Not Encouraging

Andrew Sullivan is asking readers to send in their own stories on how the recession is effecting them personally. Here is one I wish I would not have come across:

I’m a third year at a law school in Boston. Basically, everything we’ve dreamed of and been promised by our advisers/professors is no longer available. Job offers already accepted have pushed their starting dates back from September to January. Students are receiving surprise rejections for bar study loans, and I know a few who literally cannot afford the bar exam application fee ($820) because of it, let alone the bar prep courses. For the first time in any professor’s memory, students received offers for clerkships in the Massachusetts Superior Courts contingent upon funding to be established this spring. I hope to work in a government job with an agency or attorney general’s office, but am finding that there are literally no entry-level positions available, even for students from highly-ranked schools such as BC and BU.
I myself worked at the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General for the past nine months and interviewed for a really exciting fellowship. I received a call from the AGO’s HR Director: I was third in line for the position, but they were cutting
the number they were hosting from three to one. In four other positions I’ve interviewed for, I’ve received word that the position itself was canceled, or would not be filled at all this year. There’s also a state-wide hiring freeze in Massachusetts, and a lot of established attorneys suddenly on the market after record layoffs in Boston law firms. I am extremely flexible in terms of geographic location (no kids, I don’t own property), and I’m being very aggressive in my search. But it’s slow going – I fully expect to have nothing lined up when I finish the bar exam at the end of July. The thought of having nothing, absolutely nothing, to do on August 1st petrifies
me. Without a job, I will not be able to afford malpractice insurance on my own and would not risk practicing law without it. I’ll have over $130K in debt from my law degree. Thankfully, I live in Massachusetts and can utilize MassHealth – anywhere else in the country, I would have to do without health insurance (I have no pre-existing conditions, but the quotes I’ve received are so high as to be ridiculous). If I stay in the city, I do not know what I'd do for rent. I’m 26 years old, and am frightened to death I will have to move back to Ohio and away from my gay community, and live with my parents. With a law degree. I feel like a chump sometimes.

Quote of the Week

Courtesy of former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum:

A federal bank takeover is a bad thing obviously. I wonder though if we conservatives understand clearly enough why it is a bad thing. It’s not because we are living through an enactment of the early chapters of Atlas Shrugged. It’s because the banks are collapsing. Obama, Pelosi, et al are big-spending, high-taxing liberals. They are not socialists. They are no more eager to own these banks than the first President Bush was to own the savings and loan industry – in both cases, federal ownership was a final recourse after a terrible failure. And it was on our watch, not Obama’s, that this failure began. Our refusal to take notice of this obvious fact may excite the Republican faithful. But it is doing tremendous damage to our ability to respond effectively to the crisis.

Misc. Economics Post

I'm passing along a couple of economic items I found interesting this past week. First, Harvard Econ. Professor Greg Mankiw discusses what issues and economic policies economists almost universally agree on. See here.

Second, here is a vimeo video giving the best visualization I've seen thus far on how we ended up in this economic mess.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Flu Research

Last week, National Geographic wrote an article on why the flu is prevalent in the winter and what allows its transmission. In the article, they heralded a study that is going to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here is some of the article:

"Absolute humidity conditions explain most of these changes," Shaman said. The researchers do not know exactly what it is about low absolute humidity that the flu virus likes. But they suggest that absolute humidity levels be raised in buildings such as hospitals and medical clinics where the disease most often spreads.
"This gets us a big step closer to one type of mechanism" for how the flu spreads, said epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University. "One really key
question is how much influenza is transmitted in tropical locations"—places with
high absolute humidity year-round—"and how this compares to temperate parts of
the world,"

While this may be news to some, these research findings are not unique, nor are they recent. I'm surprised the journal selected the study for publishing because these findings and additional insights have already been answered - or at least discovered.

