Terrorists, your game is through

An injunction! (And also one of these!) Why didn't we think of that earlier?!

University officials filed a lawsuit against the Animal Liberation Front, the Animal Liberation Brigade and five unnamed individuals because of various attacks on professors who have been conducting animal research over the last two years.

While the concept of filing for an injunction against people you can't identify is funny, the organization's planned defense is even funnier:

“The Animal Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Brigade are two underground organizations that do not exist."

It's not clear how these non-existent organizations are planning to go about filing this defense or the threatened countersuit, but it should be interesting.

Focus the 'Tos

Today is "Focus the Nation," a national teach-in on global warming. It comes amidst a lot of exciting progress on climate change at UCLA Law. Last week's law review symposium highlighted some of the best idea for addressing the problem. The school announced that it had received a $5 million gift to open the country's first center for climate change law. A group of students has embarked on an effort to personally comply with the Kyoto Protocol. And I even got to meet one of the impostor Jonathan Wieners. (Details to follow in another post).

But this blog is not about the nation, the globe, or even UCLA Law. It is about the 'Tos, which joined the party last week.

Thanks to the efforts of Kacey Fitzpatrick and the other folks behind Cool Los Altos, our city has pledged to meet the Kyoto Protocol by 2012. This seems like it will require rethinking, among other things, how much we want to continue use free public parking to subsidize driving. I'm not optimistic that we will necessarily pull it off -- at least so long as council member and blog whipping boy Ron Packard believes that the only thing Los Altos should do about the great challenge of our time is promulgate weak revisions to the building code. But at least it will be nice to know that we inspired Iraq.

The Daily Bruin violates the Best Evidence Rule

A year after repeatedly electrocuting a kid who was lying on the floor of the library in pain, UCLA has finally come out with a new policy regarding when officers can use Tasers. (This according to the Daily Bruin, which has not actually seen a copy of the new policy).

The highlights include a prohibition on Tasing people engaged in passive resistance and a requirement that police officers actually get trained by someone other than the company who makes the weapon.

Can someone please tell me why it took more than a year to come up with this?

Dinner with Mike Gravel

I know who I am voting for.

Mike Gravel -- the man who ended the draft (and therefore the Vietnam War) and entered the Pentagon papers into the public record -- joined a small group of UCLA law students for dinner Friday night.

Gravel is the first candidate I've heard come out in support of the Wiener platform, my proposal to eliminate our country's stupidest policies. (I did not ask him not know how he feels about the penny). He has a plan to end the war (stop fighting it), and has both the best environmental record of any on candidate (he cosponsored much of our key environmental legislation in the 70's) and the best plan for new solutions (a carbon tax).

But Gravel is thinking even bigger than that. He wants to change the way we write laws and the way we tax ourselves. His real motivation for running is to draw attention to his National Initiative for Democracy, a popularly ratified constitutional amendment that would institute a version of California's initiative process at the national level. The plan eliminates the worst feature of California's system by making it a crime to spend any corporate dollars in campaigns. Of course, it still has some drawbacks, as Gravel admitted. For one, people are kind of stupid. However, unlike legislatures, they have no need to raise massive amounts of money and have more freedom to fix their mistakes.

Gravel has been shut out of recent Democratic debates, because he hasn't met the arbitrary and disturbing standard of needing a million dollars, clearly designed to keep him out. (This is a perverse reversal of spending limits that other jurisdictions employ). As he is unlikely to solve that particular problem if he keeps spending 2.5 hours with a handful of students, look for him next at a Dec. 10 afternoon rally outside NBC studios.

Another reason to hate your orthodontist

Congratulations on your retirement, UCLA orthodontics residency program chair Dr. Eric Ting.

The Daily Bruin came out swinging today against UCLA's school of orthodontics, documenting its practice of selling residency spots to the relatives of big donors. In one case, the admissions committe told one applicant he was in, only to call him back the next in an attempt to shake him down for $60,000.

The headline, "Donations influence admissions," was somewhat laughable until I remembered that I went to a public university. One professor called it a "mockery of the merit based traditions and social values that have made the University of California the best and most admired public university system in the world today."

Kudos to the Daily Bruin for a well-researched story.

UPDATE, 11/14: Our future dentists are crooked, too.

Time to sit back and wait for the federal clerkship offers to roll in

Member, City Council CITY OF LOS ALTOS
Completed Precincts 19 of 19
		Percent	Votes
DAVID CASAS		27.59%	4,435
RONALD D. PACKARD		26.41%	4,246
UCLAW alum MEGAN SATTERLEE		24.11%	3,876
RANDALL HULL		21.89%	3,519

My brother informs me that Towelie and I tied for last place with one vote apiece.

