About a month ago, I went into my bosses office, and suggested that it might be time for me to move on. I had been dreading going to work (to the point of waking up several times at night thinking about it) and felt that any ideas I put forth were pretty much DOA. It was incredibly tough to do this. I mean, I'm well aware of how sucky the job market is and this was (theoretically) a dream job for me. How could I turn my back on all this?

Let's backtrack. I had started this job in January of 2008. During my final interview, I had been impressed with how open to new ideas the management were. They were excited to have someone come in & put their imprint on the position. I was being given the ball, and told to run with it. Unfortunately, almost immediately, communication issues arose with my supervisor. She was detail oriented and fixated on micro planning every tiny aspect of things. I would argue she was myopic she would argue that I was rash and unprepared.  I think we were both right. I do consider it a great failure on my part that I (who pride myself on people skills and relationships) was unable to come to common ground with her.

The bottom line was that my time there was a real blow to me. It hurts to find out that your dream job is not at all what you thought. It sucks to have three different bosses in the course of a year. It's frustrating to have everything you do redone. The whole situation was just bad, and I did not make things any better. Towards the end, I started to see myself slipping out of interest, and that's when I decided I needed to leave. If I cared about our members as much as I said I did, and held my integrity so important, I could not continue to half ass my way through the job.

So, I quit. I didn't have another job lined up, and had only just started looking. I did not want to do the interview dance, where you lie to everybody and keep working just to get a paycheck. I did not want to stand in the way of good stuff getting done by our members because my name (and the concomitant baggage) was attached to it. Most of all, I just wanted to be happy where I worked.

So, I quit. The strangest part of it was how surprised management was. I had honestly thought (and perhaps hoped) that I was cl0se to being fired, but this made me re-think that. I am thankful for this experience, and I still think we did a lot of great work, and the organization will continue to do great work. I'm really just sad at how things turned out, and wonder where my dream job went wrong.

Convenience store robbers, beware of Kentucky.  Among the items that may be carried by the holder of a Kentucky concealed weapon permit:

• Any weapon from which a shot, readily capable of producing death or serious physical injury, may be discharged.
• Any knife other than an ordinary pocket knife or hunting knife.
• Billy, nightstick, or club.
• Blackjack or slapjack.
• Nunchaku karate sticks.
• Shiriken or death star.

Thanks to Joel Rosenberg for sending me down this dark path.

Have you ever gotten a cold call from an unfamiliar charity asking for money, and wonder if the charity was legit and how much of your money would actually go to the kittens or children or police officers or baby seals or whatever if you donated?

Of course you have.

But have you ever taken it upon yourself to find out?

Of course you have not. Because you are — and I mean this in the kindest and most constructive way possible — a lazy, feckless couch muffin what makes Kato Kaelin look like Horatio Alger.

But you could have found out. With an internet connection, you have the tools you need. All you need from there is determination and talent.

Like Kathleen Seidel.

Kathleen Seidel is the ludicrously thorough blogger who runs the usually-over-my-head Neurodiversity Weblog, which follows scientific, legal, and social issues related to autism. We followed along gleefully when Seidel, not herself a lawyer, defeated a thuggish lawyer and got him sanctioned when he served her with a retaliatory and abusive subpoena for writing things critical of one of his anti-vaccine junk science lawsuits. Pardon me if I gush, but Seidel is the embodiment of how good "amateur" blogging can be — how an informed citizen with a subject matter interest willing to put in the time can cover an issue just as thoroughly and usefully as a "professional journalist."

Today, she blogged about her detective work after she got a cold-call charitable solicitation from something called the "Autism Spectrum Disorder Foundation," which promises to support children through "TAX DEDUCTABLE" [sic] donations. Just like your fourth-grade math teacher always asked, Seidel shows her work — and the post is a blueprint for an aggressive, thorough, swift investigation of a charitable entity by a citizen journalist. That investigation raised grave questions about the "Autism Spectrum Disorder Foundation," not the least of which is the percentage of telemarketing-driven receipts that will ever be used to help autistic kids. Read it if you are interested in those suspicious charitable calls you get, or if you are interested in how one could investigate them.

And ask yourself — couldn't I do this on some subject that interests me? Why haven't I? What would the nation be like, if a hundred thousand people did?

Proving that, yes, Japan is exactly what it depicts itself to be through "Hello, Kitty" and in anime, the country has named its three Cultural Ambassadors for 2009:

[A] singer dressed in a polka dot shirt with a bunny print, offset by bouffant back-combed hair, a look that has made her a fashion leader in Tokyo teens' favourite haunt, Harajuku.

"Every female from small girls to grandmothers loves pretty clothes," said nurse and part-time model Misako Aoki, now ambassador for the doll-like "Gothic Lolita" style.

