Back when my mom was sick, we had a deeply uncomfortable conversation about whether I could find marijuana for her. It was deeply uncomfortable because (1) it showed me that my very traditional and straight-laced mom, a very anti-drug junior high school principal, was very ill and in a lot of discomfort from chemotherapy, and (2) we both knew that, as the world's biggest dork, my access to marijuana was roughly comparable to my access to the nation's nuclear launch codes or to Angelina Jolie's bra strap. She passed before the topic came up again.

Medical marijuana had been legal in California for two years then; now it's been fifteen years. Yet anyone looking for medical marijuana still has to wrangle with both lawless local drug warriors and hostile federal law enforcement. Even in California, even fifteen years after Proposition 215, even in a nominally federal system, anyone looking to obtain (and, especially, to provide) medical marijuana is rolling the dice with their freedom and future.

The Obama Administration could be saying smart things about this, making an effort to change the national conversation and move it incrementally towards a sane policy. Instead, President Obama thinks that decriminalization is an issue worthy of snickers. And his Drug Czar, Gil Kerlikowske, is doubling down the stupid by arguing that even acknowledging the existence of medical marijuana will encourage our kids to toke up.

"People keep calling it medicine," he said at a press conference today, "and that's the wrong message for young people to hear."

It's not enough to the drug warriors to prosecute medical marijuana providers. Now they want to widen the pointless, ineffectual, and long-since lost War on Drugs into a War on Language as well. They might have better luck with that particular skirmish — bureaucrats are good with linguistic slap-fights.

Through the link, over at Reason, Jacob Sullum demolishes Kerlikowske's bad logic and junk statistics. Check it out.

It's time to name and shame some scummy attorney comment spammers: that subset of the legal profession that either (a) thinks that comment spam is an appropriate way to market legal services, or (b) thinks that it isn't necessary to supervise marketeers. Both sentiments are wrong. A lawyer who thinks that leaving unwanted, irrelevant advertising on strangers' blogs reflects well on him is a jackass with poor judgment, and it's dangerous to hire a lawyer with poor judgment. A lawyer who thinks that she need not supervise how she is marketed by marketeers soon discovers that when you outsource your marketing, you outsource your ethics and your reputation.

This week's contestants:

1. The wig-wearers of Havillands & Co. Solicitors. They are the English kind of solicitors, not the prostitute kind, despite their having spammed us with six bloody pages of linkspam. What's their approach to the law:

Irrespective of the type of case and the stress involved, we go all the way if we are confident justice needs to be done.

How . . . very comforting.

2. "KEL Attorneys", the lawyers of Kaufman, Englett and Lynd, PLLC, who have deluged us with dozens and dozens of spam comments. In an effort at innovation, KEL Attorneys link their spam to pages about them or mentioning them rather than directly to their website. If your web site was as overpoweringly dull and generic as theirs, you might prefer to link to various yahoo! pages as well.

3. Mitchell & Mitchell, a Tennessee firm specializing in auto accidents and divorce, which is particularly useful if you run over your spouse in your car and he or she just stop giving you shit about it:

Mitchell & Mitchell provides high quality legal services to individuals, families, and businesses while specializing in divorce and auto accidents.

The implication is that when they work on anything else, they are strictly ass.

4. McAfee Law Offices, a California bankruptcy firm. Spammers are ethically bankrupt, so that fits.

5. Matorell Law, the firm of Frederick J. Matorell, who does not know the difference between a blog and a clumsy, butt-ugly SEO optimization page.

6. Hargrove & Associates, a personal injury firm, the chief selling point of which appears to be that its lawyers will drive to see you. Just say "outcall" and save some space, guys.

All of these firms, either through deliberate fuckwittery or abject failure to supervise marketeers, has sent us unwanted and unwelcome comment spam. Shame on them.

My typical offer stands: I will remove any name if the spammer (1) sincerely apologizes for his or her own spamming, if it was deliberate, or (2) publicly throws his or her marketeer under the bus.

One bright warm Spring in the mid-seventies I had a lemonade stand on the sidewalk outside my house, less than a mile from where I live now. You need a hook in the lemonade game, and I had one — I offered free pollywogs from the pond out back, thoughtfully provided in the same cups in which I sold the lemonade. Doesn't everyone like pollywogs?

