Ruminations, Research, and Writing
Everlasting friends can go long periods of time without speaking and never question the friendship. Regardless of how long it has been or how far away they live, everlasting friends pick up like they just spoke yesterday, and they don’t hold grudges. They understand that life is busy, but you will always love them.
I am so fortunate to have everlasting friends from high school, college, law school, and other times of my life.
If you aren’t familiar with TED Talks yet, I am about to change that.
TED started in 1984, the year I graduated from college, as a conference to bring together people from the fields of Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It is a nonprofit that holds annual conferences in both Long Beach and in Palm Springs each spring, and has grown to hold the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer. The TED Talks are published on the TED Talks video site, which has the capability of translating the talks into up to 27 different languages at this point. More are planned. TED does much more each year to facilitate advancement of the arts and sciences.
The video site on the web offers hundreds of 18 minute talks – not lectures – on subjects as diverse as Cassini’s discovery of the surface tectonics on Saturn’s moon Titan to Sam Harris’s explanation of how morality is hardwired into humans and other animals. The speakers are challenged to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
The spelunker who plans to lead the expedition to mine moon ice is absolutely riveting. Watch him. How can cave exploration and space exploration be related? How can a spelunker think that he can go into space and mine water on the moon as a propellant for space vehicles to then go to Europa? Is this science fiction? Not the way he tells it. Watch the video. If it doesn’t make your jaw drop, you aren’t paying attention.
TED isn’t just about science.A pair of beautiful dancers perform Symbiosis – and it is understandable. Isabel Allende tells true tales of passion, Natalie Merchant sings nearly forgotten children’s poems from the 19th and 20th century from her recent album Leave Your Sleep.
TED is on the edge of what is happening in the world. In July 2010. Chris Anderson of TED interviewed Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks had just released the documents related to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and there were rumors that it had still more documents that would set the US government on its ear.
Consider what Julian Assange says in this interview. He explains how the site operates, what it has accomplished, and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad in which a number of civilians and two Reuters reporters were killed.
Did you note that Assange specifically denies having the embassy cables? In the same breath he said assertively that if WikiLeaks had them, it has a duty to release them so that the world knows.
Assange asserted that “it’s a worry that the rest of the world’s media is doing such a bad job that a little group of activists is able to release more of that type of information than the rest of the world press combined”? Mainstream media does not release documents like these – not since the Pentagon Papers, that is. One has to wonder if our corporate media even would release such explosive news in this day and age. The news we do get is slanted in such a way as to suit the editorial desires of the publisher, and so often one publisher publishes numerous large newspapers, owns numerous television stations, and even owns radio stations. The news is the same on each one. We no longer have news. We have propaganda. The days of Walter Cronkite are gone.
What does WikiLeaks seek to publish? According to Assange, anything that an organization wants to keep secret. If there is an economic reason for keeping a secret, then it is in the best interest of the world to expose that secret in order to level the playing field. That, he says, is what journalism is.
That is what investigative journalism should be.
Assange pointed out that releasing the video of the Apache helicopter firing on the group of civilians that included the Reuters reporters was not done to inform the Afghans or the Iraqis. They see it every day,” he claimed. “But it will change the perception and opinion of the people who are paying for it all. And that is our hope.” Knowing in advance that innocents were killed in that incident may color our perception of what happened. We hear the soldiers in the helicopter talking and laughing, but to know that the firing was indiscriminate changed how we feel about their demeanor. Is this incident isolated? Or is it typical? We do not know We know this incident happened. We saw it; We do not know if more, similar incidents have happened. We hope not; we fear so.
WikiLeaks’s activities around the globe have resulted in major changes for the better, and for human rights and freedom. The Kenyan election was one example, and recently the Iceland legislature’s passage of a law allowing freedom of speech for journalists that is perhaps the broadest in the world is another.
Americans are divided on the issue of the Embassy documents, and on the war documents. WikiLeaks released them to show abuses. Our country is committing those abuses. It is natural to defend our country, but at the same time, we should not be committing the abuses. We have been caught, Our misdeeds have been exposed by our own words. Yes, it is embarrassing. Yes, we have lost face on the world stage.