Actress Shizuka Fujioka, 19, wears a school uniform even though she's graduated because she felt she missed out by going to a school with an ugly uniform.

The Japanese foreign ministry wants the world to know that its ambassadors accurately represent the nation's culture.

"It's all about mutual understanding," said Tsutomu Nakagawa, the head of the cultural affairs division at the Foreign Ministry, after presenting the three envoys to the foreign media.

"We want people abroad to know these kind of people exist in Japan and to feel close to them."

According to Reuters, the nation's new ambassadors were chosen from a field of finalists that included a 15 year-old leather-jacketed motorcyclist with huge eyes, a geisha, a giant tentacle with a criminal record as a sex offender, and an irradiated tyrannosaurus rex.

Why else would JP Morgan Chase have to outsource its IT department to India?

"JP Morgan CIO Guy Chiarello said last week that he will increase outsourcing to India, and will drive several integration projects from there," a New York-based expert, familiar with JP Morgan’s outsourcing plans, told ET last week, on conditions of anonymity. …

"JP Morgan is one of the first banks in the US to have fleshed out its outsourcing strategy ever since the banking meltdown happened. Many others are still undecided about their IT spend," said a senior official at one of the technology firms, who did not wish to be quoted.

In addition to federal subsidies for its purchases of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, JP Morgan Chase received $25 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Plan last year, with more to come in 2009.  And while I understand that the intent of TARP was not to create or save jobs (that's point of the "stimulus plan"), but to increase lending and stabilize credit, I must admit that this troubles me.

Of course, the holders of jobs JP Morgan is sending to India will get their bailout, when the unemployment checks arrive.

Step 1: Commit securities fraud.

Step 2: Lie to court and the SEC to avoid trial, claiming terminal colorectal cancer.

Step 3: ???.

Step 4: Profit.

The problem with lying to a court is that you may have to keep living the lie.  For instance, if a defendant seeks to avoid trial on the false ground that he suffers from metastatic colon cancer, eventually the defendant will have to get around to dying of cancer.

Evidently Howard Richman couldn't bring himself to take that step.

Howard P. Richman, the former senior vice president of regulatory affairs at Biopure Corp., pleaded guilty in US District Court in Boston to a count of obstruction of justice, averting a criminal trial.

He admitted he forged a letter and an affidavit from a doctor saying he had cancer and went so far as to pretend to be his treating physician in a phone conversation with his attorneys.

The misrepresentations prompted a judge in July 2007 to end a suit by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Richman's codefendants settled without trial, paying the SEC fines in the neighborhood of $100,000.  Now Richman is facing a sentence of up to ten years, for the equivalent of, "Please excuse Mr. Richman from court.  He has the flu."

I suppose it's a good thing for Richman's lawyers that he didn't seek to avoid trial on grounds that the dog had eaten his defense team.

I don't do reruns here as often as I used to. But this time I'm justified, really:

Life Is Not A Coin Flip

Why am I justified? Because the same client called again today and had a conversation with me demonstrating the EXACT same failure to grasp probability and reality. This time I used being struck by lightening as an illustrative example, rather than Angelina Jolie, primarily because my wife has discovered this blog.

Continue Reading »

I recognized that law school grades were completely random back about 17 years ago when I got an A+ in Tax and a B- in Evidence. Prior to that, I had begun to suspect that the whole thing was a scam. That impression was substantially promoted by the time that somewhat famous (or infamous) evidence professor Charlie Nesson threw a piece of chalk at me.

Continue Reading »

Thank God for cultural conservatives, without whom the increasingly perverse and deadly machinations of the Gay-Industrial Complex with their malign Gay Agenda might escape my notice. What do the gays have on tap this month? Well, apparently no longer content to indoctrinate our kids into buttsex, encourage polygamy, and importune innocent box turtles everywhere, now they want us all to suffer debilitating electrical shocks, courtesy of doin' the nasty with merciless robots.

Continue Reading »

Cost of a Capcom Visa "PrePaid" Card:

• $9.95 to sign up.
• $4.95 fee to add money to the card.
• $0.25 or $1.50 fee every time you use it.
• $0.50 fee to learn your balance.
• $10.00 overdraft fee.
• $4.95 monthly dormancy fee, if you don't use it.

But your Capcom Visa can kick an American Express Card's ass.

And, proving that gaming companies and Visa know their customers, a Lara Croft Visa is on the way.  Rather than functioning as a card at all, it simply deposits all of your funds directly into Capcom's bank account.

You probably won't mind.  This card has breasts.

You, you sniveling worms, with your relentless insistence on safety, absence of risk, and your belief that if the government only had more power, over everything, somehow you would not die.