Peter Palese, a flu researcher who is professor and chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York published a study a year and a half ago linking flu transmission rates with temperature and humidity. Here is an article talking about his findings, as well answering some of the questions raised in the "newer" study:

Air temperature and humidity in the guinea pigs' quarters were varied, and they discovered that when the air temperature was at 41 degrees the virus was transmitted. As the temperature rose there was a significant decrease in the transmission of the virus and at 86 degrees, the virus was not transmitted at all.
A[sic] low humidity of 20 percent, the virus was transmitted and when the humidity reached 80 percent the virus was not transmitted at all. Dr. Palese said that this
flu virus spreads through the air, unlike the cold virus, which spreads by direct contact when people touch surfaces that had been touched by someone with a cold or a handshake with someone who is infected. Cold air makes a stable
environment for the flu virus. Low humidity also helps the virus particles remain in the air. The viruses float in the air in little respiratory droplets. With the humidity in the air, those droplets pick up water, grow larger and fall to the ground.

I guess the lesson to be learned is get a humidifier or live in a more tropic climate if you want to avoid the flu.

Enemies Foreign and Domestic

This past week, former Vice-President Dick Cheney gave an extensive interview with John Harris, Mike Allen and Jim Vandhei of Politico. I'll be quoting excerpts of the interview, but in general, Cheney warned of future terror attacks because the Obama administration is departing from many of the Bush Administration policies and is therefore putting the country at risk in the eyes of the former vice-president.


First, it seems very likely, perhaps inevitable that the U.S. is going to receive another serious terrorist attack. As former President Bush stated regularly, "we only have to fail once for the terrorists to succeed." However, it appears (at least to me) that Cheney is simply using political posturing to claim that if there is a terrorist attack in the future, the blame should lie squarely at the feet of Obama because he departed from many of the aggressive/illegal policies of the Bush Administration designed to thwart terrorist threats. Just because an attack did or did not occur during an administration's term doesn't mean it was a direct result of the policy. It is part of the analysis, but not conclusive in itself.

At the heart of Cheney's argument is the notion and belief that because a terrorist attack did not occur once they implemented their policy, it was their policy that was responsible for preventing attacks. He believes that unilateral war, torture, no due process, surveillance programs and lack of diplomacy are fundamental to the security of the United States. This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The last major terrorist attack on US soil (committed by an Islamic fundamentalist) was the first world trade center bombing in 1993. In dealing with this act, President Clinton didn't impose the draconian measures similar to Bush/Cheney to ensure our security. The terrorists themselves were tried in criminal court, convicted and are rotting away in a domestic U.S. prison. Therefore, using the same logic, we can say that Clinton's approach in dealing with terrorism kept the U.S. safe. However, to stay consistent, I would argue that that logic is also flawed. To poke some more holes in Cheney's assertion - that extra-ordinary measures are needed to prevent terrorism - let's take Spain for example. After the terrorist attacks on Madrid in 2004, Spain convicted the terrorists in criminal court and decided to withdraw from Iraq. Here is Glenn Greenwald discussing their reaction to terrorist attacks and their subsequent national security (yes, the last part of his remarks are tongue-in-cheek):

Number of terrorist attacks by Islamic radicals on Spain since March, 2004 --
i.e., the last 5 years: none. Using the prevailing media-logic applied to Bush's counter-terrorism policies such as torture and Guantanamo (i.e., if a country is attacked by Terrorists, its Government then does X, and there are no Terrorist attacks for some period of time thereafter, then that is "proof" that "X stops Terrorism"), I believe these events in Spain constitute proof that the way to stop Terrorism and to keep the citizenry safe is to stop invading and occupying Muslim countries and take accused Terrorists and put them on trial with full due process rights before putting them in cages for life. After all, that's what Spain did, and there's not been another Terrorist attack for five years. Therefore, those policies have kept the Spanish people safe.

Cheney comment:

When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry.

Let me alleviate your worries Mr. Cheney. President Obama, his administration and people like myself aren't concerned with reading them their rights. I haven't seen anyone suggest we read Miranda rights to any of the detainees. However, we are concerned with an unchecked executive declaring people "enemy combatants," holding them indefinitely and not giving them judicial review. Federalist 84 states, "the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, in all ages, is the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny." We simply want a proceeding to make sure we are actually detaining terrorists instead of innocent people. The recent Boumediene ruling reinforced one of the most basic and fundamental rights of habeas. We aren't concerned with hurting the feelings of terrorists, we stand for restoring constitutional principles that have their origins in the 13th Century.