You see why I am a lawyer and not a businessman.

No one bothered me back then — least of all customers. I'm not sure I could get away with it now, thirty-five years later. There's a war on, you know — a war on lemonade.

Over at The Inductive, Christopher Carr's kid had a hook too — fruit punch and green tea. Maybe that's what attracted the attention of the Massachusetts State Police, who made his twelve-year-old stepson shut the stand on his streetcorner down. Carr also discovered that the Staties have the staff to go about shutting down kids' lemonade stands, but not the staff to answer phone calls from citizens about it. Funny, that.

Now an again it might be reasonable to hold a kid's lemonade stand to the same standard as an adult business enterprise — like when a kid sets up the stand at a commercial venue like a fair to compete with grown-ups. But when cops go about shutting down juveniles' lemonade stands because the law technically permits them to do so, we see the danger in broad, discretionary laws. Regulators tell us that the state can be trusted with broad authority because they will exercise good judgment and discretion. Really? What indication do we have of that?

Years ago, Coyote Blog did a great taxonomy of all the folks who want to run our lives for various reasons. It remains instructive, and it reminds us of why cops and bureaucrats defend shutting down lemonade stands — because the government has our best interests at heart, and knows better, and if the state lets the little things skate, next people will be questioning it on the big things. Might I catch some awful creeping crud from a kid's lemonade stand after the kid used standing pondwater with pollywogs to make the lemonade? Possibly. And God forbid that citizens start to think that maybe I can assess that risk myself, act accordingly, and accept the results.

It's simple!

1. Be a syndicated columnist affiliated with a project called "Restoring Civility."

2. Write columns calling people "economic terrorists" and comparing them to "al-Qaida bombers" because you disapprove of what they say and how they vote in Congress.

3. When this incongruity is mentioned, issue a snippy and defensive blog post asserting that (1) they ARE terrorists, sort of, and (2) anyway, "incivility" doesn't mean calling people terrorists, it means "not letting other people speak their piece . . . . [i]t’s not about offering strong opinions. If someone’s opinion is fact-based, then it is permissible in civil discourse."

4. When people dissent in the comments to your blog post, delete the comments and close comments on the post, notwithstanding that you just said civility is letting other people speak their piece.

Froma, Froma, Froma.

Here's the thing, Froma. We all have a bug up our assess about some subject or other. We're all susceptible to accusations of hypocrisy sooner or later. When confronted with such an instance, we have three choices. One is to say "yes, you're right." Another is to go down fighting — to say "why, it's because FUCK YOU!" The third — the one you chose — is to engage in a desperate and pathetic effort to reconcile the irreconcilable things we've said on different occasions. The first option makes us sound principled, the second option makes us sound human, and the third makes us a subject of widespread justifiable ridicule.

Froma, I'm going to be civil with you. On your terms, that is. Feel free to come here and say your piece about this, Froma, but I think the facts show you are a shallow, unserious, self-aggrandizing twit.

The censorious ettin has two heads.* One head is the state and its minions — thugs willing to abuse their power to censor under the color of law. But we'd be remiss to forget the other head. It is us — or, at least, those among us who run butthurt to the state, sniveling, when we encounter expression we don't like.

Dateline: Tennessee — already a place with a few issues with free speech. The FIRE's Torch blog alerts us to the story of Democratic State Representative Joe Armstrong, who became upset that the student bookstore at University of Tennessee-Knoxville was selling defamatory candy. How can candy be defamatory, you might ask, possibly throwing a few swears in there for effect? Well, apparently it can be if it looks like this:

Armstrong — who may or may not be on some Tennessee legislative committee devoted to regulating defamatory food products and novelty items — found these mints defamatory, and persuaded the bookstore (which had carried similar mints lampooning President Bush for years without incident) to remove them from the shelves.

"When you operate on state and federal dollars, you ought to be sensitive to those type of politically specific products," Armstrong said. "If it was a private entity or corporation or store, (that's different), but this is a state university. We certainly don't want in any way to put the university in a bad light by having those political (products), particularly aimed at defaming the president."