Well you are going to die, and you deserve it, because you elected a government that drafts bills like the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, or as Radley Balko called it via twitter, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of Food.

Currently before the House Committees on Agriculture, and Energy and Commerce, the FSMA is drafted with the noble goal of seeing to it that Americans do not die of salmonella poisoning as a result of the ghastly diet that most Americans consume: things like processed peanuts rendered down into a flavorless paste and slapped between crackers at industrial food processing plants, or Mexican jalapeno peppers stewed into the unappetizing gel that most Americans think of as salsa.  That's the intent anyway.  The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, on which we've written but which Walter Olson and others have covered much more effectively, was drafted with the intention that no American children die of lead poisoning.  The havoc it's wreaking on thrift stores, handmade toy makers, and smallscale clothing producers is merely an unintended byproduct of all the good that the CPSIA does.

Well, when the CPSIA was passed, no one was minding the store.  Only Ron Paul and a few other cranks raised a complaint.  Apparently on this bill, only a few blogging cranks are minding the store.  I'll barely add to the number of cranks, but the FSMA has not yet passed, so there's time to prevent the damage.  The Food Safety Modernization Act, as currently drafted, will ruin most of the farmer's markets in America.

Without going into a detailed textual analysis (click the link above), the FSMA requires all "food establishments," which means anyone selling or storing food of any type for transmission to third parties via the act of commerce, to register with a new Food Safety Administration, to keep copious records of sales and shipment by lot and label, to subject themselves to at least annual inspections by FSA inspectors, and to provide detailed handling instructions for safe processing of food.  That may work for Nabisco and the people who supply McDonald's, but it's probably not going to work at, for instance, the farmer's market I visit without fail every weekend beginning in late March.  The place is infested with hippies and rustic sorts who couldn't fill out a spreadsheet and can't afford legal advice on how to farm, but know a thing or two about growing good peppers.

Nor will the more detailed recordkeeping and lab testing requirements, and the monthly inspections, to be required of farmers' markets which offer delicacies such as bacon or cheese, both of  which I purchase at my own farmers' market because I trust the farmers involved, and because I won't give up absolutely fresh tomatoes even if I'm not assured they were audited by the government.

It's also unlikely to work for importers of certain delicacy foods which aren't made in America (the bill requires food makers overseas to adhere to bacterial testing standards equal to those mandated by the FSA) such as mortadella ham and certain cheeses.  Those may no longer be imported.

As the CPSIA illustrates, the problem with "one size fits all" regulation of business activity at the federal level is that one size, in fact, doesn't fit all.  Lead paint testing requirements, which are just a cost to be passed on to millions of customers by a Mattel or GAPKids who see little increase in price per unit because they test in bulk, simply kill small, artisan toymakers or small-lot clothing producers.  The mandates of the FSMA likewise will cause little trouble to Hormel, but may be onerous indeed to the smallscale family farmer in Louisburg North Carolina from whom I buy sausage on saturday mornings.  Even though the small farmer's operation is cleaner than a factory slaughterhouse, and even though his pigs live in far healthier conditions than those from a factory farm.  (I know because I've visited them.)

This bill can be fixed, and it should be.  We're currently undergoing a media frenzy on contaminated food, just as in 2007 we did with stories of lead paint, but farmers, even small farmers, are much better connected and have broader support than thrift stores or small crafts businesses.   If you enjoy fresh food from farmers' markets, and don't want to eat processed glop from Big Food at every meal, contact your congressman, particularly if you live in an agricultural district, and ask about this bill.  Encourage lawmakers to consider the effect this will have on family farms and farmers' markets, and to ask themselves whether we need yet another federal food agency.

Do it for the tomatoes.

An insurance company client calls to ask whether it would be worthwhile to pursue the following scenario in subrogation:

Palsgraf has a few drinks and gets into his car.  A mile from his home, he strikes a utility pole, damaging the pole and shorting power in the neighborhood.

Some hours later, the pole is repaired and put back into service.  The next day, an energized line connected to the pole detaches at the next pole down the line (evidently from strain caused by the impact or the stress on the pole) and falls to the ground.

The line comes into contact with a piece of rebar in the yard where the lines are located, which energizes itself.  This causes a gas fire because the rebar is in contact with a gas line, for some reason.

In addition to destroying the house served by the gas line, the fire melts vinyl siding, paint, and trim on the house adjacent to that where the fire began, causing $4,000 worth of damage.  My client insures the homeowner whose vinyl was damaged, and wishes to sue Palsgraf, or the power utility, or the builder of the adjoining house who left the rebar in the yard, or the gas company.

