Say whaaa?

KRMG out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, brings us the story of a woman who found her husband tied up and beheaded, in what the police called an “apparent suicide”:

The incident happened near 46th and Sheridan.

Police say a woman who lives in the home found her husband dead in the garage.

His hands and feet were tied and the body had been decapitated.

Tulsa police told KRMG news the death was due to suicide.

Cops gave no other details at the time but continue to investigate the matter.

Someone, please explain this to me.

 

Backwards Priorities

Patterico reports that the IRS has been developing a data-mining method to catch tax cheats, including snooping on eBay transactions, emails, and credit-card transactions.  (On a side note, tax professor Edward Zelinksky ought to seriously consider what “safeguards” he finds appropriate for the IRS when monitoring literally every single electronic transaction that citizens of an allegedly free country engage in.  Last I checked, the “safeguard” was the Fourth Amendment, and, prior to the 1960s, it required the government to get a warrant before snooping on Americans.)

We have video evidence of employees of wireless phone companies giving out “free” (i.e. paid for by taxpayers) wireless phones to people who say that they are going to sell the phones to get drugs and luxury goods.

In theory, advanced data mining could track down those people, but we have seen the refusal of the government to crack down on those who abuse its benefits.  (For those who want a link, just google Shaunna O’Connell and Massachusetts, and figure out how insanely hard it is for elected officials to get some accountability.)  So the IRS can snoop on the emails and online purchases of a teenager who  mows lawns over the summer and harass him about not filing taxes on his lawn-moving and snow-shoveling income, while leaving the welfare cheats, drug dealers, and illegal immigrants alone.

Yes, illegal immigrants: those people who are paid under the table or via false Social Security numbers.  Let’s all take a bet on how likely it is that the IRS will use its amazing powers to ferret them out.

As a final thought, the correct, constitutionally appropriate means of fighting crime is to have a crime, or probable cause that a crime was committed, and then find the perpetrator.  You have a suspiciously dead body; you do an autopsy and figure out if it was some form of homicide, then figure how whodunnit.  What we have here is the government monitoring every citizen for evidence of a crime, then slapping the appropriate criminal sanctions against those it finds guilty.  This is backwards: free countries do not start with a person to look for evidence of a crime, but start with a crime and look for a perpetrator.

Vindicated!

Subtitled: “How to find your best friend in law school.”

Back in 2005, when I was taking administrative law, our class discussed the fact that about 90% of our laws are made by administrative agencies, not by Congress.  At one point during this discussion, I stuck my hand up in the air and said, “The problem is that we are not voting these people [agency heads, etc.] in, and if they make laws that we abhor, we can’t vote them out.”  My professor said that we can vote out members of Congress if they keep appointing these problematic agency heads, or vote in Congressmen who promise to replace the agency heads. I replied that it was far too attenuated, and our Constitution is set up so that we vote for the people who make our  laws, not vote for the people who appoint the people who make our laws.

My professor then said that it’s impractical to expect that Congress can make all the laws and the regulations that we have now: the federal government does too much.  Immediately, a hand shot up in the air behind me, and dark-haired woman said, “If Congress doesn’t have time to regulate all of those things, maybe it’s because it shouldn’t be sticking its fingers in there anyway. The federal government is one of limited powers, and if Congress doesn’t have time to regulate something, maybe it shouldn’t be doing it anyway.”

At this point, the other 18 people in the class were rolling their eyes.  The professor said something along the lines of, “Ladies, it’s been the law for over seventy years; let it go”  – as if this were merely some abstract principle, not the essence of freedom and representative government.

Fast-forward to 2013.  The dark-haired woman is one of my best friends, and we should open up a psychic business together.  Today, in Instapundit, we have this:

Benghazi. The IRS targeting of conservative groups. Secret e-mail accounts used by top federal officials — such as former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson and Labor Secretary nominee Tom Perez — to conduct official business. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s efforts to promote Obamacare with a private slush fund solicited from companies she regulates. Subpoenas for records of journalists. The NSA revelations.

How many warning signs — emerging virtually all at once — do we need to realize that the American people have lost control of their government? Not only that, but large sectors of the government have lost any ability to provide checks and balances or even monitor the bureaucracy.

Hey, I could have told you all of this as a 1L in 2005.  I would also like to add to John Fund’s excellent article and point out that if administrative agencies didn’t exist, then some person in Congress would have to have approved these debacles – and that person’s career would be over in November of 2014.  Fund says that Congress can no longer control the Leviathan bureaucracy; I think that has been true for eighty years, just to varying degrees of bad results.

