It was very late for me, but there was nothing I wanted to do more than to drive to the train station to pick up my boy at 11:17 last night.  He’s home now. I’m thankful to have him asleep in his bed.

The notion of Black Friday is bad enough, but that people who work in retail stores that have decided to push the shopping opportunity forward so that it impairs their ability to enjoy Thanksgiving with their families is just wrong.  Do not go shopping today, no matter how enticing the sales may seem. If you go, you will encourage this wrong. Continue reading →

Forgive the title, as it was thrust upon me by a United States District Judge who feels he was the victim of the tyranny of the disjunctive. The truth is that the conjunctive was there for him, but he eschewed its safe harbor.  His having made the choice, I can do no less than respect it.

It began with a random listicle that included this:

On Friday, I sentenced a young Guatemalan woman, with no criminal history. Horror of horrors, she used a fake idea [sic] to get a shitty job. Despite the Guidelines, I sentenced her to time served and no supervised release. That way ICE will allow her to depart voluntarily and she will be able to take her three little American-born kids with her back to a country where there is no milk and honey but only grinding poverty. Aren’t I a fucking hero? Continue reading →

Via Timothy Geigner at Techdirt, it appears that the fine, upstanding airline company, United, came awfully close to killing a living thing.

United Airlines nearly killed an owner’s beloved dog and agreed to pay her vet bills, but only if she signed an non-disclosure agreement. Janet Sinclair brought her pets, Sedona the greyhound and Alika the cat, on a cross-country trip using UA’s “PetSafe” program, which makes several promises about how the animals will be treated and what type of conditions they’ll be exposed to. It would appear, to put it mildly, that the airline failed to keep their promises.

See what they did there? Create a “product” and marketing will give it a cool name like “PetSafe,” Continue reading →

There is no need to explain the problems with giving cops excess military stuff. Radley Balko has already done so in his book, Rise of the Warrior Cop. But it presents an open question: With so many billions of dollars worth of military equipment no longer needed elsewhere, what should be done with it?

On the one hand, if police have it, they will use it. Not just for parades and trips to elementary schools, but against any threat to their authority, whether it is an unlawful chicken ranch or the neighborhood poker game. Continue reading →

Well, no. The headline asserts something for which there is absolutely no basis whatsoever. I made it up out of whole cloth.  Which puts me in the company of the Dallas Morning News:

In Hous­ton alone, about 300,000 sex traf­fick­ing cases are pros­e­cuted each year.

(Dal­las Morn­ing News Edi­to­r­ial: Crack­ing down on sex traf­fick­ers).

The num­ber is such obvi­ous non­sense that any­one who gave it any seri­ous thought would decry it. (Amy Alkon and Wal­ter Olson got there before me.) But the DMN blithely pub­lished it as fact.

This was an editorial, and people read editorials and rely on them to form their opinions. And so it would seem that there is a “sex trafficking,” Continue reading →

Is this what we’ve wrought?

What!?!  Outrageous! Mean! Death to curmudgeons!!! Continue reading →

A little over a month ago, the question arose: how long before the anti-revenge porn advocates would go after the Safe Harbor provisions of Section 230?  The answer appeared, via a post by Josh Blackman, in an article in U.S. News & World Reports:

Activists seeking to criminalize “revenge porn” say they are working with a member of Congress to prepare federal legislation that would force Internet companies to take down the sometimes X-rated content.

The proposed law has not be [sic] finalized and its sponsor does not wish to be identified yet, according to University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks, who is helping draft the bill. Continue reading →

Not long ago, Dr. SJ (for those unaware, that would be my darling wife, who prefers that her real name not appear anywhere on the internets) gave a medical equipment vendor a fax number to send some paperwork.  As she was home at the time, she gave out our home fax. Big mistake.

We have been getting mid-night faxes from a scam business loan operation, night after night. Yes, it violates the CAN-SPAM act of 2003, 15 U.S.C §7701 et seq., but so what?  The operation, traced back to its roots based on a website found at the BBB (communitybf[dot]com), appears to be out of Panama, or Russia, China or a million other places, but otherwise provides a phony telephone number and address. Continue reading →

The only possible way this could have happened is if some cop in the Cornelius, Oregon, police department had whispered in someone’s ear. That, or it was the most mind-bogglingly lucky screw-up imaginable when volunteer certified law student, Stacy Du Clos, decided to subpoena some officers of the department to testify at trial on behalf of the defense.

Via The Oregonian:

In a rare move, defense attorney Stacy Du Clos, who is a certified law student, had summoned Officer Dustin DeHaven’s colleagues as character witnesses. It was DeHaven’s arrest of her client that led to the trial. Continue reading →

I have nightmarish memories of talking to prosecutors and judges in an effort to explain why a client didn’t behave the way they thought a “normal person” should.  It’s reminiscent of Angry Nancy Grace’s screeching, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”  Why don’t people do what reasonably well-educated middle class people think they should?

Two things came across the twitters over the weekend that helped me enormously to understand why.  The first is from Huff Post by Linda Tirado, entitled “This Is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense.” The second is a 1996 article from the Instructional Leader by educator Ruby Payne entitled “Understanding and Working with Students and Adults from Poverty,” courtesy of Shoirca.

There is much here worthy of discussion, but you have to read both pieces first. They are worth your time.

Update: While I appreciate the emails about other posts that you think are relevant or related, these are the two that I have chosen to commend here. The reason is that one is a first-person, as opposed to a third-person (of which there are millions), narrative, and the second is a somewhat empirically based analysis as opposed to an anecdotal commentary (of which there are millions). While I appreciate your interest and effort to “help me out,” these remain my choices. Feel free to post other things on your own blogs.

Update 2:  As it turns out, the Linda Torado piece at HuffPo is a fraud. What a shame. My apologies.