Perhaps had we not committed those abuses, our faces would not be so red right now.
Thank you, WikiLeaks, for showing us the truth.
My mom wanted me on the board of an historical cemetery. I thought it would be awesome – it’s a great old place with lots of ghost stories and locally famous – and infamous – people buried there. Including a truckload of my ancestors.
“I need your resume,” she told me.
“Mom, I hardly think that my work history has anything to do with why I might be qualified to serve on that board.”
“So dress it up. Emphasize your genealogy research and your history research. Talk about your volunteer work.”
In other words, she wanted me to re-craft my resume entirely. Therefore, I did exactly what I always do when given an irritating assignment: I procrastinated.
A week later: “I really need your resume.”
Two weeks later: “If you don’t get me that resume I can’t nominate you.”
Three weeks later: “I need it today.”
Crap. And I was having so much fun putting it off.
“Just write something. I’ll rewrite it to suit our nomination style.”
Had she said this in the first place, I could have whipped off a few relevant paragraphs and been done with this a month ago. But she said she wanted a freaking resume. So after lunch, I sat down and wrote:
Anne has a keen interest in genealogy and history, and has done research on both in this particular cemetery, once regrettably denting the side of her car as she took a turn too sharply around a certain walled plot in the northeast corner of the place. Her interest in these disciplines began in high school, when in 1976 she won the esteemed and coveted Annual Ninth Grade History Award at All Saints Episcopal School in Vicksburg, Mississippi, mostly to prove to a certain boy that she was smarter than he was. It must have worked, because that intimidated lad has refused to this day (over 30 years later!) to come to class reunions. Her interest was fed her freshman year at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, when given the task of charting the genealogy of Zeus’s progeny she instead charted the genealogy of the entire Greek pantheon. While mostly accurate, her work earned her a C for failing to follow directions. Her professor was not interested in reading that much. Anne didn’t really care, since being right was all that mattered. When she graduated from Colgate in 1984, her major was English, not Greek.
With no immediate better use to put an English major, Anne returned to her Arkansas roots the following year to go to law school. Anne clerked for Justice David Newbern at the Arkansas Supreme Court, then worked for a state agency or two until her secretary, one Gennifer Flowers, decided to hit the front page of the papers and not return to work. Anne opened her own law practice in 1993 and has remained in private practice ever since. Today, after 16 years in the trenches of litigation, Anne is a managing member of the law firm Almand, Orsi & Campbell, PLLC, which handles civil litigation. Both she and her cousin and law partner, Donald K. Campbell, III, have generations of ancestors buried at this cemetery, stories about whom they occasionally pull out, dust off, and tell to their children and other passers-by, whether or not such innocents are especially interested.
Anne has maintained a moderately noticeable profile among local bar and statewide bar associations. She joined a whole slew of them in 1988 immediately after getting her J.D. from UALR Law School and passing the bar. In 1993 she was made Parliamentarian of the Arkansas Association of Woman Lawyers, then served as Vice President in 1994-1995, and as President in 1995-1996. She remains a member of the group today. She has been a member of the Pulaski County Bar Association since 1988, and served as co-chair of the Hospitality Committee in 1995-1996. Likewise she retains her membership in the Arkansas Trial Lawyers Association, for which she chaired the Domestic Relations Division in 1997-1998. She was a member of the American Bar Association from 1988-1996, when membership became prohibitively expensive. Most of her bar activities have been through the Arkansas Bar Association, for which she has served on numerous committees, including the Real Estate Committee, Probate Law Committee, Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare Committee, Women and Minorities in the Law Committee, Mock Trial Committee, Online Legal Research Committee, Civil Litigation Committee, and Access to Justice Committee.
Very conscious of the fact that not everyone has access to the legal system in a meaningful way, Anne donates her time and expertise through two of Arkansas’ legal services organizations. The Center for Arkansas Legal Services helps clients in the central Arkansas area, and Anne is one of the attorneys who accepts legal representation of clients in need who meet low income guidelines. Anne volunteers in rural areas of the state for Arkansas Volunteer Lawyers for the Elderly, another legal aid program that ensures that senior citizens with limited assets and income can access the legal system.
