Two ways to prevent one from doing something

There are two ways to keep a person from doing X.

A) Make it impossible to do X. Make it illegal or expensive or impractical, for instance; or B) Fill up a person's life with dozens of other obligations such that he or she no longer has any time to do X.
I'm dealing with B) at the moment. I have a dozen writing projects I've been working on, but I can't get to them because I'm feeling exhausted with all the other things going on in my life. These "distractions" I've been doing for the past two weeks are important things that I want to do or I need to do (e.g., spending time with my children and tending to crushing duties at work, such as arguing appeals, writing a brief that was just filed with the United States Supreme Court and reconstructing my workstation at the law office after my hard drive died). No one is telling me to stop writing, but the result is the same because of all of these other obligations. There are only so many hours in a week. I have only so much energy and focus, and I find that in order to do original writing I absolutely need blocks of several contiguous hours, at a minimum. Those chunks of quality time have disappeared lately. I'm frustrated, because I very much want to follow up on some articles and write some new ones. On the other hand, my life is full and good. I shouldn't have any complaints, other than I have this urge to try to figure things out, and I do this much better when I write. In moments like these I'm so glad that I decided to make this website a community of writers, an intersection. But there are also other reasons I chose to make this a community, especially the increased interactions with the other authors--an opportunity to learn from each other. Bottom line, I'm sending trackbacks here and there to let readers know that I'm still alive, and I hope to be more active at this site soon.

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Fertilizing democracy at home

What follows is utterly precious, needing no further comment. Here's the opening sentence of some extraordinary information provided by the U.K. Guardian:

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

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It is dangerous to quote the United States Constitution in America

Here's a cool idea: Write the Fourth Amendment on your chest in a marker, and then refuse electronic scanning at an airport, henceforth removing your shirt and thus displaying the Fourth Amendment. Actually, it's not a cool idea, Aaron Tobey used this technique of self-expression, and here's what the TSA did, as described at Lowering the Bar:

they cuffed him, interrogated him, had the airport police charge him with "disorderly conduct" (favorite of official thugs everywhere), and then contacted the cops at his university and suggested that they report Tobey to the Dean of Students.
Here's a copy of Tobey's lawsuit. A link provided in this same article suggests that the body scanners used at many airports might be emitting ten times as much radiation as previously claimed.

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A Note From Japan, a Lesson in Humility

In the aftermath of the record earthquake and tsunami, I received an email from one of my suppliers in Japan. MrTitanium gets his bulk chains from them because no one else makes them. I place a couple of orders a year, and know several of the staff by name. I am impressed that their communications infrastructure is so hardy. This country had its infrastructure designed for such calamities. The email in slightly fractured English advised me that one of their factories was flood damaged, and both are out of commission pending some repairs, and the grid and roads being rebuilt. Their warehouses are intact, but until the emergency passes they are unable to ship. Power is being rationed and is understandably intermittent, given the worst natural disaster to ever hit nuclear power plants. Lack of food, water, roads, fuel, and such is a hardship for them. But they abashedly apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing me, and beg for our understanding.

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