Imagine if there was a medium of exchange where it was quick and easy for the consumer, no risk of fraud or loss to the merchant, and no third party sticking its finger in the middle to pull out a few points for doing nothing?  If only someone could come up with such a thing.  Maybe they could call it, I dunno, cash?

From the New York Times:

“That is the crux of the matter,” said David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report, a payments industry publication. “The real savings is not about fraud, the real savings is about interchange.” Last year, merchants paid about $61 billion in interchange fees, Mr. Robertson said, compared with about $30 billion in fraud losses.

Let’s pull out the old Texas Instruments calculator: $61 billion, plus $30, and all of a sudden you’re talking real money.  The second, smaller number, is what gets lost to fraud, which is sold to the public as if it’s just a bunch of banks being really thoughtful about protecting them. It’s nonsense. It protects the credit card issuers, who are responsible for fraudulent use of their card.  Continue reading →

Jeremy Dear was a problem cop. He seemed to keep getting caught up in controversy, which is hard in Albuquerque given how there’s so much police controversy that standing out isn’t easy, but Dear managed to do so.  The last time began with the killing of 19-year-old Mary Hawkes, for which he was, of course, cleared.

But that wasn’t the end of Dear’s problems.

“I remember at the end, I was like oh (expletives), my camera, it was unplugged,” Dear told investigators. “I mean, I’ve had problems in the past, they come unplugged, you catch that little cord on something and it snags out.”

Dear has since been fired from APD for insubordination and untruthfulness. He’s been fighting to get his job back.

What exactly happened with Hawkes’ killing is shrouded in a mystery because, you see, his Taser-made body cam was unplugged. He claims he was very upset to learn “that little cord” became unplugged. Continue reading →

In an epic rant, Jonah Goldberg, who can find a lefty under every rock just as quick as a feminist can find a misogynist, sneaks in a point worth repeating at The National Review:

I almost feel sorry for those decent, sincere career liberals standing there in the quad as the little Maoists scream in their faces and strip off the suede elbow patches on their tweedy jackets like a lieutenant being busted down to a private. As the kids fit lifelong members of the ACLU with their duncecaps, the poor souls can hear the conservatives hooting and laughing off beyond the fence, throwing nerf footballs and telling jokes at the liberals’ expense.

With the Left given total control of these oases of tolerance and citadels of progressivism, what do we get?

We get pampered and coddled students screaming that these institutions are hotbeds of racism, homophobia, sexism, and the rest of the 31 Flavors of Oppression.

Oh, there is racism. We see it in the bodies on the ground, in courtrooms, in prison cells. But on college campuses?  Not individual instances of racist behavior, because there will always be people who behave poorly and think even worse.  But in the most diverse and inclusive places in this or any other dimension, where sensitivity to claims of discrimination are at their apex. Continue reading →

Whenever someone argues why men are such monsters to women, they invariably invoke the hated strawman, a sexist word if ever there was one. Whether it’s the “too exhausting” argument that men feel entitled to women’s bodies (no, they don’t; they’re just horny, because hormones, except nobody wants your body because you’re yucky) or whether women are entitled to change their mind the day after sex (of course they are, because rape is whatever a woman decides it is), it’s based on some cartoon characterization of men’s motives. After all, aren’t men nothing more than what women tell us we are?

Is this worth more than a head shake and chuckle?  An op-ed in the New York Times by Brookings Institute’s Richard V. Reeves and Isabel V. Sawhill wants to free men from the burden of having a sense of humor.  They call it “Men’s Lib!” Yay. Who doesn’t like “lib”?

SO far the gender revolution has been a one-sided effort. Women have entered previously male precincts of economic and political life, and for the most part they have succeeded. They can lead companies, fly fighter jets, even run for president.

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Though not the sexiest Supreme Court case this year, a few have recognized that Luis v. United States has an issue that could do some serious harm to nice folks who meet the criminal justice system. It’s one of those cases that, after the shit hits the fan, everybody will cry “how did that happen?”, as if this was a big secret.

Not so secret, really. It’s just that you couldn’t be bothered watching when it was happening before your eyes, so it will seem all secret-y when it comes back to bite you in the butt.  The issue is fairly straightforward.  Should the dreaded Monsanto case be applied, pre-trial, to concededly untainted assets?

The case of Luis v. United States arose in 2012 when Sila Luis was indicted in Florida on charges of operating a complicated scheme that allegedly defrauded Medicare of upwards of $40 million. The federal prosecutor in her case sought and obtained a pre-trial order freezing her assets. What makes this order notable is that the federal government moved to freeze not only her “tainted” assets, meaning those assets that can be arguably traced back to the alleged underlying crime; but the federal government also moved to freeze Luis’ undisputedly legitimate assets, which amount to some $15 million that cannot be connected in any way to any alleged criminal activity.

