the daily snivel

It's 1:00 am on the last Saturday morning of "Spring Break" here at the University of Ottawa, and I am stuck alone inside the Community Legal Clinic working on my upcoming trial. I'm such a loser. Across the street, in view of my office window, is the Royal Oak, one of Ottawa's (and Laurier Avenue's) many pubs. I can hear loud university students whooping it up and engaging in all manner of drunken merriment, no doubt before stumbling home to have themselves some dry, fuzzy, drunk people sex.

And I'm still looking up case law.

My trial is in just over a week. It may or may not even happen on the 9th, because the Crown hasn't yet produced "disclosure" (of its evidence against my client), and among the many possible strategies we're preparing is seeking an adjournment. But I'm going to be ready. And whatever happens, I'm going to win.

Am I still a loser if I win?

Incidentally, since we're on the topic of me not wanting to be a loser anymore, I went to the gym with a colleague at the Clinic for the second time this week. My project for the year is to put on some more muscle and lose some of the other stuff. For me, the hardest part about going to a gym was just familiarizing myself. I hate jumping into something without knowing as much as possible what to do. I feel awkward and so much like an outsider that I just want to run screaming away. Gyms in particular are so full of super fit people who know exactly what they're doing that I find them very intimidating, and prefer to exercise outdoors on my bicycle, which I'm far more adept at.

Anyway, I've now overcome the mental obstacle of actually entering the gym and getting to know all the equipment and what to do with it. I've also taken the plunge and desensitized myself to the to the sweaty, cologne-infused, dangling-penis "Hey-look-at-me-I'm-walking-around-naked" man-fest that is a gym changing room. Not counting that weird, curious, uncertain adolescent period (ahem), I've never felt more stubbornly heterosexual than I do now when I look at so very many naked, naked men.

But aside from that, I'm now well acquainted with a variety of exercises, and discovered I can bench the modest but encouraging mass of 120 pounds with enough comfort to do a full set and several reps (I can certainly lift more than that, but it's the repeating that's hard). I can run on a treadmill for fifteen minutes straight without wanting to die, and I can use the stationary bikes infinitely longer (because it's what I do outdoors each and every day when the weather's less frosty).

They'll have to love me when I'm beautiful, right? 

I was pleasantly surprised to find that all my grades had finally been posted today.

Evidence Law -- B+

Selected Issues in Feminist Law -- A-

Taxx Law^* -- A-

I feel these are quite excellent law school grades, especially as I'm also juggling my casework in the legal clinic (which I don't have a grade for becausae it's a pass/fail course), and a part-time job. I hope I can keep this kind of achievement up in my winter term classes (advanced criminal procedure, family law, and constititional law II).

* -- the extra 'x' in Taxx law added as a tribute to the excellent Beck song, Sexx Laws.
 

Although it is reading week at the University of Ottawa (in other words, and despite this being January, it is our "Spring Break"), I am quite ridiculously busy these days as I am generally huddled in the attic of the legal clinic preparing for my first trial. It's coming up on February 9, and I'm terribly excited (and nervous) about it. Now, I think the law is on my side. Surprisingly, I also think the facts are on my side (which should conjure up a recollection of the old law chestnut that the other side -- the Crown -- must be pounding on the table). In the process of all my legal research, I got to do some sleuthing around -- essentially, I got to make a phone call or two in my incognito capacity as a Member of The Public^TM to find out where property lines for the scene of an incident really lie, and thus undermine the argument that the security guards who arrested my client had the authority to do so. I'm warmed by the fact that I can do something positive for my client, and hopefully contribute to the message that there really are people -- law students though they may be -- who care about legal rights and making sure that people who belong to disadvantaged groups aren't being unduly targeted by aggressive security guards. Today's security guards are tomorrow's police officers, and while neither has an easy job, it's my job to make sure that those to whom we entrust our safety (and orderly shopping experiences and teenager-free food courts) truly respect the law.

Still, it's nice to take a break from the many hours of research and put in some time at the Canadian Breast Cancer Network. A friend of my sister remarked (over pints) yesterday that she'd decoded the male thought process, and it basically read like this: "Boobies! I like boobies!" Which I suppose isn't so far from the truth. Still, my job puts me in an environment where there are literally breasts everywhere. There are pictures of breasts on the walls. Our breast-awareness-raising office calendars feature a big, tasteful photograph of someone's breasts each month of the year. I use the word "breasts" in polite office conversation. I read articles about breasts. I read websites about breasts (no, not those websites). Everything we do is all about breasts. So in some sense a little of the boobie magic has probably worn off for me. In any event, I love my job. It's fun, it's in a pleasant environment, they pay me to be there, and there's absolutely no homework.

