The early days of the internet made a promise to America and the world, that it would eventually provide access to the accumulated wisdom of mankind. Our art. Our music. Our ideas. Our knowledge. All of it. There for the taking, should you choose to partake. They were heady times.

As the mothership of social justice, UC Berkeley found itself in an awkward position when the Department of Justice dropped the hammer on its free online content.  Berkeley’s response was a threat: let it go or else.

The University of California, Berkeley has announced that it may eliminate free online content rather than comply with a U.S. Justice Department order that it make the content accessible to those with disabilities.

DoJ refused to blink, as it had law, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the demands of social justice on its side. It would not acquiesce. Berkeley made good on its promise. Continue reading →

The Trump administration finally revealed its second try at the immigration ban that conclusively proved in its first iteration that there wasn’t a person in the administration with a clue how to do this whole governance thing. It was nothing short of a manifesto of incompetence, notwithstanding the president’s inability to grasp why it wasn’t well received.

So they apparently found someone in Washington with sufficient understanding of law to revise the Executive Order.

This order is much more narrowly tailored, providing exemptions not just to those with green cards and other valid visas, but also people with significant contacts to United States, students, children, urgent medical cases, and other special circumstances—and Iraq is necessarily treated as a special case—as well as spelling out reasons for the remaining restrictions.

Having corrected some of the most shockingly idiotic errors in the original order, such as the inclusion of legal permanent residents and visa holders, has Trump finally cleaned up his mess while keeping his promise to keep those nasty Muslim refugees from terrorizing our nation? Not exactly. Continue reading →

The Supreme Court split 5-3 on whether the “no impeachment” rule for jurors remains constitutional when a juror is overtly racist during deliberations. The facts of the case were quite flagrant, with a juror injecting strong racial animus* into the jury’s deliberations.

• Pena-Rodriguez “did it because he’s Mexican and Mexican men take whatever they want.”
• Mexican men are physically controlling of women because they have a sense of entitlement and think they can “do whatever they want” with women.
• Pena-Rodriguez “was guilty because, in [Juror H.C.’s] experience as an ex-law enforcement officer, Mexican men had a bravado that caused them to believe they could do whatever they wanted with women.”
• Where Juror H.C. used to patrol, “nine times out of ten Mexican men were guilty of being aggressive toward women and young girls.”
• Pena-Rodriguez’s alibi witness was not credible because, among other things, he was “an illegal.”

How this juror managed to avoid detection during voir dire is both a mystery and unsurprising. It’s remarkably easy for a juror to appear totally open-minded while harboring prejudice. Say the right words and that’s that. Not until deliberations did his biased view of Mexicans become obvious. Continue reading →

Having spent the past week driving from San Francisco to New York, meeting and listening to those deplorables wearing John Deere baseball caps and working in unsavory jobs that are necessary to keeping a nation functioning, I learned some things.

They’re just like you. They care about their family, their country, the downtrodden and the marginalized. They care about hard work, honesty and integrity. They want everyone to do well, to be well, to thrive.

They are smart and stupid, concerned and confused. They are just like you. Continue reading →

Demands for investigations? Impeachment? Counter-demands for an investigation? For what? Jonathan Turley raises a study about moral outrage, perhaps the foremost weapon of our age as it justifies the mindless devolution into emotion without all that annoying baggage of knowledge and facts.

As our politicians went on the air to vent their disgust over Russians trying to influence our election, there was an interesting study published this month on moral outrage in an academic journal, Motivation and Emotion.  The researchers found that moral outrage is rooted, not in altruism, but self-interest — often to affirm one’s own status and avoiding responsibilities or guilt.

“Individuals,” the study notes, “respond to reminders of their group’s moral culpability with feelings of outrage at third-party harm-doing.”  The most astonishing aspect of this study is that it was not done entirely on Capitol Hill.

Well, that sucks, since all the deeply passionate social justice seekers sleep better at night knowing their true purpose is the betterment of humanity, and not just affirming their own status as social justice warriors. But that doesn’t mean the moral outrage, embraced for less than altruistic reasons, isn’t justified, right? Continue reading →

He’s best known for his book, The Bell Curve, which might have mustered some mainstream scholarly interest but for its chapters 13 and 14.

