Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
For that hard-to-shop-for existentialist in your life.
Andy McCarthy’s descent into madness (the NRO contributor, not the 1980s actor).
What gadgets to avoid on Black Friday.
Some stunning time-lapse videos.
The Adventures of Low-Impact Man!
1980s Canadian moral panic film about Dungeons & Dragons.
Absolute immunity strikes again: Federal judge says Pennsylvania judges who illegally sent kids to juvenile detention facilities in exchange for kickbacks can’t be sued for decisions they made on the bench. Even if those decisions involved, you know, illegally sending children to juvenile detention facilities in exchange for kickbacks.
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TheAgitator.com
As someone who spent many years in retail before heading off to college and law school, I can tell you from experience that the only thing you should avoid on Black Friday is anything resembling a retail store. Don’t even go to the grocery store. Stop by 7-11 if you must, but whatever you do, do not go near a mall, a Best Buy, or a Wal Mart. Seriously. Just don’t do it.
I love Black Friday!
I go to Best buy, or Staples every year. It is a lot of fun when you take warm cloths, and share a night with strangers.
I am getting two B&N Nooks this year but since they will not be out till the 30th I will not be doing the BF wait for them.
I really do not like the wait till what comes out next proposition either, if you do that then there is always going to be something else later, so you never get anything.
Let’s try not to run over anyone whilst trying to get into Wal-mart this year hmmm?
They can’t be sued, but they can damn well be tarred and feathered.
If they’re flavorless, can they really be called “mints?”
Who cares whether they’re called mints? It’s not like they have any meaning.
From the immunity article: “‘This is, however, about the rule of law,” Caputo wrote. ‘It is about the rule of law in the face of popular opinion which would seek a finding directly contrary to the result the rule of law dictates.’”
Only the politicians are entitled to outcomes contrary to the written rule of law, no go home and stop complaining serfs!
Some background for the Wegman report discussed below:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115283824428306460.html
The emails from the University of East Anglia (aka the Enron of science) show the activities of the small clique of researchers at the heart of AGW research. Here is an excerpt from Wegman’s 2006 social network analysis of temperature reconstruction, annotated with links to the searchable archive of CRU emails:
http://limitedmodifiedhangout.blogspot.com/2009/11/ad-hoc-committee-report-on-hockey-stick.html
One of the interesting questions associated with the ‘hockey stick controversy’ are the relationships among the authors and consequently how confident one can be in the peer review process. In particular, if there is a tight relationship among the authors and there are not a large number of individuals engaged in a particular topic area, then one may suspect that the peer review process does not fully vet papers before they are published. Indeed, a common practice among associate editors for scholarly journals is to look in the list of references for a submitted paper to see who else is writing in a given area and thus who might legitimately be called on to provide knowledgeable peer review. Of course, if a given discipline area is small and the authors in the area are tightly coupled, then this process is likely to turn up very sympathetic referees. These referees may have coauthored other papers with a given author. They may believe they know that author’s other writings well enough that errors can continue to propagate and indeed be reinforced….
The whole point of a justice system is to provide a less passionate and more deliberative alternative to personal or mob justice. If the justice system refuses to address certain sorts of crimes, it should not be surprising if the victims it no longer serves eventually return to prelegal mechanisms of punishment.
Writing that judicial immunity does not operate on a “sliding scale,” Judge Caputo ruled that the judges are protected by immunity from facing legal action for their courtroom acts.
They may be immune from legal action, but if they insist on it, they may not enjoy finding out that they aren’t immune to rope.
I like how in the Dungeons and Dragons video they blame the “Friday the 13th motif” on D&D, as opposed to… the violent horror movie Friday the 13th. Watching those kids calmly playing D&D in the beginning just makes the rest of the movie seem more ridiculous (it also makes D&D look incredibly boring, which may be the case, because I’ve never played it).
As someone who stumbled into the dark world of Dungeons and Dragons, I can attest that there are serious dangers for participants, including being labeled a dorkwad; a natural inability to attract cheerleaders; and a lifetime of anxiety from having to secretly hiding your D&D stash from your wife with more care than you use to hide the porn stash.
