I’m sure you’ve heard the news yesterday and today. With the wall-to-wall coverage on every news outlet, how could you not?¹

So: Are you scared yet?

What to do about this terrorism problem? Ze Frank has the best answer I’ve heard in a long time:

Now, the way I see it, you can’t have terrorism without terror. The strategy of terrorism is to use isolated acts of violence to instill fear and confusion into the population at large. A small number of people can incapacitate a society by leveraging our inability to understand risk.

. . .

As long as a small group of people can inflict mass panic across a large population, the tactic itself will remain viable. One way to deal a blow to the effectiveness of terrorism is to deal with the terror itself.

The full transcript is here, but do yourself a little favor and just watch the whole show. It will take three minutes of your life and it will be worth it.

The Democrats have been looking for a unified message on national security. This should be it. [tags]terrorism, war, democrats, ideas[/tags]

1. The news even reached me in my cave of work/sleep where I only get about 10 minutes of news a day, so I know you heard about it.↩

Over at Jeremy Richey’s Blawg there’s a long thread about people’s reactions to the bar exam. I linked to it before but it has grown since and it remains somewhat reassuring to know that most everyone felt the MBE was a killer.

The bar exam ended two weeks ago today for most of us. Two weeks. It seems like the exam was about a decade ago. Studying for and taking it was like living in a 6-week twilight zone.

Anwyay, if you’re getting nervous about your results you might, like me, find some reassurance by reminding yourself again that everyone thought it was hard and felt awful.

“This blog is coming to an end in its current form. In the near future, this blog will become focused on religion and the law.” ââ�¡â��

“Of course, if I pass, I’ll probably move on with my life without doing a single thing to fight the obviously horrid process and make it better for those who come after me. Life is just too short. Sorry guys.” A little sad, but isn’t that what we’re all going to do? That’s why this screwed up thing never changes…. ââ�¡â��

It certainly wasn’t my intention to abandon this blog but I’m having a heckuva time finding time to update, and it’s an even more difficult challenge to come up w/things to say that are, well, blogsafe. Now is when it’s probably not so good to be so non-anonymous b/c there are a million things I’d like to say about the job, but…. But, well, it’s probably best I don’t say themââ�¬â��not b/c they’re bad (if I were free to say whatever I wanted I’m sure you’d get sick of me raving about how great it is), but b/c you never know what kind of repercussions these things might cause. Still, it’s a shame. I so want to share.

But I thought of a great unintended benefit of letting this blog go into infrequent-update status: If I fail the bar, I won’t have to tell you, my dear reader! I mean, if you come to expect that I only update once a week and never say anything of substance, you won’t even notice if/when I say nothing about the biggest disaster of my life, right?

Anyway, I can sum up what I’d be saying every day if I were updating more regularly: 1) I love my job, and 2) Please please please let me pass the bar!

Boring, huh?

Oh, for Sanchovilla, the pics of the bison jam are up.

“I have a water/jump rule. If I’m scared to do it, then it means I have to.” ââ�¡â��

1. We went to Yellowstone last weekend and got stuck in many bison-caused traffic jams. Very cool. Pictures soon, I hope.
2. On Sunday we went rafting on the Stillwater River with Adventure Whitewater. The water was low and slow b/c it’s been so damned hot here recently, but it was still great fun. Highly recommended. Again: Pics to come as soon as I get the waterproof disposable camera film developed. But our guide gave us two great tips for life ââ�¬â�� the title of this post and also: “He who dies with the most worn out toys wins.” I’ve always heard it was just about having the toys, but that’s silly; it’s about using them.
3. My job: Obviously, I can’t say much about it b/c I’ve only been there two days and b/c most everything about it is confidential. What I can say is this: I really, really, really hope I passed the bar so I can keep this job. Seriously. It rocks.