Smearing one’s face with dark-colored medication is a widely-used method of treating acne, the teen skin scourge. That’s what three students at a Mountain View, California, Catholic high school did, and they took selfies which circulated on the internet and social media played “tel[...]
Archive for May, 2024
May 8th, 2024 - 8:12 pm § in Politics, Republicans
MAGA Mike in hot pursuit of phantom voting fraud!
There’s no evidence illegals vote, but GOP Speaker “MAGA Mike” Johnson (photo, left) doesn’t need any evidence. He knows it “intuitively.” (Read story here.) His press conference on the Capitol steps on Wednesday, May 8, 2024, was as clownish as the movie scene be[...]
A wacky theocratic movement is infiltrating the GOP
A fringe evangelical movement calling itself the New Apostolic Reformation is slipping its octopus-like tentacles into the heart of the Republican Party. House speaker Mike Johnson is a fan. The NAR looks like a Christian version of Iran. Its leaders are self-appointed and fancy themselves prophets [...]
Now NOT to win friends and influence people
How to Win Friends and Influence People is the title of a famous and still-popular book (get it here) by the late self-improvement guru Dale Carnegie (profile here). I haven’t read it, but the Amazon blurb says it’s about ways to make people like you, win them over to your way of thinkin[...]
May 7th, 2024 - 11:03 pm § in Schools & Colleges
School superintendent loses job in ‘Clappergate’ scandal
It began with a spring awards banquet for a girls’ softball team at a San Diego-area high school. The school district superintendent’s daughter was one of the players. She won the Most Valuable Player award, and everybody clapped. But not loudly enough, it seems. This incident came to be[...]
Conservative judges inflict collective punishment on Columbia law grads
Last week over a dozen conservative federal judges declared they won’t hire law clerks from Columbia Law School’s graduating classes because of the protests on that campus (see story here; read their letter here). They may think they’re striking a blow for the rule of law, but all [...]
May 7th, 2024 - 8:00 pm § in Law and Courts, Schools & Colleges
Do UW professors have free speech?
Academic freedom. Freedom of inquiry. Free speech. That’s what Stuart Reges (photo, left), a University of Washington computer science professor, and the public interest law firm representing him, thought they were defending when he sued UW in federal court after administrators sought to punis[...]
May 7th, 2024 - 4:50 pm § in Law and Courts
Book review: “The Innocent Man”
The Innocent Man by John Grisham (Wikipedia description here; on Amazon here) is that popular author’s only nonfiction book. Grisham writes pulp fiction with legal characters and plots. I don’t care much for his novels, but I’ve read a couple as a break from serious reading. I can[...]
Burden of proof
I haven’t been closely following Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, just reading headlines. It got pretty lurid today (Stormy: “it was lousy sex”), but I’m not interested in salacious details. I’m a lawyer, and my attention is directed at courtroom tactics. Pros[...]
May 7th, 2024 - 1:46 am § in Politics, Republicans
Artificial intelligence (video)
Artificial intelligence threatens to disrupt the 2024 elections. Propagandists can now produce fake audio and videos so realistic we can’t tell them from real ones. They could manipulate us into voting for bad candidates by falsely portraying good ones. Take the video below; if you didn’[...]