This is my first full week of classes. In general, I’m not impressed with the method of instruction in Law School, so far. I have read that almost all law schools follow the same basic method, though, so I’m not complaining about CU, my school.

In every other “technical” subject I’ve taken, whether in college or in professional training, you start by learning general rules that give you a rough handle on the subject, and a framework to make further learning easier, and then you proceed to more detailed study of the exceptions and subtleties that make it all interesting.

Law School, on the other hand, does it backwards, immersing you in the subtleties and exceptions and expecting you, over time, to develop a sense of the general rules.

Professors claim that this is because the law is always changing, and that it is more important to teach you how to think like a lawyer. But that could be said of every subject. The law actually changes less than most fields. The human brain learns better when it has a rough conceptual framework from which to start. I may change my mind, later, but so far law school appears to involve a great deal of wasted effort.

Two things:

1) Sorry I haven’t posted lately. Was on vacation in Oregon, where I went to high school, rediscovering the incredible beauty, my relatives, and my allergies.

2) Just started law school. Way too much to think about. So much so, that in spite of the post title, I won’t actually say anything about it.

3) Just wanted to have a third item.

Based on my calculations, it’s been about 12,037 days (give or take a few) since the sexual encounter that started my life. I’m still not sure how I feel about the planet Earth, or the human experience. Eating is nice. Bathing can be fun. Putting on clothes is hit or miss. Definitely not keen on work.

I’m wrapping up the last day of my third-to-last week of work in my current profession (Unix Systems Administration). The end can’t arrive soon enough. No-one seems to know what to say to me, around the office. I wander by my coworkers’ offices and try to chat, but they give me lifeless smiles and keep their bodies pointed toward their keyboards … bad body language. Maybe they’re just jealous I get to escape?

Of course, I’m just escaping to another kind of work, another way to avoid having to grow my own food. One of my co-workers summed it up well, a few days ago. “My wife says that I still haven’t figured out what I want to do in life, but she’s wrong. I know exactly what I want to do: nothing.”

Better get back to it.

I have kept this secret for a while, since people at work know about this blog (although I doubt they look at it), but I can now safely announce that I’m going to law school. I’ll be a “1L” at the University of Colorado, starting August 21.

So please, everybody, do whatever you can to injure your necks or get sexually harrassed in the next three years so that I have some clients when I get out. Much obliged.

A wooden boat exquisitely crafted to look like a Ferrari. Dang. Video here.

My favorite sport is back, and this time the season started waaaaay early. Possibly bad (according to some) for democracy, but fun for me.

Not a sport, you say? Wrong! It has winners and losers, big salaries and bigger egos, players and fans. And, as with all sports, when the dust settles and the winner is declared, we can all hold hands and be friends again. Because regardless of who wins or who loses, it doesn’t change anything in real life. (Unless you have the misfortune of living in a foreign country our new president decides to invade. You should try to live here. Much safer. And very popular. You want to? Too bad! Nobody can come here without our permission! Unless you sneak across the border or something. But that never works.)

Presidential candidates are an interesting breed. They’re too intelligent and ambitious to be happy with a normal life, they’re too hungry for public attention to make it rich in business, and they’re not talented enough to make it on American Idol.

Well, I finished the book I mentioned in a previous post, Jurismania, by Paul F. Campos. The biggest flaw of the book is that the author, though trying very hard to write for a popular audience, constantly devolves into obtuse academic-speak whenever he gets down to the heart of an issue. Countless sentences are choked to death on fish bones like “incommensurability”. I still need to look that one up.

Still, once I’d brought my reading up to a 36th grade level, I found the book was very insightful, and very disturbing.

The author pointed out that unlike most other cultures, American culture is wrapped up in its system of government. Our system of government is to us what cheese, wine, and laziness are to the French. (Ok, I added laziness. Je suis tres desole.)

If I had to condense the entire book (not really possible) into a single idea, it would be this:

Americans cling to the illusion that rational thinking can produce correct answers to questions involving values. It’s not to say that Truth or Right Answers don’t actually exist, but that people cannot reach agreement (ie., consensus) on these things through rational thought and discussion.

Instead of accepting this, we hold on to the illusion that the Law, via the decisions of judges who interpret it, can provide answers and decisions that are superior, and more rational, than those made by other people or institutions. The effect of this is that our legal system is ridiculously complicated, time-consuming, and expensive, and worse, that its tentacles reach into every part of life.

I think this delusion is one of the reasons we, as a society, have allowed the Judicial branch of our government to take upon itself the authority to make moral decisions for our country, decisions which should be made by our elected representatives. It comforts us to think that there is a small, elite group of highly-educated, highly-moral people, who are above the corruption of politics, who can make these difficult decisions rationally and rightly. But there is nothing that makes judges, even Supreme Court judges, more capable of making these decisions. They are still human.

We are, case by case, ruling by ruling, returning to the rule of kings, and doing it with smiles on our faces.

Link

If you’ve ever wondered about the relationship between radio waves, the color yellow, and Depends Undergarments ™, this diagram is for you, courtesy of XKCD.

My new favorite web comic!

http://pbfcomics.com