The Chinese regime followed its recent market meltdown in true Maoist fashion this week. It dragged out a journalist, Wang Xiaolu, to confess that he helped start the crash. It cannot be the centrally planned, artificially dumped up system itself. No, it was a journalist.
Jordan Toner, 29, allegedly not only engaged in reckless drive-in in front of witnesses, but may have created the world’s worst record of the it with a selfie while driving . . . just before he hit a tree in Maine.
President Robert Mugabe, 91, has long been one of the world’s most heartless and merciless dictators, but he seems also on a quest to show that he is also the most clueless. This week Mugabe expressed utter surprise that his people were starving as he and his notorious and corrupt family live like emperors. He assured that there is “no suffering” in Zimbabwe.
Continue reading “Mugabe Insists “No Suffering” in Zimbabwe”
There is an interesting controversy brewing over the continued removal of water by Nestle from California’s water supply during the record drought in that state. Nestle continued to remove millions of gallons of water from the San Bernardino National Forest to sell as part of its Arrowhead bottled water brand. While the rest of the state is facing stringent water reductions, Nestles has been criticized for removing 27 million gallons of water from 12 springs in Strawberry Canyon under a permit that expired in 1988. The expired permit’s fee for the water, according to critics? $524.
According to various media reports and Amnesty International, an all-male village council in India sentenced two sisters, including a 15 year old girl, to be raped as punishment for their brother running away with a married woman from a higher caste. The accounts state that Meenakshi Kumari, who is 23, and her younger sister, will then be paraded naked with their faces blackened through the streets as part of this disgraceful, primitive sentence.
There is a terrible death in San Francisco that reads like a perverse torts exam question on factual and legal causation. Barber Luis Gomez, it can be argued, was almost killed by permissive public urination in the city (an issue that we recently discussed with regard to the effort to decriminalize public urination in New York). Gomez, 40, was killed during his commute from a suburb into the city. Because the BART was done, he drove his 1994 Honda Civic into the city. He was then crushed by a falling light pole that officials blamed on human and animal urine corroding its base.
Continue reading “Lamp Post Crushes Car In San Francisco In Bizarre Consequence of Public Urination”
We have often discussed the difficulty in maintaining the creationist view of the Earth being only a few thousand years old when carbon dating and other techniques show billions of years of existence. A new such conflicting data point has emerged from Russia where a peat bog yielded a wooden idol and is 11,000 years old. What is particularly cool is that this oldest wooden figure contains a code of some ancient language that has yet to be deciphered.
Continue reading “The Shigir Idol: Russian Wooden Figure Dated At 11,000 Years Old”
By: Cara L. Gallagher, weekend contributor
Hello, keyboard. Been a while, I know. Where have I been? Let’s just leave it at “busy, enjoying the blissful, sunny, cordless weeks of summer during the Court’s off-season.” There have been a lot of Cubs games—good games too, now that Chicago finally has a North side baseball team worthy of serious attention. There was some travel, a week at Harvard, articles and books read, Internet wormholes fallen into, and tennis, lots of tennis. The product of this bliss was a complete lack of desire to outwardly reflect on the travel, books, and education by writing. This isn’t like me at all. Historically, when I’ve read something even mildly compelling, I’ll tell no less than 15 people about it, link to it on Facebook and Twitter, and find some way to incorporate it into my writing. That’s not to say I didn’t read, watch, or see anything that wasn’t good. I did, no doubt, but my desire to take it in and push it out with my own analysis just never materialized. I think I know why and I think it has a little something to do with a prophetic book I read mid-June just before I started covering the final two weeks of an exciting (understatement) Supreme Court term.
I credit Dave Eggers’ book The Circle for inspiring steroid-like levels of productivity during those weeks and for my debilitating, meteoric crash once I left. Continue reading “What Dave Eggers’ The Circle, Amazon, and SCOTUS reporting taught me”
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
We previously wrote HERE and HERE of the arrest, conviction, and sentencing several Al-Jazeera reporters for the dubious accusation of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood through their coverage of the “civil war” in Egypt.