 

In which I disagree with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling

Contra yesterday’s ruling, human genes should be patentable.  No, seriously, is there any reason why God can’t apply for a patent on the human genome, or parts thereof? Shouldn’t Satan be allowed to patent mutations that cause psychosis?  C’mon, Justices, allow these guys to get their period of exclusivity – twenty years from the date of patent application.  (Sure, we’ll have to fight over whether the genetic code has been in the public domain for too long, and how this should interact with international patent applications, but really, no reason to not allow God, Allah, Buddha, or the deity of your choice to apply for a patent on human genes.)

A very quick patent law overview: you can patent devices or new compositions (e.g. a widget or a drug) or methods (e.g. “a method of isolating genes”).  You cannot patent ideas (e.g. “e=mc^2″) or scientific progress (e.g. quantum mechanics).  Only the inventor(s) can apply for a patent; mandatory assignment clauses in an employment contract might require the inventor(s) to hand over the rights to the invention to his employer, but the inventor(s) is the only rightful applicant.

I just don’t know how you would patent part of the genome.  Neither does any Justice on the Supreme Court.  SCOTUSblog called this a “patent truism” because Myriad Genetics did not create anything; it discovered something.

Some commentators have suggested that the underlying public policy is to make health care more available to people (not subject to the high prices caused by patent exclusivity).  I hope this is not the case: the motivation for investing in and creating a new drug or medical device is the profit that comes from patent exclusivity.  Myriad’s problem is that it didn’t create anything new; it only discovered a natural process. There are certainly public policy issues surrounding the protection of scientific advances, but the solution is to not make everything unpatenable.

Belgian Parliament: kids can consent to euthanasia

The Belgian Parliament will soon vote on a bill that would enable children to consent to euthanasia, so long as their doctors think that their consent is mature and that their condition is dire, and would also allow incompetent Alzheimer’s patients to be euthanised:

A consensus among members of the legislative body has reportedly formed in support of legislation to allow children to choose to undergo euthanasia in certain dire cases, according to a report in the Belgian daily newspaper Der Morgen, as translated by the Paris-based news agency Presseurop. [....]

The bill, introduced by the Socialist party in December, would lay out guidelines for doctors to decide on a case-by-case basis whether or not a child is mature enough to make the decision to end his or her own life, as well as whether a child’s health is grave and hopeless enough to warrant euthanasia. [....]

The bill would also likely allow euthanasia for patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and other diseases leading to advanced dementia, who may otherwise be deemed incompetent to make the decision to die.

Doctors may already perform euthanasia on children, so long as they act in accordance with medical guidelines.

Fundamentally, this bill destroys any idea of meaningful, informed consent, and it highlights how fast euthanasia degrades into the standard for dealing with tough medical situations.  Alzheimer’s is a horrible, frightening, disease, one that many people would rather die than live with; however, once we remove the idea of meaningful consent, weighed against all other options, we’re well on the road to dystopia.

Children and teenagers cannot give meaningful consent, not because they aren’t mature for their ages, rather, because a kid who has only been on the planet for fifteen or so years lacks a meaningful understanding of ‘forever’ and ‘hopeless’.   Remember being a teenager?  Remember when ‘six months’ seemed like an eternity?  Remember when you thought that life would never change? And you didn’t even have a deadly disease.  A child’s short time on earth means that his perspective on ‘forever’ and ‘for the rest of your life’ is inherently limited, which is why we don’t allow children to make life-altering decisions.

Hilary Jane Margeret White’s epic “choice” rant

It’s not a rant, per se, but Miss White discusses everything from the problems with schools turning into the arbiters of healthy eating to gun control and sexuality. It’s also not a blog post about “choice” so much as one about personal responsibility.  She argues that the whole “safe sex” mindset triggered this madness, wherein teenagers were encouraged to indulge their whims, treated as if they lacked self-control, and (with taxpayer funded abortion and contraception) other people are responsible for the consequences.

My only addition to her spectacular essay is that we’ve inverted the normal range of choices that we expect that people can make.  Back in the dark ages, we assumed that a fourteen-year-old could figure out how to fix a healthy dinner for herself (ergo, she knows what is healthy and what is not, and is capable of putting a piece of chicken in the oven and a salad in a bowl).  We also assumed that she wasn’t able to make any  meaningful choice about sexual activity, i.e. the only rational choice would be to not have sex at the tender age of 14.   Now, society has decided that a fourteen-year-old can give valid consent to sexual activity with a voting-age adult, but can’t be responsible for reading a nutrition label.

