This post is not a review and contains no spoilers. It does touch on the abortion issue, for which I ask that commenters tread lightly with respect towards people with differing views.

Last week I listened to the audiobook for Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper. Clancy read and highly recommended the book and the plot actually tied into a hypothetical I was thinking may put into a creative project some day. So I took a break from Tom Clancy and detoured to Picoult. Though there’s something about Picoult’s writing I find a little offputting – I can’t put my finger on exactly what – the book itself was excellent, with the plot outstripping any of Picoult’s expressive peculiarities.

The story revolves primarily around the Fitzgerald family and two sisters within it. Older sister Kate was diagnosed with leukemia when she was three or so. Her parents, Brian and Sara, then had another daughter, Anna, by way of science so that they would have a donor to save Kate’s life. It was initially successful, but over time more and more became required of Anna to keep her sister alive. The novel starts with her at age 13 (Kate is 16) with her parents gearing up to volunteer her kidney for a transplant to Kate. For Anna, who has given blood, bone marrow, and more for her entire life, this is the last straw. She hires a lawyer so that she can be medically emancipated and make her own medical decisions.

The novel is more of a problematic than anything. By and large, none of the characters are completely good and none are evil. Most, with the exception of the sisters’ brother Jessy, are decent people. But the story involves complicated decisions. I came to my conclusion as to what should happen pretty early on. As the story progressed, though, my mind moved on to a more fundamental question: how do you determine the tradeoff between the quality of life of the many versus protecting the life of someone that has been dying almost since they were born. Is it better for there to be four satisfying lives or five dissatisfying ones?

The Fitzgeralds, including Anna, love Kate. There are bouts of resentment from her siblings from time to time, but it’s not like Kate chose her fate nor are the actions of her parents anything less than completely understandable and by and large Jessy and Anna realize this. Brian and Sara, the parents, love their daughter immensely, but there’s no denying the toll that a daughter always one relapse away from death has taken from their lives. Brian comments to one of his fellow firefighters that he stays at work late because, if he didn’t, he would have to go home. The lack of attention that Jessy got helps lead him down a wayward path where misbehavior is the only way he gets attention. And Anna is not allowed so much as to attend hockey camp. Not because of financial reasons, but because something could go wrong with Kate and she would need to stand by with parts to donate to the cause.

It’s hard to look at this situation and not wonder, at least a little bit, how much happier this family might be if Kate had simply rejected the initial transplant and died when she was three. Jessy might have gotten the attention he needed. Anna would have been able to live her own life. Brian and Sara would have been more husband and wife and less disaster management partners, which is what they became. Of course, it would be a raw deal for Kate. She would be dead. It’s tempting to dismiss this as a question of whether her life, lived in constant acceptance of the inevitability of coming death, is worth living. But when it’s your life, it’s different than merely speculating from afar. Studies have demonstrated that being crippled, for example, ultimately does not have much bearing on levels of happiness.

My friend Rick is staunchly pro-life when it comes to abortion and euthanasia. That I even ask these questions would render me, in his view, a card-carrying member of the Culture of Death. On the other hand, during the Terri Schiavo debate there really seemed to be a number of people that believe that the plug should be pulled not out of a sense of autonomy, but because they had simply decided that her life was not worth living. Even if there were a health care family and even if Terri and Michael Schiavo had been divorced, their view would have been the same. Though I came down on the side of the plug being pulled, it was on a somewhat different basis. If it weren’t for the fact that she was legally married to the man who legally decides what she wants, and if it weren’t for the fact that such care costs an already expensive health care system even more money, I would be perfectly content for her to live her life as a vegetable. But given the givens, and given her state at the time, I believe that the right conclusion was reached.

Easy for me to say, I know. And I had to remind myself of this over and over again when it came to Kate Fitzgerald. I had to fight off the belief that “Look, she had 13 more years of life than anyone ever expected. It’s time for everyone to move on.” Easy for me because I am not Kate and I do not love Kate. The fighting off of that belief was not, however, fully successful. While the Kate/Anna situation may be uniquely derived for the sake of an engaging novel, it’s something that we’re confronted with on an institutional level every day. How much do we spend to extend an old person’s life for a few months? Every dime spent there is a dime that could be spent on someone whose death is not imminent. Even for those of us opposed to abortion, what kind of exceptions (if any) should be made with conditions either incompatible with life or, if not that, incompatible with what we would consider a worthwhile life? While the Fitzgeralds’ oldest daughter’s condition lead to an additional family member, most of the time it’s going to be the other way. A family bankrupted by the health complications of a first child can’t afford to have another (and even if they aren’t bankrupted, the time and devotion required alone could preclude it).