I realize that it is out of fashion for legislators sworn to uphold the constitution to have a passing familiarity with it, just as it is outre for lawmakers to grasp laws. But implying that President Obama is a "disappointment" cannot possibly be defamatory, because it is an expression of inherently subjective opinion, not a statement of fact susceptible to accusations of truth or falsity. Only an idjit, or someone unconcerned with the actual meaning of words, would say otherwise. Rep. Armstrong no doubt meant that the mints were defamatory in the sense that he personally disagreed with their message, which is the way that censorious twats generally use the word.

Now, any citizen — legislator or not — can try to convince any bookstore not to carry a book or a tin of mints. That itself is not censorship. But how do you suppose the manager of the bookstore felt when a state legislator — someone with substantial power over the university's funding and fate — came to demand that something be removed from the store? Do you suppose that felt voluntary to the manager? Do you suppose that Armstrong meant for it to feel voluntary?

Armstrong is the censor in this story — the first head of the ettin — wielding not overt laws but a nice-store-shame-if-something-happened-to-it power. It's the other head of the ettin I want to point out to you:

Armstrong said he got a call from a student who was bothered by the depiction of the president, and the legislator followed up Tuesday with a visit to the bookstore in the basement of the University Center. There, he purchased a box of the $2.99 mints and had a conversation with director David Kent, who ultimately removed product from the shelves. About 30 tins were removed.

That's right. Somewhere at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, there is a student who went to the bookstore, saw a tin of mints that was mildly critical of the President, and was so upset that he or she called a state representative to complain.

These people walk among us.

*Yes, I just combined a D&D reference with a Song of Ice and Fire reference. I'm in a geeky mood. Deal with it, bitches.

To many people, a good criminal justice system is one that produces the result that reinforces their prejudices and expectations, often based on what they've heard from people like Nancy Grace.

Therefore it's hardly surprising that something like this exists: a Facebook "Petition to Retry Casey Anthony." It's possible that it was originally started as satire, or for the lulz. It's even possible that some of the posts and arguments on it are Swiftian. But many supporting it are perfectly sincere and perfectly totalitarian, viewing criminal justice as a sort of high-stakes American Idol. Read it, if you can stomach it, and see the angry, shouting mob. Only mere chance, and the rule of law, stand between you and that mob. The mob sees itself as patriotic — its members wave flags on the Fourth of July and have appropriate decals and magnets on their cars and stands for the National Anthem. But the mob rejects the concepts at the heart of America — indeed, the concepts at the heart of Western Civilization — in favor of the raging, incoherent I want.

Read it also for curious notions of federal jurisdiction, the Dual Sovereign Doctrine, double jeopardy (which, we are told, does not apply when the defendant did not previously offer a defense she offered for the first time at trial), and civilization. Read it, consider that these people sometimes vote, and reconsider whether it's really so ridiculous for people like me to advocate minimum possible government control over citizens.

Via Radley Balko.

I spent part of the morning waiting in a hall in what used to be called the Criminal Courts Building, and is now called the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center. It has not been cleaned, and the elevators have not been repaired, since I worked in the building in 1989.

I arrived quite early, and waited for the courtroom to open. As I did so, an unkempt and morose-looking young man sitting on a nearby bench in the sparsely-populated hall was trying out ringtones on his phone. One by one. At full volume. From an apparently vast library.

I considered, and rejected, the possibility of approaching him. Prudent people do not approach odd strangers in criminal courthouses to complain about their conduct.

I also considered going and telling a guard that I had just been in the restroom and had observed the young man removing a shiv from some bodily orifice, and that he seemed twitchy and upset.

The better angels of my nature — one of which is entrenched sloth — won out.

The young man eventually chose a ringtone that sounded like an air raid siren, and tested it out several times.

I am given to understand that in an Objectivist society I would be allowed to have my servants shoot him. Pity.

Nobody listens to me, really. So should it be any surprise that even though I rail against attorney comment spam and try to name and shame the perpetrators, they keep doing it?

We have two entries today (click to view full versions).