This week in Westwood

A man is skulking around town with a crossbow (!) and two women are violently attacked. At what point do we start getting breaks on rent?

Next time, use a blog

The editorial board of the Daily Bruin pulled no punches last week in attacking one of its lesser rivals.

The Advocate, an anti-abortion rights publication, had accused the Daily Bruin of acting as a front for the school administration's supposed disinformation campaign aimed at coercing pregnant students into abortions and saving the school the headache of taking pre-natal care seriously. Not so, said the Bruin's editorial.

If there were some way to be further from the truth, this Editorial Board would be surprised.

...

Students should be wary of accepting the views put forth by The Advocate until its writers start to take the facts seriously.

What's that they say about glass houses?

That same day, the Daily Bruin's front-page story heralded the student government's approval on an on-campus pub. Only problem was that it was not at all true.

The paper deserves credit for putting its correction on the front-page the following day, but it failed to explain the reason it got the story wrong -- reliance on a single anonymous source. It would be easy to dismiss this as an isolated occurence of a student journalist being lazy or making a rookie mistake. But then what would Judy Miller's excuse be?

Living the dream

Who wants to be a civil engineer when hanging out at frat parties is so fun?

The most popular man at last Thursday's Phi Psi "Miami Vice" party was one of the few old enough to remember the television show that inspired the theme. While the frat brothers swilled vodka and shotgunned tasteless beer in the corner, the girls were all calling Craig Harrison's name.

The "brain" behind "MV SPARTANS BLOW GOATS" is now the brain behind 575 Productions, a photography company that shoots events for drunk college kids (not excluding a certain brother of mine, described by a law school classmate who attended the party as "Much more of an animal than you.") Generally speaking, the subjects seem to be both willing and blissfully unaware that their parents have internet connections.













Those guys are solid dudes. I'm totally rushing them in the fall.

Things I learned at law school this week

Wearing a tux, attempting to bribe a juror and accusing a defense witness of having 'San Francisco values' are not as effective ways of winning a trial as you might think. (The nine-fingered litigator I am not).

Poor bloggers can say just about whatever they want. (My next post: "The following people are gay.")

And, according to my Constitutional Law classmates, Reagan "liberated" mentally disabled patients, voting equals political power and social welfare programs are evidence that the poor have a strong voice

Reprieve for apron parkers

Parking enforcement officers are delaying a plan to ticket "apron parking" in Westwood Village until the end of the spring quarter, according to an uncomfirmed report in the Daily Bruin this week.

This, of course, is a small setback for Michael Dukakis, Democratic nominee for President turned solver of local parking problems. It also, unfortunately, complicates Flexcar's plan to capitalize on the crackdown by heavily recruiting UCLA students.

Dukakis, at least, is not letting this development temper his commitment to public service. A Daily Bruin letter-writer spotted Dukakis picking up trash on his way to school this week.

At right: Dukakis overcomes reputation as soft on crime
and prepares to ticket apron parkers himself.

UCLA faces lawsuit for Taser incident

The UCLA student Tasered multiple times for his failure to show idea is suing UCLA for violating his civil rights. Mostafa Tabatabainejad's complaint, which is supposedly on the Daily Bruin Web site somewhere (if anybody can find it, let me know), includes allegations of excessive force, battery and, curiously, an American with Disabilities Act violation.

Not surprisingly, the account of the incident in the complaint looks even worse than the original story. According to the complaint (or at least Sara Taylor's description of it in today's Daily Bruin), UCPD officer Terrence Duren fired the Taser more than once after Tabatabainejad was already in handcuffs.

Notably, the complaint does not raise an issue of racial profiling, an accusation which would seem difficult to prove given the facts of this case. I expect that a lot of people are likely to lose interest as a result. But the constitutional question has more significant ramifications. If Tabatabainejad can resist the temptation to settle and end up prevailing on that issue, it will put a lot of pressure on police departments across the state to prohibit the use of Tasers on suspects who are passively resisting.

Acting Chancellor Norm Abrams has released a rather bland statement, saying "We regret that Mostafa Tabatabainejad has filed a lawsuit at this time," and asking everyone to wait for the results of an independent investigation. No word yet on when those will be coming.

On the other hand, we got a green light for our baby-killing policies

UCLA has "at least one policy" that substantially restricts freedom of speech, including, apparently, the freedom of reporters to explain what the hell they're talking about.