Tonight my job was to engage in some troubleshooting. First of all, we just bought a couple of laser printers since they were on sale for an insanely good price (about $199 Canadian), and have been gradually installing them throughout the office. Unfortunately, the laser printer destined for our accountant has been up to no good since it was first plugged in, and refused to print more than a flimsy test page despite the best efforts of a lot of people who know a lot about a lot of things. Secondly, we've been trying to reprogram our collection of Nortel Norstar programmable phones, which has produced only a calamity of follies that I now understand has been cleverly engineered into such phone systems so as to insure a long and profitable line of service visits. Naturally, I was drafted, on the assumption that anyone as single as me must be good with computers -- [pause for laughter at my expense].

Still, I like solving problems. I tend to think of stubborn technical and conceptual problems as a personal mission -- a quest, if you will. So, I spent half an hour on the printer, and five hours on the phones. The former is now printing perfectly. The latter nearly killed me. In the end, I worked out that an old mailbox, which was hidden from the phones' internal company directory by a past administrator, still had an extension assigned to it that conflicted with the mailbox of that extension's current owner. It meant that you couldn't access her name from the company directory when you called in, and you couldn't transfer calls from the front desk. But since the mailbox was named by the admin technician who originally installed the phones, its name and very existence was impossible to guess, and since it was hidden, it was invisible from the directory. After hours of trial and error, I figured out that some assigning of extensions was conflicting with transferring the call to the mailbox properly, because I could delete the mailbox and still transfer calls to the assigned phone. I ultimately came across a fleeting reference to box 100 in a list of the assigned extensions in a "flash programming record" left behind with our phones' documentation, and worked out the conflict. I know, this is dull, technical, and ponderous (and in no way makes the world a better place to live), but I still felt like freaking MacGuyver when I finally figured it all out.

Rob Fairchld: solver of problems and friend of breasts. 

Early one morning after a long night studying for exams last December, I was unceremoniously awakened by my ringing telephone. Instead of the call being from someone I actually wanted to talk to, it was a telemarketer. In fact, I was called by a very nice and excruciatingly persistant voice who sought some of my money on behalf of the Police Association of Ontario. The PAO, I was told, was a non-profit organization engaged in outreach to troubled youths in programs like "Fishing with cops." The sales pitch went like this: by providing underprivileged and "at risk" kids with positive role models who would take them fishing and expose them to the positive benefits of the outdoors and try to steer them away from trouble, the PAO hoped to improve community relations and make the streets safer.

This seemed like a laudible goal, to be sure, but it was just before Christmas and I was none too wealthy. I told the persistent voice that, as a student, I did not have a lot of money to give. Ah, the voice thought: opportunity! The price just kept going down. I didn't have to give a hundred bucks. I didn't even have to give fifty. There was also a twenty dollar donation well within the price range of students like me. Couldn't I see my way to giving such a worthy program twenty dollars?

And yeah, I'm ultimately a soft touch when it comes to improving communities, and so they had me. I pledged twenty dollars and they pledged to send me a donation package in the mail. They did, too.

And what does it say? Well, it does mention the "Fishing with cops" program. Yes it does. It gets three whole lines in the letter I received, at the very end, after this part:

"This year your generous donation can help provide the resources for several programs and initiatives to improve the quality of life in Ontario including: The PAO's Lobbying Efforts for a safer Ontario through improved law enforcement and criminal justice programs. Key items on our agenda this year include legislative initiatives for a more accountable Young Offenders Act. The PAO is working to address the Public's [sic] concerns that the pending Youth Criminal Justice Act will not hold young people accountable for their actions and for truth in sentencing. In addition, PAO is also calling for a federal corrections and parole system that will end 'Club Feds' and keep dangerous criminals in secure jails where they belong. Our goal is to stiffen sentences for violent offenders and address shortcomings in the corrections and parole systems. The campaign focuses on establishing longer minimum sentences, reasonable parole standards, higher security incarceration for violent offenders, an independent review of sentencing and greater voice for victims in sentencing decisions."