First we have Bob Khakshooy. Bob's a rare bird — a lawyer for whom spamming blogs with drivel may represent an improvement in dignity and professionalism. One of Bob's blogs appears to be organized entirely with half-assed SEO as its guiding principle ("Personal injury attorney Los Angeles handle [sic] a broad range of cases in which one party’s negligence results in injury or loss for another individual. Some of the most common cases handled by personal injury attorneys Los Angeles include [sic] auto accidents, burn accidents, truck accidents, spinal injuries, wrongful death incidents, nursing home abuse, slip and fall injuries and dog bite injuries."). Bob's other site appears designed by web experts who are more accustomed to sites describing how FEMA hired the Jews to demolish the World Trade Center. Bob also has a Twitter account, the sole content of which is "George Lopez rocks." My cup runneth over.

This is not, by far, Bob's only effort at comment spamming — Google reveals that he alternates between calling himself a "well liked" attorney and a "greatly loved" attorney, possibly based upon his progress at therapy.

Second, we have comment spam from The Forman Law Offices, a Florida shop that does med-mal work. You can trust them because one of their lawyers wears a medical instrument.

The expression of the guy on the left suggests that he considered contributing to the theme by bringing a speculum, but couldn't think of a dignified way to hold it. Google reveals that the Forman Law Offices has been spamming their sub-literate crap ("Forman Law Offices have provide [sic] good service and they located [sic] in Delray Beach, FL, specializes in [sic] Florida medical malpractice, malpractice law, Florida Medical Malpractice, Florida Medical Malpractice Lawyer.") all over the internet. Though, hey, maybe those Celebrity Kim Kardashian Hairstyles sites were really classed up by references to developments in Florida malpractice law.

Once again, we're left with the core question: did these lawyers (1) direct spam themselves, (2) hire "marketing experts" and then fail to supervise how they were marketing them, or (3) (very highly unlikely) fall victim to some sort of devious plot to discredit them? My money is usually on #2 — that they bought some "marketing expert's" pitch, and the marketing expert hired some twit in Bangladesh to use a spam-comment generator to spray crap all over the internet.

Remember: outsource your marketing, outsource your reputation and your ethics.

A couple of nights ago, after a disappointment in a hockey game, a number of folks in Vancouver rioted. They smashed windows, looted stores, and overturned and torched cars. This was not a crowd of the dispossessed. This was a crowd of hockey fans.

I confess that I'm quite surprised that Canadians riot. I was under the impression that they were too polite. Riots involve rudeness. There's an unacceptable risk that someone might say something cutting that could hurt someone's feelings based on social condition or ethnic group membership or something.

Anyway, regrettably for them, these were not practiced rioters, and few came equipped with masks. In the age of the cell-phone camera, misbehaving in public carries with it a grave risk of worldwide exposure (as Hermon Raju, our friend from yesterday's post, might tell you). The rioters did not heed those risks; they capered for the cameras.

Now come the modern consequences.

Within hours, people on the internet began collecting the pictures and identifying the rioters, particularly those who were doing notably obnoxious things like setting police cars afire. With the aid of such identification, police have already arrested some. As I said, these were not the dispossessed — they were people like Air Cadets on their way to college and water polo stars with scholarships. Many of these were Canada's privileged. They had Facebook pages.

Now, thanks to the magic of Google, any inquiry into their names yields evidence of their bad public behavior.

How should we feel about that?

The comments in the posts linked above are a microcosm of the public debate over this phenomenon. Some advocate deliberate public shaming of people who engage in bad public behavior. Others accuse shamers of vigilantism, judgmentalism, and failure to respect the presumption of innocence, and assert that modern Google-fame is a disproportionate punishment that will follow bad actors for too long, because such people "just made a mistake."

Here's my take, which is not terribly different than what I've been writing about this phenomenon for three years:

Vigilantism: Exposing people to the social consequences of their misbehavior is not vigilantism. Subjecting them to physical danger is. That's why decent people involved in this process don't post home addresses or phone numbers, and delete them when they are posted.