As someone of (relatively) sound mind and body, these remain easy thoughts for me to think. And on a personal level, this is particularly true since I owe my life to a miscarriage my mother had. Yet knowing my innate biases does not seem to prevent me from forming my beliefs based on them. It is enough, though, for me to see this as an immeasurably complicated issue. And one that, when some procedure can extend my life by a “mere” six months, is definitely subject to change.

A while back I wrote a hypothetical about an employee being fired for asserting his fifth amendment rights:

After the police do a search of his {Jerry Gomez’s} office at W&S {his employer}, his boss and a corporate VP call Gomez into a meeting. Gomez assures the firm that he did not commit any crime and says that he is perfectly willing to take a polygraph to that effect provided that is the only question asked (the concern being that the police could subpoena the results and find out more than he wants to tell them). Likewise, beyond assuring them of his innocence, he will not explain any of the circumstances surrounding his relationship with Toomey for fear that they will be subpoenaed. The firm finds this unacceptable and they issue Gomez an ultimatum: fully cooperate with the authorities or you’re fired. Gomez refuses to cooperate and is fired.

Meanwhile, out of Britain:

A man convicted of murder has lost his employment tribunal case against Royal Mail which he claimed had breached his human rights when it sacked him.

Roger Kearney, 57, was convicted in June last year at Winchester Crown Court of stabbing his married lover Paula Poolton, 40.

But his employers, Royal Mail, sacked him from his job as a van driver in January 2010 because they said he had committed gross misconduct.

But he claimed he had been sacked prematurely because he was not found guilty of the offence until June.

Different circumstances, obviously, one reminded me of the other. Speaking on the subject, a guy named Chris Hoey remembers an old case in the US that had a different result:

In a case I briefed and argued on behalf of the NLRB while serving it its Enforcement Division of its General Counsel’s Office, one of the individuals found to have been fired for his union activities later confessed to having murdered his mother. The crime had taken place before his activity, in fact he was on the lam while he became a union protagonist. The NLRB ordered he be paid back pay from the day of his discharge up until the date of his conviction, a decision upheld by the 6th Circuit in 1959. I don’t have the cite at hand, but the employer was Keco Industries, and it only took the court about three weeks following oral argument to decide in the Board’s favor.

I assume that Hoey is referring to this case, though I can’t find any details on it other than the ruling.

Bloomberg has an interesting article on the antics that life insurance companies use to deny claims:

Jane Pierce spent nine years struggling alongside her husband, Todd, as he fought cancer in his sinus cavity. The treatments were working. Then, in July 2009, Todd died in a fiery car crash. He was 46. That was the beginning of a whole new battle for Jane Pierce, this time with Todd’s life insurance company, MetLife Inc.

A state medical examiner and a sheriff in Rosebud County, Montana, concluded that Pierce’s death was an accident, caused when he lost control of his silver GMC pickup after passing a car on a two-lane road.

Their findings meant Jane was eligible to collect $224,000 on the accidental death insurance policy that Todd had through his employer, power producer PPL Corp. MetLife, however, refused to pay. The nation’s largest life insurer told Pierce on Dec. 8, 2009, that her husband had killed himself. The policy didn’t cover suicide, the insurer said, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its April issue.

“How dare they suggest such a thing,” says Pierce, 44, a physician assistant in Colstrip, a Montana mining and power production city of 2,346 people.

She says she’s insulted that the man who courageously battled his disease for a decade was accused by an insurance company of abandoning his wife and two sons — one a U.S. Marine, the other a National Guardsman — and giving up on his fight to live.

Attempts to get the federal government more involve to prevent such behavior have apparently backfired. To be fair, denied claims are actually exceedingly rare. Even so.

