Sheriff Roy Templeton was in fourth grade again. The irony was not lost on Mud Lick’s top cop, who spent many a day dealing with adults who behaved like fourth graders.

Today was different. The Sheriff had been summoned to Bear Bryant Elementary School at the request of Ms. Furstenburger, Roy Junior’s fourth grade teacher. Apparently the boy’d been up to some mischief and the Sheriff had been summoned to deal with his son’s behavior.

If only Arlene weren’t at her bridge club, the Sheriff thought. I’ve got that new revised treatise from Jordan Peterson on ‘Atlas Shrugged’ waiting on me back at the station. Continue reading →

To read about it on social media is to be deluged with the belief that Missouri put to death an innocent man.  The reason, they contend, is that finality matters more than innocence. As long as a defendant received the mechanics of due process, the fact of actual innocence made no difference. And while that is, indeed, the state of the law, it wasn’t quite the state of Williams’ case.

I’m not certain that he was innocent. There was no mic drop moment that proved he had nothing to do with the murder, and there was certainly some evidence to support the conviction. He pawned the victim’s laptop, the victim’s property was found in a car that his grandfather let him drive, and his girlfriend and a jailhouse informant told the police that he had confessed to the crime.

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It’s totally understandable that Kamala Harris wants to run for president on the issue of abortion. It’s just as understandable that Harris is proposing a national law protecting the right to choose. But to get there, she’s proposed what may be the most short-sighted move conceivable, eliminating the filibuster.

“I’ve been very clear: I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe,” Ms. Harris told Wisconsin Public Radio in the interview, which was recorded on Monday. “Fifty-one votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”

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They did it. Again. After some guy named Musk retwitted a deepfake video of Kamala Harris that made her look…not good, California snapped into action and enacted AB 2839, a law prohibiting materially deceptive election advertisements.

(1) California is entering its first-ever artificial intelligence (AI) election, in which disinformation powered by generative AI will pollute our information ecosystems like never before. Voters will not know what images, audio, or video they can trust.

It is a serious concern, standing alone, but was its impetus serious? Continue reading →

Perhaps the funniest (in the weird sense, not the humorous sense) reaction to Bruce Schneier’s apocryphal op-ed is that the small minds can’t get past his use of Israel’s exploding pagers and walkie-talkies to grasp the magnitude of what Schneier is trying to explain. If they could just let go of their hatred of Israel for a moment, they might realize that it was merely a flagrant example of a far larger, far deeper problem that cybersecurity experts like Schneier have been warning about for a long time.

Israel’s brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us vulnerable. And we have no good means to defend ourselves.

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Forget the twinkie defense. The new hip defense is the “family man defense,” raised according to Jessica Grouse in the New York Times to sanitize Sean “Puff Daddy,” etc., Combs’ crimes because he’s rich.

On Monday, Sean Combs was arrested in Manhattan on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. If he’s convicted of the racketeering charge, it could potentially land him a life sentence. His legal team defended him that day with references to his role as a father. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children and working to uplift the Black community,” they said in a statement. “He is an imperfect person, but he is not a criminal.”

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From the cries of outrage on social media, you would have believed that two NYPD officers shot a man because he failed to pay the subway fare. The problem was that the man, Derrell Mickles, not only tried to beat the fare, twice, but had a knife in his hand which he refused to drop when the cops commanded he do so. That little detail was omitted by those trying to whip up outrage over the shooting.

[A longer video is available as well.] Continue reading →

Fall had set upon the quiet town of Mud Lick, Alabama. In most years, this meant the turn of the air from oppressively muggy to somewhat pleasant, the first signs of leaves changing color, and the Alabama Crimson Tide returning to form as the alpha males of NCAA Football.

The latter wasn’t happening this year and it worried one man more than others. Sheriff Roy Templeton, Mud Lick’s top cop and current contender for Southeastern Sheriff of the Year by the NAACP, was not happy with his Tide’s current prospects. They looked almost human under the guidance of new head coach Kalen DeBoer. And if Sheriff Roy wasn’t mistaken it almost looked like the boys were playing with their food at times. Continue reading →

A thought experiment. You have 100 feet of shelving in a public library and 1,000 feet of books, with more coming every day. What do you, the librarian, do? You pick and choose which books to put on your shelf and use up your precious shelf space. It’s not because you’re a censor or book-hater, but because the laws of physics apply in libraries and two objects cannot occupy the same space.

In libe parlance, the problem is called “weeding.”

I want to talk about a particular twist in the dispute, which can be particularly well seen in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Freedom to Read Foundation, the Texas Library Association, and American Library Association. The passage, and the sources it cites, refer to the necessity to remove books on some criteria—this is called “weeding,” and some sources suggest that each year a public library would generally weed out 5% of its stock—and discuss which criteria are proper: Continue reading →

District of Maryland Judge Paula Xinis denied a motion to dismiss as to a school district’s “official” twitter “StaffPride” account. Why, you may wonder, would a school district have an official Pride account. That was at the heart of the matter.

In October 2022, the School Board announced the introduction of LGBTQIA+-themed books into the MCPS [Montgomery County Public Schools] curriculum. In response, several parents sought permission from MCPS for their children to “opt out” of any classroom instruction involving these books. Continue reading →