Now in its latest retrial, the Court sentenced Peter Greste, Mohammed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed to three years imprisonment for operating without a press license and broadcasting material harmful to the state. An international outcry likely will follow.
Continue reading “Court In Egypt Sentences Al-Jazeera Reporters To Three Years Imprisonment”
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo and Councilmen Johnny Khamis and Raul Peralez proposed installing license plate readers on garbage trucks. If there is one thing apparently that is important to the collection of your trash and rubbish it is reading every license plate in the neighborhood it seems. The city officials believe it will make a strong dent in the number of stolen and wanted vehicles left out in the street around garbage day.
The proposal involves installation of the readers and feeding the license data to the central computer system that serves the police department’s LPRs installed on patrol cars. It promises to be a monumentally cost inefficient system despite what city officials might claim. The civil liberties implications notwithstanding.
Psst, car thieves of California: be sure to take in your stolen car when you take out the trash.
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
Those who strongly advocate for both privacy and efficient government are sure to be perplexed.
Oakland Police, which has a License Plate Recognition system that gathers thousands of its citizens’ license plate data via cameras, decided to reduce their license plate data-mining retention time after the underlying hard drive storing the data filled up, crashing the storage system. The culprit was a desktop computer running Windows XP on an 80 gigabyte hard drive.
If that wasn’t enough the replacement of this hard drive, at least, was curtailed by a firewall of red tape that seems to have prevented the city from buying a replacement drive. A one terabyte hard-drive can easily be found for fifty dollars.
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
A sign of the current education situation in Washington State took a turn for the obvious when, showing a fundamental lack of knowledge of basic civics, a coalition of Washington State Senators declared an order of the State Supreme Court to be Unconstitutional. That’s right, the several senators seem to have missed a key portion of their junior-high education relating to which branch of government has the ultimate say in constitutional matters and perhaps the workings of our tripartite government.
The claim of unconstitutionality stems from an open letter penned by several state senators describing the “constitutional crisis” caused by a rogue state supreme court. Previously the court held the state in contempt for failing to provide for the constitutionally mandated primary duty of funding basic education. It ultimately prescribed a penalty of $100,000.00 for each day the legislature failed to furnish the court with a suitable plan to address shortcomings enumerated in McCleary v. State.
Continue reading “WA State Senators Declare Supreme Court Order “Unconstitutional””
While this may be just another “he said, she said” situation, a document released at the University of Tennessee suggests that it may be actually a “ze said, xe said” situation. Donna Braquet the director of the university’s Pride Center is asking faculty and students to drop using “he” and “she” in favor of using “correct pronouns” for particular students like ze, hir, zir, xe, xem and xyr to reflect a broader array of gender identifications. We recently discussed how the University of California has adopted six different gender categories for students. Braquet is now suggesting that faculty adopt the new array of pronouns (“dozens of gender-neutral pronouns”) and use whatever the student feels is appropriate.
Continue reading “University of Tennessee Considers Adopting Gender Neutral Pronouns Like “Ze,” “Hir,” and “Xyr” To Avoid Discrimination”
New York has a rather bizarre case this week where Jordan Zeidman, 20, sued his own mother, Shirley Zeidman, 54, to recover $5,000 that his grandmother gave him as a bar mitzvah gift. Shirley Zeidman has now been found liable for conversion and unjust enrichment. It might not have been a bona fide but it was a baba fide transaction according to the court. The case is Zeidman v. Zeidman, CV-011924-14.
Former TV judge Joe Brown, 66, has surrendered to Tennessee deputies to begin serving a five-day jail term for contempt of court. Brown was held in contempt by Magistrate Judge Harold Horne for an outburst in Juvenile Court in March 2014. He took the issue all the way up to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which denied Brown’s application to appeal a Court of Appeals upholding the ruling. Brown called the court a “circus” and a “sorry operation.” Of course real judges do not have producers and set designers. When Horne told him to stop, Brown did not. He gave him a day in jail but Brown continued until he had five days in jail.
Continue reading ““Judge” Brown Goes To Jail Over Contemptuous Encounter With Real Judge”