“The test of civilization is the estimate of woman. Among savages she is a slave. In the dark ages of Christianity she is a toy and a sentimental goddess. With increasing moral light, and greater liberty, and more universal justice, she begins to develop as an equal human being.”
– George William Curtis

Dahlia Lithwick has a nice little article about Sandra Day O’Connor.

Describing herself as a “cowgirl from Arizona,” O’Connor tells of graduating from Stanford Law School in 1952 (she doesn’t mention she was No. 3 in her class) and being unable to get a single law job. Her one interview at a big firm ended with the question, “Miss Day, do you type?” At which point she was grudgingly offered a secretary’s position. At which point she began inventing her own luck. . .

. . . Whenever a glass ceiling appeared, O’Connor either ran around it or blasted through. Women like me, who have seldom faced that kind of discrimination, have no idea of the kind of strength required to deal with it. O’Connor uses the phrase, “I had a great time!” often today, and you know she really means it. She loved working at the DA’s office, and then opening her own practice, and then being a state senator, and then a judge. She loved doing it even when she had to, because no one would give her a regular job. When “disaster struck” and she lost her baby sitter, she just stayed at home and did volunteer work for five years. She felt, and still feels, that she was lucky. But with all the talk of fun and chance, you sense that she forgets how hard she fought to make those chances pay off.

Read the whole thing. I’m not a big fan of Sandra Day O’Connor as a jurist at all–her jurisprudence is maddeningly unprincipled. But there’s no doubt she lived quite an extraordinary life.

“When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.”
– Eric Hoffer

Looks like Hillary’s decided to get nasty regarding Bush’s re-election.

Re-electing President Bush will mean a loss of freedoms and “create an America we won’t recognize,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is telling potential Democratic donors.

In an e-mail appeal distributed by the Democratic National Committee to help Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign, the former first lady said “the stakes in this election are incredibly high.”

“If they get their way, you and I will be living in an America governed not by our hopes, but by our fears,” Clinton wrote. “We’ll be living in an America where we see our freedoms diminished when they ought to be embraced, our rights restricted when they ought to be strengthened.”

Normally I wouldn’t even acknowledge petty little political shit like this, but this has a particular irony for me. You see, Hillary’s husband (you may remember him) gave a speech on my campus last weekend. The theme of the speech? Bipartisanship and how rhetoric of venom and hatemongering without respect for other people’s views and opinions was tearing the country apart.

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
– Winston Churchill

Here’s one of those pieces of news that always makes you wonder whether they even bother with bother with security at Los Alamos.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory, the USA’s foremost nuclear weapon design facility, has lost a computer disk.

According to a lab statement, staff were checking an inventory of classified material and realised a piece of classified removable electronic media (CREM) was not where it was supposed to be. The lab says that the missing CREM, which could be a CD, USB flash drive or Zip-type disk, “in no way constitutes a compromise of national security”.

Nope! No threat to national security at all! At least, we don’t think so…

Since the disk is missing, its contents cannot be verified. The statement admits to “administrative errors and the past pervasive use of low-density magnetic and desktop systems.”

Nope, no threat to national security at all. Even though we don’t know what’s on the disk. Don’t worry. I mean, it’s not like we here at Los Alamos lose computer data all the time or anyway.

Er… wait…

Reuben Ham’s latest music column is filled with something for everyone to disagree with! Go read it now! Personally, I think he’s dead on, except for #6. Sorry, Reuben, but I’m psyched for the Velvet Revolver album. However, he is, to quote Marisa Tomei, “dead on balls accurate” about this:

2. THE DARKNESS. I don’t get it. It’s a 57-year-old guy in a leotard, singing falsetto and playing twentieth-rate covers of VAN HALEN’s ‘Eruption’. I don’t get it. GUNS ‘N’ ROSES in 1987 were nasty. They were filthy, dangerous—anti-cheese. Is this supposed to be like QUEEN? Again, I don’t get it. Why do we need QUEEN impersonators in 2004, when we all have access to, erm… QUEEN records? Blow, hookers, and bizarre motorcycle fetishism aside, rock’n'roll is not supposed to be a joke. It isn’t about pigtails and glove-puppets and pulling your pants down to reveal cartoon-character underwear. If it was, BLINK 182 would be messianic archetypes. You think ZEPPELIN weren’t serious? You think the ‘deal with the devil’ thing is just a laugh? Go: become an accountant.

He’ll get no argument from me on that one.

Well, I graudated from law school yesterday, marking my third and likely final graduation. Nothing fancy or exciting about the ceremony. Just what you expect in this sort of thing.

However, one thing of note is that while we were lining up to go into the ceremony, we were being protested by Fred Phelps anti-gay rights group. And let me tell you, seeing them was a relief!

A relief? You ask. You betcha! You see, every doubt I’ve had about being a lawyer has now completely disappeared. After all, if Fred Phelps and crew think I’m doing the wrong thing, then I *must* be doing the right one! So thanks, Fred and pals!

(PS - If you don’t know who Fred Phelps is, he’s the leader of one of the most disgusting anti-gay groups around. His website is here, if you can stomach aboiminable hatemongering.)

“They asked President Bush today why we didn’t observe the Geneva Convention in Iraq and Bush said, ‘That’s easy, we weren’t in Geneva.’”
– Jay Leno

Looks like things are going well for California under Arnold’s governorship.

A leading Wall Street ratings agency on Friday raised California’s credit rating, citing an improving economy, the first such upgrade in four years and a move that promised to bring down the state’s borrowing costs on $44 billion in debt.

Analysts saw the unexpected credit upgrade by Moody’s Investors Service as an endorsement of the steps Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken to bring California back from the brink of a fiscal crisis that drove its credit ratings near junk levels and had threatened to effectively shut the state out of the bond market for new borrowing.

Citing an “established trend of recovery,” Moody’s raised California’s rating to A3 from Baa1, reversing a downgrade it made in December out of concern over continued political deadlock and a move by Schwarzenegger to cut car license fees.

That’s great work. So far, Arnold seems to be doing a pretty good job as governor.