It’s like an implausible sitcom story that somehow worked, and all the other networks rushed to put on bad copycat shows of their own.  Take pre-school teachers, mix in some innocent little children and tie it together with sexual abuse and the ritual murders of babies and animals. Bingo: primetime.

Except it wasn’t a bad TV show, and it cost too many people too many years of their life until the show was canceled. The latest was Fran Keller, who was released after spending 21 years of her life in prison because of this ridiculous yet beloved scenario of ritualistic abuse.  And this came right on the heels of the release of the San Antonio 4.  This was the progeny of the McMartin Preschool Case, the fantastical scenario that gave rise to a hysteria that swept the nation, or at least parts of it.

It pitted children against horrible people who sexually abused them and murdered babies. Continue reading →

When a police officer shoots someone, there is invariably an investigation that follows.  Forget that the outcome of the investigation tends to be a foregone conclusion, and consider that they still go through the motions. Of course, the police strongly prefer when the officer’s story aligns with the facts, and this becomes even more important when the facts are shown via video.

There are, therefore, two primary routes to be taken following a police shooting: First, question the officer about what happened and why he decided to shoot to kill rather than protect and serve.  If he tells the truth, then his story will be confirmed by subsequent evidence, ranging from witnesses to the event to the omnipresent video. Continue reading →

The heyday of the Beastie Boys came well after my music appreciation days waned. But apparently they had some misogynistic song about girls back then which now embarrasses them. Punk rock had a way of doing that, songs that shocked in ways that should remind everyone writing today that their words will still be around later when they’ve grown up.

Thirty years later, GoldieBlox stole the song, put its own lyrics to it so that it could use it in a commercial to sell stuff to girls. There was a video of it available when it happened, but it’s since been removed.  Not because the song was pretty awful, both in the first place and the remake, and not even because the Beastie Boys were particularly beastie in demanding that GoldieBlox not use their song. Continue reading →

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 →