Last Saturday, I was the keynote speaker at a conference of FACE, Families Advocating for Campus Equality. It was a sobering experience in a great many ways, meeting many parents and students who have been through the wringer of being wrongfully found responsible for sexual misconduct of some form or another and having to deal with the consequences.

While the deal is that nobody talks about fight club, one of the themes that emerges was how to inform new students and their parents of the Kafkaesque nightmare of campus sex inquisitions. Concern for this issue has been greatly exacerbated by the impending shift in rules under Catherine Lhamon, Biden’s head of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, who is determined to undo the minimal due process provided under the DeVos rules, perhaps the only thing the Trump administration got right. Having spent a decade fighting to give the accused a chance to defend themselves, the whiplash felt by Lhamon’s malicious undoing of the reform is painful. Continue reading →

Before they had any clue what he would say, the writers at Saturday Night Live were ready to storm the castle, because Dave Chappelle, black comedian though he may be, was in the evil category because he continued to make jokes after the new taboos went into effect.

He last hosted the sketch comedy show in 2020, well before Netflix released his 2021 special “The Closer.” It angered some viewers because many of Chappelle’s jokes were aimed at the trans community. For example, he intentionally misgendered a trans friend and fellow comedian for laughs.

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The “rib,” or practical joke, is as integral to professional wrestling as a headlock. With long road trips common in the business and weeks sharing the same locker room with the same guys, ribs were a way to relieve tension and provide much needed laughter among the boys.

Ribs take many forms. They can be as simple as rubbing Tiger Balm all over someone’s clothing or as elaborate as removing the engine from a wrestler’s car.

And then there were guys like Jackie and Don Fargo, who took it to another level. Continue reading →

Back in the ’60s, underground comix were very cool, and the coolest were done by R. Crumb. Remember Mr. Natural? Zap comix, violating taboos whenever possible? Wild stuff for wild times, representing the exuberance of counterculture youth rejecting the constraints of the Silent Majority’s rules through nasty, ugly, cutting satire. Remember?

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Five states had propositions on the ballot to remove “slavery” from their Constitutions. Four passed, and the fifth, Louisiana, was a poorly drafted change that found little support on either side the issue. Wait, you say. Side? What side could there possibly be that was in favor of state constitutions permitting slavery? I mean, it’s slavery. Didn’t we fight a war to rid ourselves of slavery?

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution contains a clause of which many are unaware. Continue reading →

As of this writing,* it appears that there will not only be no “red wave” from the midterms, but it may turn out that Biden’s Dems may have the best outcomes of any election in the last 20 years. It’s possible that the GOP will eke out a majority in the House, though it appears that the “quality candidates” blew the Senate. Who thought Herschel Walker was a viable candidate for senator, other than a pathetic fraud whose sole concern was fealty to him personally?

As Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Maybe the common people aren’t as stupid as some would have us believe. There are, of course, many elected who are fools and knaves, if not both, but there are always outliers and they don’t change the bigger picture. Continue reading →

Why twelve? Why not 14 or 10? It’s not an unfair question but for the fact that a number existed at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified that was so deeply embedded in common law history and tradition that it was accepted as the number of people that made up a jury for the trial of serious criminal offenses.

And while scholars may debate the precise moment when the common-law jury came to be fixed at 12 members, this much is certain: By the time of the Sixth Amendment’s adoption, the 12-person criminal jury was “an institution with a nearly four-hundred-year-old tradition in England.”

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Will it be a red wave or a blue vindication? Both tribes have done everything possible to lose, to demonstrate their inability to break free of their most radical influences that the vast majority of a nation despises, to offer candidates that people want to vote for rather than hate the least.

Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. At least I don’t, no matter what I suspect. Is it the death of democracy as the president and the New York Times claim, or is it the pocketbook concerns that affect ordinary Americans in their daily lives? Continue reading →

The phenomenon of “citizen journalists” has had a curious history since social media allowed anyone to claim the protections of the First Amendment’s Freedom of the Press. Some, like Carlos Miller, with his blog Photography is not a Crime, spawned movements to protect the constitutional right to video police. Others wore the mantle in the expectation that they could use it to falsely attack with abandon and then hide behind the claim of being a journalist exposing baseless conspiracies.

In Laredo, Texas, Priscilla Villarreal was a bit of both, revealing actual news on her Facebook page, LaGordiloca, with harsh criticism of law enforcement and prosecution. Unsurprisingly, this gained her a significant following as well as some people who didn’t like her very much. Continue reading →

I dipped my toe in controversy yesterday, not because I have any particular feelings about basketball, in general, or the Nets, in particular. It was because I, being Jewish, could say something that a non-Jew would have been ripped to shreds as a hater for saying. Yes, it was about a basketball player named Kyrie who rode the Kanye (Ye?) West’s antisemitism train into suspension, and possibly the end of his career.

Here’s the weird thing. I have never, to my knowledge, watched Kyrie Irving play basketball. I assume he plays well or he wouldn’t be in the NBA, but beyond that, he means nothing to me. To be honest, I’m not exactly an aficionado of Ye either and wouldn’t be able to name a song of his or, until I googled it, tell you what his sneakers looked like. But I digress. Continue reading →