds like "You are guilty. Though the guilt doesn't withstand the evidence. Meaning, you're not guilty." Although if the dictionary is to be believed it means "You're guilty in spite of the evidence." I don't get it. It hurts. I'm a computer dividing by zero, Einstein standing at the darkness hiding the unified theory, a fresh-faced immigrant watching Arrested Development. It does NOT compute.

Guess the City: Procrastination Edition

My international trade class was discussing development issues in trade and so I started looking through Wikipedia for cities to see if my stereotypes about the place were completely wrong...or if I actually had ANY idea whatsoever what some of these places looked like.

So, I decided to post one. Guess the city. (Some of you might recognize one of the buildings, but if you did, then you're a step ahead of me)






If you have absolutely no idea...here's a final hint...which is probably not helpful. This man had an enormous role in the destiny of this country/city.

Lovely lookin' man isn't he? Filthy rich though.

World AIDS Day 2006

I tend not to speak much about HIV/AIDS on a regular basis (at least I don’t think so), mostly because I don’t really know what can be done to stop it, and I’m not even sure most people want to hear it. But I’m going to say something useless and stupid, but hey, it’s World AIDS Day, and if the entire readership of the blog (2) read this…then at least it’s something.

I have a thousand stories to tell about this wretched disease. Some of them are wonderful stories about humanity in the face of AIDS, and some of them are awful stories about the ravages of the disease, and some of them are eye-witness accounts of visceral incarnations of tragic clichés so foul that I get upset just thinking about them. In my daily life since I’ve returned to law school, it’s sometimes hard to remember that AIDS is still out there. That my old friends from Freedom still spend every single day trying to help people cope with the devastation of a virus. A virus.

A freakin’ virus.

AIDS is not going away. Even though we’ve all been talked to death about it, and it’s all over the media, and it’s the trendy band-wagon issue for celebrities, GAP, and whoever else to jump onto…AIDS is a forgotten epidemic. As the third biggest cause of human death, how is that? We’ve been oversaturated with shrill doom-and-gloom, we’ve been smothered with sob stories, and AIDS has become a warm and fuzzy issue that we universally recognize but fail to actually think about. It’s almost as if the more we talk about it, the less we think it’s necessary to do anything. And even when we do hear the "new ideas" about AIDS, especially in this country, it’s controversy over some stupid, moralistic crusade against condom use -- Actual debate over the utter idiocy of abstinence-only AIDS policy.

Why have we really forgotten? AIDS has slowed among the affluent. Among whites. Among the middle class. It can no longer scare us. It’s someone else’s problem, like malaria. Like malnutrition. What're the fears we really talk about? Bird flu. West Nile Virus.

AIDS has not stopped, and it has not slowed, it has realigned its rampage. In the US, AIDS is now accelerating in amongst poor black women. In India, AIDS is exploding amongst monogamous Indian wives. Like so many things, AIDS has become an affliction of groups without the ability to fight it. Sure it’s a disease, a virus…but it’s the cause, the effect, the catalyst, and the result of so many things that’re wrong in this world: poverty, failed governments, human error, human desires, failures in public health, lack of education, patriarchy, cultural conservatism, sexual repression, homophobia, the war on drugs, ignorance, failed prison policies, discrimination, collapsed economies…and the list goes on and on. And if you don’t understand how any of the things I just said feed the cycle of infection, just ask. With so many causes and effects, there is no magic bullet. Not even the Warren Commission could believe there's a bullet that could do this.

So I’ll be perfectly frank: There's nothing simple we can do about this. The massive movements in AIDS policy towards massive distribution of antiretroviral drugs, in my opinion, may just be the trigger for a more powerful, drug-resistant epidemic. The inability for policymakers to move behind lunacy like abstinence-only, or prevention-only, or antiretroviral drugs-only is not going to help us stop the problem. Any solution requires everybody.

The only thing I can say is this: AIDS will not be solved by concerted government action or by action by UNAIDS. It will not be soothed by the passion and compassion of the few. And it will not be something that “others” will remedy. Unless a medical cure comes to light, this is simple fact. To end the physical infection of a virus, to end the devastation of stigma, and to save the lives of those infected and affected has nothing to do with a few dedicated people trying hard, or pushing themselves to the limit to find a solution. It’s not about grandstanding, or making a scene, or a huge demonstration of energy. This problem, like so many others, simply requires that each person make the tiniest decision to not make things worse, but better. By not getting infected, by not passing it on, by not stigmatizing the infected...Having each and every person make the tiniest commitment. And for Americans, the decision is usually pretty easy. Getting the rest of the world to a position where they can be faced with the same decisions, and find the same ease in making them is the challenge...