The Devil is Beating His Wife

That’s apparently what some people call a sunshower, i.e. when it’s sunny and raining at the same time.  There are twenty-one other “linguistic maps” here, with everything from the names of carbonated beverages to rotaries.  Apparently, people in the Dakotas and Montana do not have a multitude of roads that meet up, which is why they don’t even have a name for rotaries.

In which hipsters copy Sarah Palin

Alex Williams writes about how hipsters name their babies: foolishly and pretentiously.  Okay, the adjectives are mine.  Williams has this to say about names:

What’s in a name? What isn’t, these days? Baby naming has become an industry — with paid consultants, books, Web sites brimming with trend data, and academic studies exploring correlations between baby names and future success. The once-simple task of coming up with a monogram for the baby blanket has evolved into a high-stakes exercise in personal “branding.”

Perhaps I should have added “self-absorbed” to that, since it’s really hard to see how naming another person involves improving the brand of the person bestowing the name.  Every time little Nanou calls up for a pizza, the person on the phone isn’t going to think “Wow, I must get to know her dad!” In reality, little Nanou will spend her life spelling her name for people and explaining her name at every social interaction.

Besides, since when do hipsters imitate Sarah Palin?  Back in the Bush Administration – the Bush Senior Administration – Sarah and Todd started giving their kids quirky, unique names that are easy to spell – Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trigg.  (Okay, maybe the last one throws people with the double v. single G, but the others are easy.)  Since when do hipsters follow the twenty-year-old trend started by the snowbilly of Alaska?

 

 

 

Sounds like a plan

Unlike Elie Mystal, I can’t find it in myself to condemn the new strategy by law schools: offer a one-year “master of law” to those who have completed undergrad and spend a year in law school.  Mystal complains that it’s a useless degree, that no one needs it, schools can’t figure out what to charge, and that it’s just another way to make money.

Au contraire.  Anyone who thinks that a law degree is useful, but does not want to be a lawyer, could benefit from this.  Schools aren’t doing a typical 1L curriculum; rather, it’s things like environmental and natural resources law.  If you were a professional in the natural resources field, think that a legal background would help you, but don’t want to pay $70,000 per year for a three-year JD, then why not fork over for one year of law that is focused on what you care about?

Dirty little secret: most lawyers do not need the vast majority of what they learn in law school.  They need it to be eligible for the bar exam, and to pass the test once they take it, but an in-house lawyer at a tech company really doesn’t need to know the nuances of mens rea in homicide cases.  The people who want a JD, but do not want to be lawyers, need even less of the education.  In fact, they might need one year of highly focused education that is tailored to their own professions.

Non-lawyers can already practise in front of the USPTO; some of them may find value in taking a few patent law and intellectual property classes.  Compliance officers (named by Mystal as a group not in need of anything but a JD) could take a few courses in administrative law and law related to whatever the heck they are doing compliance for (e.g. medical devices, home loans, etc.).  Accountants and financial planners can take tax law and wills, trusts, and estates. It doesn’t make them qualified to draft a will, but it will help them to give a seamless, straightforward experience to their clients.  We don’t need to churn out 50,000 JDs every year, but we do need more people with an understanding of how the legal system works with their own professional area.

I’ve been saying this for years

But Alison Green says it better: don’t follow your passions.  I especially liked this part, because it so underscores how out-of-touch it is to say that you should “follow your dreams”:

“Do what you love” is privileged advice that ignores the fact that the majority of the world’s population works to get food and housing, not for emotional or spiritual fulfillment. And even among the most socioeconomically privileged piece of the population—the segment that this advice is usually targeted to—it causes an awful lot of angst and even shame over not loving your career when people are telling you that you should.

I would go a step further: I bet that the majority of college-educated Americans go to work because it provides a paycheck, with which they can buy a home, put food on the table, and put clothes on the kids’ backs.  (As my dad always says, “That’s why they call it work.”)

I’ve done a lot of very interesting work since graduating from law school, but it’s been sporadic, comes without benefits, and at least once a year leaves me furiously chasing the next opportunity.  To some people, it’s glamourous – how many people can say that PBS set up a studio in their living room for the purpose of interviewing their fabulous selves? – but it’s stressful, unnerving, and inconsistent.   So I’m here to tell you that unless your dreams include eating Ramen noodles (without the meat-containing sauce packets), don’t “follow your dreams” -  or rather, follow your dreams on the weekends.  Or after work.  Or if you’re married to someone who can pay all the bills.  Because no one pays you gobs of money to save the world or be happy.