Which is to say that the PAO is actually engaged in political lobbying in support of a right-wing law and order agenda which, as any good criminologist knows, accomplishes very little in terms of actually reducing crime and making streets safer for anybody. Ontario's criminal justice system is already clogged with a backlog of thousands of criminal cases. The system is strained for an adequate number of judges and Crown prosecutors (and legal aid funding for defence counsel) to effectively deal with these cases. A political lobby to spend money elsewhere on imposing tough sentences means spending money on new, larger prisons, more prison guards, and the costs of incarcerating offenders. Punishing criminals may be politically satisfying, but you have to address the root causes of crime to see progress. For more expansion on this rant, I'd recommend Elliott Currie's Crime and Punishment in America: Why the Solutions to America's Most Stubborn Social Crisis Have Not Worked, and What Will.

Even with politics aside, I'm thoroughly irked that I was promised one thing and sold another. Nowhere in the carefully scripted sales pitch was this intense lobbying mentioned. But I'm stuck giving them twenty dollars because they've been sending me letters every two or three weeks reminding me of my pledge. What's a boy to do? Bitch. That's what I'm doing here. I'm also including a note on the memo of the check and on the pledge form itself that my money is to be spent on the "Fishing with cops" program and NOT political lobbying. Fat chance they'll actually do that, however.

Let this be a lesson to me, and to you: ask questions instead of accepting easy answer.

Also, someone needs to invent a "Tele-Zapper" that actually electrocutes the telemarketer, and doesn't just confuse them.  

As much as any person can be, I try to be an "ethical shopper." My coffee is fair trade, whether I'm brewing it at home or when I'm out and about, say at the school coffee shop. I go to the local/independent book and music stores. I try to support as few oppressive regimes as possible when buying sneakers. Heck, If I'm ever in the financial and romantic position to buy someone a diamond, I'll make sure it's not the bloody kind. Now, nobody is perfect, and you can't expect that at all times your buying decisions will make the world a happy fun super swell place to live, but there's a lot to be said for spending your dollars judiciously enough that retailers who stock sensible products get the hint that there's actually profit to be had in taking the high road. In the end, however, I also try not to come off as sanctimonious or morally superior. I'd rather just enjoy my extremely high quality, supremely tasty coffee and not attempt to convert or lecture to people who aren't going to be swayed by any amount of rhetoric, dimples, or beatings. Lead by example, I always say.

Discussing politics at the office one afternoon in that luke-warm, non-inflammatory way that co-workers do, I was at least able to express the opinion that Wal-Mart just isn't for me, even if I can't expect everyone else in North America to stop shopping there, or hold people to my personal standards. After all, I have the privilege of being able to choose to shop elsewhere. I live downtown in a large city with lots of easy access to transportation, I have a reasonable amount of disposable income and I don't have any dependents. I'm not forced to shop at one store as many people are, either because their small town only has the Wal-Mart now, or because they don't have access to good transportation, or are simply shopping on a meagre, downsized budget (or some combination of all of those things).

But it remains that I refuse to shop there, and I think a lot of us could easily manage to buy our crap somewhere else given just a little pause for thought. There's a Wal-Mart moving into my hometown of Smiths Falls, now, and they've already received 3,000 job applications (in a city of 9,000). Times are tough for the place I grew up. Jobs are disappearing. So some might see the store's arrival as something of a blessing, as not only will Wal-Mart provide a lot of jobs, but it will provide cheap goods in vast quantities. Yet I'm not happy about this. Because Wal-Mart cuts corners so expertly, they can undercut almost any competitor in prices and selection. This eventually drives other, locally owned shops, right out of business. Wal-Mart also manages to save a great deal of money by offering employees poor wages and benefits. The management is vehemently anti-union.

Indeed, because Wal-Mart imports goods so extensively from countries like China, where goods are mass-produced for a fraction of the cost demanded by North American workers, we are sending our own jobs overseas by buying there. Domestic companies can no longer compete. Wal-Mart imported 12 billion dollars worth of goods from China alone last year.

I came across a great article detailing the economics of the Wal-Mart empire, and how this affects both its suppliers and the working joe. You can read it here, and I highly recommend doing so:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

I also have the article saved on this website as a PDF file in case it ever goes offline.  

It's been a fairly swell year for me, as these things are reckoned. With the completion of my courses in tax law, evidence law, and feminist law (agonizingly, however, my grades for all three are still pending), I'm now officially halfway finished my law degree (three terms down, and just three to go). I'm extremely well-rested after the holiday break, and warm in my happy, cluttered, candle-lit room. In terms of lifestyle, I am reasonably well off between my job, student loans, and receiving a modest student line of credit from the bank, so I can afford to eat and buy textbooks, as well as having paid back some of the money I owe my friends and buy my family some swell Christmas presents. Throughout 2003, I was surrounded by wonderful friends and a loving family, and I've also matured and grown as a person. I've learned to put the happiness of friends ahead of my own insecurities, crushes, desires, and baggage. I can leave heartache in the past and live more fully in the present. I was also privileged to read excellent books like Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? and treated to the cinematic goodness of The Return of the King.