I thought the speech policy in question, bizarrely never mentioned in the front-page story in today's Daily Bruin, might be the one that prohibits hanging signs out from the windows in college-owned housing.

I'm sympathetic to those who think that colleges can do students a disservice by trying to protect them from challenging, offensive or even stupid views, especially since my brief turn as the campus racist at Williams. I suspect the reason so many of my fellow alumni become Republicans is that few of us had to justify our beliefs in college. When we eventually discover that those beliefs have weaknesses, some people feel betrayed or perhaps wiser.

But Freedom and Individual Rights in Education, the group who issued the report cited in the Daily Bruin article, doesn't specify how UCLA's student codes are illegal. That is the reason the article doesn't specify which code it is or how it infringes on free speech. The blanket allegations make it close to impossible to come up with an informed response. The report, it's worth noting, was already at least six months out of date when it was published in December, as it still listed Albert Carnesale as chancellor.

David Lazar is about to blow your mind

Over at Gold Star Mother Speaks Out, Karen Meredith is pleading with readers to write to Congress in opposition of the President's call for an escalation in Iraq. I'll probably do that myself, but first I figured I'd make fun of this schmuck named David Lazar who writes for the undergraduate Daily Bruin here at UCLA.

Iraqis can be unified through separation

Here we go. Try to look past the non-sequiturs, as they'll distract you from the brilliance of his arguments.

Saddam Hussein's execution is a pivotal event, one which calls for a re-evaluation of the positive consequences of the American-led invasion of Iraq, as well as our present strategy of attempting to rebuild Iraq.

It's pivotal because now we can finally settle the question of whether those positive consequences have been just awesome or super-awesome.

The U.S. has achieved several crucial accomplishments in this war, primarily the liberation of millions of people, which are downplayed in the pessimistic media environment as most reports focus on the ongoing sectarian violence.

So far, it looks like super-awesome.

The current violence, though, requires that we consider a more comprehensive political solution than simply deciding whether to increase or decrease the number of U.S. troops. Rather than establishing a single democracy which forces bitterly warring sects together, it should instead consider more of a loose confederation with autonomy for each group.

We. It. The important thing is to get these bitterly warring sects out of a republic and into a confederation.

Within hours of Hussein's execution -- a seemingly key positive event -- media outlets reported that the event could serve to increase violence, something that has yet to be clearly manifest.

Can you believe the nerve of these cut-and-runners?

But the same reporters have been spreading these claims for some time, playing up reports that the removal of Hussein's regime and the continued American presence destabilizes the region into open violence. Some even suggest that Iraq was more peaceful under Hussein's brutal regime.

But you'll show them, won't you?

Yet thousands died in the mass graves of Hussein's brutal regime, including 5,000 Kurdish villagers killed in a single 1988 attack. Some accounts put the total number murdered under Hussein's regime at more than 200,000.

For comparison, IraqBodyCount.org puts the number of Iraqis killed since the U.S. invasion between 53,000 and 59,000, and even that number may be inflated due to its heavy reliance on unofficial eyewitness accounts.

Liberal estimates of the number of Iraqis who died under 25 years of Saddam exceed the conservative estimates of Iraqis who have died from the violence in the nearly four years since the U.S. invaded. Definitely super-awesome.

Hussein's government-sanctioned killings have been decisively put to an end. Many of his murders occurred under a brutally enforced veil of secrecy in which his opponents simply disappeared.

Probably just awesome. The government-sanctioned killings still go on but they are no longer Hussein's government-sanctioned killings, plus the bodies are no longer being hidden.

The situation is far more positive than media reports let on; there is no question that Iraq is far better off than it was under Hussein.

Too bad awesomeness doesn't sell.

There is the lower death toll achieved by removing a tyrant who massacred his own people and who invaded Kuwait. The U.S. eliminated an exporter of terror -- Hussein harbored terrorists and funded suicide attacks in Israel. In addition, Iraqis now enjoy priceless freedoms, as well as healthy economic growth, which the Global Insight firm estimates had a gross domestic product growth rate of 17 percent for 2005.

Let that sink in for a while. ... Iraq had a gross domestic product growth rate of 17 percent for 2005. 17 percent! I'd like to see the Defeatocrats try to spin that one.

...But, in light of ongoing violence, rather than continuing to forge a country from such fundamentally different groups such as Sunnis and Shiites, the U.S. should look into creating a confederacy in which each of the sects would be largely autonomous....

