Whether billionaire Mike Bloomberg is bored or just sees his moment, it’s unclear that he’s doing anything more than floating a trial balloon to see if he can slide into the Democratic mix as the Great White Hope, the reasonable man for the middle who isn’t out to reinvent the Great Society and isn’t a vulgar, amoral ignoramus whose only motivations are self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment.

But then, Bloomberg’s tenure as Mayor of New York was not without its well-founded controversy, the worst of which was “stop & frisk.” Like any well-named program, it linked to a completely lawful and proper concept, as Terry v. Ohio expressly permitted “stop and frisk” (note that I don’t use the ampersand to distinguish between the two), but the program instituted bore no greater connection to lawful stop and frisk than a name.

Under the law, a police officer with reasonable, articulable suspicion could briefly stop an individual to ask questions. If the officer had a reasonable, articulable suspicion that the person posed a threat of harm, either as the cause for the initial stop or in addition to it, the cop could frisk the person for a weapon. Continue reading →

I love churros. Not as much as donuts, but still. There’s even a chance I might buy one from a woman in the subway, although I do not, in general, believe it’s wise to buy food in the subway, especially sushi, but I digress. Some people, however, try to make some money by selling such delectables. They go about with a cart, hawking their wares, as a way to earn a living, feed their children, survive.

The problem is that it’s against the law to do so if you lack a license from the City of New York. You can’t do it on the street without a license. You doubly can’t do it in the subway without a license. The rationale includes public health and safety, although the fact that licenses generate revenue and protect the revenues of people who rent space in the subway to churro-women poaching their turf.

Should there be such regulation? Should this regulation be enforced by the police through the legal system? Those are questions for philosophers, as there are such regulations* and they provide for criminal enforcement. Apparently, Sophia B. Newman didn’t know this, and thought this was a fair issue for debate with police in the subway. Continue reading →

Since I write occasionally, a plea by 33 writers to the New York Times to stop using the phrase “quid pro quo” in reference to the conduct underlying the Trump impeachment proceedings was curious. Sure, it was Latin, so maybe they were just a bunch of American English jingoists, or perhaps concerned about cultural appropriation. As it turned out, that wasn’t at all their concern.

A plea from 33 writers: Please use language that will clarify the issues at hand.

Please stop using the Latin phrase “quid pro quo” regarding the impeachment inquiry. Most people don’t understand what it means, and in any case it doesn’t refer only to a crime. Asking for a favor is not a criminal act; we frequently demand things from foreign countries before giving them aid, like asking them to improve their human rights record.

Continue reading →

There has probably been no worse development for lawyers than internet legal directories. While they allow people to find lawyers, they provide no useful means of differentiating between lawyers. The problems have been described here in detail over the years, when there was a rush of new “legal space” start-ups trying to milk a bit of the legal budget out of the middle by connecting some random lawyer, willing to pay a monthly fee, or willing to split their fee, to pretend they were a good lawyer.

Every lawyer on the internet claims to be tough, experienced and caring. The clients of some lawyers might dispute that characterization, but when the basis for choosing a lawyer is whatever crap they write online, it’s hard to tell in advance.

Naturally, that means there should be a new push for doing the same old failed thing, and Bob Ambrogi is on top of it. Continue reading →

It occurred to me not long ago that every time my family has gone out to eat with my brother-in-law’s family, I pay the tab. There are three ways to look at this phenomenon. The first is that I have substantially more wealth than he does, so I can better afford it. The second is that I choose to do so, so it’s my pleasure to pick up the bill.

The third is that he’s cheap and never reaches for the check, even though we all ate a meal together and his share of the bill is invariably greater than mine as he tends to imbibe in significantly greater quantities when it’s us, since he knows he won’t be the one paying for it. On his own, it’s burgers. With me, it’s filet or lobster.

I don’t expect anyone to feel badly for me. But do I owe him a free meal? It’s not that I can’t afford it. I can. Without breaking a sweat, I can provide him and his family with a delightful meal at a restaurant he would never go to otherwise. In my mind, it’s my pleasure to do so, though it would be nice if he tried, just once before I died, to pick up a tab. I wouldn’t let him, but it would be nice not to feel as if I’m just a meal ticket. Continue reading →

Prefatory note: I was handed the following text from an intern at Children’s Workshop. The bastards finally did it. They got to Sesame Street.

INTRO WITH GRAPHICS
(notify Standards and Practices of lyric change)

La la, la la, la la, la la, Elmo’s world.
La la, la la, la la, la la, Elmo’s world.

Elmo loves his trans friends, and cis friends too,

That’s Elmo’s world! Continue reading →

It was a curious point, that the cost of providing basic services to people in rural America was far greater than for those living in cities. After all, wire up one tenement on 207th and Dyckman and you’ve got 100 people covered. But a ranch in Wyoming could required 20 miles of electrical cable to provide light to five people.

The point was why should the city folk subsidize the rural folk by paying exorbitant amounts of money to string lines to their million acre ranches? If they want electricity, let them move to the city like all decent people. It’s not a crazy consideration, and it’s why government provided incentives to compel private enterprise to provide universal electricity (or, to be more modern about it, internet access). Good business would mean wire up the city. There’s little money to be made from running 20 miles of fiber to the Double D Ranch.

So why aren’t rural Americans rushing to live in the city? Kristin Shapiro* listened to NPR so you don’t have to. Continue reading →

While there has been a good deal of effort put into fighting the deprivation of due process in campus sex tribunals, it has largely been directed toward male students. At the same time, there have been some academics who have gotten caught up in the campus hysteria and learned, the hard way, that Kafka was an optimist.

For some, there’s a schadenfreude quality to it, as they were often very much a part of the machinery that created or enabled these problems to exist and fester. But as courts are now reining in colleges for the sake of male students, the University of Michigan has decided to wage war against its own professors. Continue reading →

Conor Friedersdorf pulled an interesting quote from a New Yorker article about Meghan Daum and her new book, The Problem With Everything.

Daum presents herself as a bit of a lurker, haunting the fringes of this world without becoming one of its pundits. She portrays herself instead as a liberal inspecting her own house for evidence of hypocrisy. “I felt an obligation to hold the left to account because, for all my frustrations with it, I was still of it,” she writes. As long as she doesn’t commit to some of the views of Free Speech YouTube, especially those that emphasize the rightness of hierarchy, I suppose she can still say she is “of the left,” which she also fails to define. But being “of the left” is not a purely materialist position. Right now, it also indicates a set of values, most obviously fairness, in which political correctness is a form of good etiquette practiced by well-intentioned people.

Conor questioned whether this assertion is correct. Continue reading →

My acceptance letter to Yale not having arrived in the mail yet, it’s possible that I fail to appreciate the artistic value of the performance. Art is in the eye of the beholder, I’m told, by people who know more about it than I do. I can accept that, but I nonetheless doubt that one person’s (or five people’s, as is technically the case) attempt at art justifies what happened in Professor Emma Sky’s class.

“My classroom is a safe forum for students with different views and backgrounds to debate vigorously the politics of the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy,” Sky wrote in an email to the News. “The world is complex and there is no single narrative. We all learn from each other and tolerance is a key value. It is a classroom that values freedom of speech and rigorous debate and that is why so many students compete each year for one of the 18 slots.”

Sounds interesting, not that I’ll ever know for sure. But some students who did get the letter disagreed. Continue reading →