Archive for 2021

ELON MUSK JUST TWEETED THIS STALIN MEME ABOUT JACK DORSEY: “Can we please take a moment to appreciate how Elon continuously picks fights with other powerful billionaire magnates without regard for social propriety?? The madman just does not care, and it’s so entertaining!”

DOZEN FACTS ABOUT A 15-WEEK OLD UNBORN YOU MAY NOT KNOW: Given these 12 facts, it’s hard to see why there is much to debate about regarding the Mississippi law now under review by The Supremes. That said, if you believe in prayer, ask that these nine black-robbed judges will have discernment and courage.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Kyle Rittenhouse Can’t Sue The Kenosha District Attorney’s Office, But He Should Be Able To.

Prosecutorial immunity — along with judicial immunity and qualified immunity for other government officials — should exist, if at all, only via legislation. And that legislation should limit whatever immunity it exists much more strictly than the current judge-made immunities are limited.

Personally, I think immunizing government employees from accountability for their actions is a due process violation, and possibly a violation of the Titles of Nobility clauses, too.

¡NO PASARÁN!: Puzzling Out the Puzzle Pieces.

The puzzle pieces of what has gone wrong are enormous, so much so that fitting two or three together is unwieldy, while attempting to piece all the pieces together is both a fantastical and terrifying project, overturning long-held dearly held assumptions about government, public safety, human worth, personal liberty, and the dignity of our lives. Simply put, piecing together the bigger picture puzzle is traumatizing. To protect ourselves, the puzzle pieces are commonly processed separately, which is to say without correlation.

Read the whole thing.

STANDARDS: ABA Permits Law Schools To Accept GRE Scores In Lieu Of The LSAT. The goal here is to be able to admit warm, tuition-paying bodies without hurting your US News ranking by driving down your average LSAT score. I wonder how long before US News closes this loophole.

ERROR-CORRECTION UPDATE: I’m wrong above — this has already been taken account of. Paul Caron writes: “Your comment isn’t right — U.S. News takes GRE scores into account.” Here’s how:

Median Law School Admission Test and Graduate Record Examination scores (0.1125; previously 0.125): These are the combined median scores on the LSAT and GRE quantitative, verbal and analytical writing exams of all 2020 full- and part-time entrants to the J.D. program. Reported scores for each of the four exams, when applicable, were converted to 0-100 percentile scales. The LSAT and GRE percentile scales were weighted by the proportions of test-takers submitting each exam. For example, if 85% of exams submitted were LSATs and 15% submitted were GREs, the LSAT percentile would be multiplied by 0.85 and the average percentile of the three GRE exams by 0.15 before summing the two values. This means GRE scores were never converted to LSAT scores or vice versa. There were 60 law schools – 31% of the total ranked – that reported both the LSAT and GRE scores of their 2020 entering classes to U.S. News.

My mistake. I’m bumping this up so that people will see the correction. And thanks, Dean Caron!

HMM: China’s disappearing ships: The latest headache for the global supply chain.

Analysts think they’ve found the culprit: China’s Personal Information Protection Law, which took effect November 1. It requires companies that process data to receive approval from the Chinese government before they can let personal information leave Chinese soil — a rule that reflects the fear in Beijing that such data could end up in the hands of foreign governments.

The law doesn’t mention shipping data. But Chinese data providers might be withholding information as a precaution, according to Anastassis Touros, AIS network team leader at Marine Traffic, a major ship-tracking information provider.

“Whenever you have a new law, we have a time period where everyone needs to check out if things are okay, ” Touros said.

Other industry experts have more clues of the law’s influence. Cook said that colleagues in China told her that some AIS transponders were removed from stations based along Chinese coastlines at the start of the month, at the instruction of national security authorities. The only systems allowed to remain needed to be installed by “qualified parties.”

Unintended consequence of Beijing’s new privacy law, or another power play by Xi?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): This seems potentially much more nefarious to me.

THE FAKE FACT-CHECKERS AT FACEBOOK AND TWITTER: Fact-BLOCKERS. John Stossel shows how social-media platforms, with the aid of the supposedly non-partisan media watchdogs at the Poynter Institute, are censoring inconvenient — but accurate — scientific information about climate change and Covid. He interviews Michael Shellenberger, Bjorn Lomborg and me. (For those who don’t want to watch on Facebook, here’s a link to it at YouTube.)