Proportionality: The proportionality argument is at least somewhat misguided. First of all, bad behavior doesn't go viral on the internet unless it's really notable. Garden-variety assholes don't get top Google ranking. You've got to be somewhat epic to draw this modern infamy — by, say, being a water polo star on a scholarship trying to torch a cop car because your hockey team lost. Second, lack of proportionality is self-correcting. If conduct is actually just not that bad, then future readers who Google a bad actor's name will review the evidence and say "meh, that's not so bad. Everyone acts up now and then." Saying that bad behavior should not be easily accessible on the internet is an appeal for enforced ignorance, a request for a news blackout. It's saying, in effect, I'm more wise and measured than all the future people who might read about this; they can't be trusted to evaluate this person's actions in the right light, like I can.

"They Just Made A Mistake": The argument that bad actors shouldn't become infamous because they "just made a mistake" is a riff on proportionality. The same criticisms apply: it takes a hell of a mistake to go viral, and future viewers can make up their own minds. Plus, this argument is often sheer bullshit. Trying to torch a cop car because your hockey team lost is not a mere faux pas; normal and decent people don't do it.

Can internet shaming be disturbing? Of course. Threads about Hermon Raju are filled with racist and misogynist drivel. Threads about the hockey rioters are filled with calls for murder. But that's not too different from the way any thread on the internet goes — the trolls are always with us. Moreover, bigotry-driven shaming is self-defeating. Shaming depends on shared values; if communities don't share the values, the shaming doesn't work.

One of the criticisms of modern society is that we're indifferent and best and rude at worst too each other because we're anonymous. We get away with things in big-city life that we couldn't in small-town life because the consequences of our behavior don't follow our name. Can the internet be the antidote for that phenomenon, at least for epic bad behavior? Can it be an effective deterrent to bad behavior in public? Can cell phone cameras be the arms in the catchphrase "an armed society is a polite society?"

What do you think?

Remember the unspeakably evil Dr. George Rekers, simultaneous critic of gays and customer of rent boys, who conducted a hideous experiment too see if psychological torture would eradicate "feminine" behavior from a little boy?

CNN is running a three-party story about the experiment. The little boy, Kirk Andrew Murphy, committed suicide at age 38 in 2003. His siblings are now telling his painfully sad and chilling story. This is not a happy link. It will depress and infuriate you.

Rekers is unrepentant.

"I only meant to help, do the best I could with the parents, and I've written articles you can look up, too, on the rationale for our treatment. And the rationale was positive; to help children, help the parents who come to us in their distress asking questions, 'What can we do to help our child be better adjusted?' " Rekers said.

What could they do? Rekers told them to beat the kid if he acted girly.

According to Rekers' case study, blue chips were given for masculine behavior and would bring rewards, such as candy. But the red chips, given for effeminate behavior, resulted in "physical punishment by spanking from the father."

By the way, Rekers' "research" is still cited by anti-gay groups for the proposition that one can "cure" people of being gay. Do you suppose they know what Rekers did to produce the "data"? Do you suppose they care?

…  do you, Senator McCain.

Really, Santorum?  Really?

We talk and we talk and we talk about comment spam, but lawyers still do it. Time to call some out.

Anthony Hughes, a Sacramento bankruptcy attorney, only got his bar card in 2007 after graduating from Lincoln Law School. Anthony is apparently a very hard worker; in four years he's already been involved in lots and lots of cases:

Bankruptcy Attorney Anthony Hughes has been involved in over 5,000 bankruptcy cases which have resulted in discharges of millions of dollars of debt. He has spent an average of 20 hours per week for the last two and a half years in the bankruptcy courtrooms and the rest of his time has been spent assisting clients throughout California to obtain all the relief available to them under federal and state law, and attending substantial amounts of seminars on cutting edge topics affecting Bankruptcy Law, Foreclosure, and Debt Relief.

By my calculations, that means that Anthony Hughes, Sacramento bankruptcy attorney, has been involved as a lawyer in 3.42 cases per day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks per year, since he got his bar card. Jesus, Anthony, take a vacation! Unless Anthony is exaggerating, or "involved with" means that the case files resided in the same office in which Anthony is physically located, or — worse yet — Anthony is being tricky and referring to cases he was "involved in" before he became a lawyer. But Anthony wouldn't be tricky like that. Would he?

Is this the face of a trickster? Or of someone even briefly trained in Photoshop?

