When you think about it, I have a very strange job.
I am not a trial lawyer; I’m a corporate and regulatory attorney. But much of what I do every day bears the same relationship to a chess game that a trial lawyer would say his trial bears to a military battle. And chess, after all, is simply abstracted war.
I’m going to have to be circumspect about this, but here goes:
Even when you yourself think your cause is hopeless against the leviathan, you never stop fighting, even in retreat.
That’s the lesson I’ve learned to live by in the business world. Ironically, I learned it first by observing Bill Clinton, a master at slogging on, regardless, because eventually your enemies tire, or forget, or become interested in other things. And much more often than you think, you can win just by keeping your eye on the very, very long game. Survivalists and preppers act on this principle, even if they’ve never thought of it in those terms.
For the last seven years in business, I’ve been devoted to fighting existential threats, one after another, and defeated or evaded each one — with one exception.
Tonight, while at dinner with my wife and her friend, I quietly celebrated with a Bruichladdich 1988, an amazing Islay single-malt that was sweet, fruity, and with barely a hint of peat.
I was celebrating not a win, but an opportunity to win against that one remaining existential threat. Today the long game came through for us again, and in two weeks my colleagues and I will fight a battle we’d thought barred to us.
We’ve been preparing for this for the last three years. We laid the foundations without knowing when or how they’d be used; now we have two weeks to finish a fortress of paper and electrons in which to fight our battle; two weeks to solidify logistics and the all-important maskirovka; two weeks to train and drill our footsoldiers to say and do the right things and not do the wrong. And the stakes (for us) couldn’t be higher.
All afternoon I’ve been playing the Extended Version of Two Steps From Hell’s Strength of a Thousand Men. I expect it will be a daily listen for the next two weeks.
Lessons in duty, teamwork, leadership, strategy and tactics come together, from childhood Scouting and athletics to graduate academics, all reinforcing each other towards this one goal. It’s as though my entire life prepared me for this. And it’s days like this I utterly, completely love my job.
The two sides do, however, agree that there was a three-to-four second interval between the first and the second shot, raising difficult questions in evaluating the two camps’ versions.[10] Historian William Weir speculates that Hamilton might have been undone by his own machinations: secretly setting his pistol’s trigger to require only a half pound of pressure as opposed to the usual 10 pounds. Burr, Weir contends, most likely had no idea that the gun’s trigger pressure could be reset.[11] Louisiana State University history professors Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg concur in this view. They note that “Hamilton brought the pistols, which had a larger barrel than regular dueling pistols, and a secret hair-trigger, and were therefore much more deadly,”[12] and conclude that “Hamilton gave himself an unfair advantage in their duel, and got the worst of it anyway.”[12]
David O. Stewart, in his biography of Burr, American Emperor, notes that the reports of Hamilton’s intentionally missing Burr with his shot only began to appear in newspaper reports published in papers friendly to Hamilton in the days after his death. The two shots, witnesses reported, followed one another in close succession, and none of those witnesses could agree as to who fired first. Prior to the duel proper, Hamilton took a good deal of time getting used to the feel and weight of the pistol (which, incidentally, had been used in a duel in which his own 19-year-old son had been killed on the same Weehaukin site), as well as putting on his eyeglasses in order to see his opponent more clearly. His seconds placed him so that Burr would have the rising sun behind him, giving Hamilton a better target, though during the duel itself, one witness reported, Hamilton seemed to be hindered by this placement.
*I don’t generally use wikipedia as an authoritative source on anything, but rather as a repository of useful summaries and links about a subject. So take this as you will.
A couple weeks back I asked my guitar instructor about maybe starting some ear training. After a short conversation we concluded that attempting to do this with a bass guitar would be one of the more difficult methods, what with the octaves being so low.
He said I could either do this with a piano/keyboard, or with the guitar. Seeing as how I’m already learning to play the bass guitar, I decided that sliding over to a standard six-string would be the easier choice.
So yay, I get to buy another guitar! Boo-hiss, good guitars aren’t cheap.
Alexander Hamilton and the Articles of Confederation: Euro Crisis Prophecy!
Now I don’t know about you, but nobody in my classroom (including me) had ever read through the A. of C., and it turned out to be a damned interesting experience. …To begin with, it’s good to remind oneself from time to time that our first experiment with “republican government†was a colossal failure – a self-proclaimed “perpetual Union†(!) that lasted for less than a decade.
But beyond that bit of humility inducement, on the substance of it it’s pretty easy to identify – in hindsight! – the many flaws of the government of the United States of America as they appeared in, say, 1787 or thereabouts. You read through the A. of C. and you realize, as one of my students nicely put it, that it has “no provision for executive power, legislative power, or judicial power.†The trifecta of constitutional deficiencies. It doesn’t really set up a “government†at all – it’s more like a “league†of sovereign States, in which those States promise each other certain things (mostly, to treat an attack on one as an attack on all and to contribute men and money to the common defense at the direction of the Congress). ….
All very interesting late 18th century stuff, beautifully articulated. But even more interesting is what came next, immediately after class. As it happened, we had a lecture scheduled that day by Isabella Bufacchi, the financial reporter at one of the daily newspapers in Rome (Il Sole24Ore), on the developing Euro crisis. At her lecture, she starts talking about the fundamental problems, in her opinion, afflicting the structure of the European Union and the Eurozone that have contributed to (and become the focus of attention because of) the current Euro crisis. And damned if her list didn’t look a lot like Hamilton’s list! It was actually quite astonishing – a couple of students asked me afterwards if it had all been planned out that way (it hadn’t)….
One of the guys who drives a recycle truck at my place of employ handed me this book one morning last week, figuring I’d like it. I do, and I think you all will like it too, since it is a book of quotations from famous and infamous sci-fi authors. Enough so that I’ll be posting quotes from it as I find them.
This universe never did make sense. I suspect it was built on a government contract.
Robert A. Heinlein
On a side note, he found it laying on the ground next to his truck after having picked up a mixed paper dumpster. He said a good dozen or more ended up on the ground since the box was overloaded and he is obligated to clean up the mess, regardless whether it was his fault or not.
One of the other items that fell out was an annotated copy of the US Constitution. It was at that point I decided not to ask whose dumpster he was picking up since it very well could have been a school.
Last week Phil posted about the newest addition to his family. The crew here at RNS seem to have our animal events takes place coincidentally. We all lost a dog last year and now two of us have added back.
In March I adopted a border collie rescue named Milo. Not a name I would have chosen but it’s the one he came with so I’ll deal. I’d never spent much time around border collies before but had heard they were a smart breed. I’m a believer now.
The newest is a golden retriever pup I brought home last week. My first inclination was to name him Shiloh (as in Sharps . . . as in 45-70), but that would make three dogs in the household with names ending in “OHH”. The wife has a little freak of nature known as a shit zoo whose name happens to be ElmOHH. I just couldn’t do another OHH, so I went with my second choice of Winchester, as in Oliver, not the cathedral.
I’ve given him firm instructions to ignore the wife when she addresses him as Winnie, and to respond only to Winn or Winchester.
Priority items for new puppies are toys, so we went shopping . . .
And swimming . . .
Rolling in dirt to get the camo suit on . . .
Back at the ranch, they get the water boarding rinse and then it’s rest period . . .