But 2003 is memorable for reasons that have nothing to do with my new cat or
that wonderful, funny, dancing-filled and ultimately ill-fated first date that culminated in the girl of my dreams leaning back, limbo style, to avoid my lips as I leaned forward to kiss her. Instead, the world (or, rather, a very small and unilateral part of it) went to war against terror by invading one of the countries least connected to it. I was never in favour of the unilateral invasion of Iraq. I don't think world stability can be achieved when one nation, acting without justification and against the counsel of a largely outraged coalition of unwilling nations, can declare war on another country for political ends. Worse, what justification the United States was willing to offer the public and the United Nations Security Council have not been validated by any measure. Most reasonable people agreed the evidence supporting the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was dodgy even before the invasion. Now, no one refers to Iraq's WMDs except in derision.

The tunnel vision of the political machine in the US is highlighted by the fact that you probably never heard about the fact that honest-to-goodness weapons of mass destruction were found in 2003.

You heard me right. A terrorist plot involving the use of weapons of mass destruction against the US was foiled in 2003. Terrorists had assembled and stored a sodium-cyanide explosive capable of killing thousands of people, along with half a million rounds of amunition and more than a hundred other conventional explosives. Thanks to the redoubled efforts of the formerly humbled FBI, a deadly terrorist attack on US soil with real WMDs never came to be. But stop for a minute to ask yourself who could have been behind this evil terrorist plot -- Al-Qaida? Saddam Hussein? North Korea? In fact, it was the work of home-grown, white supremacist Americans working out of Texas.

I wonder: Did you read this news story on the front page of USA Today or see it on CNN? Did you hear about it at all? After months of colour-coded terror alerts, and commentators such as Ann Coulter pronouncing that the liberal left were one of the single greatest threats to American security (in fact, she dedicated an entire book to calling liberals "treasonous"), and fictitiously tenuous insinuations that Iraq had something, anything, to do with the attacks on September 11, 2001, you would think that the repercussions of a real live terrorist plot on US soil would fuel a media wildfire.
I believe the Daily Show actually covered this story, but as glad as I was to have seen it reported by someone at the time, isn't it sad that the only major media reporting came from a fake news show that airs in the US on Comedy Central?

The sordid details can be read about here:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1229/p02s01-usju.html

Here is an excerpt:

Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature.

"Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal," says Daniel Levitas, author of "The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right."

....

Experts say the case highlights the increased cooperation and quicker response by US agencies since Sept. 11. But others say it points up just how political the terror war is. "There is no value for the Bush administration to highlighting domestic terrorism right now," says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. "But there are significant political benefits to highlighting foreign terrorists, especially when trying to whip up support for war."

Mr. Levitas goes even further: "The government has a severe case of tunnel vision when it comes to domestic terrorism. I have no doubt whatsoever that had Krar and his compatriots been Arab-Americans or linked to some violent Islamic fundamentalist group, we would have heard from John Ashcroft himself."

....

Experts say the case is important not only because of what it says about increased government cooperation, but also because it shows how serious a threat the country faces from within. "The lesson in the Krar case is that we have to always be concerned about domestic terrorism. It would be a terrible mistake to believe that terrorism always comes from outside," says Mark Potok at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

The fact is, the number of domestic terrorist acts in the past five years far outweighs the number of international acts, says Mark Pitcavage of the fact-finding department at the Anti-Defamation League. "We do have home-grown hate in the United States, people who are just as ill-disposed to the American government as any international terrorist group," he says.

....

Because I'm not a skilled, dedicated, and s-m-r-t political weblogger like the devastatingly astute Atrios or the sexily brilliant Cruinne, I'm also including a link to a critical examination of the matter by Orcinus:

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003_12_28_dneiwert_archive.html#107257032555368697

So, happy 2004. May it be filled with far more peace and prosperity around the world than 2003 saw. In particular, may the citizens of the United States of the America, a good and well-meaninging people all in all, boot that no-account George W. Bush out of office and restore some sanity, integrity, compassion, honesty, and rational thought to the White House.

On a personal note, I hope that everyone reading this is happy, warm, well-fed and safe, and may your 2004 be filled with smooches, cake, great books, good beer, and sexy thoughts of me.