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James Murphy III was so fresh from being the Saratoga County District Attorney that he barely had time for his new robe to wrinkle before signing off on a search warrant for the Saratoga County Public Defender’s Office.

The unprecedented search warrant, signed Sept. 27 by County Judge James A. Murphy III, permitted police to search offices at 40 McMaster St., including the office of assistant Public Defender Matthew Maiello and the client file for Arthur A. Gannon of Corinth, according to a copy of the warrant obtained by the Times Union.

What could possibly necessitate this “unprecedented search warrant” remains unclear, though it appears to have started with an overheard jail telephone call.

Gannon, 47, was arrested in July on felony sex crime charges. The search warrant sought to find evidence of child pornography in the case against him, including “any and all material that Matthew Maiello obtained” from a black briefcase that Gannon’s mother, Patricia Gannon-Ramsey of Hudson Falls, gave to Maiello. An affidavit in which a law enforcement official lays out the probable cause in support of the warrant has not been turned over to Gannon’s new attorney, Danielle Neroni.

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According to the New York Times headline, the death toll in Paris from last night’s coordinated terrorist attacks stands at 127, with another 200 wounded. There are things to be said about this attack, not the least of which is that for all that’s been done, to appease religious groups, to sacrifice rights for safety, to put effort and fortunes into ineffective methods for the purpose of preventing them from ever occurring again, it still happened.

There will be advocates using this to further an agenda. And it will reduce the horror of mass murder to an abstraction, a tool to be used to manipulate the unwary and hard of thinking.  For now, the only thing to be said is to offer condolences to those whose family, loved ones and friends were murdered. Their deaths are real, and they cannot be undone.

As reports of the murders in Paris spread, so too did reactions from college campuses, angry that dead bodies stole the spotlight from their complaints.  A twitter account, @AmherstUprising, which may be an intentional parody or merely a parody in fact, announced that it would be protesting the school’s mascot at its football game today.

We will be protesting Lord Jeff at the football game tomorrow. We cannot be safe when racist mascots represent us. #AmherstUprising

— Amherst Uprising (@amherstuprising) November 13, 2015

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It was a remarkably bold move when Washington State embraced the concept of Limited License Legal Technicians, or 3LTs as I’ve called them. There has been no shortage of truly bad, really unworkable, ideas to address the Access to Justice problem, but this was an idea that seemed to have merit. No, there was no assurance that this was “the answer,” but at least it was a sound effort.

And so, it’s imploding.

Last month, nearly the entire Practice of Law Board resigned along with several former or prospective Board members who had been nominated and were awaiting appointment or reappointment to the Board. We are a group of dedicated volunteers with decades of experience serving on a wide variety of professional and community boards and organizations. We have a deep commitment to and long track record of increasing access to justice. The Board’s mission is laudable and we could have accomplished much to help increase the availability of legal services to the public if we had been allowed to do our job. Instead of advancing our mission during the past two years, we have spent more time and energy responding to and fending off the Washington State Bar Association’s efforts to undermine and eliminate our Board.

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Very bad things are happening on college campuses across the nation. Not the systemic racism of which so many complain. Not the never-ending stream of rapes allegations. Not the dethroning of college presidents or apologies of college administrators whose crime is failing to adhere to the orthodoxy of the Academy.

These may all be bad things, to the extent they’re true (and I have no doubt that there is truth in there; we may have come a long way in battling racism, but racism remains).  But these aren’t the bad things of which I write. The bad things are the dumbing down of thought, of rights, of words. And they make it impossible to fix the other bad things as we’ve lost the ability to distinguish, and in some instances care, between real harms and empty whining.

I was asked yesterday how it’s possible I can be as concerned as I am about the killing of black men by police, yet so callous about the racism and sexual assault claims on college campuses.  Which side am I on? The only answer I can give is that I’m on the side of real harms rather than “senses” of anything.  At HuffPo College, a statement by Yale senior, Reine Ibala, a founder of the Black Ivy Coalition, said:

“To the students of color at Mizzou, we stand with you in solidarity. To those who would threaten their sense of safety, we are watching.  #ConcernedStudent1950 #InSoliarityWithMizzou.”

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Everybody, except maybe The Intercept, who has anything to do with the criminal justice system knows that you don’t talk about anything that matters on a jailhouse phone*.

There are signs by the phones: All Calls Are Recorded.

They’re not kidding. They’re not kidding when they say they’re “recorded.” They’re not kidding when they say “all.” And yet, amazement fills the air when people learn that all calls are recorded.

AN ENORMOUS CACHE of phone records obtained by The Intercept reveals a major breach of security at Securus Technologies, a leading provider of phone services inside the nation’s prisons and jails. The materials — leaked via SecureDrop by an anonymous hacker who believes that Securus is violating the constitutional rights of inmates — comprise over 70 million records of phone calls, placed by prisoners to at least 37 states, in addition to links to downloadable recordings of the calls.

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