Also worth noting is that later in the article, they cite a case where a claim was denied due to drunk driving laws. The problem is that the deceased was not actually in a car, but rather fell down stairs. According to the insurance company, that didn’t matter because alcohol contributed to the accident. It was reversed, but it’s another thing to file away when we consider the low BAC levels required for drunk driving in this country. It’s said that drowsy drivers, drivers on cell phones, and drivers listening to sports on the radio are “just as bad as drunk drivers.” By this reasoning, falling down the stairs because you’re sleepy is like being drunk is like being a drunk driver and is your own darn fault.

It’s common practice in the United States for men to be charged more for automobile insurance than women. Apparently, that’s about to change in Europe:

The decision means that women can no longer be charged lower car insurance premiums than men, and the cost of buying a pensions annuity will change.

The change will come into effect in December 2012, although customers could see premiums alter in the interim.

Representatives of the insurance industry said they were disappointed.

The court was ruling on a challenge by a Belgian consumer group Test-Achats.

It had argued that a current exemption for insurers contradicted the wider European principle of gender equality.

It’s not all gravy for men, though. Men had previously received greater pension annuities on the basis that they are less likely to live as long to collect them. So the end result is that men get less pension for their work, in the aggregate.

I have mixed feelings about this. My natural inclination is to see the first part as being relatively fair but to be outraged about the second. My mental wiggle room on this is that driving is something that each individual has a good deal of control over and so you can take a look at my driving record and compare it to a woman’s driving record of the same age and determine who is a better driver*. On longevity, though, behavior certainly plays a role but biology seems to favor women and so not only do men die younger, but now we leave money on the table when we go!

But really, this is splitting hairs. Either you accept aggregate probabilities as a legitimate factor or you do not. And so I am mixed. In the case of gender, I actually lean towards discrimination being okay within certain contexts. I am iffier on other topics. I’ve complained in the past about some of the criteria that auto insurance companies use (precipitated by a huge increase in my auto insurance rates due to some mythical problem with our credit) such as housing (if you live in a poor neighborhood, you may dinged whether you are a safe driver or not even though the correlation is without causation).

* – Along these lines, I have no problem with discrimination among the young, where driving records are less firmly established. And really, this may undercut my thoughts on the matter because I’m not sure how prevalent the discrimination is as you get older and have established your own driving record.

According to Consumer Reports:

The overall top five — Honda, Subaru, Toyota, Volvo and Ford — all received reliability ratings of Better Than Average. No automaker earned the highest rating, Much Better Than Average, and none the lowest, Much Worse Than Average. {…}

Subaru was awarded an overall score of 73. Only one model, the sporty Impreza WRX, was cited for below-average reliability.

Subaru is probably helped by the fact that they release only a few different models and so can focus on making the best of what they have. It’s the upshot to the downside that they only participate in a relatively niche market: no minivans, no fuel-efficient compacts, and so on. I’m still not sure what Subaru is going to do when the CAFE standards go up. According to some market information I got in the run-up to purchasing the Forester, they’re working with Toyota (which has a stake in Subaru and a business partnership that has Camrys being made at a Subaru plant) to roll out some more fuel-efficient vehicles. Hard to do with standard AWD, though.

Clancy comes from a Toyota family and I come from a (mostly) Ford one, so it looks like we are well-represented across the board. When I was younger, we came from a Chrysler family. They didn’t fare so well:

For the third consecutive year, Chrysler earned the lowest overall score, with a 43. Despite Mr. Champion’s affinity for the company’s new products, he cautions that “reliability is still going to be an issue.”

Which is a shame, because for my money Chrysler makes the best looking cars on the market.

Curiously omitted were Mitsubishi and Suzuki. Kia was also excluded, but they may have been rolled in with Hyundai, which it is partially owned by.

You’ve got to give BYU credit for putting their basketball program where their mouth is:

Brandon Davies was dismissed from BYU’s basketball team after he admitted to having sexual relations with his girlfriend, the Salt Lake Tribune reported Wednesday.

BYU’s honor code forbids students from having premarital sex and instructs them to “live a chaste and virtuous life.”

The newspaper reported that Davies met with school officials on Monday.

