Want to decrease your carbon footprint? Have fewer children. While you're at it, some gross negligence, reckless driving, or (for eco-terrorist bonus points) maybe a premeditated murder or two could potentially erase your carbon footprint altogether!

Ugh. Are we really this stupid?

(NOTE: I've been tweaking and thinking and re-tweaking this one for a long time. I think it's time to just post it and hope it makes sense. Or is long and rambling enough that no one will read it, and therefore be able to criticize me for writing it. d^_^b)

I admit, I don't follow athletics very closely. But it is hard to miss conversations about Caster Semenya, the South African runner who has been dominating sports headlines lately.

The extant furor is over the IAAF's decision to perform genetic testing to determine whether Caster should be allowed to compete as a woman. Caster consented to the testing, though we'll likely have to wait until November to hear the results. She and her family are quite dismissive of the whole affair. In the particulars, I'm with them. The IAAF has done bizarre things before and will do bizarre things again. Life goes on.

But in the abstract? Well, you know how I love me some abstract!

Since my previous entry, I've started three blogs that I couldn't finish. Mostly out of anger, or despondency, or perhaps both. I'm a bad person, yes, I know. So here's a story about my precocious daughter, because while it may not be incisive political commentary or helpful law school advice, right this moment I could use the psychological boost that comes with actually finishing something I've started. d^_^b

After almost three years of law school, you grow accustomed to certain patterns. One of those patterns takes the form of a question that Professors employ to "teach" something about "intent." Because intent impacts tort law, criminal law, contract law, and so forth, the question comes up repeatedly throughout one's legal education. It has to do with ascertaining intent, and through gross misapplication of something they like to call the Socratic Method, professors will eventually spring the trap:

"Isn't intent subjective!?"

For quite a while now, something has been bothering me and I haven't been able to quite pin it down. The incidence of this vague dissatisfaction always seemed to border on petty, but I could sense a depth there, eluding me, mocking my attempts to fathom it. I've probably failed again, before I've even begun, but... perhaps aggregating things here will help. But be warned--I am going to talk about media depictions of "unsavory" things, which ironically some will find in itself unsavory.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a funny (in retrospect...) conversation with a couple of kibitzing 1Ls. I had (in a separate conversation with a somewhat brighter 2L) sweepingly generalized this year's presidential election as a choice between "stupid hope" and "stupid fear." The 2L asked me whether it was "really" stupid fear, suggesting that we may not know how many terrorist attacks have been prevented since the Towers went down. I responded that, no, I could hardly claim epistemic certainty about the absence of theoretical events--

What the frak.

So it turns out I'm partial to "freak" and "freaking" (pronounced "frick" and "frickin'"). My wife was somewhat more tickled by "feck," as borrowed from the TV comedy Father Ted. With George Carlin's recent death, it seems like everyone has swearing on the brain... so I wasn't entirely surprised to see that CNN finally picked up on how Battlestar Galactica's "frak" has infiltrated the language as a "pseudo-swear."

As a teenager, I plowed through just about every book then written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Though I would be hard pressed, over a decade later, to recall any of those works in great detail, one of their less impressive projects, the Darksword books, included a passage that has, for some reason, stuck with me over the years. A young man is asked to explain why he was admitted early to an institution of some prestige:

Every summer for several years now, my mother-in-law's extended family has gathered at Bear Lake for a few days of fun at the lake. We've stayed at various places, but last summer reservations were made, a full year in advance, for this years festivities to occur at a lakeside condominium.

My recent consumption of Neal Stephenson literature has sent me down an old and familiar path, returning to a theme I was first exposed to by the works of Robert Pirsig. It is a theme as diverse as post-cyberpunk science fiction and Amish rumspringa, posing at once an explanation for the past and a seemingly intractable challenge for the future. It bears implications for religious and riotous living alike.