She has served on the boards of other historical societies, including Scott Connections in Scott, Arkansas (Director, 2007-2008), and the National Society of Colonial Dames of America in Arkansas (Director, 2006-09; and Board of Managers 2009-present). This spring Anne was selected to be the state’s Regent of Gunston Hall, the Northern Virginia home of founding father George Mason, a position she will hold for the next four years.
Anne is active in several of her family’s businesses. She is on the board of directors of ARNO, Inc. and Pioneer Farms, and has served as Chairman of the Board of Three Rivers Title Services, Inc. since 1999.
For pleasure, Anne loves to grow herbs, read, and write short stories. She maintains two blogs: one is purely for pleasure and the other is purely for work. She is also working on three novels, none of which she ever expects to finish unless the Fountain of Youth is found and she drinks copiously from its non-Stygian depths.
“Very amusing, my dear. I will extract the pertinent information to send out to the rest of the Board, omitting the humor, sad though that makes me.”
She will extract the pertinent information? That means most of what I wrote will end up in the trash.
And I worked so hard to get it to her!
Sadly edited in 2012 to remove links to the defunct law firm of Almand, Orsi & Campbell, PLLC.
Let’s face it: social networking is fun. We stay in touch with friends flung geographically far and wide, and we reconnect with friends from summer camp, college, and even kindergarten. We make witty comments in our status bar, witty comments about our friends’ statuses, and even wittier comments on those wonderful photos posted everywhere. We comment on political statements, join groups and become fans of things, and write posts about things we feel are important. We even write posts about things that aren’t so important, but that we think are hilarious at the time. We post family photos, high school reunion photos, and photos from parties.
Oops. Rewind.
Photos from parties? She doesn’t remember behaving the embarrassing way that picture depicts her, so maybe she should be reminded!
Reunions? He kissed his old girlfriend and now his wife wants a divorce!
“Witty” comments? Those can be taken any number of ways. And what if we – dare we even think it – get into smackdown-style ripostes with people who get on our wrong sides?
When we are in the midst of litigation where our characters may be an issue, social networking sites are Not Our Friends. Unless, of course, the Other Party’s character is the big issue and they have neither read this article nor taken its advice. Then we love social networking websites. That’s because lawyers have subpoena power and are not afraid to use it in the quest for elusive evidence that will help win their clients’ cases.
Within the last few years, as more and more people from teenagers to grandmothers register with MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Bebo, and any number of other social networking sites, personal information has become easily obtainable on the web. The personal information that these sites protect includes things like credit card numbers, telephone numbers, and email addresses. They do not protect the information users carelessly put out in public for anyone to see.
The things that lawyers either love or hate about these sites are the things people do not bother to hide. These are things like how much a person drinks, who they kiss, who they are sleeping with, what social activities they enjoy, what clubs they belong to, what their political leanings are, where they hang out, where they were on a certain night.
Why would a lawyer care about these things?
I’ll tell you why.
Scenario 1:
Bob has come to Lawyer seeking custody of his two children, ages 4 and 7, who live with their mother, Candy. Bob tells Lawyer all kinds of horror stories that his kids have told him about their mother, none of which can be proven in court because (1) judges hate it when young children testify, and (2) it’s hearsay unless they do. Bob tells Lawyer that Candy has a Facebook page.
Lawyer checks out Candy’s Facebook page, either through Bob’s account or through a third person who is a contact of Candy’s. It turns out that Candy is either a fan or a member of the following groups, among others: NORML, Facebook Sluts, Drugz Rule, and assorted others in the same vein. On the wall of the group Heroin, Candy posted this comment: “ i think it should b legalized, its ur choice to do it…not anyone elses. It takes away depression nd i dont c wat the big deal of it.” On the wall of the Sex Workers of Pulaski County group, she posted, “i have sex with anyone that pays!” Candy has been tagged in a number of photos with her breasts bared, and apparently extremely intoxicated. She has posted at least three photos of her children riding in cars without seatbelts or car seats. One man posted to her wall, “Last night was gr8 babe but next time dose the kids with something to make them sleep.” Her reply was, “sry benedryl usually works nex time i use codine.”
