Should there be a “Recipe of Remembrance” for 9/11?  Sam Sifton, New York Times food editor, thinks so.

The first restaurant meal we had in the chaotic, somber days after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center was downtown, in TriBeCa, with an awful, smoky stench in the air and a tiny child sleeping in a stroller beside us. The setting was the Odeon, a bistro that opened in 1980 and for a long time defined the neighborhood’s possibility, back when its streets were empty and dark.

Some people remember 9/11 for the death and destruction. Some for the steak frites.

As that city lay wounded, the Odeon seemed the very best place to take a newborn to dinner.

We had country salad and steak frites that night.

My old pal, Dan Arshack, didn’t really think that tying a recipe to the deaths of thousands was appropriate, and let Sifton know. Continue reading →

Some have questioned what the big deal is with a NYPD detective’s take down of tennis star James Blake.  Now that the video has been released, two points are raised by those inclined to trivialize the incident.

In his description in the Daily News, he said that the officer who rushed him was wearing shorts, and as the video shows, he was not. Aha, he’s lying. Except that this detail is irrelevant to what transpired, and a guy who, out of the blue, gets taken down sometimes misperceives details.  There’s a video. The core description is not merely intact, but conclusively proven.

The next challenge is that he wasn’t exactly “slammed to the ground,” as in a pile-driver type WWR move. Yet again, the video shows what happened, and even though police-defenders can claim they got a different impression from the description, that’s a problem with their imagination based on the description. It doesn’t change that he was rushed, grabbed, spun immediately to the ground face down, and cuffed. Continue reading →

Via Matt Apuzzo at the New York Times, it turns out the feds, who arrested Temple University’s head of its physics department, Dr. Xi Xiaoxing, for spying by sending schematics to China of a secret device, a “pocket heater,” blew it. The very serious looking schematic turned out to be the plans for, well, something else.

It was an embarrassing acknowledgment that prosecutors and F.B.I. agents did not understand — and did not do enough to learn — the science at the heart of the case before bringing charges that jeopardized Dr. Xi’s career and left the impression that he was spying for China.

He was arrested, led away in cuffs, reputation stained and life upended.  Because he was a spy the agents had no clue what all the squiggly lines meant, but it sure looked spy-ish.

“I don’t expect them to understand everything I do,” Dr. Xi, 57, said in a telephone interview. “But the fact that they don’t consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn’t do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game.”

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In response to a question as to the seriousness of the problems with campus rape adjudications, FIRE’s Joe Cohn responded that anything said could be used against the accused in a subsequent criminal prosecution. The 5th Amendment problem, that the defense in campus disciplinary proceedings required the abridgement of the right not to bear witness against oneself.

While true, it was neither a strong point nor remotely sufficient. After all, the natural assumption is only the guilty need to invoke it, and, well, it’s an inchoate problem.  There was no mention of the natural consequences that flow from a wrongful “conviction.”  There was no point made that this is only administrative in name rather than consequence.

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Lawprof Doug Berman immediately saw the problem.

New Justice Department sound and fury about white-collar prosecutions signifying….?

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates took to the podium to make one of the silliest announcements ever by the Department of Justice, that a memo had issued to instruct their various divisions that it would now hold individuals “accountable” for crime.

No, she didn’t say some United States Attorney indicted anyone. Not someone from a big bank, or a major brokerage house. No one.  Rather, this was to announce that the DoJ has figured out that it need only say that it was going to do something rather than actually doing something. Continue reading →

Having chosen not to write the obligatory 9/11 mush for my own reasons, that opens the door to discussion of what this ancient history means for those who suffer the problematic, traumatic oppression today on college campuses.

After all, when one juxtaposes 9/11 with micro-aggressions, one can certainly understand why the former has faded from memory while the latter is crushing their very soul.

While the video may try to make more of students’ gestalt than it’s due, the fact is that 9/11, like all historical tragedies, has faded from reality to myth in the minds of college students.  This is as it should be.  Continue reading →

We’re past the proof of concept part of the shiny death of the great American pleasure of cruising down the highway, top down, wind in your hair.  Route 66 is closed. Instead, we can sit there like uninvolved blobs, because that’s what shiny-lovers really want out of toys so they can check their text messages instead.

Cool future? Maybe not. As Karl Bode at Techdirt explains:

As Google, Tesla, Volvo, and other companies make great strides with their self-driving car technology, we’ve started moving past questions about whether the technology will work, and started digging into the ethics of how it should work.

Wait, what?  Are you saying it’s not just groovy technology making our life even more tech-tastic? Continue reading →

In the back of fair-minded people’s heads, there’s a bug that whispers that the law should provide a remedy for things that are wrong. It’s only fair. And to a large extent, the law does, but one of the biggest cracks in the system surrounds wrongs committed by federal prosecutors.

Sure, the prosecutors have immunity so they can prosecute criminals without fear of being sued, which does little to stem misconduct, abuse and concealment of exculpatory evidence used to convict the innocent and guilty alike. But the courts have chosen to side with the poor prosecutors and they’re sticking with their narrative.

Yet, there is no rationale to justify why prosecutors should be entitled to issue press releases that are flagrantly false and defamatory. Indeed, issuing press releases alone emits an unpleasant odor, but to be able to lie and defame?

Former InterMune CEO W. Scott Harkonen demanded correction of a press release issued by the FBI and United States Attorney announcing his conviction for wire fraud, that also announced that he lied to the public about the effectiveness of his company’s drug. While the former was true, the latter was entirely false.  So Harkonen sought to have the government correct its release, withdraw its release, unring the bell of their lie. Continue reading →

Third time’s the charm?  Senior United States District Judge Richard G. Kopf has twice quit blogging at Hercules and the umpire, but that doesn’t mean his belief in judicial transparency is over.  Judge Kopf returns today to Fault Lines with his post, Why Do Federal Judges Send Criminals To Prison?

We (Lee Pacchia and I, not the royal “we”) couldn’t be more thrilled than to have the judge back in the saddle.  No one has brought more humanity to the judiciary than Judge Kopf.  No one has offered a more enlightening peek under the robe.  And in keeping with our ideal of providing real insight from people who know what they’re talking about, this is about as real as it gets.

And the good judge takes praise and a punch with equanimity. Not bad for a guy confirmed by the Senate for life. Welcome back, Judge. We missed you.

And as if this wasn’t enough. Fault Lines is thrilled to welcome three new contributors to the cause of keeping it real. Continue reading →

Whether it’s a problem of false equivalencies or just that any “rebel” given an official title quickly becomes co-opted into the machinery of government, another officious cog in the wheel, isn’t clear. But Richard Emory, chair of New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, one-time challenger of police misconduct, is now just another apologist.

The good news is that the pervasive existence of video capturing police encounters with citizens has fundamentally altered the role of the CCRB.

More and more NYPD misconduct is being caught on video — making substantiating complaints a cakewalk for the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, the agency’s head said Monday.

“Video is a fundamental revolution when it comes to the accountability of police officers,” CCRB Chairman Richard Emery told the Daily News. “It’s demystifying the whole investigative process. No longer is the lion’s share of the cases ‘he said, she said’ where additional corroboration is almost always required and substantiation is quite difficult.”

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