Anthony is too busy to be tricky. Anthony, or some marketing expert working for Anthony, spammed this blog last week with ten comments saying this:

Good post, its nice to see some real analysis! [spam link to Anthony's site omitted]

Anthony, or his marketing expert, liked our analysis on a number of posts — including posts calling out attorneys for using comment spam. The kids these days, with their irony: I can never tell when they are serious.

Now meet Gary N. Gosanko, Seattle personal injury attorney. I know that sounds familiar, but this is a totally different spamming Seattle personal injury attorney.

Note: no scary teeth.

Gary's hobbies are personal injury litigation and banal website copy like "our firm's greatest asset is our people," by which I frankly hope Gary does not mean his marketing people, because they suck. Gary or his marketing team left the insightful comment "Thank you for that great article" on two posts this morning, both of which related to prostitution. I'm not sure whether Gary or his marketing team is particularly enthusiastic about prostitution, or thinks that his potential clients will be interested in prostitution, or thinks that prostitution-related posts are particularly effective for SEO manipulation. Who can say?

As I see it, there are four possibilities:

1. Some third party, without Anthony's or Gary's permission, plugged their names and web sites into some auto-comment-spam program just to test it out. Unlikely.

2. Someone vile enemy, wanting to darken Anthony's and Gary's good name, plugged their names and web sites into an auto-comment spam program to make them appear sleazy. I suppose it's possible. But it seems unlikely.

3. Anthony and Gary hired "marketing experts" or "SEO experts" without understanding (or caring) what they did, and failed to supervise them adequately. This is a strong possibility.

4. Anthony and Gary deliberately chose to attempt to improve their search engine ranking by comment spam, and don't see anything wrong with it, or don't care if it's scummy or not. Experience suggests that this is entirely plausible.

Anthony's and Gary's web sites both appear to have been designed by a moderately talented fifth-grader, so I'm guessing that they didn't personally fire up an auto-spam program and type in their insipid spam comments. My bet is that they used a "marketing expert", and either (1) went "eh, whatever" when the "marketing expert" told them what they were going to do to improve their search engine position, or (2) utterly failed to supervise what methods were being used to "improve their web presence."

Remember, as others smarter than I have said:

When you outsource your marketing, you outsource your ethics and your reputation.

Comment spam doesn't work. All it does is piss people off. If you are someone who depends on a good reputation — like a decent lawyer — then it can be counter-productive, as searches for you or your firm can start to return hits on your shitty little comment spams, or on posts like this. Plus, anyone familiar with lawyering, or with SEO, or with internet etiquette, will conclude that you are either (1) ethically challenged, (2) judgmentally challenged, or (3) incapable of supervising your hirelings.

I have previously called out comment-spamming lawyers by name and subsequently deleted their names upon sufficient apologies or explanations. The problem persists. Here is the price of getting your name taken off a post like this: (1) a personal apology, including taking responsibility for either bad judgment or for inadequate supervision, (2) the name of the marketer who spammed on your behalf, so that I can call out that person and/or company by name, and (3) sufficient proof (like email correspondence with that marketer) to show that you're not just throwing some random marketer under the bus.

Attention, lawyers who engage in, or permit, comment spam: we will name and shame.

PRIMITIVE AMERICANS: IN EUROPE, RAPE IS A PLEASURE OF THE FLESH.

Gilles Savary, a member of the European Parliament who belongs to Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s Socialist Party, wrote on his blog that the arrest of Mr. Strauss-Kahn had hints of American-style hypocrisy. “Everyone knows that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a libertine, and that he is distinguished from others by the fact that he doesn’t try and hide it,” he wrote. “In puritanical American, infiltrated by rigorous Protestantism, financial misdeeds are far more tolerated than pleasures of the flesh.”

Which isn't to say that rapists aren't admired and respected by many on this side of the Atlantic.  Even child molestation is praiseworthy, if the rapist sodomizes his victim artistically.

STUCK ON STUPID: "Facebook was caught red-handed last week being socially unfriendly to Google, its Silicon Valley competitor. It hired a public relations firm to plant negative stories about Google's privacy policies, and then it tried to hide its involvement in the whisper campaign."

HOW MANY COPS, MACE CANS, AND BATONS DOES it take to bust a sixty year old man for making music in the park? The world may never know.