BYU officials would only confirm Wednesday that Davies wasn’t involved in anything criminal that resulted in his dismissal from the team.

BYU is currently ranked #3 and so they have a lot on the line. They lost their first post-Davies game.

I think I mentioned this, but I have a former coworker that was kicked out of BYU for having sex with a local bishop’s daughter. He hated it there and so it was two birds killed with a single stone. His parents didn’t see it that way though.

Another article on the dangers of “distracted driving”:

“The dangers of driving while talking on the phone come not from our hands or from our eyes, but from our brains,” they wrote in The Seattle Times. Simons’ research backs this up.

In one of his driving experiments at the University of Illinois’ Beckman Institute, participants drove on a simulator depicting a four-lane, divided highway. Their sole task was to follow the car in front while performing a counting task. In this case, Illinois researchers found that if drivers are distracted while simply following traffic, they instinctively give themselves a little extra space with the car in front.

“This suggests that distractions wouldn’t be as bad as long as drivers don’t have to make any decisions and provided that nothing unexpected happens,” he says.

But unexpected things do happen, and distractions like talking on the phone can make you slower to respond. Problems also arise when drivers have to make a tactical maneuver, such as passing. If drivers are being distracted in these situations, Illinois researchers found that they usually drive too close—dangerously close.

Though it’s true that unexpected things do happen, it is not the case that they happen on a random distribution. People often tend to discuss this issue in black and white terms. It’s dangerous! Don’t do dangerous things! Of course, driving is dangerous. Life is a series of tradeoffs. Rather than suggesting that people should limit their cell phone conversations to when they are in potentially hazardous situations, we have the Secretary of Transportation trying to find ways to jam the signal (thereby preventing passenger and emergency phone calls). Cause danger is danger and all that.

On the other hand, as heretical as it may sound, not only does talking on the cell phone while driving not always pose the same hazard, it’s quite possible that sometimes it can result in safer driving:

When engaged in a secondary verbal task, drivers showed improved lane-keeping performance and steering control when vigilance was lowest.

This fits entirely within my experience. Even before phoning while driving became a no-no, I found myself rather uncomfortable doing it if I was driving on unfamiliar roads, times when surrounded by cars, and/or places of frequent stop-start. On the other hand, when driving on a long stretch on a freeway with light traffic, the hazards seemed pretty minimal to me.

Something like 70% of Americans with cell phones cop to either talking on a cell or texting while driving. Unless Secretary LaHood gets his insipid signal-jammers installed in cars, it’s not something that’s going to go away any time soon. It’s my hope that most people are instinctively aware when phoning while driving is more hazardous or less. Maybe our public relations campaigns should focus on that. It’s unlikely to happen, though, because of a relatively puritanical itch that people without cell phones and those that have them but never use them in the car have. I don’t want to do it, therefore you should never. And another group of people that supports these rules but doesn’t follow them because they can handle it but those other drivers are crazy.

Keep in mind, though, that if you listen to sports in the car, or you eat in the car, you are likely similarly distracting yourself. In fact, I personally find that the same rules I used to follow for cell phone usage I follow for eating. And to a lesser extent, with audiobooks. I tend to reserve these things for the freeways.

But as the chicken littles talk about how the sky is falling, there are a few important things to remember:

First, that there are tradeoffs. The second study linked aside, maybe in a perfect world nobody would multitask behind the wheel. They wouldn’t talk on cell phones. Or eat or smoke or listen to anything. Just keep an eye on the road. Realistically, though, we spend a lot of time in our cars. Making that time more pleasant is not without its own value. Being careful is one thing, but being miserable while doing it is another.

Second: The roads have never been safer. Accidents are fewer and farther between than they have ever been. The same goes for injuries and fatalities. And for all of the dangers that cell phones are alleged to cause, all three statistics have been on the decline ever since they were first introduced. I don’t think that this is because of cell phones, but it is true regardless. So let’s stop freaking out. {h/t OTB}

I have a question for the lawyers that will probably betray a lot of ignorance, but here it goes… when it comes to privilege, what is the line between attorneys and employees of the attorney (or people hired out by the attorneys). Specifically, investigators. I assume that an investigator working under the employ of an attorney cannot be called to testify against the client. I assume that this is the case whether the investigator is a full-time employee of the attorney or just hired for a specific job. Are these assumptions correct?