Clearly, you do not understand the dangers posed by Dungeons & Dragons. Just look at this educational video:
http://www.dailyhaha.com/_vids/Reno911_Dungeons_and_Dragons.htm
It’s strange to me to see Caputo invoking “rule of law”, apparently completely oblivious to the actual meaning of the term. These judges do not believe in rule of law, instead embodying the very antithesis of rule of law – that is the “rule of governmental officials”. That they would be judged by different standard is completely improper.
Indeed, immunity for anyone is incompatible with the rule of law.
I called a store yesterday to ask about their online ad, and if it’s accurate and the item is in stock. The ad says it runs Fri 28th and Sat 29th, aka Black Friday weekend. The person said “yes Black Friday blah blah oops corporate wants us to call it GREEN Friday”. I asked if that is because of this bullshit “everything is eco- and green- and hype bandwagon and feel my nuts good” and they said yes, and that Black connotates bad and could be construed as racist. I refrained from a correction of “racist” as we’re all part of the HUMAN RACE, so you have to be against all humans to be a racist, otherwise you’re an ethnicist (best I can come up with) if you’re against a particular ethnicity.
The solution to absolute immunity: private justice.
I renew my proposal that we separate Christmas itself into 12 holidays, on the 25th of each month. You celebrate according to your last name; for example, A-B names celebrate Amas (January 25), C-E celebrate Cmas (February 25), F-G have Fmas in March, etc., with X-Z observing Xmas in December (for backward compatibility). This ensures that families mostly celebrate together, while in-laws usually don’t conflict (I’d observe Lmas in June with my wife and her family, but we wouldn’t be expected to visit my family on that day). Gifts would be given on Christmas rather than received, so, for example, I’d buy gifts for all my friends and family in December, giving everyone a steady trickle of gifts throughout the year. This would spread the buying of gifts more uniformly, creating jobs and reducing traffic congestion, airline fares, car accidents, people being stampeded to death at Wal-Mart, and general insanity.
Christmas celebrations by businesses and other non-family groups could be handled by choosing the month in which the largest number of employees have Christmas, or using the name of the company (if you work at Costco, it’s in February). Most churches would probably leave Christmas where it is, which is fine, since they’re always on everyone’s case to remember that Christmas is not ultimately about shopping, and for 92% of the population it wouldn’t be. We could even call the other 11 days collectively “the Holidays” and reserve “Christmas” for the religious observance.
Caputo’s decision is correct and I can even understand the reason for judicial immunity up to a point [so as to not prevent judges from making correct, unpopular rulings: of course that's also the reason judicial elections should be gotten rid of] but judicial immunity should be reformed: if Plaintiff’s can show specific criminal acts, immunity should not apply.
I have no problem with judicial immunity *when they are doing their job*. Same with cops. I have no problem with giving them qualified immunity *when they are doing their jobs*. Sometimes bad stuff happens.
However, a cop’s job is never to beat someone, shoot an unarmed person, break the law, etc. So there’s no immunity for those actions. None.
Same with the pieces of garbage judges in this case. They were breaking the law – there’s no reason to give them any immunity in this case, as they weren’t doing their jobs. They weren’t judges – they were criminals who had obtained judicial positions. Hence, no immunity.
Solution for the immunity issue: give the judges the death penalty and let the victims sue their estates. Since an estate is not a judge, it cannot have judicial immunity.
BamBam,
I think you’re getting confused. The term racist isn’t applied that way because it originally meant that you deemed another ethnicity as another race OR that your race does not include that other ethnicity, usually in order to imply that they are sub-human. There are still people who think like that unfortunately.
So you don’t have to be against the entire human race to be racist, you just have to dis-include part of it in your definition.
I do not see how this decision doesn’t make it ok for sitting judges to sell rulings on motions or even verdicts to the highest bidder.
Judge Immunity: “This is, however, about the rule of law,” Caputo wrote. “It is about the rule of law in the face of popular opinion which would seek a finding directly contrary to the result the rule of law dictates.”
“Rule of law” sounds a lot like protection of the state at all costs from the peasant class.