Bob takes screenshots of the pertinent posts for his lawyer and continues to deliver posts similarly devastating to Candy’s case on a regular basis. Lawyer files motions asking that Candy be immediately tested for both drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, both of which are positive. At the final hearing, all of these posts are presented as evidence. Candy has no choice but to admit they were made by her.
Guess who wins custody?
Scenario 2:
Joella is injured in an automobile accident. She has filed suit against the person who drove the other car, and who was at fault in the accident. Months and months pass, during which Joella still claims not to be able to walk more than about twenty yards at a go, and claims that she still cannot sit or stand for any significant period of time. Finally, at her deposition, a year after the accident and with her still claiming not to be any better, the other driver’s lawyer pulls out a photo that was posted to Joella’s Twitter account. It is of Joella in her snow-bunny outfit sitting on a ski lift. There are about twenty more pictures, all posted to that account over the week of Spring Break just three months after the accident. The accompanying Tweets make it clear that Joella not only had a great vacation on the slopes but danced the nights away that week in Vail.
Her settlement is substantially lower than she had hoped. In fact, it does not even cover her medical bills since she continued going to therapy claiming to be in terrible pain long after that ski trip.
Scenario 3:
Because they like crowds and many participants at their events, a group of drag racing enthusiasts posted their plans to hold illegal street races to a website. They did not realize that police had discovered the website a couple of weeks before, and to their dismay, on January 15-16, 2010, four of the racers were arrested. The police had staked out the location of the race. Yes, this really happened.
Scenario 4:
Remember the riots after the NBA championship game in Los Angeles last summer? Police used YouTube and Flickr to identify people involved in riots following the June 14, 2009, NBA Championship.
Scenario 5:
You don’t have to be the one who posts anything. Like the looters and rioters in Los Angeles after the Lakers Championship in June 2009, people with cellphones took photos and videos of a fight in Suffolk, Virginia, that led to the arrest of the participants. The videos were uploaded to YouTube.
We’re starting to see this a lot in the employment law arena – e.g., employees calling in “sick” and then boasting on Facebook about the things they did while out – like drug use, vacations, etc. Surprise! – they get fired for it.
And what about the 17-year-old Buffalo, NY girl who killed her boyfriend in a drunk driving accident, then a month later went on a beach vacation. Upon her return to New York, she posted a picture captioned “Drunk in Florida” to her Facebook page. How could she be surprised when the sentencing judge essentially threw the book at her?
I don’t think that, in general, this generation does things that are any more reckless or stupid than what many of us did in our youth (although this particular case is obviously egregious), but why would anyone what to publicize their stupidity to the world?
As for why people share these things with complete and total strangers (or just anyone, without restriction, who wants to see them), they either don’t know how to adjust the privacy settings on their accounts, or they’re naive enough to think that those whom they’ve granted “friend” status on a social networking site don’t include people who are just waiting for the chance to rat them out. It seems as if some are absolutely inviting the police to catch them at their illegal activities.
As LAPD’s chief detective Lt. Paul Vernon said as the riot arrests last June mounted, “It’s nearly impossible to stay anonymous in this age of cell phones, video, and social websites; and that’s a good thing if it holds people more accountable for their behavior.”
The moral of the story is to behave always as though your worst enemy is watching. Chances are, he is.
I’m riding my white horse today.
As a lawyer, I know that people get harmed through no fault of their own by other’s people’s negligence and failure to pay attention to what is important. Whether it’s a car accident, a doctor who ignores symptoms, or a vicious dog who attacks a child, the person who is hurt should not have to pay the price for the injury. The court system cannot give back the things these people have lost: time away from work which leads to the loss of their careers, the pretty face that existed before the dog mauled the four year old girl, the mother who was killed by a drunk driver, living without constant pain caused by the injuries in the accident, the cheerful contributions to her family that the coma patient used to make before the doctor ignored the pulmonary thrombosis that led to her vegetative state.
When lawyers screw up a case, clients want to sue them and recover their losses. And they should. They should also be able to sue doctors, negligent drivers, and other people whose failure to pay attention has hurt them.
Unfortunately, “tort reform” usually means “medical malpractice lawsuit reform.” People think that lawyers are mean to doctors, who are just doing their best to heal people who probably can’t be healed in the first place.