But let’s say that a business is up to something illegal and wants to know if an employee has figured it out. What is to stop him from hiring an attorney to hire an investigator to keep tabs on the employee? If I recall, attorneys cannot actively assist in illegal activity, but what happens if the investigator, while following the employee around, discovers it? I assume if the business hired the investigator independently, he could be called on to testify. But would hiring him through a lawyer (an outside lawyer, in this case) be a way around that?

I’m thinking that there’s something I’m missing here, but I just can’t figure what.

It looks like the fishy CBS press release about Lara Logan’s “brutal and sustained sexual assault” was indeed a lie. Finally, we have an account from some actual witnesses. Temoris Grecko blogged about what he and others saw:

I was buying tea from a vendor in Tahrir with two friends, Amr Fekry, a 26 year old Egyptian call center agent, and Andi Walden, a San Francisco political science student. Then we heard the noise and saw the mob coming. A blonde woman, neatly dressed with a white coat, was being dragged and pushed. It didn’t seem to me she was panicking, but rather trying to control the situation. They passed us in an moment. They were yelling “agent!, agent!”

I tried to run to intervene, but some Egyptians I didn’t know prevented me from doing it. There was nothing I could do and, as a foreign journalist, I’d surely end up being accused of being an agent too, and attacked. Fekry did go there and dissapeared into the crowd, 50 or 100 people strong.

Later I spoke with two young male activists who helped the person I later learned was Lara Logan (I didn’t know her before, I don’t usually follow US networks). They were Omar El Shennawy, a 21 year old teacher of English, and Abdulrahman Elsayed, a 25 year old teacher of physical education. They said they had formed a human chain with other young men to protect Logan, and then delivered her to the Egyptian Museum military post.

When I read CBS’s story and it’s interpretation by other media outlets, I felt troubled. It seemed misleading. “It didn’t make sense to me”, said Benjamin Starr, from Boston who arrived as a tourist on January 24th, and stayed to witness the uprising. He also saw the mob pass by with Lara Logan. “I want to give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe something happened in another part of the square, but from what I saw, she was being taken by men to the soldiers, and her clothes were not torn off. There were no women, I didn’t see a single woman in the crowd around her.”

So basically, Logan got roughed up like a hundred other unremarked-on reporters in the area around that time. But for having the bad taste to bear witness to the facts (and against precious Lara’s claim to specialness) Grecko got attacked as a “yellow journalist” by white knight/pretty boy/nepotism hire* Dan Abrams: “Lara Logan Attacked Again, This Time By Yellow Journalists.”

… There is no doubt. It is a fact that Logan was hospitalized with severe injuries. Not a theory, not an allegation not a claim, but a fact. Because Grecko and Starr did not actually see the attack itself and other “activists” with whom Grecko claims to have spoken, did not witness it (or more likely don’t want to believe it), he questions whether it was sexual in nature and whether it happened at all.

A “fact” that she had “severe injuries?” Where does Abrams get this? All we know is Logan reportedly spent four days in a hospital. We have no idea why, and more importantly, we have no report or evidence that any injuries that did occur were sexual. As I noted in a previous post, it’s unlikely a hospital would turn away a woman of Logan’s wealth and fame if she felt the need to stay there for a few days claiming any type of attack.

And ironically, the accounts provided in Grecko’s story provide the only witness accounts of Logan’s attack that have appeared to date. Despite Logan’s claim of being rescued by women and soldiers, not a single person other than Logan herself has corroborated her account of her sexual attack.

Abrams goes on to call Grecko a “charlatan,” and to accuse him of discouraging women from reporting rape. Why, because potential rape claimants will read Grecko’s account and fear they, too, might be discredited by witnesses who saw it not happen? No, I have a lot more fear that underdog journalists like Grecko will be discouraged from reporting the facts because they fear being smeared by wealthy powerhouses like CBS and Abrams.

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*Abrams’ dad is Columbia constitutional law professor/rich lawyer Floyd Abrams, which probably helped Abrams when he was at Columbia law grooming for his career as a TV legal analyst.