We haven’t forgotten

Hat-tip to cookie jill.

Rate of return

Listen, if you are a parent or grandparent, and ask yourself this question: When you raised your children, did you intend for them and their children to grow up worrying about money? Or did you want them to be good people, to do what they could to help other people first and foremost? But so many are hungry, and so many who have enough fear the wolf at the door.

I guess it feels okay if you think your children and grandchildren are provided for in a trust of indeterminate value and duration, but for the people who don’t have quite so large a fortune it is a miserable way to feel.

I invest in karma, and I see it working, but it does not reassure everyone.

Sunday services

Love forever changes.

Sadly, Arthur Lee passed away on August 3rd.

Motion in limine

Criminal informants often lie. This shouldn’t be a big surprise to people. Under the prohibition regime, informants are offered lighter sentences or complete exoneration in return for their “testimony” if it helps the police convict someone else. Of course, if the snitches don’t know anything they can’t get a deal, so they make stuff up. Alexandra Natapoff writes in the San Francisco Chronicle,

The recent wave of exonerations suggests the extent of informant unreliability. A 2004 San Francisco Magazine study estimates that 20 percent of all California wrongful convictions, capital or otherwise, are a result of false snitch testimony. Nationwide, according to Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, 45.9 percent of documented wrongful capital convictions flow from false informant testimony, making “snitches the leading cause of wrongful convictions in U.S. capital cases.” These statistics reveal not merely that informants sometimes lie, but that juries believe them, that police and prosecutors rely on them, and that the traditional safeguards of the criminal trial process are inadequate to protect against them.

Wasn’t there a commandment about bearing false witness? But then we go ahead and reward that very behavior? Let’s hope California does the right thing and ends the practice of relying on criminal informants. And it would be nice if the courts everywhere would take judicial notice of the fact that these are not reliable witnesses.

Hat-tip to FoM.

The first thing we do, let’s call all the lawyers

This administration is lawless, and anyone out there with an ounce of legal training knows it. Some lawyers are paid to defend criminals, of course, and they have the right and duty to make the best case they can for their clients. But they know, too. When the client did it, they know it and they have to put the best face on it they can.

Of course, we know that many people are charged with offenses that shouldn’t be crimes at all. And that’s always an available legal argument, albeit a risky one. It can only succeed on a moral foundation.

Unfortunately (for defense counsel) in this case that foundation is absent.

Anonymous Liberal writes about Dick’s pathological speech to the Federalist Society, wherein he tries to pretend that the Supreme Court has not already ruled against his misconstruction of the constitution. And Glenn Greenwald gives the same speech a thorough fisking.

Would you like to be injected with poison?

So the FDA is reapproving silicone breast implants. It’s not that the agency thinks they are actually safe, according to their statistics 69% of women will have a rupture. Regular MRI’s are recommended, beginning three years after implantation, and those are expensive for people to pay for out-of-pocket (insurance doesn’t usually cover costs incident to cosmetic procedures). So my guess is most women won’t have the scans done.

But it will be an interesting scientific experiment for the agency,

[Doctor Daniel G. Schultz, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health] said the agency would require the companies to conduct post-approval studies involving a total of 80,000 women to continue monitoring the safety of the implants. He said that information would be collected about rates of rupture, cancer and autoimmune diseases and effects of the implants on reproduction. That would enable the agency to evaluate concerns about the implants in a large number of women.

Oh, well, that’s all right then.

Tell me again why the FDA thinks cannabis isn’t proven safe enough for use by medical patients?

Hat-tip to the Heretik.