Fortunately, there is a solution to the problem of who to sue:

Continue Reading »

Dear Lozar Theofilactidis:

Your stab at humor regarding incoming Dartmouth College president Dr. Jim Yong Kim sure struck a nerve among the hypersensitive PC police, didn't it?  After all, only stuckup leftists wouldn't find jokes about Dr. Kim's Korean-American ethnicity funny, particularly given the obvious satire of referring to Dr. Kim as a "chinaman".  That zinger probably flew right over the heads of the speech police, as did this:

On July 1, yet another hard-working American’s job will be taken by an immigrant willing to work in substandard conditions at near-subsistent wage, saving half his money and sending the rest home to his village in the form of traveler’s checks,” the message states, in part. “Unless ‘Jim Yong Kim’ means ‘I love Freedom’ in Chinese, I don’t want anything to do with him. Dartmouth is America, not Panda Garden Rice Village Restaurant.

It's a shame isn't it, that a campus wit such as yourself is forced to endure outrage over a simple joke, especially when the joke is circulated as an email blast, Dartmouth's comedic Generic Good Morning Message, to over 1000 students and alumni, most of whom are probably good Americans like yourself?

And it's a shame that the thought police forced you to apologize for your humor, isn't it?  Don't worry, real Americans know that your apology was insincere, and probably forced on you after Chinese water torture or having bamboo shoved into your fingernails, because you refuse to apologize in your own name. If I were in your shoes, getting slandered by all sorts of weirdos who probably aren't even American, I wouldn't want to have my name revealed either.  Because while taking actual responsibility, exercising your right to free speech like a man, might require revealing your name, you'd likely have to take an ass-whuppin'.

Could it be taxpayers?  Thomas Dart, the sheriff of Cook County Illinois, is suing Craigslist.

In the words of Sheriff Dart…

Prohibited activity rarely transpires in secret.  Rare is the instance when such conduct occurs unabashed.  Yet as these words are read, Defendant's website Craigslist.org ("Craigslist") is facilitating prostitution.  To say Craigslist's "erotic services" forum makes prostitution accessible is an understatement.  Advocacy groups consider the website to be one of the largest sources for prostitution in the country.

Informed sources tell us that Craigslist is also one of the nation's leading sources for broken down cars, slightly used mattresses, and cheap yard work.  The site facilitates those who would play Dungeons and Dragons in secret, but those activities escape Sheriff Dart's attention for now.

No, Craigslist, according to the complaint filed by Sheriff Dart today in the Northern District of Illinois, is a public nuisance, and must be abated.  Read his complaint, in page after page of lurid detail that reads like the script from a 50s  exploitation film titled "Prostitution: Communist Threat to America's Children?" for yourself:  dart-v-craigslist.

I have not yet had time for full digestion of Dart's masterwork, but a few thoughts stand out:

1. This appears to be a shakedown without legal merit.  This is a civil suit, not a criminal action.  The Communications Decency Act immunizes websites for postings by third parties (which the denizens of Craigslist's "erotic services" forum assuredly are), unless the site's very purpose is illegal.  Presumably plenty of people use Craigslist for unpaid hookups that are entirely legal, unless Dart also intends to enforce antiquated sodomy and cohabitation laws in the future.  The other exception to this shield is for violations of federal criminal law, and while interstate prostitution is a federal crime (remember the Mann Act?), this is not a criminal action, and Dart has no more authority to prosecute criminals in Illinois than I do.  He isn't even a lawyer.
2. The Communications Decency Act's shield preempts state law, and yes, it even preempts the municipal code of Chicago.
3. It would appear that Dart was unable to get the Cook County District Attorney to go along for this ride.  The suit was filed by private counsel, Daniel F. Gallagher, Paul O'Grady, and Christopher P. Keleher of Querrey and Harrow in Chicago, all of whom I congratulate for drafting some of the most wretchedly purple prose I have ever seen in a legal pleading.  Truly outstanding, guys.
4. Isn't this killing the goose that laid the golden egg?  Come on, guys, if you want to end prostitution, use the Craigslist!  If Craigslist makes it so easy to find a prostitute for Johns, surely it makes it just as easy for cops.
5. Doesn't the sheriff of Cook County have better things to do than suing Craigslist?  Or did crime and corruption in Chicago end with the impeachment of Rod Blagojevich?
6. Depositions in this case, if it ever gets that far, should make for endlessly entertaining reading.  I particularly want to know how many Cook County users of Craigslist's "erotic services" forum are cops, as well as how many of the posts on said forum are "stings" set up by cops masquerading, or not masquerading, as whores.

Once again, read the complaint.  If you live in Chicago, note the multiple references to "the Sheriff's constant surveillance of Craigslist's erotic services," and consider how Tom Dart uses his time when next you have an election.