It’s central point is that intelligence is a better predictor of many factors including financial income, job performance, unwed pregnancy, and crime than one’s parents’ socio-economic status or education level.

Cool enough, but then he did what, even in 1994, was an unforgivable sin. These two chapters question the role of race in intelligence.

While the authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic, they write in the introduction to Chapter 13 that “The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved,” and “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences.”

Continue reading →

See you when I get back.

If I get back.

Meta Prologue: In the first post today, Trump’s shallow, ignorant grasp of law, Constitution and governance is discussed with regard to federal enforcement of marijuana laws. In this post, the alternative is juxtaposed, as social justice rhetoric proves itself just as shallow and ignorant. The question isn’t which is better, as people will pick the lesser of two evils or the side most closely alsigned with their personal issues, but to note that both reflect an untenable depth of ignorance. It’s die by knife or drowning in the cesspool, but either way, you’re gonna die.

When the brilliant and beautiful Roxane Gay decided to condemn Nate Parker for being acquitted of rape, and the New York Times found this worthy of its precious real estate, it reflected the modern social justice conundrum. Not even a black man, tried and acquitted, could be permitted to move on in the court of racial and gender justice.

Casey Affleck won the Best Actor Oscar. There is no doubt that his performance in Manchester By The Sea was worthy. One might suspect that the win was deserved because of the performance, since the Oscar is about acting in movies. Except when it’s not.

For months now, the media has been taking Casey Affleck to task over his past sexual harassment allegations, which resurfaced in September in a Mashable article. But, as we predicted, it appears all the backlash over the 2010 incidents had no effect on the actor’s Oscar chances.

Continue reading →

There was once a time when the rarified air of federal court wasn’t commonly befouled with the banal stench of defendants accused of drug crime. But the war on drugs in the 1970s changed that, and a defendant might well find himself one of the unfortunates who faced penalties magnitudes harsher than state judges would mete out for no better reason than “it’s Tuesday.”

The Drug Enforcement Administration was created in 1973. Conspiracy became the darling of federal prosecutors, especially when they needed no overt act for drugs as opposed to any other conspiracy. Forfeiture was beloved by Americans who wanted to take the profit out of crime. Heady times.

But Americans began to tire of the War on Drugs, both because it was expensive and we were losing it. Badly. And in time, people came to doubt that Reefer Madness was a documentary, and voted in states to legalize marijuana, first as medicinal and later as recreational. As it turned out, the horrors drug warriors predicted failed to happen. In fact, things turned out surprisingly well, generating revenues for states, providing jobs, reducing illegal sales.

One thing, however, did not happen. Pot remained not only a federal offense, but a Schedule I drug. For all the epiphanies of the Obama administration, removing it from Schedule I was not among them. There was the Cole Memo, which shifted federal criminal priorities away from states where marijuana was legalized, but like almost all Obama-era “reforms,” it was as easily undone as done. as it lacked rule of law. Continue reading →

The “free the nipple” movement is one that a very diverse group of people can support. Some for the right reason. Some for their own reasons. For obvious reasons, you pigs. This is not, as some might surmise, about women whose deepest desire is to walk around without wearing a shirt (or blouse, for the purists out there).

Rather, it had historically been the crime of indecent exposure for women to publicly bare their nipples. Men could go shirtless all they wanted. Boys divided into skins and shirts for basketball teams in gym class. Women would get arrested. Equal protection, right?

But the argument for prudes was that women and men were different. Nobody gave a damn if a guy’s nipple was out there, while female breasts were objects of sexual desire, and so exposing them would inflame the hormonal masses. Or, at least, this was what prim and proper folks believed, and those pearl-clutchers had breasts of varying size of their own. While we may not be a society founded in religion (hi, Sharia folks), the Puritans had their influence on the law.

Colorado District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson called bullshit* on a Fort Collins, Colorado, law that perpetuated the criminalization of the female nipple. Continue reading →