That is not the case.
Look at the statistics in a recent Huffington Post article. Only 2-3% of ALL medical malpractice results in a lawsuit. That’s not 2-3% of medical care cases; that’s 2-3% of actual malpractice situations. Is such a number of lawsuits really excessive?
Caps on punitive damages is the issue Obama is expected to embrace, though. Punitive damages don’t reimburse someone for money they are out. Compensatory damages cover that. Punitive damages are intended as punishment – hence, the name “punitive.”
Why would someone require punishment for a screw-up? Think about how we decide how and whether to punish our children for negligence. Let’s say that Susie and Jenny are at a birthday party for one of their classmates and it’s cake and ice cream time. Susie gets excited explaining something and throws her arms wide, knocking over Jenny’s glass of punch, spilling it on her and ruining her party dress. Of course, Susie has to apologize to Jenny, and she has to get Jenny another glass of punch. She has to help clean up the mess, and if Jenny’s party dress is expensive Susie’s mom might offer to pay for it to be cleaned. These actions are compensatory in nature. They compensate Jenny for the loss of her glass of punch, her clean and dry dress, and her hurt feelings.
If Susie knocks the punch over because she was dancing on the table, though, Susie will be punished. Punitive action will be taken to ensure she doesn’t dance on the table and spill someone’s punch again.
Maybe we put Susie in time-out. Maybe Susie gets a spanking. Maybe Susie is grounded from her Barbies, or she is not allowed to go to any parties for the next month.
The point is not that Susie is being punished for doing something intentionally. She did not. She did spill the punch while being grossly negligent, though. She should have known that if she danced on the table where Jenny’s punch sat, the punch would spill.
Punitive damages in these cases are intended to stop gross negligence. They are not appropriate where there is no gross negligence – where the punch spills accidentally due to something unforeseen or where the negligence was minor. Punitive damages are for those egregious cases where the doctor ignored clear warning signs of his patient’s impending doom and did nothing.
Punitive damages are not awarded lightly by any jury. If a jury awards an amount in the millions, it is because the defendant in those medical malpractice actions has the resources to pay such an amount, even if it hurts. Punishment is not intended to kill, and punitive damages that bankrupt a company or a doctor aren’t appropriate. Punitive damages are supposed to hurt, though – just like being grounded from birthday parties hurts. And just like Susie, the idea is that punitive damages will hurt for a little while, but the defendant will get over it – hopefully to go forth more carefully in the future.
Did you hear? I had a softball-sized tumor removed from my neck three weeks ago.
I noticed it about a year ago and shrugged it off, thinking it was a little lipoma that wasn’t any big deal. Then I began having trouble turning my head. The lump was getting bigger – about the size of a golf ball – and I couldn’t comfortably wear turtlenecks or even mock neck shirts. I named my lump Esmeralda and patiently waited for her to gain sentience.
When Esmeralda started aching, I decided to go to the doctor. I hate going to the doctor, especially if I think I’m going to get bad news. I’ve had cancer twice, so having a tumor made me think that number three was here. If I pretended it didn’t exist, it would go away. I’m a very bright girl in these matters. I knew exactly what I was doing when I ignored the wretched thing for so long. Really.
My doctor looked at it and said that there was no question that it needed to come out. Clearly, it was causing me trouble. Even if it was probably just a lipoma and not something devastating, it was in a bad place. And, he said, even for a lipoma it was, well, kind of big. There was definitely an asymmetry to my non-gazelle-like neck. A bump about the size of half a golf ball hung off the side it.
I knew all this before he told me. I knew he’d have to refer me to a surgeon. That’s why I was there, right? So, deep breath, I got the referral and made the appointment and went the next week to see when I could divorce myself from dear Esmeralda, who I was beginning to think of as my dicephalic parapagus conjoined twin.
He sent me to an otolaryngology clinic. Otolaryngologists cut on people’s necks when the spine isn’t involved. I was glad my spine wasn’t involved, although I did wonder if that was because I simply didn’t have one. What kind of person, being possessed of a spine, was afraid of what was probably just a harmless little lipoma?