Cheney comment:

At least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the
Bush administration — that’s about 11 or 12 percent — have gone back into the
business of being terrorists.

No, you are wrong. Secretary Gates himself has debunked this figure along with a prominent study by Stanford School of Law Professor Mark Denbeaux, where Gates says the rate is closer to 4-5%.

Cheney comment:

The 200 or so inmates still there, he claimed, are “the hard core” whose “recidivism rate would be much higher."

I'm skeptical that Dick Cheney really knows much about the remaining GTMO detainees. Last week the press reported that the files on the detainees were a) non-existent or b) missing. If the previous administration didn't even take the time to create files on these detainees, then how can one be sure that they are the hard-core terrorists? Especially when he previously asserted that all detainees were dangerous terrorists; yet hundreds have been released without charge and others have been proven to be innocent. All I ask for is that we simply determine if they should be detained in the first place.

Cheney comment:

If you release the hard-core Al Qaeda terrorists that are held at Guantanamo, I think they go back into the business of trying to kill more Americans and mount further mass-casualty attacks, he said. If you turn ’em loose and they go kill more Americans, who’s responsible for that?

This is a straw-man. No one is advocating that we simply release hardened terrorists. We just ask that we make sure they are terrorists in the first place. If they are terrorists, then we should absolutely imprison/execute them. However, Cheney ignores the fact that the war in Iraq, Abu Gharib and torture in general has been the #1 recruiting tool for terrorist organizations. There is more Al Qaeda in Iraq now than before we invaded, Iran has become the regional power and there is the little problem of breaking the law. Gee, who is responsible for that Mr. Cheney?

Cheney comment:

Is that really a good idea to take hardened Al Qaeda terrorists who’ve already killed
thousands of Americans and put ’em in San Quentin or some other prison facility where they can spread their venom even more widely than it already is?

I can't call it a bad idea because we have been doing just that for years without any escapes, terrorist attacks on the jails or venom spreading problems. Finally, and I'm not downplaying how dangerous terrorists are, but the terrorists that have already killed thousands of Americans are already dead - they died on 9/11. But yes, I do concede that terrorists are capable of killing thousands of Americans, yet I don't see why that should prohibit us from placing them in domestic jails. Finally, the primary reason Gitmo was established wasn't because we were scared of terrorists escaping. It was established because the Bush Administration believed the geographic location of of the prison in Cuba was beyond the reach of U.S. courts. We all know how well that plan worked out.

I still believe that terrorism is one of the most serious threats we face - and will face for some time. However, I strongly disagree with Mr. Cheney on how we should deal with that threat. I do not believe it is worth throwing away our Constitutional principles to try and secure our safety. A police state would guarantee our safety, but at what cost to our liberty? I'll end with an excerpt from the Boumediene opinion.

The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system, they are reconciled within the framework of law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, part of that law.

Addicting Website

Today in class (yes, on a Saturday - snow days aren't free in law school), we had a speaker come in to talk about the various forms of technology available to attorney's to access discoverable information or evidence. While discussing methods to retrieve files from computers, the speaker pointed us to the website - www.enronexplorer.com. Here is the description of what the website provides:

In October 2003 the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission placed 200,000
of Enron's internal emails from 1999-2002 into the public domain as part of its ongoing investigations. The archive offers an extraordinary window into the lives and preoccupations of Enron's top executives during a turbulent period. Read more about Enron's demise on Wikipedia. Trampoline engineers used this data as testbed during development of the company's SONAR technology. The result was so fascinating we decided to open it up and allow anyone to dig in. The Enron Explorer lets you investigate the actions and reactions of Enron's senior management team as the noose began to tighten.

As you can guess, I spent the rest of class prying into the lives of various former Enron employees. However, it made me realize how many emails I've written that I probably wouldn't want published in the future...

Enjoy!