David Lazar took a class on Iraq once. Or maybe he looked on Wikipedia. Either way, he knows about Iraq.

There is some precedent for such a system of representation based on consensus between self-governing regions. Termed consociational democracy by political scientists, the system seeks to resolve struggles for control between ethnic groups within a country, according to Michael Thies, assistant professor of political science at UCLA. He mentioned Belgium, Switzerland and Lebanon as possible examples of the strategy's success.

We should probably call it New Lebanon. By the way, David Lazar also knows what "consociational democracy" means.

The fact that the control over oil is at the center of disputes lends itself to a relatively easy compromise. According to Thies, "Oil is a resource that is sold for money, which can be distributed easily, since it is infinitely divisible."

Wait, there's oil there? Perfect. I can't even think of the last time a dispute over oil wasn't easily resolved.

Establishing a system of this sort would not be admitting defeat, but it would be acknowledging past errors -- which the U.S. did not commit -- in the creation and brutal enforcement of the borders of a country which only really existed on paper.

As long as everyone agrees that we didn't make any mistakes or lose or anything like that.

Lasting peace would then be within reach because, as the cliche goes, good fences make good neighbors.

What do awesome fences make?

The Duke of Westwood

John Kerry. Al Gore. George Bush I. Jimmy Carter. You probably have have heard from these presidential runners-up recently. Some of you may even have a vague notion of what Walter Mondale and Bob Dole have been doing with their free time. Michael Dukakis is a different story.

On the night Dukakis lost the 1988 election, I echoed the chants of the audience at his concession speech by defiantly scrawling a block-letter " '92 " in pencil on the wall in my bedroom (where it still visible). But it was not to be. Dukakis did not run again, and few, outside of Massachusetts or the community of Amtrak aficionados, would ever hear from him again.

Until now. Dukakis is capping off his post-candidacy political "career" by sparring with spoiled UCLA undergrads over so-called apron parking in North Westwood Village (a college town apparently designed by 16-year olds). Apron parking, which is illegal in California, basically works like this: landlords sell tenants the right to park their cars in front of their apartments with their noses in the driveway and their butts in the street. This creates a ridiculous situation in which landlords are renting out land they don't own for illegal uses and in the process encouraging driving and creating hazards for disabled residents and pedestrians. But the police have not enforced the law out of fear of inconveniencing those students who can't be bothered to walk, bike or ride the bus the mile or so to campus.

Some students, like those on the editorial board of the Daily Bruin, say things should stay this way, because, well, no good reason, but we really want to be able to keep our cars wherever we want. Maybe it is unfair to students who are in the middle of their lease terms and are unlikely to get a rent abatement from their landlords. But that's a problem between the students and the landlords, not a reason to ignore the law and dedicate every possible square inch of Los Angeles to parking spaces. It shouldn't take a former presidential candidate to explain that.

UCLA study: Film and TV industry among worst polluting industries

Fucking actors.

UCLA student Tasered in library for failure to show ID

Remember when Taser International said that their products would save law enforcement officers from having to use guns? UCPD were caught on video camera Monday night using the weapon four times on a student who refused to show ID in the main library.



The video and other witness accounts in today's Daily Bruin contradict the police version of events that the student was physically struggling and encouraging others to join in his "resistance." One officer threatened to use the Taser on another student who asked for his badge number.

Meanwhile, Assistant Chief of Police Jeff Young defends the officers by saying that Tasers are safer than batons. This is, of course, not true. More importantly, it is pointless. Police are not supposed to use batons to beat people for non-compliance with verbal commands or to threaten those who ask for their badge numbers.

Young also says that police didn't know the suspect was not armed. Unfortunately, police never actually know a negative fact like that, even if the suspect is naked, so accepting Young's argument would give police a right to do pretty much whatever they wanted.

I hope that UCPD takes a close look at its training and use policies and disciplines the officers. A surprising number of my classmates seem willing to defend the officers today, but I guess we didn't get here by questioning authority.

The worst idea since "Guns for Africa"

UCLA's student newspaper, the Daily Bruin, ran a column this morning advocating oral sex as a good way to protect yourself against HIV transmission. This is, for lack of a better word, retarded. Let's get a petition going to kick the writer out of school and refund to taxpayers any public money that has contributed towards his education.

"UCLA to blacks: You're welcome"

Am I the only person who found this to be an unfortunate headline for Rebecca Trounson's otherwise perfectly fine article in the LA Times about the debate over affirmative action in the UC system? Did the editors just not consider that the phrase has more than one meaning?