At the otolaryngology clinic, I got a CT scan of my neck. Back in the examination room, the surgeon pulled up the scan on the computer screen. “Wow, it’s really big!” he exclaimed. He showed me what to look at. The difference in the two sides of my neck was obvious. One side of the screen looked like what you’d think a neck should look like on a CT scan. By that I mean it had not much flesh and a big amount of bone. At least, that one side did. The other side? Well, it was different. Waaaay different.
There was a vast blackness that took up a lot of space on the right half of my neck. It looked as though Darth Vader himself had taken up residence there and his helmet was pushing things around.
The doctor pointed out how my muscle was stretched over this dark growth, how my nerves and blood vessels were pushed out of place, and how much space the thing took up.
“It’s sooo biiiig,” he said again. And again. And yet another time, just in case I hadn’t heard him before. That’s right. Only I could have a freakishly large tumor in a place with as little flesh as my neck and not notice it for years on end. Evidently, I can’t see a damn thing with my eyes full of sand.
Lipomas usually grow just right under the skin and are fairly simple to remove. Unless they become bothersome, it’s not necessary to remove them at all. Mine was different. It was under the muscle, which, the doctor graciously postulated, was probably the reason I had never realized it had been growing there for so long. It was also pressing on important nerves and blood vessels. There just isn’t a lot of room in a neck, and there’s a lot of important stuff there. Like, say, the carotid artery, which feeds blood to the brain. Which my lipoma had shoved out of place. In fact, it had shoved things so far out of place that I was in danger of soon looking like the Elephant Man.
Surgery wasn’t just an option; it was necessary due to both the size and the location. If Esmeralda really did get large enough to become sentient, state law would forbid me from removing her. I mean, I could already forget about using federal funds. Her presence could no longer be disguised with loose clothing or makeup. I had to act, and act quickly.
The problem was, the size and location of the tumor meant that a different doctor needed to do the surgery. Someone who specialized in cancers of the head and neck. Swell. The”C” word again. Fortunately, I liked the new surgeon. I liked the old one, too, but the new one was quick-witted, funny, and personable. And probably married. (sigh)
My family rallied around me. My sister went with me to the pre-surgery appointment. My mom took me to her house after the surgery so I could be pampered. Jack came to see me that night. I felt pretty raw, and my throat, complete with a drainage tube, wasn’t pretty either.
Three weeks later, I’m still a little tired, but I’m fine. Some mornings it’s harder to shake off the latent effects of the anesthesia than others. Of course, staying up until 1 a.m. to finish a novel I can’t put down sort of contributes to the problem, but I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do. (The books are really good. Brent Weeks is a new, young author and he has time to grow. I can’t wait for his next offering.)
I have an awe-inspiring scar on my throat. I can come up with plenty of tales to explain its presence.
I’ve told the story of Jack the Ripper to my wide-eyed nieces and youngest nephew (they’re 11, 8, and 6). I have the scar to prove that I narrowly escaped him.
Next, I plan to work up a tale of the Bride of Frankenstein for their entertainment. I’ve already got the white hair at the temples going on, so between that and the scar, I’m not going to have to spend a lot on costuming.
The surgeon said that the tumor had to have been there for a very, very long time to be as large as it was. How the hell does a softball manage to hide in a neck for years and only show up as a golf-ball sized bulge?
The size of the thing was apparently really impressive. Every time I call his office his nurse exclaims, “Oh, you’re the one with that really huge lipoma!” Every time. Every stinkin’ time. I’m beginning to wonder if I ought not to have saved the damn thing and taken it on the road. I could have made a living in the sideshow as the girl with the softball in her neck.
Maybe I should have had the thing cut in two and used it for a boob job. Next time, if there is a next time, I’m going to think that through carefully.
According to CNN, an International Atomic Energy Agency draft report says that “Iran may be working on secretly developing a nuclear warhead for a missile.”
They MIGHT? Really? I mean, my cats might be, too. Should UN Inspectors beat a path to my door, too?
And why is CNN reporting on a draft report that says maybe something is happening?
Oh. Wait. I see why. According to CNN, “The IAEA’s draft report became public on the same day that Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech in Washington warning about the dangers of nuclear proliferation.”
This is what propaganda looks like.
God, I love The Oatmeal!
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