Blog Profile / Lawyers, Guns & Money

Dude for Thought

A little addendum to my  earlier post… First off, just wanted to thank everyone for their comments. Even the ones that made me want to have crazy, uninhibited screwdriver-eyesocket sex were instructive, so…thanks. Secondly, I noticed a lot of people expressing concern for those were “there first.” Some food for thought: Everyone is new at [...]

“We shall drink only distilled water or rainwater, and only pure-grain alcohol, and maybe Black Butte Porter.”

Portland, I love you, but you’re bringing me down: Late last night, Portlanders rejected a plan to fluoridate their city’s water supply (and the water of over a dozen other cities). It’s the fourth time Portland has rejected the public health measure since 1956. It’s the fourth time they’ve gotten the science wrong. When new [...]

The Worldwide Leader in Unnecessary Profit Taking

ESPN is a great corporation. It is ungodly profitable. It creates a mere 43% of Disney’s total operating income. Think about that. All of Disney, including Disneyland and everything else it owns. 43%. But you see, ESPN has recently acquired some lucrative properties, like more SEC football games. In order to show us more Vanderbilt-Kentucky [...]

Able Archer

My latest at the Diplomat talks a bit more about Nate Jones’ work at National Security Archive: Like in the United States, the political and military elite of the Soviet Union disagreed on the likelihood of war, and on the predisposition of the new administration in Washington. Soviet hawks took the exercises as evidence of [...]

Scabs of the New Gilded Age

As I talked about yesterday, there’s a 1-day strike today of non-unionized government contract workers who make low wages and who SEIU ultimately wants to organize. In ye olden days of the Gilded Age, the government would use federal troops to bust strikes. The Department of Homeland Security’s response to the strike? Serve as a [...]

Peak Law School

Bill Henderson and Kyle McEntee have a couple of interesting articles regarding the ongoing crash in law school applications and enrollments, and the implications it has for law school budgets. Some numbers: First year enrollment at ABA schools: 2010: 52,500 2011: 48,700 2012: 44,481 This fall the 2010 matrics will be replaced by a new [...]

A Kinsley Coda

A useful reminder related to Michael Kinsley’s argument about how horrible it is to criticize people who compare gays and lesbians to pedophiles: Oh, but, look: It’s next Tuesday now. What has happened since Kinsley made his case on behalf of the people who aren’t yet ready to accept gay people as equal? Over the [...]

Help, Help, I’m Being Repressed!

The Phosphorous Crisis

I’m glad to know that our addiction to oil from politically difficult places will soon be matched by relying on Western Sahara, an area with a long-standing independence movement against Morocco which nominally controls the area, for the fertilizer for our industrial food system. Hard to see how that could go wrong.

Ray Manzarek, R.I.P.

A couple of notes on the late keyboardist. First, it should be noted that he produced Los Angeles and Wild Gift, two of the best American albums of the 80s (as well as the two quite good followups.) Exene and John remember. On the Doors…they’re become sort of like an overhyped New York roleplayer, so [...]

Gate-Rape

As I’ve noted before, I’m not really involved in the Realms of Geek, realms like gaming, role-playing and comic booking. These are realms I watch from a distance because I’m interested in how women function in them. One thing that particularly fascinates me is geek gate-keeping, that is self-professed geeky dudes, scoring–mostly women–on how truly [...]

9CA Rejects Anti-Choice Junk Science

Good: A federal appellate panel struck down Arizona’s abortion law on Tuesday, saying it was unconstitutional “under a long line of invariant Supreme Court precedents” that guarantee a woman’s right to end a pregnancy any time before a fetus is deemed viable outside her womb — generally at 24 weeks. The law, enacted in April [...]

Let Us Return To The Gloriously Bipartisan Government of the Late 90s

Shorter Verbtim Bill Keller: “The president should announce that he has told the Justice Department to appoint an independent investigator with bulldog instincts and bipartisan credibility. The list of candidates could start with Kenneth Starr, who chased down the scandals, real and imagined, of the Clinton presidency.” Atrios skimmed the cream from this unwitting parody, [...]

It’s An Asshole Contest!

Our first finalist: James Inhofe, arguing that aiding him own state is a completely different issue that aiding heathens in New York and New Jersey. Our second finalist: Tom Coburn, who at least as of now is consistent in applying the same stupid position to disaster relief for his own state that he applied to [...]

Yamamoto

Interesting (slightly old) piece on Isoruku Yamamoto in Japanese historical memory: Unlike the Yushukan museum at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, the Yamamoto museum does not appear to re-write or glorify Japan’s war history. A small exhibit notes Yamamoto’s role in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the devastating defeat at Midway. The main [...]

Passing the Penn Test

So, it appears that (as expected) Hillary Clinton has passed [via] the first test of whether her 2016 candidacy is serious, the Mark Penn question. I enjoyed this from the linked article: Penn has been tagged as the egocentric villain of the campaign who sowed seeds of dissent in the Team of Rivals. [Ugh, STOP [...]

Federal Contracts and Labor Law Violations

Today, a one day strike is taking place among non-union, low-paid government workers, some of the nearly 2 million government workers making less than $12 an hour, which I think is an absurdly low wage for a federal employee or someone employed by a government contractor. They are demanding that President Obama do something to [...]

Linguists of the Future take note

This morning I heard a tornado compared to the physical equivalent of “the IRS-ghazi-gate.” The Jew in me wants to insert a “ben” just to let people know that this shit has a father to blame.

On History’s Most Recent Greatest Martyr

Wilkinson sums up the Richwine controversy very nicely: I suspect that Mr Richwine may have been able to survive either controversy taken in isolation. Had he not just argued, in an extremely tendentious fashion, that Hispanic immigrants are, on the whole, parasites, he might have endured public criticism of his dissertation. Had he not in [...]

The Greatest Generation

The greatest generation indeed: The soldiers who landed in Normandy on D-Day were greeted as liberators, but by the time American G.I.’s were headed back home in late 1945, many French citizens viewed them in a very different light. In the port city of Le Havre, the mayor was bombarded with letters from angry residents [...]