There’s a kid in Iowa or Kansas, somewhere that doesn’t appear on New York maps, named Derek who is constantly replying to my twits by going ballistic about my friendship with Mike Cernovich. Yes, that Mike Cernovich. I’ve known Mike for a long time now, as he was doing a blawg called Crime and Federalism with Norm Pattis back when SJ was born. Mike,  you see, is a lawyer, and a very smart one. That’s when we became friends.

And there’s another kid who used to be ridiculed for being a bit overweight, not being the best speller and being a little loose with details when he wrote at Above the Law, after winning David Lat’s “ATL Idol” contest by being very funny. And he was very funny, and very smart, and provocative but in a way that would have you rolling on the floor. Elie Mystal was a friend, he would jokingly call my “angry black man friend.” At least I thought he was joking, but he never came to dinner, so who knows? Continue reading →

Let’s begin this week with some observations I’ve made over the course of last week’s visits to the grocery store.

First, our society has become a lawless hellscape run by thugs, the likes of which haven’t been seen since “Mad Max.”

Second, people clearly haven’t been taught proper grocery store etiquette. Continue reading →

The concluding sentence of Mary Pilon’s homage to economic ignorance points at us.

Now it’s on fans to pay attention.

To be fair, more you (if you follow basketball) than me, since I’m not really a fan. But either way, Pilon’s dot connections are clear: the reason Brittney Griner in in prison in Russia is because you suck at being fans. Continue reading →

It’s the first day of school,* so the Times has a series of op-eds about education in America. It’s an interesting mix of the usual assortment of fantasy and condemnation that largely goes nowhere as the educational establishment engages in its annual determination of what new fashion trend to promote this time around.

But one op-ed faces a hard choice, one that is so disfavored as to require parents to go to court to stop their local school board from trampling hard working, dedicated students under the sharp hooves of their unicorns. It’s an homage to merit. Continue reading →

At the New York Times, Charles Blow announced that “Defund the Police” is dead. It’s not that it needed announcing, but that it died with such a whimper that few noticed, but with President Biden talking about putting more cops on the street, Blow made a political assessment.

Some said it was dumb.

Some thought it was politically disastrous. Continue reading →

Talking to a long-time SJ reader, I spoke of the social shift between the time SJ started in 2007 and now. Back then, people were still of the general view that police were the good guys and that the bad things people claimed cops did were, well, untrue. Why would they do that? A great question to which there was no good answer, because there was often no good reason for the violence, the meanness and the cruelty, yet it happened. Continue reading →

Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick has been doing a series of posts about a stunningly dystopian scheme to protect children from “inappropriate” content, whatever that means in California, and which could very well end up affecting SJ (and hence you, dear reader) as it would the readers of Techdirt and pretty much every other site in existence.

Eric Goldman parsed the bill when it was little more than a twinkle in an unduly passionate eye.

First, the bill pretextually claims to protect children, but it will change the Internet for EVERYONE. In order to determine who is a child, websites and apps will have to authenticate the age of ALL consumers before they can use the service. NO ONE WANTS THIS. Continue reading →

Sure, the Supreme Court held that corporal punishment in schools was not cruel and unusual in violation of the Eighth Amendment in Ingraham v. Wright, but we’re better than that now. We don’t let teachers strike kids anymore. We know that’s harmful, that’s cruel and that’s wrong. Or do we?

The road to corporal punishment in Cassville, [Missouri] a city located nearly 60 miles southeast of Springfield, started earlier this year with an anonymous survey of parents, students and school employees. Continue reading →

In elite circles, where they keep changing pedagogical methods until every child is equitably illiterate, the test for being licensed as a social worker has been branded “racist.” John McWhorter points out a problem with the conclusion.

The Association of Social Work Boards administers tests typically required for the licensure of social workers. Apparently, this amounts to a kind of racism that must be reckoned with. Continue reading →

Edward Niedermeyer (no known relation to Douglas) isn’t wrong.

Compared to the herculean task of building supply chains to sustain a broad domestic E.V. market, tackling this problem from the demand side almost seems easy. Proving that E.V.s can road trip may have been an important psychological hurdle for the technology to tackle, but it remains more psychological than real: the average American motorist drives about 40 miles per day and 95 percent of our car trips are 30 miles or shorter.

Continue reading →